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Svetlana Stephenson, Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 288 pp., appendix, glossary, references, index. Paperback. ISBN 9781501700248.
Sociologist Svetlana Stephenson's Gangs of Russia is a welcome contribution to existing scholarship on street gangs and criminal groups in post-socialist Russia. Grounded in revealing ethnographic interviews and focus groups conducted by the author and her colleagues in Kazan, Tatarstan, and deftly situated in the substantial comparative and theoretical scholarship on gang culture and criminal networks around the world, Stephenson's monograph offers valuable insights into the development and social dynamics of the violent, entrepreneurial gangs whose practices and ideologies have come to structure so much of Russian business, politics, and society.
Although the interdisciplinary literature on organized crime in Russia is both plentiful and sophisticated, an ethnographic perspective on the place of 'the street' in that overall phenomenon has been lacking. That matters, because as Stephenson shows, the Russian gang formations, which even refer to themselves as "streets" (ulitsy) (47), are crucial social links-between the widespread organized fights of the past and present-day forms of territorial violence, between childhood dominance rituals and adult criminality, between local and national scales of violent entrepreneurship, and between masculinist pedagogies and state-level patrimonial praxis. Neither the ubiquity nor the durability of violent, networked patrimonialism across Russian social institutions can be explained adequately without the detailed depiction and nuanced sociological analysis of street gangs that Stephenson provides. Gangs of Russia convincingly demonstrates the structuring force and profound cultural impacts of "a whole field...