Becoming the Chechen Mafia: Ancient Outlaws, Soviet Scabs and a British KGB Plot
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Late February 1993, at a luxury penthouse apartment on London's Baker Street. Yes, that Baker Street. 221B, Sherlock Holmes, Madame Tussauds, tourist town. But inside, the scene is anything but family friendly. 38-year-old Ruslan Utsiev and his brother Nazarebek lay dead, shot at point-blank range by assassins.

The two men are Chechens, confidants of businessmen and self-proclaimed president of an independent Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudiev. Ruslan, Dudiev's trusted advisor, calls himself the Chechen prime minister. His brother, a martial arts expert and all-round tough guy, provides other services.

Officials in Grozny, the Republic's low-slung capital thousands of miles from London, claim that the men are in London to broker high-level oil and metal deals, to secure $250 million in loans from a U.S. businessman, and to print passports and banknotes for the want-away state, a mountainous hinterland in the heart of the former Soviet Caucasus.

But let's just say the brothers are enjoying their assignment to the max. At first, they bounce from hotel suite to hotel suite, splashing the cash on casinos, luxury goods and higher meals. One evening alone, they tip waiters two grand. They're also partial to sex workers, lots of them, sometimes three or four a night. Some call the Yutsev statesmen, others call them gangsters.

In Chechnya, those two words have become interchangeable for centuries. Eventually, the brothers buy their penthouse at the prestigious Bickenhall Mansions, a stone's throw from the fictional home of London's most famous deerstalker-wearing detective, a £700,000 cash, much to the annoyance of the building's wealthy occupants.

But the dealing and decadence are hiding another far darker mission for which the Yudhsievs have been tasked. And that's setting up a base for drug smuggling, money laundering and, inspectors reveal, purchasing 2,000 surface-to-air Stinger missiles, most likely for sale to neighbouring and fellow Muslim former SSR Azerbaijan, itself locked in a deadly conflict with Christian Armenia for the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The plot thickens, though. Ruslan Utsiev decides he needs a translator, and he turns to a correspondent from the BBC's Eastern European department, Alison Ponting, who recently interviewed him. Since 1988, Ponting has been married to a man McMafia author Misha Glennie describes as a, quote, chubby Armenian chancer named Gajik Ter Oganisian, whose official job is as a South London swimming pool attendant.

Ponting introduces her husband to the Utsievs. It's a fateful act. Writes Glennie, quote, Terogonissian was ducking and diving, smuggling, setting up fake companies for money laundering, and also doing menial work when his tentative criminal activities dried up. Initially, the macho Caucasian trio hit it off, holding raucous parties to which a stream of cool girls were invited.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Ponting is furious at the behaviour of her husband, which less resembles that of a loving partner than a rapacious post-Soviet mob boss. But Terogonissian is getting used to his new luxury lifestyle, says a London detective, quote, he rode the gravy train. But that car hits the rails when Terogonissian finds out about the 2,000 Stinger missiles and their intended target.

His nationalist sympathies awakened, Terorganissian reaches out to two other Armenian expats, Mikotish Matryoshin, a member of the Armenian KGB, and Ashot Sarkissian, ostensibly chairman of the Armenian Chamber of Commerce, but known to British cops as a general also in the young nation's KGB. The pair meet the Chechens at a five-star West End hotel, but fail to persuade the brothers to drop their arms deal. It's a death warrant.

The Armenians hire an LA-based hitman who rents a house in Pinner, northwest London, and gets a visa through Ponting the Journalist.

Nobody knows exactly who pulls the trigger, but on February 26, 1993, Ruslan Utsiev is killed with three bullets to the head. Writes the independent newspaper, quote, The following evening, after purchasing a fridge freezer with a cardboard box to hold Utsiev's decomposing body, the Armenians paid two delivery men £450 to take it to Pina. Unfortunately, it split and the smell alarmed the men.

By the time they contacted police, Nazarbayev was also dead, killed by another three bullets. Police pick up Martirosyan, the Armenian KGB guy, and Tehranisyan soon after. Neither issues a confession, although Martirosyan says not so cryptically, quote, the KGB will not forgive anyone.

He hangs himself at Belmarsh Prison while awaiting trial, leaving Terogonissian, the pool attendant-cum-murder-for-hire patriot, to pick up two life sentences for the deaths of Ruslan and Nazarebek. It's a blood feud that will come back to haunt his family within a year.

More than that, the spectacular double slaying is Western Europe's introduction to a new wave of bitter post-Soviet crime that's been kicking off in the motherland for decades and which, just months later, will explode into an all-out war between Chechnya's brigand kings and their parent state, Russia, helping to empower and unleash a new and ultra-violent generation of Chechen gangsters. This is The Underworld Podcast.

