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Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

www.elsevier.com/locate/postcomstud

Crime, organised crime and corruption inpost-communist Europe and the CIS

Leslie Holmes

School of Social and Political Sciences, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne,

Victoria 3010, Australia

Available online 15 May 2009

Abstract

This article examines the incomplete and sometimes contradictory evidence on the crime,organised crime and corruption situations in post-communist states, and then seeks to explain

the apparent increase in all three in early post-communism. Among the factors considered arethe impact of weak states and economies, neo-liberalism, globalisation, Schengen and FortressEurope, the Communist legacy (the ‘ghost from the past’), and collusion. The article then

examines the dynamics of criminality and malfeasance in the region, and provides evidence tosuggest that the crime and corruption situation has stabilised or even improved in most post-communist countries in recent times. The factors considered for explaining this apparentimprovement are the role of external agents (notably the EU), the move from transition to

consolidation, and the role of political will.� 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Regents of the University of California.

Keywords: Crime; Organised crime; Corruption; Post-communism; CEE; CIS

In the first, euphoric weeks and months following the collapse of Communistpower, some commentators claimed that the democratisation, marketisation andprivatisation of the formerly Communist states of Eastern Europe and the SovietUnion would lead to a marked decline in corruption levels. In fact, virtually all of themeasurement methods available suggest that most of the post-communist statesexperienced a marked increase in corruption. At the same time, several of them

0967-067X/$ - see frontmatter� 2009Published byElsevier Ltd on behalf of TheRegents of theUniversity ofCalifornia.

doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2009.04.002

266 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

appear to have experienced a substantial growth in both crime generally andorganised crime more specifically; the latter has been particularly pronounced inparts of South-Eastern Europe (SEE) and the CIS. But is the situation now begin-ning to improve?

This article considers the incomplete and sometimes contradictory evidence on thecrime, organised crime and corruption situations in post-communist states, and thenseeks to explain the apparent increase in all three of them in the 1990s. It goes on toexamine the dynamism of criminality in the region, showing how and why somestates now appear to be beginning to get on top of these problems, while otherscontinue to deteriorate.

The overall crime situation

Unfortunately, there are numerous and substantial problems involved in usingrecorded crime statistics to compare criminality across countries. One is that thedefinitions and categorisation of particular types of crime vary. There are alsodifferences over the kinds of crime-related statistics collected and published. Whilemost countries provide aggregate data on all reported crimes, a few e most of thesuccessor states to former Yugoslavia e provide details in national statistics year-books only on the number of persons accused, not the total number of crimesreported. Some countries e notably Latvia and Lithuania e have in the 2000sexplicitly amended the way they record and present crime statistics, in both of theseparticular cases making them appear higher in more recent years than they wouldhave had their previous methodology been applied (though any trends since thechanges can still be discerned). The EU is acutely aware of these problems, asrevealed in the European Council’s Hague Programme (European Council Presi-dency, 2004, pp. 34). Because of this awareness, the EU Commission’s statistical arme Eurostat e has been authorised to collaborate with the statistical offices of eachEU Member State and the Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, Freedomand Security on a project designed to increase the level of standardisation of crimestatistics.1 However, this is not to be completed until 2010 at the earliest, and it willapply only to some of the states considered here anyway.

Eurostat standardisation is also unlikely to change the culture of reporting formany years anyway. This relates to a second group of problems, the actualrecording process. Police forces vary in their levels of efficiency, capacity, integrityand traditions. Some are much more thorough than others at registering every crimebrought to their attention. Moreover, whereas some forces ‘de-record’ a hithertorecorded offence if, after investigation, they determine that no offence took place,others register all reported crimes and retain these in their published records,whatever the outcome of investigations. Some police forces are simply more honestthan others. While this can relate to the overall culture e notably ethical values e in

1 Details at: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page?_pageid¼ 3073,67701349,3073_67745354&_dad

¼ portal&_schema¼ PORTAL (accessed 1.08.08).

267L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

a given society, it can sometimes also be explained by system-related factors. Thus, ifpolice forces and/or individual police officers are judged or evaluated on the basis ofclear-up rates, then it is often in their vested interest to report lower rates ofcriminality in order to make their ratio of cases solved to cases reported appearmore impressive.

A final group of problems relates to the sources of reported crimes. A majorproblem for anyone engaged in comparative criminological analysis is that thepropensity of citizens to report crimes to the authorities can vary markedly acrosssystems. Cultural differences are one reason that citizens in country A are more likelyto report a particular crime than citizens in country B who have been victims ofa similar crime. For instance, it is widely considered inappropriate in some societies forvictims of certain types of crime to approach state authorities to seek justice. Rather,family or clan members, friends or ‘the community’ are seen as best suited toadminister justice (often more accurately described as revenge); parts of Albania andGeorgia exemplify this. Some citizens prefer not to report crimes because they wouldconsider this humiliating, or because of concern about self-incrimination (Killiaset al., 2006: 25). An example of the latter of direct relevance to the present analysis iswhere citizens might consider reporting a corrupt official, but fear being chargedthemselves with having broken the law in having paid a bribe to that official. Otherreasons for victim and citizen non-reporting include a lack of trust in the authorities esometimes because of perceived high levels of corruption, and the possibility ofcollusion between the authorities and the criminals e and a belief that the authoritiesare ineffectual, so that there is no point in reporting crime.2

Educational levels can also affect the propensity to report; in general, better-educatedpeople are more likely to report crime than less educated people. This relates to factorssuchasoverall personal confidence, and themore specific confidence required if reportinga crime involves the completion of a form.One practical reasonwhy reporting rates differsomuch is that citizens aremore likely to report the theft of items of relatively small valueto the police if those items are insured (for which their insurance company will requirea police report number); in general, themore affluent a society, the greater the percentageof citizens who insure their goods. Unfortunately in terms of explaining differing rates,this point about affluence can also operate in the opposite direction. Thus, citizens frommoreprosperous societies areoften less concernedabout reporting the theft of goods theyconsider relatively inexpensive, such as mopeds, than their peers in countries in whichsuch items are seen as more valuable, relative to income (Siemaszko, 1993: 89).

2 In the 2000 International Crime Victim Survey (ICVS), West Europeans were likely to report half of

the crimes they experienced to the police, whereas CEE/CIS respondents were likely to report only one

third. Part of the explanation for this is probably that West Europeans were clearly much more likely to be

satisfied with the way the police handled their reports than were their CEE/CIS counterparts; CEE/CIS

respondents were on average almost twice as dissatisfied with police performance as respondents in

Western Europe. Finally, the surveys revealed that CEE/CIS respondents considered police officers to be

more corruptible than any other group of state officials (Alvazzi del Frate and van Kesteren, 2004: 15e18

and 25e28).

268 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

In sum, comparing registered crime rates across countries will remain problematicfor the foreseeable future.3 It might, therefore, seem appropriate to throw our handsup in despair and the notion of comparison into the ‘too hard’ basket. But this wouldbe defeatist; despite all the problems involved, it is important to seek to maximiseour knowledge of crime trends both within countries and across them. By employingdifferent methodologies (multi-angulation), constantly attempting to refine each ofthem, and developing new ones, our understanding of the nature and scale of crimecan improve. It will never be perfect but abandoning our imperfect methodologiesonly plays into the hands of criminals.

