Proposed Solutions to the Organized Crime Problem in Russia Lessons Learned from Social and Legal Approaches Employed in the United States, Great Britain, and Sicily

rganized crime has become one of the major problems facing the modern world. It no longer exists within the boundaries of individual countries; today, primarily because of advances in communication and transportation technology, the organized criminal has become a citizen of the world, unwelcome, but nonetheless there. It is naive to view the phenomenon of organized crime in provincial terms as has become the fashion of those who point to Russia as experiencing a volatile and unique epidemic of this form of criminality.1 Every major country—the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Columbia, China, and Japan, to mention only a few—is engaged in its own war on organized crime. In responding to the specific and rapidly increasing threat of organized crime currently facing Russia and the Russian people, we believe it to be a challenge and obligation of social scientists, along with specialists from other disciplines, to offer solutions. In that spirit and framework, we seek to offer solutions to the problem of Russian organized crime by drawing comparisons with the results of measures that have been attempted in the United States. Although we respect the conclusion drawn by scholars at the conference “The Black Market as a Political System,” as reported in the Moscow News,2 that there is no sociological solution to the mafia problem in Russia, we believe that there is a solution. However, that solution depends solely on the sincere involvement of the Russian government and the individual Russian citizen. In opposition to the conclusion that there is no possible solution to the mafia problem is a statement made by Russian sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya in 1989: