It may all be a great pity, but why should outsiders actually mind what happens inside the Kremlin’s realms? But as I will show in this chapter, the toxic combination of chauvinism and criminality is a problem for the rest of the world too. In no other country have gangsterdom and state power overlapped to such a threatening extent. The most powerful drug cartels may have high-tech communications equipment or the ability to penetrate a law-enforcement agency, or have some politicians on the payroll. But they have nothing that (yet) matches Russia’s ruling criminal syndicate’s capabilities. It has almost limitless money, global geographical scope and the full armoury of state technical and logistical resources, from spy satellites to submarines, giving unprecedented capabilities in snooping and manipulation. Russia’s world-class hackers, for example, work sometimes in government, sometimes under official protection and sometimes entirely in their own criminal interest.1 Russian dirty money and underhand business practices taint and corrode the financial systems, business cultures and politics of the countries they touch.