Bearing these numerous caveats in mind, some of the statistics can now be pre-sented and analysed. An obvious starting point is with the official statistics on thetotal number of crimes committed per annum in each state, standardised to rendercomparison somewhat less precarious.

In light of the differences in defining, classifying and reporting crimes, the figuresin Table 1 must be treated with extreme caution. Their most useful function is not todetermine whether country A is more or less prone to crime than country B, butrather in identifying over time trends in country A, then in country B, and so on; thisis how they are used here. Using this method, and bearing in mind that somecountries’ statistics are incomplete, it appears that crime rates have risen and maystill be rising in five states (Belarus, Georgia, Republic of Macedonia, Russia,Slovenia); have not changed substantially in three (Azerbaijan, Croatia,Kazakhstan); and may be falling in two (Albania, Uzbekistan). But by far the largestgroup of countries is that in which rates initially rose but are now apparently sta-bilising or even falling; fourteen countries are in this category (Armenia, Bulgaria,Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland,Romania, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Ukraine).4 Thus, in only five countries out of 24classified are crime rates still trending upwards e at least according to officialstatistics. Combining those countries in which the rate is still rising with those inwhich it did rise substantially in early post-communism, it emerges that nearly four-fifths of states are either experiencing or have experienced significant increases intheir crime rates since the early-1990s; but of these, up to three-quarters are nowseeing their rates either stabilised or declined.

Given all the problems of comparability identified here, criminologists have devisedalternativemethods for gauging crime levels and trends, and these aremuchmoreusefulfor cross-polity analyses than a comparison of official statistics. The most valuable ofthese methods is crime victimisation surveys. These ask citizens about their directexperiences of various types of crime. The best known andmost highly regarded are theInternational Crime Victim Surveys (ICVS), which have so far been administered onfive occasions (1989; 1992e1994; 1996e1997; 2000e2001; 2004e2005).

3 Interpol began to collect national crime statistics from many states in 1950, and used to make these

publicly available on the Web. However, it ceased doing so in the early-2000s because of the possibility of

misunderstanding and misuse; only authorised police personnel may now access them.4 Four states e Bosnia and Hercegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkmenistan e have been excluded from

this classification because of inadequate or no statistics.

269L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

Whereas the 1st ICVS included very little from any post-communist state e onlyWarsaw was surveyed e the 2nd ICVS included an analysis of six transition ‘units’(four states e Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Georgia, Poland; and two cities e Moscow,Ljubljana e Zvekic, 1998: 19), while the 3rd analysed 19 CEE and CIS states5 plusMongolia (of the post-communist states). One of the most interesting findings fromthe mid-1990s surveys relates to respondents’ perceptions of their safety walking thestreets after dark; a comparison with the overall reported crime rates summarised inTable 1 suggests a complex and partly contradictory relationship. Thus, respondentsin several of the countries with low or medium crime rates in 1995, according to therecorded crime rates, were among those most nervous about going out after dark;this applies particularly to Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.Conversely, the 2nd and 4th lowest ‘fear factor’ scores were those for Slovenia andHungary, both of which were countries with high official crime rates in 1995 and1998. In some countries, however, there is a reasonable correspondence betweenrecorded crime rates and the ‘fear factor’; this was true of Albania and Bulgaria.Overall, citizens in CEE and CIS states were in the mid-1990s more nervous aboutgoing out after dark because of criminality than their counterparts in Latin America,Africa, the New World, Western Europe or Asia (Zvekic, 1998: 82). While thesefindings might suggest that some of the official recorded statistics are seriously atodds with reality, it would be unwise to assume this too readily; citizens’ fears mightrelate more to media coverage of crime or the age demographic (older people areoften more nervous about venturing out at night) in a particular country than to anystatistical probability that they will become victims of crime.

The 4th (2000e2001) ICVS was conducted in nine states or micro-regions ofWestern Europe and 16 cities in CEE and CIS e the capitals of Albania, Azerbaijan,Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia,Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Ukraine (Alvazzi del Frate andvan Kesteren, 2004: 4).6 Once again, space considerations necessitate selectivity herein citing findings. Based on citizen experiences of a basket of eleven types of crime,the Estonian capital of Tallinn emerged as the most crime-prone, closely followed by(in descending order) the capitals of Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania andAlbania. This time, with the notable exception of the Albanian case, the ICVS resultsare broadly in line with the 2000 recorded crime rates. At the other end of the scale,the CEE and CIS capitals with the lowest per capita experience of crime wereAzerbaijan’s Baku and Croatia’s Zagreb; while the Azerbaijani results resonate wellwith the official crime rates, the Croatian ones do not. Overall, the averagepercentage of respondents who had been victims of at least one crime (the prevalencerate) was e at 27% e identical in both Western Europe and CEE/CIS. In thisparticular and rather depressing sense, CEE and CIS can be said to have become

5 Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia,

Lithuania, Republic of Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and Yugo-

slavia; sample size per country was between 1000 and 2000 respondents.6 Note that the surveys in Tallinn and Ljubljana were subsets of national surveys conducted in Estonia

and Slovenia. The ICVS was conducted globally; only the European subset is analysed here.

Table 1

Registered crime rates (indicative only) in CEE and CIS states, selected years 1985e2007. Official rates per

100,000 population.

1985 1990 1995 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2007

Albania 208 195 170 169

Armenia 342 269 283 317 376 314 303 261

Azerbaijan 215 258 188 173 189 201 223

Belarus 584 738 1276 650 1204 1282

BiH 558 402

Bulgaria 541 772 2342 1936 1827 1873 1831 1776

Croatia 1397 1402 1230 1541 1754 1922 1825

Czechia 2517 3639 4139 3813 3649 3440 3271

Estonia 969 1515 2776 3315 4228 3930 3937 3861 3440

Georgia 361 290 325 286 384 575 1417 1249

Hungary 1567 3291 4864 5858 4418 4149 4148 4231 4250

Kazakhstan 906 815 1014 910 952 918 822

Kyrgyzstan 675 987 640 605 558

Latvia 972 1299 1585 1529 2123 2116 2696a 2732 2440

Lithuania 996 1682 2210 2362 2098 2456a 2230 2185

Rep. Macedonia 784 686 944 976 905 1114 1079

Moldova 986 1112 858 1050 1001 800 690 681

Montenegro

Poland 1463 2317 2525 2775 3312 3674 3828 3378 3025

Romania 276 1311 1775 1577 1434 1069 1079

Russia 990 1240 1860 1779 1759 1740 2007 2700

Serbia

Slovakia 1319 2135 1741 1651 1996 2437 2135 2051

Slovenia 1919 1918 2793 3398 3871 4334 4494

Tajikistan 317 219 231 196 163 156 170

Turkmenistan 516

Ukraine 490 713 1251 1143 1161 959 1116 918 880

Uzbekistan 436 334 300 328

Sources: Most of the 1985 and 1990 figures are UN statistics from http://www.uncjin.org/Statistics/WCTS/trc000927.pdf

(accessed 8.08.08). The 1990 figure for Czechia is based on the national statistical yearbook, while Lotspeich (1995) is the

source of the 1995 Turkmen figure. For all statistics from and including 1995 through 2006 for Bulgaria, Croatia,

Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and

Slovakia e the figure has been calculated by the author on the basis of the number of ‘Crimes recorded by the police’ on

the Eurostat website (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-08-019/EN/KS-SF-08-019-EN.

