ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the influence of organised crime on the younger generation in the light of changing patterns within Russia's social and economic life. Until the draconian social changes of the 1980s organised criminal activity had been confined for the most part to the over-eighteens. M. Dixelius and A. Konstantinov and A. Gurov trace organised criminal activity in Russia as far back as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it tended to operate outside the legitimate framework. Russia's growing organised crime problem, its pervasive and dangerous influence on the future of the country, in particular on its youth, presents a challenge of self-reappraisal to Russian academics, educators, and law enforcers. Despite the anti-corruption campaigns led by Yuri Andropov and Gorbachev, little real progress was made in rooting out a problem that, by the mid 1980s, had become an integral part of the shadow economy, the foundation upon which the precarious legitimate economy then rested.
