Challenging widely held views, this book presents a thorough account of the Russian Mafia. It charts the emergence of the group in the context of the transition to the market, the privatization of protection, and pervasive corruption. It includes reports of undercover police operations, in-depth interviews conducted over several years with the victims of the Mafia, criminals and officials, and documents from the Gulag archives. It also provides a comparative study, making references to other Mafia, such as the Japanese Yakuza, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, and the American-Italian Mafia.
Federico Varese is the author of "The Russian Mafia" (2001). He spent almost ten years working on this project and travelled regularly to Russia in the 1990s (and lived there for a period). "The Russian Mafia" won the Ed Hewitt prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2002 and has been translated in Dutch and Polish.
In 2011, he published "Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories" and edited a collection of papers titled "Organized Crime". He also contributes to "The Times Literary Supplement" and has written for "The London Review of Books", "Dissent Magazine", and "The Times (London)". He lives in Oxford, where he teaches at the University.