PDF) and the population at year’s end. A small number of gaps were filled from the 1997 and 1998 editions of the

CMEA’s Statisticheskii Spravochnik; Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year 1986: 940e945; 1991: 860e865; 1996:

882e887; 1999: 874e879; 2001: 874e879; 2003: 874e879 e and were in most cases calculated by the author on the basis

of total number of crimes committed divided by the population and standardised. For countries not included in the UN

or Eurostat databases and for all 2007 statistics, the figures have been either directly cited from, or else calculated by the

author on the basis of national statistical yearbooks; where data are not available in the yearbooks, the author has

contacted the relevant statistical offices by e-mail. But the empty cells in the table reveal that gaps remain.

Notes: As noted in the text, the ways in which crimes are classified and recorded vary somewhat from jurisdiction to

jurisdiction, and sometimes even within one country over time. This is one reason why these data must be treated as

indicative only. All figures are rounded to the nearest whole number; however, where the last digit is a ‘0’, this is

sometimes because the figure given in the National Statistics book is per 10,000, not per 100,000. Readers should also

consult Killias et al. (2003: 33) and Killias et al. (2006: 37) for alternative statistics. These are mostly very similar to those

cited above; they have not been used here because the Eurostat set is marginally more comprehensive (the 2nd ed. of

Killias provides figures for 1995, 1998 and 2000, while the 3rd ed. covers two of the years required for the table e 2000

[revisited] and 2002). The 1st ed. provides crime rates for many of the CEE and CIS countries for 1990 e but, frus-

tratingly, does so only for particular crimes, not the overall rate. Moreover, none of the three editions provides statistics

for most states for which we have blank cells.a This country changed its methodology with effect from this year, and the data are not comparable with earlier data

(though they are with later data).

270 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

271L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

‘normal’, now being e in aggregate e in line with European averages.7 On the otherhand, CEE/CIS citizens were on average more than twice as likely to feel unsafewalking the streets at night as their West European counterparts; among CEE andCIS citizens, those who felt most at danger were inhabitants of Vilnius, Sofia, Kiev,Minsk and Moscow, while those who felt least threatened were the citizens of Baku,Zagreb and Ljubljana (Alvazzi del Frate and van Kesteren, 2004).

Although the full results of the 2005e2006 ICVS were not publicly available at thetime of writing, most of the results of a European subset e the EU ICS, or EuropeanUnion Crime and Safety Survey e were. Unfortunately, this includes findings ononly three post-communist states e Estonia, Hungary and Poland, as well as on the15 countries that were Member States of the EU prior to May 2004. While thismeans that only a small cross-section of post-communist states can be considered onthe basis of this survey, it is interesting to compare these three states with moreestablished democracies elsewhere in Europe. Among the more noteworthy resultswas that Hungary had one of the lowest overall crime experience rates, while Estoniahad one of the highest, with Poland being in the middle (Van Dijk et al., 2007a: 2).Such findings are clearly at odds with the registered crime statistics presented inTable 1, according to which the order, highest first, would be Hungary, Estonia andPoland for both 2004 and 2006.

Given the sorts of mismatches identified here, it is not surprising that statisticalanalyses reveal the relationship between the number of recorded crimes and thenumber of crimes experienced in a given country to be e at best e weak. Indeed, theauthors of a recent analysis of the ICVS and EU ICS noted that, ‘The number ofcrimes recorded by the police bears hardly any relationship to the ICVS-basedmeasure of crime’ (Van Dijk et al., 2007a: 25).

Afinal problemregarding comparison is that twocountriesmayappear tohave similaroverall crime rates, but the crimes aremostly petty in one and serious (involving violence)in the other. Clearly, a distinction should be drawn between a country in which there aremany bicycle thefts but a low homicide rate and one in which murder is common, butone’s bicycle is less likely to be stolen.While this important point cannot be explored here,disaggregated data are available e on both reported crimes and from the crime victim-isation surveys e that will answermany of the questions relating to this particular issue.8

On balance, the ICVS are likely to be a more accurate reflection of reality thanofficial statistics, though the fact that a different number of post-communist states issurveyed each time is regrettable; the official statistics are more complete, and areuseful for tracking trends within a particular country.9 Despite their respective

7 If anything, the rates may have been slightly lower nationally in CEE/CIS, since crime rates in capital

cities often exceed the national norm.8 For reported crimes, see national statistics yearbooks; Killias et al. (2003, 2006). For experienced

crimes see the various ICVS analyses cited here via http://rechten.uvt.nl/icvs/.9 Poland is one post-communist state that has now appreciated that victimisation surveys are often

a more accurate measure of crime rates than officially recorded crimes. The Polish police authorities began

commissioning what are planned to be regular large-scale (N¼ 17,000) crime victim surveys in 2007. I am

indebted to Prof. A. Siemaszko for alerting me to this fact.

272 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

drawbacks, both methods yield some encouraging results. Before concluding thissection on overall crime rates, reference can be made to observations that givefurther cause for cautious optimism, at least regarding some post-communist states.Thus, a comparison of two quotations referring to Poland, both based on actualexperiences of crime but made almost 15 years apart, is encouraging. The first datesfrom the early-1990s, and reveals a pessimistic view of the correlation betweentransition and crime rates: ‘‘The Polish experience clearly shows .that the processof political and economic transformation is always accompanied by an unprece-dented growth in the crime rate.’’ (Siemaszko, 1993: 87).

The second is a recent assessment of the Polish situation, and is far more upbeat:‘‘Poland, for which national (victimisation) data are available since 1990, shows a clearand consistent downward trend. From a European perspective, Poland has turned froma high crime into amedium crime country.’’ (VanDijk et al., 2007a: 23) Poland is not theonly CEE/CIS country to have been reassessed in a more favourable light. In its traveladvisories, the U.S. State Department has recently lowered its crime rating of Albaniafrom high to medium, and has stated that the overall crime rate in Bosnia and Herce-govina, Croatia, Czechia, theRepublic ofMacedonia and Slovenia is either ‘relatively’ or‘generally’ low, and that Estonia andLithuania are both ‘relatively safe’. Slovakia’s crimerate is described as medium. Conversely, the crime problem in Georgia is rated ‘veryserious’, whileKyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are also seen as having high crime rates. To saythat there is a mismatch between these assessments and most of the statistics in Table 1would be an understatement. Conversely, it is encouraging to see that the crime situationin many CEE states e parts of the CIS are another matter e appears to be eitherstabilising or improving.

Organised crime

It is even more difficult to obtain reliable information about organised crime thanabout crime generally. Once again, this relates to several factors, including disagreementonwhat constitutes organised crime.Whilemost authorities agree in principle that a cleardistinction should be drawn between street, or predatory crime on the one hand, andorganised crime on the other, distinguishing them in practice can be problematic. Thelatter is supposed to involve a level of continuity, for instance; but some street gangs alsoprove tobe durable.While the term ‘organised’ necessarily implies a levelof coordination,many analysts believe it also involves strict hierarchical arrangements e whereas othersargue that although thismighthavebeen true in thepast, contemporaryorganisedcrime istypically structuredalongmuchmoreflexible lines.For example, althoughelementsof theSoviet-era Russian organised crime groups known as ‘Thieves-in-Law’ still exist andremain highly-structured, most Russian crime gangs are more fluid (United NationsOffice onDrugs andCrime, 2002; Schiller et al., 2004: 65, 66). Indeed, the fluidity ofmanycontemporary organised crime arrangements, both inRussia andmore generally, has ledsomeobservers to refer to themas disorganised crime (Paoli, 2002;Galeotti, 2004;Reuter,1983). Then there is the fact thatmany organised crime syndicates engage in semi- or evenfully legitimate business as well as their criminal activities; a UK parliamentary researchpaper recently even defined organised crime groups as ‘essentially businesses’ (Strickland

273L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

et al., 2004: 7). Some analysts include ‘oligarchs’ under organised crime, while othersexplicitly exclude them, treating them as sui generis. The list of definitional and boundaryproblems could continue for several pages.But one ramificationof suchdifficulties is that,unlike the situation with crime generally, most post-communist states publish nosystematic data on organised crime.10 Hence, it is not possible to produce a comparativetable akin to Table 1, even allowing for the latter’s problematic nature.