Hey guys, welcome to another edition of the show that embeds images of groups and murders and horrific gang violence in your minds just as you're drifting off to sleep. I'm your host Sean Williams, you all know I'm in Wellington, the metropolis capital of New Zealand, and I'm joined today by Danny Gold who lives in an actual city with actual people in it. I think we're both having nightmare weeks with edits and so on, which I'm sure is going to resonate with our listeners who have proper jobs.

Not me, man. I've always loved all my editors throughout the years and gladly accept their criticisms no matter how unconstructed they are. That sounds like a Sean problem, actually. Yeah, maybe it is a Sean problem. I mean, I am actually getting sued for $100 million. So yeah, we'll see. Is that how much the suit was for? Yeah, $100 million. It's going to be so much fun when Sean's article, when that article comes out, it's going to be so much fun. I know, I know. It's going to take at least half of our revenues as well.

Oh yeah, but it'll be a great episode. But yeah, Sean's getting sued. Good for you. Good stuff. Anyway, you know about the tons of bonuses we've got coming, guys. I'm off to Auckland in a couple of weeks. I'm going to record some interesting stuff for the show up there. You've got a load of cool stuff you're working on too, right?

No, no, I'm mostly just going on Instagram and just commenting must be nice on people's vacation photos. That's pretty much it these days. No, I do. I don't know if I can talk about them yet, but there'll be some other podcasts I'm working on that are going to be pretty interesting. I think everyone here will like them. But yeah, it's kind of like slogging away right now, but they'll be out soon enough. Soon enough.

No one's suing me yet, but I'm sure it'll happen eventually. But it'll come. Yeah. And I should mention that as well as the bonuses, if you sign up to the Patreon, you get all these episodes ads free, guys. A lot of you hate the adverts, which is fine. Ads mostly suck, do they? Well, hold on there, buddy. I mean, I love the ads and advertisers and would gladly love to have more of them if we could.

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. They don't suck. They're great. Let's get more of them on, actually. Maybe we do like five or six ad breaks for this one. Let's just see how that goes. Anyway, don't bother telling us about the ads, guys, because, you know, it's how we make money. And you're not coming into my house doing stuff for free, so, you know, give it a rest. But if you give us a few measly dollars a month, you can DM me all the abuse in the world. That is totally fine. Yeah, that's patreon.com slash in the world podcast or on iTunes. You can sign up as well. All right, nicely done. So,

Silky, smooth, journalistic segue coming your way. Chechens. Danny, what do you imagine when you hear the word Chechnya? Well, I'm actually kind of surprised that you're doing this episode because off air, you're always telling me about how you think Chechens are like the biggest pussies except for Albanians and Dagestanis, which, you know, I always aggressively disagree with you. But that's that's what Sean always says, like all the time.

That is what I do always say. And as we're going to learn over the next 45 to an hour, that's definitely warranted. They're basically complete pussies. But anyway, we've got all of that and way, way more on those wussies. We've got tons more coming up in what is going to be a monster three-parter eventually down the line. There's just so much stuff when these guys are concerned.

And it's like so bound up in the history of the Chechnyan Republic, the Caucasus Mountains, the tribes, the culture. You really can't do the modern stuff without explaining the very old and sometimes the not so old stuff too. And about them being considered barbarians, criminals, are people to be feared.

Well, yeah, I mean, Russians have been thinking pretty much the same thing for over a millennium themselves, which, given the current state of the world, is no bad thing. But the Chechens are the real Russian bogeymen of history, or bogeymen if you're American and for some reason just thrown another O, like you just don't give a shit. But before we dive into this one, guys, I'm well aware of Ramzan Kadyrov and his Instagram and the Golden AKs and the MMA fighters.

And hunting down LGBT Chechens and all that horrible stuff. But the Kadyrov cinematic universe has been covered about a billion times on podcasts. I'm guessing a lot of our listeners already heard like dictators or gangsters of the Northern Caucasus, anti-gay strongman, oil baron, three hour ASMR pod or something like that. So all of these parts on Chechen crime are going to skip over him just a little bit because we're basically way better than everyone else. And we're going to show you how Chechen organized criminals became such a big thing. It's very true. We are.

Thank you. Yep. Kateroff is only the latest, if entirely batshit, an awful manifestation of something which has been woven into Chechen history since there were tales to weave and bison to scrawl on cave walls in blood. Are you microdosing right now by any chance? I'm glad you are. I'm kind of flattered that you think I've got the self-control to microdose, but no.

And trust me when I say this stuff is way more interesting than any social media savvy autocrat. We're talking war, genocide, one-legged brigands, mongol armies, train robbers, noble outlaws, deportation, Soviet mafiosi, Ponzi schemes, and something called the Scab War. And of course, I'll head back to that Baker Street double murder in a while too, because there is a lot, lot more shenanigans that came with it. Just real quick, because I'm uncultured. Baker Street is like a fancy avenue in London.

