ABSTRACT
Russia is a country of long and rich traditions: of literature, of faith, of absolutism and also of crime. Successive Tsars and then General Secretaries battled against corruption within the state bureaucracy, just as the life of the peasant and, later, worker often revolved around the black economy and lynch law. Traditional forms of social control had little authority or relevance in the late nineteenth century's growing cities and their working-class slums such as St Petersburg's infamous Haymarket or the Moscow Khitrovka. In order to survive despite both the pressures of daily life and the inefficiencies of the economy, Soviet citizens themselves turned to crime, even if only the ubiquitous black market. In Robert Sharlet's vivid words, 'beneath a planned environment of acute and persistent scarcity, nearly everyone steals goods from the state, sells one's services on the side or, if neither is possible, at least "steals time" on the job'.