In the absence of even semi-reliable official data, this section focuses on threecountries in which the problem of organised crime has widely been portrayed asparticularly serious e Russia, Bulgaria and Albania.11 It begins by providingevidence for the claim that organised crime in these countries e and its effects beyondthese countries e has been seen as a serious threat. Following this is consideration ofwhether the situation appears to be improving, worsening, or stabilising.

At an all-Russian conference on organised crime and corruption held in February1993, President Yeltsin stated that ‘Crime has started to become the No.1 threat inRussia’ and that ‘Organised crime has become a direct threat to Russia’s strategicinterests and national security’ (TASS, 12 February 1993; BBC Summary of WorldBroadcasts, 15 February 1993), while Izvestiya claimed in January 1994 that 70e80% of banking and private business in Russia was under the control of organisedcrime (Goldman, 2003: 177). While such claims are based more on perception thanon scientific research, they testify to the widespread and serious concern thatorganised crime was causing within Russia during the 1990s. This concern was notpeculiar to Russia; many other countries were also increasingly alarmed.

Perhaps the best example of this is the USA, where the authorities took the threatof post-Soviet (including but not exclusively Russian) organised crime seriously inthe 1990s. A Tri-State (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) Joint Soviet-Emigre Organized Crime Project was established in 1992 (Williams, 1997: 177e226).The FBI established special investigative squads for ‘Eurasian Organized Crime’ inseveral U.S. cities e including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles e between 1994and 1999. By the mid-1990s, the heads of both the FBI and the CIA were warningCongress that Russian organised crime and corruption were undermining theRussian system and could pose a serious threat to the USA, in part because ofRussia’s less than secure nuclear stockpile (Webster, 1997: esp. 3, 51; Farah, 1997).

The FBI’s concern about the impact of post-communist organised crime on theWestgenerally was such that it established a ‘Eurasian Organized Crime Working Group’ in

10 For an excellent survey of the patchy Russian statistics on organised crime, highlighting the contra-

dictions and confusion, but also that both the number of gangs and the number of people involved in

organised crime appear to have declined in the 2000s, see Serio, 2008: 71e94. For an even higher figure

than any cited by Serio e an unsourced claim that Russian organised crime includes 250,000 former

members of the Red Army e see Gruba�c (2008: 31).11 This list is to some extent arbitrary, and others would produce alternative lists. For example, Atha-

nassopoulou (2005b: 4) maintains that Kosovo is ‘the notorious criminal capital of SEE’, while some

would want to include Serbia. The choice here is based partly on my own perceptions and knowledge, and

partly on the availability of materials. On organised crime in other post-communist countries and regions

see e.g. Shelley (1998) (Ukraine); Hignett (2004) (Czechia, Hungary and Poland); Athanassopoulou

(2005a) (SEE); No�zina (2006) (Czechia); Giatzidis (2007) (SEE).

274 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

1994 that now works under the auspices of the G8 (the original G7 countries, plusRussia itself) and exists primarily to address the transnational aspects of ‘Eurasian’organised crime.12 While the USA has in the 2000s placed less emphasis than it did onthe threat posed by post-Soviet organised crime, the West’s overall concern remains.13

A recent piece of evidence is the EU’s April 2008 announcement of the commissioningof a Russian Organised Crime Threat Assessment, to be drafted by Europol, because ofwhat the EU somewhat opaquely called ‘organised crime groups relative to certainregions’ constituting ‘.a serious threat to the security of the European Union and itsMember States’ (Council of the European Union, 2008: 1).

Even before it joined the EU, Bulgaria was under pressure from Brussels toaddress the issue of organised crime more enthusiastically than it had been; andever since Bulgaria became a Member State (January 2007), it has been criticisedfor continuing to do too little. While some of the evidence on organised crime isflimsy and anecdotal, the fact that perceptions matter e and that these can bemeasured e will tell us something about organised crime, and about what citizensbelieve are the connections between organised crime and corruption. Thus,a survey on people smuggling conducted by Vitosha Research on behalf of theauthor in November 2004 revealed that 58% of Bulgarians either agreed orstrongly agreed with the notion that people entering their country illegally did sowith the assistance of organised crime gangs, while 55% of these respondentsbelieved that the gangs colluded with corrupt officials.14 While such perceptionsmay be at odds with reality e and nobody knows for certain e it does suggest thatthe Bulgarian authorities need to address the issue, even if only to correctmisperceptions.

Much Bulgarian organised crime activity has been dominated by the so-calledwrestlers, some of whom actually had been wrestlers, while others had been athletesof various kinds or simply looked like wrestlers.15 Unlike the situation in Russia,there was little history of Bulgarian organised crime dating from the communistperiod; rather, it was: ‘.created by the ‘‘transitional state’’’ (Nikolov, 1997: 80).Bulgarian mobsters have had a reputation for being particularly violent towards

12 The FBI website e http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/orgcrime/eocindex.htm (accessed 7.08.08) e defines

Eurasian Organized Crime as ‘.organized crime groups comprised of criminals born in or with family

from the former Soviet Union or Central Europe.’ It is thus broader than just Russian organised crime,

although it was initially organised crime originating primarily from Russia that interested the FBI.13 The relative decline in U.S. interest is partly borne out by the fact that the National Criminal Justice

Reference Service refers readers to assessments of the Russian threat that are relatively old (nothing more

recent than 2001) e http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/QA/Detail.aspx?Id ¼ 265&context ¼ 9 e even though the

website was updated in May 2008 (accessed 7.08.08).14 The survey was of 1001 respondents, face-to-face. A similar survey run in Poland in the same month

(N¼ 998; survey conducted by CBOS) produced almost identical figures e with 59% of Poles agreeing

that illegal migration involved organised crime gangs, and 54% of these believing that corrupt officials

colluded with organised crime gangs in this activity.15 This physical stereotype can be found in other post-communist countries. Thus, the Poles sometimes

refer to their own gangsters as ‘ABSs’ or absolutnie bez szyi (absolutely without necks). On the ‘wrestlers’

see Gounev (2006: 110e112); Bezlov et al. (2007): esp. 12e14 e while Volkov, 2002 describes somewhat

similar phenomena in the Russian context.

275L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

each other, arguably even more so than their Russian counterparts.16 Nevertheless,there appear to have been some potentially positive developments. Thus, when a newgovernment came to power in 1997, it made clear its determination to stop violentprotectionism e but also acknowledged that legitimate security and insurancecompanies were needed, and urged gangs to re-direct their activities into these twolegal types of company (though they had to be kept separate e Gounev, 2006: esp.114). Some Bulgarian mobsters did respond to this government directive, and arenow running more or less legitimate companies. The transmutation of organisedcrime into legitimate business is nothing new globally, but this constitutes a concreteexample from the post-communist world. One final positive sign was that, thoughstill relatively high, the level of violence in Bulgaria relating to organised crimedeclined in the early-2000s in comparison with the 1990s (Bezlov et al., 2007: 35) ethough it may recently have begun to rise again!

