«I honor the Criminal Code» («Чту Уголовный кодекс») is the signature line of Ostap Bender, the charming, endlessly resourceful con artist at the center of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov’s two satirical novels «The Twelve Chairs» (1928) and «The Golden Calf» (1931). Bender operates almost entirely outside the law, running schemes, impersonations, and swindles across the length of the Soviet Union, yet insists on a personal set of rules he never breaks — famously enumerating «four hundred relatively honest ways of taking money» and refusing the ones he considers beneath him. Decades after publication, both novels remained so widely read and quoted that Bender’s lines functioned as a kind of shared cultural shorthand in Russian speech — which is exactly how Zhorik uses him here, as an instantly recognizable stand-in for a criminal who nonetheless holds to his own code of honor.