Yeah, it's just a big street in the middle of town that all the tourists go to. It's nothing great, but...

Pretty good for a party with a few Chechen gangsters, I'm sure. Anyway, I know you're gagging for some Chechnya facts, and I don't know how many times I'm going to say the word Chechnya in this episode. In case you haven't visited the Caucasus region, you should head there immediately, guys. It's one of the most beautiful places on earth. Probably the best, most fun reporting trip I ever went on. Packed with history, cool cities, food, and hiking trails of all stripes. What was the reporting trip that you were on when you were there?

Oh man, I did this mad trip between like Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. And I did stories about, I did stories about these guys who like live in the mountains. I did stories about hiking. I did story about chess and I did a story about Armenian history in Turkey and

It was pretty fun. Yeah. And a friend of mine from Berlin showed up with me and we went to a football match in Armenia and hung out with the chairman and he gave us a bunch of brandy and loads of like little cheese sticks. So that was cool.

Politically, there are two Caucasian regions, the North and the South, and they sit either side of the Caucasian mountain range. So the North Caucasus is essentially everything on the Russian side of the border, and it comprises a dozen republics and oblasts, of which Chechnya, population 1.4 million, and around the size of Connecticut or Kuwait, is one of them.

On the other side, you have the former Soviet independent nations of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran. So this is an unbelievably diverse area with dozens of ancient languages, each with their own alphabets, all packed into a wider Caucasus region that is still only the size of California.

And I'm not even mentioning the Circassians, the Kurds. It's crazy there. But while all this diversity is fascinating, it also means that historically, the Caucasus is about as stable as an argument in a Moldovan casino. I'm not sure where that reference came from. And Chechens, just like their neighbors in Dagestan and in Gershetia, are no strangers to violent incursions and war going back literally thousands of years. I mean, this place is old. It

Various incarnations of a Chechen culture date back to around 8000 BC. That's over 4000 years before the pyramids showed up. Weirdly, that reminds me of an interesting fact that the pyramids were older to the Romans than the Romans are to us. Really makes you think, doesn't it? Do your own research, guys.

Yeah, not in books. Do online research on Reddit threads and other YouTube shows. That's how you learn the real truth. I think that's the ultimate message of this show, yeah. Anyway, I'm going to spare you the next 9,000 years or so, other than to say that the area is, for 600 years of antiquity, known as something called Caucasian Albania or Agwank.

But in 1227, Batu Khan, a Mongol ruler, he swallows up the Caucasus as part of his Golden Horde, a constituent of the Mongolian Empire that stretches all the way as far as Vienna. Now, Khan is a notoriously cruel and vicious despot, and the Mongols are hardly known for their magnanimousness. But it's noted at the time that the most successful holdouts from his conquests are the inhabitants of Alania, a kingdom comprising, yeah, of course, Chechnya. So,

Subsequent sorties by the likes of Tamerlane and Toktamish are battled back by the Alans who bivouac in the frozen mountains and attack like modern day guerrillas. All the while, Russians across the northern side of the range are watching with interest. Their sardine wants access to Persia, Arabia, latterly the Ottoman Empire and a buffer against those places too.

But they've got these total psychopath Alans to go through. And the Alans want a bunch of Russians rolling past their hill forts as much as they do the Mongols. Alania sounds like a made-up sort of Wheel of Time or Fantasyland. And also it's kind of funny that they're known as the Alans.

Yeah, also, yeah, fighting the Malcolms and the Kevins all the time. I mean, I'm going to rattle all the way up to the 19th century now because this is where the juicy stuff is. And also, Danny's probably tearing his beard out listening to all this history stuff. That's not true. I love the history stuff, man. I'm learning a lot here.

Okay, we're going to go back and do another half hour on Egyptians. So you get this near constant push and pull between the Russians and North Caucasians who suffer a series of violent incursions from 1817 to 1864. And that's when Russia defeats the famed Dagestani spiritual and military leader, Imam Shamil, and carries out a genocide of the Circassian people that's over a million dead by many accounts. In 1865, Dagestan

Almost 40,000 Chechens are exiled to Turkey by Tsarist forces. They move ethnic Russians into the territories and they force convert people to Christianity, which, surprisingly, goes down like a sack of spuds. And it won't be the last time Russian leaders in Moscow or St. Petersburg try that game.

The Russians are, let's put it mildly, fed up with the Caucasians. Dagestanis, Ossetians, English, Chechnyans, they're all a massive pain in the imperial government's ass. Russian troops are shit scared of them. They're still living in mountaintop villages, barely accessible. They've got ancient watchtowers spread through the range. Oh yeah, and they're widely viewed as savages because of their Islamic faith and deeply insular tribal culture.