In order to address organised crime in both Albania and SEE more generally, 12SEE governments established the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI)Regional Center for Combating Trans-Border Crime; this became operational in2000 and is headquartered in Bucharest. SECI’s principal task is to coordinate theactivities of national police and customs forces to combat transnational crime inSEE. Its success has been limited; but SECI’s very existence testifies to concern in theregion by the late-1990s, which was when the idea was first mooted. Citing thecurrent (2008) FBI website once again is a useful starting point for demonstratingthat Albanian organised crime, as part of SEE (which the FBI prefers to call Balkan)crime, is of growing international e not simply regional e concern: ‘Balkanorganized crime is an emerging threat in the USA.’17 Despite this blanket term of‘Balkan’ organised crime, the country focused on in the FBI blurb is Albania.

Although Albanian organised crime has not been researched or analysed as muchas its Russian and Bulgarian counterparts, it has assumed a higher profile in recentyears because of its apparently greater propensity than any other branch of Euro-pean organised crime to use violence (Hysi, 2006: 546). In contrast to contemporaryBulgarian organised crime, its history is a long one, traceable to the fifteenth century;much of it is clan-based. It became a serious problem for Italy, in particular, duringthe 1990s, since crime gangs were both smuggling and trafficking Albanians emainly women for the sex industry e into Italy. One of the salient features of theAlbanian penetration of Italy was that it targeted Northern Italy, rather than theSouth; it is likely that this was either part of a pact made between Southern Italianand Albanian gangsters or because of the latter’s fear of the former. Not only werepeople trafficked by Albanian gangs often subject to violence at their hands, butmany also drowned. Even Italian state officials were under threat; police officers have

16 I am indebted to my Bulgarian research assistant Katya Malinova for providing me with numerous

examples from the Bulgarian media.17 The FBI defines ‘Balkan Organized Crime’ as ‘ .organized crime groups originating from or operating

in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia

and Montenegro, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania.’ http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/orgcrime/balkan.htm

(accessed 7.08.08).

276 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

been killed in shoot-outs with the traffickers, while anti-mafia prosecutors such asCataldo Motta have had to be given round-the-clock protection against not onlyItalian but also Albanian organised crime (Barron, 2000). Cooperation between theItalian and Albanian authorities in the early-2000s appears to have encouraged mostAlbanian gangsters to steer away from Italy. Unfortunately, they simply movedelsewhere, having been seen by the early-2000s as a growing threat not only by theUSA, but also by the British government (Cobain, 2002).

Even more than with crime generally, much of the information available on CEEand CIS organised crime is vague and/or speculative. Nevertheless, there is moreinformation than is often assumed.Aswith both general crime and corruption, surveyshave been conducted of respondents’ actual experience of organised crime in CEE andCIS.One of the best known is the InternationalCrimeBusiness Survey (ICBS) that wasconducted in nine CEE and CIS capitals (of Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia,Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, Russia and Ukraine) in 2000, and focused on busi-nesses’ experiences of corruption, fraud, extortion and intimidation; it followeda similar but less thematically focused survey conducted in eight countries during 1994.The 2000 ICBS focused mainly on smaller enterprises, and discovered that almost onein 10 businesses across the region (nearly one in three in Minsk) had experiencedintimidation or extortion during 1999; of these, some 9% involved a direct threat ofviolence with weapons. Approximately, 8% of businesses across the region had beencoerced into paying protectionmoney the previous year (again, the situationwasworstinMinsk, where the figure exceeded 30%). But reflecting the fearmany businesses havethat the police would be unable to protect them against reprisals, 70% of respondentsdid not report these crimes to the police (Alvazzi del Frate, 2004).18

What conclusions can be drawn about organised crime?The direct threat ofRussianand post-Soviet crime to the USA’s security might never have been very great, even inthe 1990s. This was the position adopted by James Finckenauer and Elin Waring intheir detailed study of crimes committed by Russian and post-Soviet migrants to theUSA, in which they reach the conclusion, ‘.whichmay be startling to some .that theRussian organized crime in America widely known as the Russian Mafia is first, notRussian; second, not a mafia; and third, not even organized crime’ (Finckenauer andWaring, 1998: xiv). Finckenauer repeated the argument that the threat from post-Soviet migrant crime was not as serious a security threat to the USA in a later study heco-authored with Yuri Voronin (Finckenauer and Voronin, 2001; Finckenauer andWaring, 2001). This is not to say they claimed there was no threat; and that is not beingsuggested here. But it should be borne in mind that the West needed to identify anenemy following the end of the Cold War and what Fukuyama misguidedly called theEnd of History. While that enemy eventually crystallised on 11 September 2001, its

18 Another source on business experience of organised crime, and which is likely to become more useful in

the future, is the World Bank’s BEEPS (Business Enterprise Economic Performance Survey). This has

been completed three times (1999, 2002, 2005). But while the 2005 BEEPS included a question that

explicitly referred to organised crime (Q.32b), the earlier surveys were more circumspect, so that they

cannot be used for tracking trends. It is likely that this will be possible in the future, however, as more

BEEPS are conducted using the 2005 explicit question.

277L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

identity was more disputed during the 1990s. This is not to engage in conspiracytheories, and it is not suggested here that the threat from post-communist organisedcrime was purely a figment of the imagination of security agencies needing a post-ColdWar raison d’etre. While there may have been an element of this, several Westernintelligence services were probably genuine in their concerns about the effects oforganised crime on Western societies; after all, in the case of Russian and Ukrainianorganised crime in particular, mobsters with apparently no ethics and no commitmentto self-discipline were operating in countries that still had huge nuclear stockpiles thatwere not totally secure and inwhich there were large numbers of corrupt or corruptibleofficials. In this context, it is worth noting that theG7 summit held inHalifax (Canada)in 1995 focused on crime and nuclear safety, and agreed with Russia to establisha special task force to address the issue of transnational crime (Financial Times, 19 June1995). Add to this themuchmore flexible borders of the post-1989world and the rise ofthe internet e which dramatically enhanced a new type of crime, cyber crime e and itbecomes obvious that much of the concern was valid.

