The Brutal Russian Mafia Wars of Tolyatti, Russia's Detroit
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April 13, 1998, in the city of Togliatti.

Workers at the city, known as Russia's Detroit because of the dominance of its Lada car factory, are settling down to get hammered at a bar for veterans of the brutal Soviet war in Afghanistan, where over 100,000 soldiers have served. Since the fall of the USSR, the guys in Togliatti have fought a different kind of war.

From 1992, dozens if not hundreds of mobsters have been dropped, often with battle-worn AK-47s, by gangs that sprang into life under the thawing years of Glasnost and saw a chance to seize control of Russian industry when the Berlin Wall and communism fell apart.

A series of so-called racketeering wars have targeted sprawling Toliati, with warring factions from the local region and ethnic Tatars fighting to command every step of its massive production line, from windscreen wipers and tires to trucks and even spare parts. By 1998, three of these wars have exploded and died, gunfights a daily occurrence and bodies tossed into the frozen waters of the nearby Bolga River.

Media who report on the violence are targeted, hunted down and killed. The Kremlin, hobbled by corruption and poor leadership, is finally taking proper notice of Izmora city. Public outcries at boiling point. Even then, nothing's going to prepare Russia for the bloodletting that April evening, when a group of masked, camouflaged men burst into the veterans bar and spray it with machine gun fire, killing over a dozen men.

Days later, the same men kill mob boss Dmitry Ryskalayev, aka Dima Bolshoi, or Dima the Great, or Big Dima, depending on how WWE you want to be. He's the leader of the feared Volga's criminal outfit that's led much of the vicious fighting. In seconds, the assailants have broken the backbone of Bolshoi's mafia and laid waste to a third wave of the Togliatti gang wars.

Demon the Great gets a capo's burial and a Togliatti cemetery famed for its wild gang mottos. Local cynics dub it the Alley of Heroes. But in Moscow, there's no talk of legends. The Veterans Bar Massacre is the latest embarrassment for a Kremlin that's completely lost grip of its young nation to oligarchs, money laundering and rampant gang crime.

Internal Affairs Minister Anatoly Kolikov can't bear the heat anymore. He assembles a crack team of anti-mafia cops and prepares for war over control of a factory and a city that have become icons of Soviet and Russian engineering might. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. ♪

Hey guys, and welcome to a new edition of the show that teaches you how you should never ask how a thimble king made his first million rubles. I'm your host, Sean Williams, and I'm joined as ever by my American colleague, Danny Gold. We are two investigative journalists who rip off the bark of the rotten tree of organized crime, and we see which creepy crawlies come scurrying out.

I'm going to run out of visual metaphors soon, but that's going to do for now. I'm actually in a Belize City hotel room. You're in Austin, Texas. I believe you've come down there as a producer on the Joe Rogan Experience. Are we ever going to meet in person? I thought we were going to meet like in a few days.

Yeah, sorry about that, man. You know, things happen. Alex Jones needed me to be here and be his producer. So, no, I'm not doing that. None of those things are true. And we should actually probably both be in Ukraine covering the situation right there.

But for now, we'll talk about this different war, mafia war. And this podcast, it'll have to do. And I think it's actually an amazing episode. From what I understand, this might be the first time this has been reported in English, no? I think so, yeah. Like, I've not seen anything about this stuff in English. We got, there's loads of, like, I don't know, feature articles and documentaries and YouTube videos in Russian, but nothing. Yeah, nothing to date.

Maybe, you know, some editor wants to send us out, but maybe it's going to be a bit hard to get to Siberia at the moment. And I guess I'm going to just give a caveat that I'm sitting in the corner of a Belize city hotel and there's some kids playing outside and there's all kinds of noise. So sorry guys, if you hear anything. Sean's, if you heard our Belize episode,

Uh, what's the Sean's the story that Sean's doing? I'm actually helping him with it, but I am not able to be there. It actually came out of that episode. So, uh, we're pretty, we're pretty psyched on that and we'll let you guys know. Cause that's going to get published and it's, it's kind of going to be big, but anyway, moving on. Exciting stuff. Yeah. Um, yeah. First thing housekeeping, um, we were always putting stuff up on the IG. I just did a mini episode on the Patreon about Nepal, which I hope folks enjoyed. Uh, make sure to subscribe five solar shows just gives us a real leg up with all this stuff.

Yeah, patreon.com slash standardworldpodcast. Email us, holler at us. We love you guys. And if all of you join, then we could just go to Ukraine right now and I wouldn't have to be working somewhere else. Anyway, but actually, you know what? I want to give stjavelin.com. I mean, our buddy of the show, Christian, who was a world reporter in Ukraine, is in Canada now, has been doing amazing charity work through like a meme that he came up with that is everywhere now.