There's a good book about various mountain cultures and violence. I think it's called No Friends But The Mountains by Judith Matloff. I haven't read it in a minute, but it was really interesting. I think the saying actually is Kurdish. I've heard it all over the place, but it kind of talks about...

how the geography of a lot of these places and lends itself to like certain cultural aspects and and and violence in some ways uh and she connects i mean i believe chechnyans are chechen is one of the cultures covered but it's it's all over the world you know so it's not just focused on the caucasian mountains but it's uh yeah i don't remember too much of the central theses but it's uh it's a really interesting read if you're looking for something like that

From one minute to the next, Danny's recommending you go to subreddits and then reading academic books about mountain culture. Yeah, there was a brief period in history where all of these republics broke off and they declared, I think they've got an amazing name, like the State of Mountain Dwellers or something like this. So there was definitely something to it. But

A Russian imperial viceroy named Alexei Yermolov, I'm really sorry guys, there's going to be so many names I mess up in this show. He says back then that the Chechens are a quote, bold and dangerous people and that quote, amidst their forests and mountains, no troops in the world could afford to despise them. But they were good shots, fiercely brave and intelligent in military affairs, chechens.

Do you know what, though? All this hassle, bloodshed, and so on, it might just be worth it for the Russians. As you'd expect from a mountain range, Chechnya is packed with mineral wealth like limestone, gypsum, sulfur. And in 1893, authorities begin drilling for oil near the capital city, Grozny. And guess what? They find it. Tons of the stuff. You know, I never actually knew that. I didn't realize that there were...

big deal sort of resources there. I thought the Russians just wanted to crush any sort of opposition and that's where their aspirations came from. I had no idea that there was actual stuff to plunder and pillage there as well.

Yeah, I think for the Russian Empire it's just like a happy accident that they have a bit of an economic benefit as well. Because they do like killing people a lot back then. So anyway, now everybody's incentives are pretty clear. The Russians want a thoroughfare into Asia, a buffer against their rivals, dominance over the Caucasian people, and yes, oil. The Chechens want the Russians to piss off, and so the legend of the Chechen rebel bandit grows.

Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, they all write about the feared Chechens in great works of literature. "Your men slaughter ours," one of Tolstoy's Chechen protagonists tells a Russian, "ours butcher yours."

Few people embody this image more than a name... Few people embody this image more than a man named Baysangur of Benoy. Jesus, these names. And embody might be the best and worst word to use because Baysangur is this mad Monty Python Black Knight character. He's had an arm, a leg, and an eye blown out in battle, which means he struggles to get a driving license. But on the plus side, it makes him an excellent piratical talisman against the Russians.

And his tongue definitely hasn't been blown out either. At a parlay with one Russian envoy, Basen-Guryev is said to dismiss the man, pointing to a nearby cemetery and telling him, quote, talk to them, they'll hear you better than me.

That kind of rules right there. That's solid. Basangur might be the Chechen folk hero with the most missing appendages at this time, but he's far from the only hero. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, we have the rise of something locals call an abrek, or roughly translated a quote, outlaw exile.

writes Rebecca Gould in an academic paper called Transgressive Sanctity, a convoluted title I'm fully on board with, quote, After the surrender of Imam Shamil, North Caucasian mountaineers were faced with the problem of developing new modes of expressing their cultural and political aspirations.

As the promise of independent statehood offered by the eminent faded from the realm of possibility, the noble bandit of the Caucasus, known by natives by the term Abrek, rose in cultural significance. I mean, we all love academic writing, don't we? And Abrek comes out of a culture of linking holy war or jihad with anti-colonialism, i.e. against Russian incursions.

But it also emerges from ancient blood feud practices in Chechnya, spats between tribes and families that would be exacted by these outlaws as kind of bandit executioners. After the likes of Beysangur in the early 1900s, there is Sulembek Gandaleyev, an ethnic English who becomes one of Imperial Russia's most infamous gangsters.

gandalaev gandalaev i don't know robs banks trains stores and he escapes from prisons he's your dillinger your ned kelly but he does it in russia which just seems kind of tougher gandalaev though he doesn't go it alone he's joined by a chechen abrick an owner of one of the sickest mustaches outside of pt barnum show and he goes by zelim khan

And Zelim Khan, who, like his pal, robs and thieves and beats his way to criminal affluence, personifies a rally cry for the benighted Chechen people, just as Imam Shamil and Basangur once had been. Already you can see this interweaving of Chechen statehood and criminality, where mobsters are heroes and Moscow is the great eternal enemy. Oh yeah, and Zelim Khan even has his own narco-corridors too. One of them goes, quote,

"People gather only after death, but death does not take Zelim Khan, since God protects him until the moment when he avenges every one of his dead relatives to all the guilty, since God does not leave any evil, not a single tear inflected on the innocent without avenge. And since he, Zelim Khan, is a real man, only then will he find peace and death for himself when he covers blood with blood."

