This is Putin’s Russia:
Earlier this year, a 488-page document, the product of a decade-long investigation by Spanish prosecutors into the linkages between organized crime and the Kremlin, alleged that Russia’s Chairman of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, owes his political career to Gennady Petrov, a high-ranking member of the Tambov crime syndicate. The Tambov gang was the top mafia clan active in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, around the time when a young Vladimir Putin was active in the city’s government. Spanish wiretaps allegedly caught Bastrykin’s lawyer openly thanking Petrov for having arranged political promotions for his boss. And Bastrykin was hardly the only high-ranking official implicated: there were are at least a few Duma deputies, a former Defense Minister, and even a former Prime Minister.
And just two weeks ago, the results of an investigation published by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny thoroughly shook up Moscow in revealing that the two sons of Russian Attorney General Yuri Chaika had engaged in a close business partnership with Russia’s criminal Godfather Sergei Tsapok. Tsapok, whose gang in Russia’s Krasnodar region operated with impunity for years and received protection from higher-level authorities, became known country-wide in 2010 after his goons killed a dozen of people, including women and children, in what became known as the Kuschevskaya massacre.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/12/23/the-implications-of-russias-mafia-state/