Comrade Criminal

The countries which formed the Soviet Union, once the feared superpower, are now in turmoil after the fall of communism and the break up of the Union. The attempt of all the countries to create democracies and to form their own governments, and at the same time change their economics from socialist to capitalist, has created enormous upheaval, ethnic uprisings, war, poverty, disease and famine on a scale which we are only just beginning to understand. Stephen Hendelman, a five-year resident in Moscow and an expert on the Soviet Union, presents here the first portrait of a society which is now more frightening than it was at the height of the Cold War, both to its own people and to outsiders. The book is based on over 150 interviews with government officials and policemen, members of the criminal underworld and ordinary Russian citizens, the new entrepreneurs and the old bureaucrats, as well as communist archives and original Russian material.