Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.
Mafia guys are all just insecure people who want their money. They're like little seven-year old kids when they don't get their way. I knew guys like that growing up in New Jersey.
The Yanukovych regime is a mafia, which regularly threatens, imprisons, murders, or disappears political opponents as well as those whose possessions it covets.
Italian-Americans are not the Mafia.
Wherever there's opportunity, the mafia will be there.
Putin and many of his gang may have once been Communists, but they are not that today. Rather, they have embraced a new totalitarian political ideology known as 'Eurasianism.'
The best defence against mafia business is full declaration of assets and incomes.
I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I was a big favorite with the Mafia.
Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.
The post-Soviet mafia wove a spider's web of dirty money around the world. Where better to attack it than to start with the Ukrainian criminal heavyweights - the 'family' and its closest circle?