Parts of the scholarly community were also affected by, and contributed to, theperceptionof a serious threat fromorganisedcrimeatabout this time, as seen in the settingup of the journal Transnational Organized Crime (first issue Spring 1995)19 and theestablishment of two research centres for analysing organised crime and corruptione theTransnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) in Washington DC (founded1995), and the Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime andCorruption in Toronto (founded 1996). On the one hand, the reaction of both Westernauthorities and the academic community was impressively quick; on the other hand, theoverall dangermay have been overstatede though it is easy to say this in hindsight. In allevents, and while the dangers of CEE and CIS organised crime should not be under-estimated any more than they should be exaggerated, recent evidence on much of itsuggests that it, too, may be less of a problem now than it was in the 1990s.20

Corruption

An appreciation of how serious the problem of corruption is perceived to be insome SEE states can be gleaned from the actions of the EU vis-a-vis Bulgaria in July2008. What was meant to be a confidential report by OLAF (the EU’s anti-fraud

19 This journal’s name was changed to Global Crime with effect from the beginning of 2004.20 It was argued above (note 13) that some of the best known ‘official’ analyses published on Russian

organised crime are now a little dated, and that this suggests that the threat is not perceived to be as great

as it was. Much the same can be said of scholarly analyses of the threat of organised crime and nuclear

materials (Allison et al., 1996; Lee, 1998) e and indeed of Russian organised crime generally (Williams,

1997; Frisby, 1998; Friedman, 2000; Varese, 2001; Galeotti, 2002; Volkov, 2002). However, the interest has

certainly not disappeared altogether (Galeotti, 2004; Serio, 2008, Orttung and Latta, 2008). On recent U.S.

concern about security threats from transnational organised crime, see Wagley, 2006; while this analysis

does not focus specifically on Russian or post-Soviet organised crime as such, it argues (p. 4) that many

analysts consider the greatest threat from transnational organised crime to be the smuggling of nuclear

materials and technology, and singles out the former Soviet Union in this context.

278 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

watchdog) was leaked by sources inside Bulgaria. According to the report, millionsof Euros granted to Bulgaria in the pre-accession phase for rural and agriculturaldevelopment may have been corruptly siphoned off. The July 2008 warning to Sofiawas just the latest in a string of such warnings that had been given to Bulgaria andRomania both prior and subsequent to their admission to the EU in January 2007(Economist, 17 July 2008).

Obtaining statistics on corruption is at least as difficult as for crime generally, ifnot quite as problematical as for organised crime. Most countries do not system-atically publish figures on corruption rates, while the reliability of those that do isoften questionable.21 As with crime generally, many cases of corruption are neverreported; but the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the victim of corruption isoften an abstraction (‘the state’, ‘society’), and hence will not report crime. In caseswhere citizens have paid bribes, they often fear falling foul of the law themselves, andso do not report corrupt officials with whom they have been dealing.

Because of these and other problems, analysts have devised several alternativemethods for assessing the level of corruption in a given society. The most common isperception surveys, of which the best known globally is the Transparency Interna-tional Corruption Perceptions Index (TI CPI). This has been published annuallysince 1995, although only one post-communist state (Hungary) was included in thefirst CPI. The results of the CPIs for CEE and CIS countries are in Table 2.

So many points could be highlighted from Table 2 that selectivity is againnecessary here.22 Moreover, a number of states have been assessed only recently, sothat some patterns must be seen as very short-term and tentative.

It is difficult to discern a general pattern across the post-communist world. Evenemploying a 4-category classification e ‘improvers’, ‘deteriorators’, ‘steady staters’(fluctuating only within 0.5 points over time) and ‘mixed’ e many countries still donot fit comfortably into any of them. Albania, Croatia and Romania, for instance,were all steady staters for most of the period, but have made significant improve-ments recently; but given that these improvements have only emerged in 2007 or2008, these countries are still classified as steady staters here. With this importantcaveat in mind, it appears that the 16 steady staters are Albania, Armenia,Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Kazakhstan(since the early-2000s), Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania (following a marked improvement atthe beginning of the 2000s), Moldova (following a marked improvement in the mid-2000s), Montenegro (assessed in its own right only very recently), Romania,

21 Though for statistics on the number of officially recorded bribery and corruption cases in many

countries 1986e1990, including what are now 16 CEE and CIS states plus ‘Former Yugoslavia’ and

‘Present Yugoslavia’, go to http://www.uncjin.org/stats/ccrimes/bribery.txt (accessed 10.08.08). Unfortu-

nately, the table is vague about what is being included, sources and other details.22 Another ranking system is that devised by Freedom House; in addition to perceptions, this includes

acknowledgement of how many high-level officials are prosecuted, new anti-corruption legislation, and an

attempt to rate the efficacy of official anti-corruption campaigns, to produce a composite score. The FH

and TI rankings of CEE and CIS countries for 1999 have been directly compared in tabular form by the

President of Freedom House, Adrian Karatnycky, in his prepared submission before a U.S. commission

hearing (Smith, 2000: 66, 67 and 71) e and show a remarkably high level of agreement.

Table 2

TI CPI scores for CEE and CIS states, selected years 1996e2008.

1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2007 2008

Albania 2.5 2.5 2.6 2.9 3.4

Armenia 2.5 3.1 2.9 3.0 2.9

Azerbaijan 1.5 2.0 1.9 2.4 2.1 1.9

Belarus 3.9 4.1 4.8 3.3 2.1 2.1 2.0

BiH 3.1 2.9 3.3 3.2

Bulgaria 2.9 3.5 4.0 4.1 4.0 4.1 3.6

Croatia 3.7 3.8 3.5 3.4 4.1 4.4

Czechia 5.4 4.8 4.3 3.7 4.2 4.8 5.2 5.2

Estonia 5.7 5.7 5.6 6.0 6.7 6.5 6.6

Georgia 2.4 2.0 2.8 3.4 3.9

Hungary 4.9 5.0 5.2 4.9 4.8 5.2 5.3 5.1

Kazakhstan 3.0 2.3 2.2 2.6 2.1 2.2

Kyrgyzstan 2.2 2.2 2.1 1.8

Latvia 2.7 3.4 3.7 4.0 4.7 4.8 5.0

Lithuania 4.1 4.8 4.6 4.8 4.8 4.6

Rep. Macedonia 2.7 2.7 3.3 3.6

Moldova 2.6 2.1 2.3 3.2 2.8 2.9

Montenegro 3.3 3.4

Poland 5.6 4.6 4.1 4.0 3.5 3.7 4.2 4.6

Romania 3.0 2.9 2.6 2.9 3.1 3.7 3.8

Russia 2.9 2.4 2.1 2.7 2.8 2.5 2.3 2.1

Serbia 3.0a 1.3a 2.7a 3.0 3.4 3.4

Slovakia 3.9 3.5 3.7 4.0 4.7 4.9 5.0

Slovenia 5.5 6.0 6.0 6.4 6.6 6.7

Tajikistan 2.0 2.2 2.1 2.0

Turkmenistan 2.0 2.2 2.0 1.8

Ukraine 2.8 1.5 2.4 2.2 2.8 2.7 2.5

Uzbekistan 2.4 2.9 2.3 2.1 1.7 1.8

Notes: The TI CPI is scaled 0e10; the lower the score, the more corruption there is perceived to be. Blank

cells mean that this country was not assessed that year (usually because of insufficient survey data). For the

numerous methodological problems involved in using the CPIs see Sık (2002) and Galtung (2006).a Includes Montenegro.

279L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine (though it improved significantly in the early-2000s, albeit from a low base). It must be noted that the level of the steady statevaries considerably across this group; it would be quite unfair to lump Hungarytogether with Azerbaijan, for instance. The seven overall improvers are Estonia,Georgia, Latvia, Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Two stateshave clearly deteriorated in recent years e Belarus markedly so, Uzbekistan lessdramatically so, though moving from just bad to very bad (the worst or equal worstof all 28 states included here for both 2007 and 2008)! Finally, there are the statesthat have been mixed, that is, inconsistent e Czech Republic, Poland and Russia; ofthese, the first two have improved recently (Czech Republic more than Poland),while Russia clearly improved in Putin’s first term of office, but has since deterio-rated again. Overall, however, the pattern is encouraging; the corruption situationappears to be worsening in only a tiny minority of post-communist states.