I mean, it sounds a bit heavy, but if you put the right beat behind it, I feel like it could work. I reckon Dale could probably lay something over there. I don't know. I was imagining some Gogol-Bordello kind of thing, but maybe early Eminem would be better. Yeah, it's not really sort of like 100-year-old Olivia Rodrigo. Oh, God, I can't even say it. Writes Mark Gagliotti in his book, The Vory, Russia's Super Mafia, quote,

Banditry and resistance are deeply ingrained within the Chechen national identity, not least in the traditional figure of the Abrek, the honourable outlaw whose banditry is driven by righteous vendetta or a refusal to knuckle under the crimes of the powerful. The Abrek is a self-sufficient and wily figure.

a Caucasian Robin Hood, who often gathers a gang of like-minded daredevils around him, raiding the rich, feeding the poor, protecting the weak and dismaying the corrupt. While essentially mythological, the figure of the Abrek still provides a degree of legitimacy to the modern gangster. But now guys, we're up to 1917. It's the Russian Revolution, the death of the Tsar, the rise of Lenin's Bolsheviks and the beginning of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps in this new worker-led universalist utopia, there'll be room for the Caucasians. Yeah, nah. From 1920, Chechens do what they do best, resist the Russians. And for years, the territory is controlled by red and white Russian forces, themselves duking it out for control of this new, huge country.

The Chechens roll up their sleeves and take on all of them. But come 1925, the Red Army has largely laid the capital, Grozny, to waste, a hundred villages of dust, and the Chechen population, what remains of it, are left to go bust and starve. History really does just always repeat itself, huh?

Yeah, and it's going to happen a few more times. According to a U.S. Naval School academic paper I read for this show by Thomas Ross, Chechens are so poor at this point that they're forced to wear animal pelts. Quote,

It's not surprising that many Chechens perceived this period to be a second imperial conquest and subsequently developed a deep mistrust of Soviet policies thereafter. I'm guessing that's pelts like cavemen, not pelts like some mink stole around your neck. Anyway, in 1940, a revolt breaks out against Moscow in Chechnya. What else?

So deep is the hatred for Russia that when Hitler invades the Soviet Union a year later, Chechnya is split between those fighting in the Red Army and those who team up with the Nazis to sabotage the communist war effort. This will end, to put it very mildly, badly for the Chechens. Stalin, who absolutely loves a purge, his forces are being pushed back by the Germans and he's desperately looking around for scapegoats, turncoats, those he can claim are enemies of the people.

In 1944, Stalin collectively punishes the entire Chechen people by signing off on something called Operation Lentil. Yeah, sounds innocuous. I mean, who doesn't like lentils, especially Eastern Europeans? But it is, of course, horrific. Here's Mark Gagliotti again. Quote,

The Chechens have periodically rebelled when they have felt their masters were weakened or distracted. The Russians have brutally repressed them each time, crushing the forms of resistance, but never managing to extinguish the desire. Joseph Stalin, true to form, adopted the most murderously comprehensive response in 1944, when the Chechens took advantage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union to launch another series of uprisings.

On February 23rd, coincidentally Red Army Day in the Soviet calendar, the Chechens, along with their ethnic cousins the English, were ordered to report to local party centres. And Gagliotti goes on, quote, This was the start of Operation Lentil, the forced deportation of two entire nations in which anything from a quarter to a half of the total population died.

Stalin had them scattered across Siberia and Central Asia. Yeah, his book is really solid, by the way. It's all about Russian gangster history and...

all the codes, not like modern day stuff, right? The stuff that goes back decades and decades and it's great read and fascinating. So definitely pick that up if it's of interest. Yeah, it is. And Federico Barresi's book is also brilliant on the Russian mafia. And it also gave me a good excuse to watch Eastern Promises, which was nice. Oh, fucking awesome. Oh my God, man, that shower scene. Jesus.

Old, sick or even infant, yes, baby Chechens are slaughtered as part of the deportations and they even sweep up Chechen Soviet soldiers who are at that very moment fighting the Nazis. Radio Free Europe writes about a young man back then named Salman Dudiev, no relation to the guy at the top of the show, who's in the trenches of Stalingrad when he's told he's being exiled for helping the Germans. Says Dudiev as his commander, an ethnic Ukrainian, quote,

He came up to me, wrapped an arm around me and said, son, I wasn't able to tell you this for several days, but I have to. Chechens are born warriors. They fight well. I'm truly sorry, but I cannot disobey orders.

