Zhorik’s «five years have passed» marks the gap between the late-Soviet criminal economy Chicha still has in his head and the one that actually exists in 1993. Under the USSR, spekulyanty — black-market resellers of scarce goods — operated in the gray zone of a state-planned economy, vulnerable but fundamentally solitary targets. Gorbachev’s 1988 Law on Cooperatives legalized private enterprise for the first time in decades, and by the early 1990s that first wave of legal «commercial» entrepreneurs (kommersanty) had, almost universally, come under the protection — and taxation — of organized krysha («roof») networks: criminal groups who, in exchange for a cut of profits, provided security, debt collection, and dispute resolution that the collapsing, underfunded post-Soviet police and courts increasingly could not. By 1993, robbing an independent trader «on nerve alone,» the way it might have worked in the shortage economy of the 1980s, meant robbing someone else’s protected client — an act read by the underworld itself not as ordinary crime but as an attack on another crew’s territory, with consequences delivered by that crew rather than by the state. This is exactly the shift Zhorik is trying, and failing, to explain to a man whose criminal instincts are five years out of date.
"Five Years" and the Rise of the Krysha