280 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

The table also indicates a high level of consistency over time in terms of the leastand most corrupt post-communist states. Thus, Estonia, Slovenia and Hungaryconsistently emerge in the TI CPI as the least corrupt post-communist states, whileRussia, Ukraine, and the Islamic Soviet successor states appear to be the mostcorrupt.

Perception surveys are important, since perceptions are a form of reality and canaffect the way people behave e for instance, in investment decisions e and systemsoperate. Conversely, they do not necessarily tell us much about ‘real’ rates ofcorruption. While these can never be gauged with a high level of accuracy eparticularly concerning corruption in the upper echelons of the state e askingrespondents in surveys about their actual experiences of corruption, as distinct fromtheir impressions about it, is nowadays seen as a relatively reliable measure ofcorruption. It is, therefore, to such experiential survey results that we turn. Onceagain, the ICVSs are a particularly valuable source of information (though see tooMiller et al., 2001).

The 2nd ICVS revealed that, in the early-1990s in the few CEE and CIS statessurveyed, Georgia e where almost 21% of respondents had been subject to demandsin the year before the survey e and Moscow (almost 12%) were clearly the mostcorrupt; they were followed by Poland (5.1%), Czechoslovakia (2.4%) and, bottomof the list, Ljubljana (0.6%). The 1996e1997 ICVS revealed that, while the overallsituation in the transition states of CEE and the CIS was not as bad as in thedeveloping world e with an average of approximately 13% of citizens in the formerreporting recent experiences of official corruption, compared with almost 18% in thelatter e it was noticeably worse than in the established democracies of Europe,where direct experience of corruption was relatively rare (1.0%). Moreover, thepercentage of citizens directly experiencing corruption varied dramatically across the20 post-communist states e from almost 30% in Georgia, more than 21% inKyrgyzstan and just over 19% in Bulgaria to 3.9% in Hungary, 3.8% in Estonia anda mere 1.5% in Slovenia (Zvekic, 1998: 48e50). These findings are very much in linewith TI assessments.23

In the 2000e2001 ICVS, the single biggest difference between the crime experi-ences of West Europeans and CEE/CIS respondents related to corruption. Whereasan average of 17% of respondents in CEE and CIS capital cities had been asked orexpected to pay a bribe in the previous year, a negligible 0.2% of the West Europeanrespondents had. Once again, the CEE/CIS average conceals substantial differences.At one end of the spectrum were respondents from Baku and Minsk (21% hadexperienced corruption in this way during the previous year), Vilnius (23%) andTirana (a staggering 59%!), while at the other, only 2% of the Slovene capital’s

23 The reader is reminded that not all CEE and CIS countries were included in the 3rd ICVS. Moreover,

the statement about the TI correlation is based on the nearest year for which there is a reading for the

particular country; in this regard, note that the Kyrgyz and Georgian TI assessments, in particular, are

based on surveys conducted several years after the ICVS ones. Unfortunately, this is the best that can be

done with the available data.

281L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

respondents and 6% of Prague’s respondents had (Alvazzi del Frate and vanKesteren, 2004: 25e28).

The 2005 EU ICS revealed that the three post-communist states had almost thehighest rates of recent experience of corruption; only Greece was worse (it had notbeen included in the 2000e2001 survey). Thus, whereas the average percentage ofrespondents in the EU claiming to have been asked for or expected to pay a bribe tostate officials in 2004 was just 1.4% (with most countries being below 0.5%), thefigure was 4.8% in Hungary, 4.4% in Poland and 3.1% in Estonia (Greece wasa high 13.5%) (Van Dijk et al., 2007a: 3, 56 and 112).24 But while Hungary had notbeen assessed on this variable in previous ICVSs, both Poland and Estonia had eand their 2005 scores were the lowest they had been throughout the 1990s and 2000s.This sample is far too small to allow any general conclusions about the decline ofcorruption in post-communist states; but it can at least be concluded that the pictureis not all bleak. Moreover, Van Dijk et al. (2007a: 55) correlated their findings (forall the EU states they examined) with the TI CPI scores, and found a high level ofagreement (r¼ .73); again, while this cannot be taken as conclusive, and did notinclude many post-communist states, it does suggest that the CPI generally producesresults that are more robust and closer to the actual situation than some of its criticsclaim. One other encouraging aspect of this methodological comparison is that thecohorts were different (TI assessments are based very much on businesspeople’sresponses, rather than the population at large); given this, the relatively highcorrelation is even more reassuring.25

Other methods for assessing the level of corruption e notably tracking surveys(Reinikka and Svensson, 2003) e have been used in other parts of the world. It wouldbe worthwhile conducting them in post-communist states; but in the absence of suchsurveys, this must remain on the wish-list for now.26 It does mean, however, that thereis scope for additional methods to be applied in multi-angulation as we try to refine andimprove our assessments of the level of corruption in individual CEE and CIS states.

Explanations for the rise e and sometimes demise e of crime and corruption

The apparent rise of crime and corruption in the post-communist world in the1990s can be explained by many factors; just a few can be considered here, and then

24 Bulgaria was not included in the EU ICS, but was the only other CEE/CIS state included in the 2005

ICVS; it emerged as worse than any of the three other post-communist states listed here e at 8.4% e

though it was still not as bad as Greece (Van Dijk et al., 2007b: 88e92).25 One way of conducting a more comparable analysis of different methods would be to compare the TI

findings with the experiential surveys of businesspeople. In addition to the ICBS, the most useful for this

exercise would be the BEEPS surveys mentioned earlier; unlike the situation with organised crime, these

have included questions on corruption from the beginning.26 However, tracking surveys are apparently being or about to be conducted in Albania, the Republic

of Macedonia and Russia e http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/

EXTPUBLICSECTORANDGOVERNANCE/EXTPUBLICFINANCE/EXTPEAM/0,,contentMDK:

20235447~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:384393,00.html (accessed 26.12.08).

282 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

only briefly. Before elaborating them, however, it must be noted that there isevidence that data e of all sorts e were often manipulated in the communist world.This, plus the fact that the media became much more open in most post-communiststates in the 1990s, means that we cannot be certain that crime and corruption reallyincreased as much as they appeared to do in many countries during the 1990s. Oneother introductory caveat is that some factors are peculiar to a particular country orregion. For example, the fact that international sanctions were imposed on formerYugoslavia in the 1990s has been seen by several analysts as a factor encouragingboth organised crime and corruption, as the country sought to obtain supplies thatthe international community was trying to prevent it from accessing. This encour-aged more criminal behaviour not only in Yugoslavia itself, but also in neighbouringcountries that were supplying it, including Bulgaria (Bezlov et al., 2007: 16, 17).Equally, violent conflict situations in some parts of CEE and the CIS greatlyexacerbated some of the more general difficulties outlined below; but this factor, too,applies only to a minority of states. Factors that applied to all or many states cannow be considered.

The first factor is the combination of a weak state and a weak economy. Althoughthis is not always sufficiently acknowledged by comparative transitologists, post-communist states had to undergo far more comprehensive transitions than LatinAmerican or Southern European states, so that their transitions were typically evenmore problematic. All of the CEE and CIS states had significant economic problemsthroughout the 1990s, so that they had inadequate policing resources to makesubstantial inroads in the fight against crime. Moreover, many officers of the statewere seriously underpaid or not paid at all, making corruption a more attractiveproposition than it would have been under better circumstances. The weak economyand state also led to despair in many sections of the general population, includingamong former officers of the state who had been retrenched. The latter were oftenlured into organised crime, while the former were sometimes either tempted intogeneral crime themselves or else became easy targets for traffickers; this last pointapplied even more forcefully in CEE and CIS countries that experienced violentconflict. The combination of poor state control with widespread despair andeconomic hardship is a powerful explicator of increased rates of general crime andcorruption and the growth of organised crime.

