Johnson's Russia List
#8025
21 January 2004
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A CDI Project
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#23
St. Petersburg Times
January 20, 2004
City Crime Not What Once Was - Author
By Irina Titova
STAFF WRITER

St. Petersburg is no longer Russia's criminal capital - this is the good
news announced in a new book called "Banditsky Peterburg 1703-2003," by the
city's most famous crime reporter Andrei Konstantinov.

"The 'Banditsky Peterburg,' the history of which we followed attentively
since the beginning of the 1990s ... doesn't exist anymore," Kostantinov
writes in the preface.

"The period of gangster wars is over, and, above all, the most criminal
groups, which were the reason for the notion [that the city was the
criminal capital] are no longer here," he writes.

Konstantinov, who heads the city's Agency of Journalistic Investigations,
is reputed to be the city's best informed journalist on the local criminal
world.

His 1998 book "Banditsky Peterburg" inspired a hugely successful television
series featuring some of the country's best actors. It was rescreened
numerous times on several channels. The soundtrack became a popular hit.

The new book updates the 1998 book, but also goes back to the crimes
committed when the city was founded.

In 1990s St. Petersburg was stigmatized as the country's criminal capital
after several murders of prominent federal politicians and city
administrators, including Mikhail Manevich, head of the city's property
committee, in 1997 and State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova in 1998.

Local businessmen and criminals were also frequent targets of contract killers.

Konstantinov estimates that in the last decade, which he calls "the period
of gangster wars," about 5,000 people were killed in criminal conflicts in
St. Petersburg.

The list of murders in the city from 1993 to September 2003 provided by
Konstantinov indicates that people holding high office in business or the
local administration were killed in St. Petersburg every week and sometimes
more often.

However, the new book, which covers 300 years of crime in St. Petersburg,
suggest that the last 10 years of unprecedented criminal activity in the
city was not unique.

Konstantinov says the city's history was punctuated with the dark moments
from the very beginning.

The city's criminal rating was especially high in 1741 when Elizabeth,
daughter of Peter the Great, took the throne. Her guards, who helped her to
get the crown, considered they could do whatever they liked.

Konstantinov said the guards robbed people on the streets and sometimes
broke into the homes of wealthy people and killed whole families.

At that time, so-called "sly" wayside inns appeared on the roads leading to
St. Petersburg. Far from populated areas from where help might come, these
were almost factories of death for foreigners traveling to or from the city.

A century later, another landmark in the criminal history of St. Petersburg
was reached when the city became overrun with female criminals, many of
whom worked as prostitutes.

Konstantinov writes the city had 148 registered brothels in 1853, By 1880,
the city had more than 6,000 prostitutes.

Trying to explain why this was so, the author suggests female criminality
might have something to do with passive roles that the society assigned to
local women at that time.

"Not being satisfied with playing those roles, ladies with an 'active life
position' turned into prostitutes, scoundrels or thieves," Konstantinov writes.

The absolute queen of the city's criminal world at that time was infamous
Sonka the Gold Hand. To use modern language, the Gold Hand could be called
a criminal sex bomb.

This beautiful and very elegant woman, who knew several foreign languages,
was an extremely successful thief.

One of her favorite methods was called "Good Morning."

Dressed in fine clothes, Sonka stayed in the city's best hotels, studied
their layouts, and paid close attention to visitors. She would then go to
their rooms early in the morning in search for precious things. If a man
woke up suddenly she would pretend mistakenly entered the wrong room.
Sometimes she slept with the men in the room.

The Bolshevik revolution became an impulse for another wave of criminality
in the city. This was the era of Lyonka Pantelyeyev, the superstar of the
local criminal world , whose robberies kept the whole city in fear.

However, the biggest part of the two-volume book by Konstantinov is
dedicated to the city's recent criminal history, which the author himself
witnessed.

"Gloomy times," Konstantinov writes, describing the St. Petersburg of the
early 1990s.

"People were afraid to go outside at night. They were afraid to drive their
miserable Moskvich cars.

They feared that they could occasionally scratch a bandit's Mercedes ...
and after that your life would be ... over," he wrote.

"A couple of bandits would get out of their Mercedes and break a couple of
your fingers [if they saw you were not able to pay], and that was if you
were lucky. If you had a small business in a kiosk, they could take all
your stuff; if you entered a cafe with a beautiful woman they could just
violently take her and drive away," Konstantinov wrote.

Konstantinov writes about a man called Anton, nicknamed "Karabas" by the
author, who in 1993 kept a farm for slaves outside St. Petersburg. It was a
sort of informal labor colony for hostages, who didn't pay their debts, or
for bandits who misbehaved.

Anton made those people work until they had served their time or had paid
off their debts.

Konstantinov met the city's organized crime bosses, including the recently
murdered "Kostya the Grave" and Ruslan Kolyak. Some he managed to interview
"for posterity," and his unique interviews are reproduced in the book.
Kolyak was a colorful representative of St. Petersburg's criminal world who
survived nine attempts upon his life, but was finally killed last year.

Konstantinov says Kolyak, who was a very emotional person, had vowed to
kill the author, but said that he didn't do it only because of
Konstantinov's "advanced abilities, intellect and talent."

The book also has an interview with Vladimir Barsukov, also known as
Kumarin, whom Konstantinov describes as a businessman.

Konstantinov said that when telling stories of those people, he never aimed
to advertise them, but that they belonged to the city's history, and he
also tried to show them from a human point of view.

Konstantinov said the criminal situation in the city was under control by
the end of 2003.

The end of St. Petersburg's criminal status can be explained by a general
improvement in the country's economic situation in the country compared to
the decade of chaos, which provoked the rise of boundless criminality in
the early 1990s.

The world of organized criminality has changed today - when part of that
world legalized into respectable businesses and doesn't want to go back to
its dark past, while the other part has turned to drugs, he writes.

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