Within 24 hours of this operation being signed off, the Soviets have expelled a third of a million Chechens and English to, quote, special collection points, and have loaded almost 200,000 onto trains. By March 1st, so that's a single week, around half a million people have been shipped out, many of whom have nothing but the clothes on their backs, no food, no money, and they'll be left to labour and die in the frozen tundra.

Chechens refer to this deadly period as the Ardak, or Exodus, and it's burned into the national psyche today, giving rise to almost all of the stuff we're about to discuss in this massive three-parter. Yeah, that period, man, of like the 40s, I mean, 1910 to 1950, just an incredibly savage time in human history. Like, I don't think proportionally there's ever been more death and destruction.

Now, there's this crazy war in China like 2,000 years ago that supposedly killed half of China. But yeah, like how many shows have we done where you can trace it back to these like exoduses, genocides, stuff that happened at the start of the century? It's all in that period. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. So right there and then on those packed rail cars going east, the concept of a Chechen state or even the Chechen Republic within Russia dies.

And it won't emerge again until 1956, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounces Stalin during his famed secret speech at the Kremlin, aka on the cult of personality and its consequences, or as I always prefer to call it, of course, Okulti Nizhnoki. Can

I couldn't even say the first word. No, I couldn't even do it. I thought I'd be able to spell it out and read it, but no. Anyway, even then... It's a good effort. Was it? I don't know. Have you seen the words? It's a good effort.

Even then, as we'll hear later on, Khrushchev is hardly a great liberalizer. And any mention of Chechnya is a blink and you'll miss it thing. Nobody in Moscow is particularly keen to revive a nationhood whose people's names still strike fear into the hearts of the empire. It's that bogeyman thing again.

But this is now a people in exodus. And between Operation Lentil and the secret speech, Chechen identity has gone through a complete and utter change. According to Ross in that US naval paper, quote, it was a 1944 deportation that crystallized and criminalized the Chechen identity.

The mass exile fused the Chechens together through shared adversity and established the Soviet authorities as the common enemy. Life in exile deepened the connection among Chechens while alienating them from the developing Soviet society. It was the criminalization and alienation from society that facilitated the development of Chechen organized criminal elements.

Bit word soupy, but you know, these are academic papers. Essentially, the Chechens have lost their homeland. Everybody around them is alien, foreign culture. They're adrift in a vast land governed by a great evil thousands of miles away in Moscow, which is itself as far from Grozny as Moscow is from Berlin. So you're already an insular tribal culture. What do you do? You cleave together like Velcro, packing out neighborhoods and keep to yourself.

Chechens value faith and family over anything. They respect elders no matter what and settle disputes with firearms rather than fists. So I'm surprised they haven't been invited to a CPAC conference. Just nailed it, right? That's that political humor that the people know and love from you. Yeah.

and these guys they don't have to spin legends and fairy tales of oppression and conservative values like say the undrangetta the chechens actually do have millennia of exiles and genocides and mass murder and invasion and war

They are hard as shit. Not to mention, Chechens who've been banished out east often end up in the worst inner-city slums, so they're left with no way to make money and they're outcast as barbarians with a strange language and religion. Whether in Kazakhstan or Siberia or anywhere else that's cold and poor and shit at the time, tons of Chechens turn to the black market. It's their only hope.

Rights of Moscow police captain quote, it was a logical step to turn their clans into criminal groups. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this before, right? I think in Russian mafia episodes, how minorities in the Soviet Union that were marginalized like Chechens, Georgians, Jews, they're kind of pushed into the black market for lack of opportunity, lack of work. So when the whole system eventually collapses, right, they're the ones who know how to operate, who know how to move energetically.

and are familiar with logistics to get something from point A to point B. So they kind of rise up both in industry and in organized crime, which in 90s Russia, it's kind of the same thing. But it's fascinating how much of organized crime is just logistics. Oh, yeah. I mean, these guys with connections to the kind of furthest outposts of the empire, they've kind of got it made at this point. And this is like the seedlings of the Chechen mafia that we might recognize today. Yeah.

And what happens to organized criminals? Well, some of them go to prison, of course. And in Stalin's Soviet Union, authorities do not need an excuse to lock anybody up or really put a bullet in the base of their skull. Over 2 million Soviets languish in the empire's network of 30,000 labor, prison and death camps. What the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously described as the Gulag Archipelago.

By the early 50s, the Soviet prison population is a whopping 2.45 million. That is from a USSR home to under 200 million, so a more than 1% prison population. That is insane. For reference, the modern-day United States has around 1.2 million prisoners from 332 million people, and that number is considered out of hand.