The influence of neo-liberalism e our second factor e can be seen not only in CEEstates that adopted a version of it, but also in the overall international economic climatein which other CEE/CIS states were operating. Neo-liberalism blurs the boundariesbetween the state and the market, which plays into the hands of potentially corruptofficials, and can explain how official corruption encourages the growth of organisedcrime through the creation of new opportunities. Globalisation is closely related to neo-liberalism; but the focus here is on the new opportunities generated particularly byglobalised communication technologies or cyber crime (Wall, 2001, 2007).

The communist legacy e the ‘ghost from the past’ e also helps to explaincorruption and, to a lesser extent, organised crime. This includes the culture ofbureaucratic corruption and the tradition of organised crime in some states. It alsohelps to explain why there seems to have been a genuine problem for many post-

283L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

communist officials in the 1990s in understanding the concept of conflict of interest;in this sense, neo-liberalism and the communist legacy overlap, since both blur thedistinction between the state and the economy (Holmes, 1999, 2006). It must also beacknowledged that much of the reason for the weak economies that so typified earlypost-communism, and which were emphasised above, was that the communist modelhad failed, leaving economies throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR in a sorrystate by the end of the 1980s.

The ease of travel within the Schengen zone plays into the hands of organisedcrime, once gangs have moved into the zone or transported illicit items (or illegalmigrants) into it. Against this is the fact that entering the zone in the first place hasbecome more difficult, leading some to refer to ‘Fortress Europe’. Misha Glenny(2005) is among those who make the point that restrictive West European policies onlabour movement for those outside the EU, particularly those who live in troubledand impoverished countries such as many of the SEE countries have been since theearly-1990s, encourages desperate people to break rules and seek illegal migration.This is conducive to people smuggling and human trafficking, much of which isorganised by crime syndicates, as well as to corruption by officials in visa depart-ments, customs, and border control. As Glenny points out, an irony of this situationis that many West European countries need to boost their labour forces if theirageing populations are to enjoy reasonable living standards in their twilight years;many SEE citizens would be willing to perform the more menial tasks in Westernsocieties that most Westerners appear unwilling to perform.

While it is acknowledged that corruption and organised crime are interactive, themore powerful driver is corruption; high rates of corruption encourage organisedcrime. In light of this, the issue of collusion is highly germane. In 1996, former headof the CIA, James Woolsey, claimed that officials in the Russian Ministries ofDefence and the Interior were ‘ .very much in bed with Russian organized crimegroups’ (Webster, 1997: 51). Well-regarded specialist on Central Asia, Nancy Lubin,reported to a U.S. government commission in 2000 that, according to surveyresearch undertaken by her and colleagues in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (N is>2000), the going rate in the mid-1990s for a bribe to a judge or prosecutor to releasesomeone from trial for a low level organised crime offence was approximatelyUS$10,000. Her team also reported that almost 30% of police officers in an expertsurvey claimed that their colleagues were usually colluding with organised crime(Smith, 2000: 76). And the July 2008 OLAF report on Bulgaria cited aboveacknowledged its ‘strong suspicion’ that organised crime was involved with corruptgovernment officials in creaming off EU funding (Economist, 17 July 2008).

Given these and other factors, how is it that many states e probably a majority, atleast in CEE e are now improving? Here, just three out of numerous factors will bementioned. One is the role of external agents. When the EU produced its Agenda2000 in 1997 concerning the next expansion, it also produced individual studies ofthe issues each applicant state was to address before it could be admitted. The onlyfactor mentioned in the political section of each of the individual analyses of CEEapplicants was corruption, and several states made serious efforts to reduce it. Whileit would be going too far to argue a clear line of causality here, it is interesting to

284 L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

note that none of the post-communist states that appear to have the worst corrup-tion rates is either in the EU or likely to be in the foreseeable future.

Second, most of the post-communist states have more or less stabilised in recentyears; a majority of economies have turned around, the legislative lag of the 1990s isbeing overcome, institutions are crystallising and becoming more effective, moststate officials are being paid regularly and in full, and citizens are less uncertain thanthey were about the future of their country. Thus, as transition slowly mutates intoconsolidation e more so in CEE than in the CIS e crime and corruption rates eitherstabilise or decrease.

Finally, many analysts have argued that the single most important factor inreducing corruption is political will. In fact, this is a necessary but insufficientcondition. It is not enough for a political leader or leadership team to be committedto fighting crime and corruption for these to be reduced; that leadership must alsohave the capacity to implement its will. This implies, inter alia, an adequate stateapparatus, which in turn is related to the economic improvements and generalinstitutionalisation referred to above. But in addition e and this is often overlookede it means that there needs to be a loyal apparatus willing to implement the will ofthe leadership. Ideally, most of the general population will also be committed toreducing crime and corruption. In short, the notion of political will must include theattitudes and commitment e the will e of those charged with implementing lead-ership policies, and preferably of the citizenry. Thus, Georgia’s apparent improve-ment since 2003 has been linked to the Rose Revolution, following which a popularnew president was committed to reducing corruption e but was also well supported(Shelley et al., 2007). Conversely, President Constantinescu failed to curb corruptionin Romania in the late-1990s largely because key agencies of the state were opposedto his attempts.

Conclusions

At the beginning of this article, the question was raised as to whether or not thecrime and corruption situation in CEE and CIS states had begun to improve. Havingexamined the available evidence, is there reason for guarded optimism? As with somany other aspects of post-communism, the picture is mixed, varying from countryto country. But if the CEE and CIS region as a whole is analysed, the answer isaffirmative; while some countries are still mired in corruption, the evidence indicateseither a stabilisation or an improvement in most countries in at least two of the threeareas of anti-social behaviour considered (insufficient evidence is cited here to permitthe drawing of even tentative conclusions about organised crime). It is true thatcrime rates in many parts of the world appear to be dropping e for reasons thatrange from better security technology for protecting homes and motor cars to, it hasbeen claimed, the impact of more liberal abortion laws (Levitt and Dubner, 2005).Some factors, such as greater use of security technology, apply in the post-communist world too. But there are also features peculiar to CEE and the CIS.

But perhaps we are looking in the wrong place anyway for the most serious threatfrom the largest and most powerful of the CEE and CIS states. While most Russians

285L. Holmes / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) 265e287

might approve of the fact that Putin gave them back their sense of national pride,this is unfortunately at the expense of others e whether it be in the form of energyblackmail or seeking to remove democratically elected leaders who dare to criticisethe Kremlin bosses. In focusing so much on the threats from post-communist crimeand corruption since the 1990s, we may have been paying insufficient attention to thegradual return of traditional threats. The strengthening of weak states generallyappears to be a positive development in terms of bringing crime and corruptionunder control; but it can also create new problems e or old problems in a new guisee for international security.

Acknowledgment

I am indebted to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for funding that greatlyfacilitated the research for this project (Large Grant No. A79930728 and DiscoveryGrant No.DP0558453).

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