ABSTRACT
In her damning book on Russian politics and society, Putin’s Russia, published in 2004, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote of a ‘government riddled with corruption (Politkovskaya, 2004: 274). Two years later she was murdered, allegedly by three gunmen, in what was deemed to be a contract killing. The ineffectual investigation into and judicial aftermath of the killing, as with a number of similar cases of assassinated Russian reporters, pointed to the probable collusion between corrupt officials and organised crime, one of Politkovskaya’s topics of investigation. As yet, no one has been successfully prosecuted for her murder, nor indeed for a number of other killings of Russian investigative journalists looking into corruption and links between officials and organised crime. Uncovering substantive evidence on the links between corruption and what many refer to as the ‘Russian Mafia’ is a difficult and, as the tragic occurrence described above demonstrates, dangerous task, not least when these relationships involve the higher echelons of power. Investigations into corruption entailing links between low-level officials, most notably in the police, and organised crime in Russia, have generally produced more tangible evidence of the nature and modus operandi of the relationship – rather than what we might refer to as ‘speculative certainty’ which hangs around the ‘corrupted’ elite – but is clearly only a limited glimpse of the criminal landscape.
