Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda. Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs — this is still Goebbels-type but stretched out and product-diversified to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti's method.
His new book on the business of Russian crime isn't about business at all. There's not a single item from a balance-sheet, cashflow analysis, asset trace, or financial indictment in
Galeotti's effort to exaggerate Russian criminals to mean Russian people, all of them.
The Russians are also the unique criminals of our world, he thinks - no other nation on earth matches them for their criminality. So for the protection of the rest of the innocent world, and to protect the uncriminalized from being Russianized, the Russian state, that's the "super-mafia" of Galeotti's targeting,
should be destroyed by warfare. And since Galeotti repeats the slang of the Russian streets himself to rub in his conclusion that "mainstream society" - that's everybody - "reflect[s] a fundamental process of criminalisation of politics and daily life", he means that Russians deserve more than their mouths washed out.
Galeotti is a mercenary; his book a weapon — a stun-gun for the naive, an improvised explosive device for the unguarded, a neutron bomb for the sceptical. Means, motive, opportunity for a hate crime in the service of a war crime.
Galeotti's book,
The Vory, Russia's Super-Mafia, was published by Yale University Press a year ago; its paperback edition was released this year. Galeotti and his book are
promoted in Moscow in English by
The Moscow Times,
the Dutch Government-financed publication.
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