Before the Second World War, this massive internment is bad enough. Officials and guards are understaffed and underpaid, and the only way they're able to keep the peace is by enlisting the help of hardened gangsters on the inside to contact their fellow gangsters on the outside to help control the rest of the prisoners, a huge number of whom are political prisoners, thrown behind bars on trumped-up charges, oftentimes for little more than their ethnicity.

This collusion gives rise to the so-called Vody Vysokony, the famous thieves in law, who we've mentioned in a bunch of Underworld episodes already. Among the Soviet Union's political detainees are, of course, plenty of Chechens. And just like the English and Tatars and Jews and other minorities, they don't really have a lot of love for the Politburo, or, by extension, the organized criminals who are now colluding with the prison authorities to keep them under control.

or in other terms, victimized them, beat the shit out of them, sometimes fatally. Writes Gagliotti, quote, in Stalinist terms, these thieves, murderers, rapists and bandits were, quote, socially near, merely workers who had fallen from grace and thus to be preferred from those imprisoned for political offenses.

When the Nazis invade in 1941, this increasingly brittle balance begins to break. This is the beginning of something called the Scab War. Scab in the varmint bastard sense rather than anything skin related. And it will have a seismic effect on crime throughout the Soviet Union and beyond.

So now we're just going to take it back a minute. We're at 1945. The Soviet Union has defeated Nazi Germany, albeit perically with its cities in ruin. Stalin is still in control and swelling the Gulag archipelago. The authorities continue to collaborate with the Vori, the thieves-in-law. And there's this osmosis of prisoner to guard to gangster that's subjugating everybody else inside, and that includes the Chechens.

The traditional Vori, their thieves code forbids submission to the state. Yeah, it's really wild. I mean, Galeotti's book talks about what their actual code is and how strict they are with it. And it's like the craziest thing I've ever heard of in my entire life. I just remember it being completely unreasonable. There's a lot of situations where they would take their own lives rather than do anything that was seen as being submissive to the state or any authority figure. Well, yeah, I mean, we're going to see one kind of like...

one outcome of that actually right now. So when the Vori who've served in the Red Army or worked for the Soviet war machine in any way, when they are arrested and put in the system, those colludas are known by their fellow Vori as Suki or bitches. Now, on one side, you've got the powerful Vori with the backing of the guards and Gulag administrators in opposition to the bitches, those who've collaborated with the Soviet state itself.

And oddly enough, those who despise the state too, like the Chechen criminals who've come out of the 1944 deportations. And at the end of the 1940s, this rivalry sparks out into an all-out war. Casualties far worse than the prison riots we've done on shows recently in South America. This is the Scab War. Around five years of brutal, brutal bloodletting.

At the end of that period, towards the end of Stalin's rule, the bitches emerge victorious. And the traditionalist Vori, the anti-state thieves in law, they're decimated, almost wiped out altogether. According to historian Federico Varese, I've wanted to get Federico on the show for years, so hopefully he listens to this. This is an earth-shaking moment.

A new thieves code has effectively been written in the bitch's blood and it no longer forbids collaboration between organized crime and the Soviet state. This is the moment when gangsters hew closer to authorities and in many cases work hand in glove. It's a relationship we'll hear a lot more about in this show and the second and the third parts. Yeah, I mean, that's really fascinating. It kind of speaks to modern day Russia really accurately too.

Yeah, I'm surprised it's not written about more. It's like kind of glossed over in all the books I read a little bit. It seems like such a pivotal moment. Anyway, writes Stephen Handelman in his 1994 book Comrade Criminal, quote, having already been violated for having broken one tenet of the code, they felt little compunction about ignoring its other commandments, particularly the prohibitions about going into business or trade. The Suki, those are the bitches, in effect became the financiers of the black market.

The Chechens though, that's who we're here for, they're not much into this new bunch of Vori. They may have fought on those guys' side in the Skab War, but they despise the state, spit on Russians and their exiled networks in Kazakhstan and Siberia, have already been building their own separate mafia for years. In 1953, Stalin dies, Khrushchev becomes a Soviet leader, he denounces his predecessor and allows some Chechens to return to their mountainous homeland.

Some of them do. But when they get to Chechnya, they discover that the best land has, in the intervening years, been divvied up by a mix of ethnic Russians and other North Caucasian groups. They're suddenly second-class citizens in their own ancestral domain. More misery and more reasons to become career crooks.

In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev takes over as Soviet leader. By then, the Vory and establishment have grown even more cozy. According to an LRB feature, quote,

The mafia of Brezhnev's days thrived under the direct patronage of Communist Party leaders in Central Asia. In the Caucasian states and on the Russian Black Sea coast, areas where distance from Moscow, local wealth and the clan loyalties which existed before communism allowed the growth of a second economy and second power, though one restrained by the need to display a proletarian propriety.

