Anyone who watches recent James Bond or gangster films knows about the Russian Mafia. As far as cultural perception is concerned, Russia has four main exports: 1. Weapons; 2. Beautiful Women; 3. Fossil Fuels; 4. Mafiosi. And number four runs the place. They are a major faction, up there with the Army, the Church, and the Secret Service. In any thriller set in Russia, at some point somebody will have to at least contact the Russian mafia. My parents worried about them when I decided to go to Russia. I was warned all across Eastern Europe to watch my back for the mafia once I got there.

I had my first contact with the mafia about two weeks after I arrived. I had just escorted some friends of mine back to their apartments, and turned for home. It was rather early in the morning, and it was not long before two policemen accosted me. They thoroughly inspected my documents and rifled through every pocket I had, looking for "narcotics." They did not stop their search until they were absolutely sure that I did not have a stitch of cash on me. I walked the rest of the way to my apartment in peace.

Today in Russia, or at least in St. Petersburg, the "Mafia" has become an anachronism. The oligarchs have been crushed, and the central state has increased in power. Order seems to prevail. There is even a popular Sopranos-style television show about organized crime in the chaotic days after the collapse of the USSR. The main extortion racket has long ceased to be shady men in Mercedes. They all drive police cars now.

Down the street where I live there is an antiques store which never seems to sell anything. Every once in a while a few big black cars pull up in front of it. Some ex-pats nearby swear that it is a Mafia front. When I asked a Russian student of mine about this, a somewhat prominent businessman in the city, he laughed and laughed. "Today the Mafia only does little things, maybe some drugs, maybe some prostitutes. If you want power today, you do not hire hooligans to do your work, you just buy power directly from the State." Why bother to plunder the country outside the law when, for a fee, you can plug yourself into the biggest protection racket in history?

Bastiat, the 19th century French economist, contrasted legal and illegal plunder. Illegal plunder includes pickpockets, muggers, and organized crime. Legal plunder, on the other hand, is much more dangerous to society. In 1991 a company wishing to do business in Russia had to grease the palms of all kinds of gagsters, or they had their equipment sabotaged, or at worst, someone was assassinated. It is a very sloppy and haphazard way of getting things done, from a criminal perspective. Today, however, if a large company runs afoul of the State, millions of dollars in back taxes are demanded. If you did not pay the mafia in the old days, you could always get out of the country. Today, if you do not pay the police they will detain you in the country, or, more likely, drown you under tomes of senseless paperwork which are never filled out correctly. Cocaine is a silly commodity to peddle if you can instead hold Europe hostage by threatening to cut back on natural gas supplies.

The medieval Russian State at least believed it had a civilizing mission, or that it was beholden to the Church, or that the nobility was not low enough to engage in trade. This is not to romanticize the past, but they had ideals beyond their power and the will to use it.  Today the State is unrestrained by any ideals or imperatives beyond the security of Russia. While we justly praise Russia for throwing off communism, we must pause to think: is the current Russian administration a friend of the free market because they believe that freedom is good, or because siphoning off the free market is more lucrative than dominating the entire economy? Compared to the State, the small rackets of Russian mobsters dotting Europe are pitiful. The lot of the Russian mobster has improved with the lot of the common Russian in the last decade; how much longer will their interests remain common?