Book Review: Russia in Four Criminals by Federico Varese

There has been a range of books this century on organised crime that have been researched and written seriously for a general audience. The most impactful of these is probably Misha Glenny's McMafia, later made into a popular television series, which dramatically portrayed the internationalisation of organised crime groups, including Russian ones, in a clever if slightly overcooked analogy with McDonalds as a global imperium. This awakened some politicians to the dangers of taking money from oligarchs: a label that is hard to shift. The current decade has seen stimulating and accessible books on transnational crime that include Russia. Federico Varese's Russia in Four Criminals is the latest contribution to this genre, first published in Italian in 2022, early on in the second invasion of Ukraine, and it reasonably focuses on Russian organised crime at home and abroad after 1994.

In Kurosawa's great film Rashomon, we are treated to multiple perspectives on the same individual crime in medieval Japan, in a way that illuminates different components of Japanese society. Here, via the Four Criminals, we are invited to consider the relationship between post-Soviet Russia and different facets of Russian organised crime. Like Varese's previous book – Mafia Life: Love, Death and Money at the Heart of Organised Crime – Russia in Four Criminals largely eschews academic exegesis and referencing in favour of communicating more directly about the meaning of the stabilities and changes in organised crime for the elusive audience of educated readers beyond scholars in social and political sciences. This makes it much more readable than many ‘academic’ books, and there are some references at the end for those interested in pursuing them. The short book ends its substantive work as the second invasion of Ukraine was beginning, and therefore – despite some short comments in the conclusion – leaves unaddressed the adaptation of criminals to the old/new era of repression and conscription of criminals, and their effects, including the arguably tighter relationship between cybercriminality and the state.

Organised crime is an area of research and policy that has not attracted many top criminologists, but Federico Varese is one of them. Russia in Four Criminals aims to and does illuminate the sociology of a failing state. The four figures at the centre of the book are carefully chosen. We encounter a more traditional mobster; an oligarch who – like many Putin opponents – died in suspicious circumstances; an incarcerated drug-dealer who made and distributed videos of torture behind bars; and the mastermind behind the world's then most potent computer virus. Each criminal and associates represent a distinct era and a distinct mechanism by which the post-Soviet state either ‘failed’ or was actively captured or collaborated. Each character in Varese's dramaturgy represents a special – perhaps unique – aspect of Russia's evolution: whether through organised crime, the rise of oligarchs, state-sanctioned repression in the prison system, or the emergence of state sponsored or state-tolerated cybercrime.

Varese's portrait of Vyacheslav Ivan’kov, the old-school mafia boss, is the most classic of the four, and corresponds most closely to the popular image of ‘organised crime’. As a ‘thief-in-law’, Ivan’kov exemplifies a system – discussed more fully in his early work, The Russian Mafia – in which criminal norms and enforcement mechanisms constitute extra-legal governance of a parallel world outside of formal state control, which Putin later sought to subordinate. Varese uses Ivan’kov to illustrate the persistent role of organised crime during the Soviet era and its adaptation to the new, chaotic post-Soviet landscape.

The chapter on Boris Berezovsky deals with issues related to the rise of the oligarchs in the 1990s, when privatisation allowed a select few to amass immense wealth and power, arguably through criminal means – though Varese, like others, does not excavate the issue of whether these would have been crimes if the prosecution agencies had been set up to deal with this form of criminality. His is a powerful case study of how economic elites can manipulate political systems to their advantage, fusing crime, business and politics in post-Soviet Russia until Berezovsky's connections faded from the Putin ascendancy and he became a blustering anachronism in exile. Varese brings analytical precision that distinguishes this book from some journalistic accounts of the same period, and he makes some personal observations from his interactions with Berezovsky that illuminate the problem of verification and falsification of claims from participants.

The third figure, Sergei Savel’ev, offers the book's most viscerally disturbing material. Distinguished not so much by his crime – drugs trafficking – but by his actions during his incarceration, he leaked videos of prison torture and rape to a human rights group, proving that the state had condoned and indeed encouraged the mass rape of convicts. Varese is right to dwell on this harrowing passage: the prison system reveals what a state actually is, beneath its rhetoric. Ironically, prison experiences and tattoos serve as a guarantor of a form of reliability among some Russian offenders.

The final section, on cybercriminal Nikita Kuzmin, brings the narrative into the digital age. He acted as a role model for those seeking a career in exploiting their skills, expanding cybercrime-as-a-service as it often is today, lowering barriers to entry into cyber-dependent and cyber-enabled crimes.

The book is less interested in its subjects as individuals than as emblems of larger issues in the ‘macro history of Russia’. This is both the book's great strength and its occasional limitation. Readers hoping for the intimacy of true crime narrative may find the analytical scaffolding obtrudes at times. The thesis at the heart of the book is relatively self-evident from the beginning: that Russia has neither aimed for nor achieved a rule of law in the pre-Trumpian sense.

What makes the book particularly authoritative is Varese's personal connection to the material. The author presents a vivid personal account from the Russian city of Perm in 1994, during the chaotic transition from the state-controlled economy of the Soviet Union to a free-market system, where he observed the post-Soviet bazaar economy first-hand. This grounding gives the book a warmth and authority from self-reporting: using personal stories to illuminate broader social, political and economic forces. Notwithstanding a rounding conclusion, what is less clear is whether these Russian criminal archetypes are mutually exclusive or in what ways they are and are not connected.

Varese describes how the Russian underworld emerged as a powerful actor right after the end of the Soviet Union, taking over state functions like the protection of property rights. This is one of the most important scholarly arguments about Russian organised crime – that it did not merely exploit a vacuum but actually substituted for the state in key economic functions – and Varese expresses this through individuals’ lives. The drugs dealer and cybercriminal illuminate state repression and the digital economy of crime, broadening the book's lens but diluting its focus on criminal organisations per se. It is an excellent entry point and insightful macro-level account of how criminality shaped modern Russia. But it is more a social and political history through crime than a technical analysis of how organised crime developed. Furthermore, the book ends at the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which may have reshaped how the Vory operate and how the state adapted – or sought to adapt – ‘organised crime’ to suit its purposes.

Overall, the book is an accessible and intellectually serious contribution, particularly for readers new to the subject. Specialists in Russian organised crime or post-Soviet politics may find its argumentation somewhat familiar and its individual case studies too compressed, but as a synthesis aimed at a broader audience it succeeds on most counts. What I missed was any critique of or reference to Vadim Volkov's arguments in Violent Entrepreneurs or to Charles Tilly's earlier proposition that states generally were not designed ‘rationally’ but emerged as a byproduct of organised violence. It also has little to say about the more routine forms of criminality for gain or about the sort of elite super-scams that led to the Magnitsky Acts and that continue to be exposed by journalistic consortia and by Bill Browder (2022). ‘Adverse media’ – of which there has been much – now constitutes sufficient grounds to de-bank Russian elites abroad and many critics of authoritarian regimes, on which subject the book is silent (see Reimer, 2024; Bullough, 2026). The counter is that there are enough formal academic texts and journalistic accounts that do this, and what Russia in Four Criminals aims to do is to illuminate the dynamic and fluid interactions between ‘organised crime’ and Russia prior to the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine, rather than exploring the more static and binary ‘organised crime’, and this is welcome. Some high, medium and low-level crime entrepreneurs are always exploring new opportunities and seeking to by-pass constraints, and one hopes that others will illuminate these variations in times to come.