And yeah, that's kind of what you were adhering to before, right? That's this kind of distance from Moscow and how everything operates in the shadows in these sort of hinterlands. Some Chechens, they operate within this underworld, others outside it. They're universally feared, however, just like the Abrek outlaws of the early 1900s. And people note their quickness to violence. Chechens who've returned from their exiles in the east to major cities, searching for a living,

They often end up in these slums in the inner cities, and that further accelerates their need to turn to crime. And in the 1970s, a whole generation of trigger-happy, mafia-inducted and anti-state Chechens are introduced to a Soviet economy that's collapsing, with locals getting more and more interested in Western consumerism. A huge shadow economy. Knock-off goods, stolen vehicles, currency. It thrives.

This is the so-called thieves' world, and rather than join it as a part of a wider criminal network, the Chechens carve out their own kingdom within it.

Now, Dan Carlin can tell you more about this, I'm sure, in a three-parter in about five hours' time. But the 1980s sees Chernobyl, the Afghan war, more economic decay, and Gorbachev's liberalizing perestroika reforms aimed at keeping the USSR together while dipping its toes in Western economic values. Individualism bleeds into communist society, but nationalism

but not for the Chechens, whose decades of ill-treatment have only made their idea of nationality stronger. They hold together tight in another organized criminals and command greater chunks of this shadow economy. Writes Ross in that naval paper, quote, mass criminalization exposed the Chechens to a wider Russian criminal world. Through illegal activities, Chechen criminals amassed significant resources.

With the relaxing of Soviet control in the late 1980s, Chechen organized crime elements blossomed into an entity with the necessary resources to support a viable independence movement.

So, it's the early 90s now. The Soviet Union is crumbling at the seams, the Berlin Wall's down, and liberation movements have already toppled politbureaus across the Eastern Bloc. Apparatics are already discussing how they're going to carve up the empire when the shit hits the fan. Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, these will all become independent nations. Chechnya? No chance. Russia wants the region for itself. Remember that oil they found in 1893? There's tons of it.

If the Chechens despise the Russians after Cyrus times, after Operation Lentil, well, you get the point by now. The Chechens are pissed, and they're Chechens. So you don't just get a sit down and an angry chat, you get hellfire.

In 1991, a Soviet Air Force vet named Dzhokhar Dudiev, yes, that one, assumes control of what his people call the Chechen public of Ichkeria and declares its independence from Moscow. Of course, this being the Caucasus, there is tons of tribal infighting and a Russian-backed coup against Dudiev falls in 1992. He responds by throwing out communists and building a phalanx of troops and weaponry.

Now we're back to our pals, the Utsied brothers in London and their grisly deaths at the hands of the Armenian KGB. Remember Alison Ponting, the BBC journalist whose podgy pool attendant husband has a hand in the killings? Well, in 1994, the Chechens get their revenge. In her home, the sleepy British town of Woking.

According to a news piece at the time, quote, As dusk fell on Willow Way, a quiet road of terraced housing, cars had already been garaged and families sat down for dinner and Saturday night television. At nine o'clock, a man emerged from his red Toyota outside number 31. Carrying a flat blue and white box, he strolled up to the front door and tapped on it.

Inside, Karen Reed, a 33-year-old geophysicist who analysed seismic data for a living, was enjoying a glass of white wine and a chat with a friend when they heard the man's muffled voice through the window. ''Have you ordered a pizza?'' he inquired. Karen opened the door, whereupon the pizza deliverer drew a .38 pistol and shot her several times in the head with calm deliberation. The killer then ran back to the car and drove off.

An innocent woman caught up in a feud between Armenians and Adairis, Chechens and Russians, at a time when the entire communist world is falling to ribbons and the line between freedom fighter and outlaw, mobster and guerrilla, is growing thinner than a goat in the gulag.

Are you just making up that saying? Also, I like how you start off being very serious, like you're saying this poetic, deep thing, and then you just end it with the phrase, thinner than a goat in the gulag. What is going on? I don't know. Maybe I'm Rokodosian. I don't even know it. In the fledgling Chechnyan state, banditry and crime have become the state, the law.

And over the course of the next three bloody decades, through conflict and mass death, oligarchy, chaos and jihad, the modern Chechen mafia, one whose influence will be felt across Western Europe and beyond, will take shape. And it will begin with a coup in Moscow and one of the most gruesome battles in European history. But that is for the next episode.

I feel like that was too serious. Maybe I should do a fart joke or something. No, that was good. That was good. That was good. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, we'll come back with way, way more on these guys because as you might be sensing, there is tons. Yeah, that was great. And also patreon.com slash the normal podcast bonuses, iTunes bonuses, all that sort of stuff. But yeah, man, that was a mouthful and that was great.