And they're donating money, all the money to, I think, war orphans and victims of the war right now in Ukraine. St. Javelin dot com. It's incredible. Go buy some T-shirts, go buy some stickers and, you know, hook them up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So we promised you something you'd never heard of a couple of weeks ago, right? And unless you're Russian, and even then, if you're around 40 years old and from the Volga region, you've probably never heard of the Togliatti gang wars, which is surprising really given that it played out in the death throes of the Soviet empire for control over one of its biggest companies. And it claimed hundreds of life, like literally hundreds of life. We actually don't know the full death toll because like I said, at the top of the show, tons of mobsters just dumped bodies in the Volga itself and

And huge, massive kudos for this show goes out to listener Yevginy. He's a Moldovan, which means we're best friends. And he suggested this episode about like six weeks ago or something. We love getting your emails and we've had, we're getting like tons of great ideas for shows. So keep them coming.

Yeah, I think I'm definitely talking to a few people right now, including the visit I wanted to do for six months that hasn't worked out yet. But hopefully it will. And yeah, definitely do all the work for us. We actually really love that as well. Yeah, write the show. It's cool. I like to think of myself as a connoisseur on wasting time Wikipedia and I've been to Russia and I've reported there a few times, but I'd never even heard of Togliatti before this show. And that's

Pretty surprising given it's home to over 700,000 people and one of the country's most iconic rivers. It's right next to Samara, which is on the edge of Siberia, not too far from the Kazakh border, about 600 miles southeast of Moscow. And today, pound for pound, Togliatti is Russia's poorest city, which if you listen to the end of this pod, you're going to know why.

Yeah, I mean, I've read travelogues and stories about how rough and distressed areas are outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg and other big cities can be, I think. But it might have focused on like rural areas. But either way, with that sort of description, I'm really intrigued about the city and everything that's going on there. Yeah, there's a couple of crazy YouTube videos where people go around this like it's rough.

So this is like a city that's bigger than Detroit, Boston, Liverpool, Lisbon, even Bissell. And you've never even heard of it, right? Well, actually, neither have many Soviets until the 1960s. Before then, it was an 18th century fortress called Stavropol. A few nice administrative buildings, your fave Russian Orthodox Church with the little golden onions on top, you know. It's a quaint little place. And then in the 50s, Stalin's Politburo put a giant dam nearby on the Volga area

creating a massive reservoir that kind of put the town on the map. But in 1964, things really kick off. That year, the Kremlin picked Stavropol to be the site of its new Vaz automobile plant in a hookup with Italian maker Fiat. And suddenly this little scratch home to just like a few dozen thousand folks, it becomes the Soviet Union's latest utopian workers' paradise, full of giant projects and parks and busts of Lenin and all that other good stuff.

And the Soviets renamed their new Motown on Volga, Togliatti. And that's after a guy named Palmiro Togliatti, that's the longest serving head of the Italian Communist Party, because Fiat, right?

And they even name a local football team FC Akron Togliatti. And they're a sister city of Flint, Michigan and Wolfsburg. Wolfsburg, I can't believe I said that. Wolfsburg, home to the largest factory in the world. And that's the Volkswagen one. And this place, it just tees off, right? Vaz builds giant trucks and stuff. But in 1970, the first Lada car rolls off the production line. That's the Giguli sedan. I'm probably saying that wrong. Two in blue, four in cherry color. Gross, horrible cars. And like...

countries across the Iron Curtain have laughed at in the West for how shit these things are like Ugo's and Skoda's, Trabant's, Honchi's but larder actually does alright it's bargain basement and markets itself as just that

I actually remember growing up in the UK, loads of families around me had larders and they were terrible, but working class people could actually afford them. And they were the butt of the jokes too. Here's one. A guy walks into a larder dealer and asks the salesman, can I get a windscreen wiper for my larder? Salesman says, yeah, seems like a fair swap. Good. Yeah. I got, okay, that was half a laugh. Here's one more. Had you doubled the value of a larder? Fill the tank.

These are not bad. They're better than your usual jokes, I gotta say. I'm taking that as a massive slight. But, of course, the vast majority of these little tin boxes, they're getting sold across the USSR, right? Closed economy, no tariffs. But the foreign success of Lada and Togliatti is a major boost for the Soviets heading into the 70s and 80s.

The economy's struggling, Chernobyl's wiping billions if not trillions from Moscow's budget, and the Soviet-Afghan war, which they liken to Vietnam, is an absolute disaster. 79 to 89, hundreds of thousands of dead, no progress whatsoever, Mujahideen ambushes, Soviets hiding bombs in kids' toys to blow up Afghan children. Like, that actually happened. In these dark times, foreign exchange to Moscow is like gold dust, and Lada is a Russian icon.

So that makes it a pretty mouth-watering prospect for gangs in 80s Russia, right? With money draining out the economy's arse, people in Togliatti struggling to get by. In fact, this happens all over the empire, with mobsters kind of laying the groundwork with what will become the lawless 1990s.

Basically, there's a whole generation of grizzled old Afghan war vets who are short in the Soviet Union and it pays off. And in Togliatti, it's not just larder potentially up for grabs. Each bit of this massive company has its own factory, brand, production line, even city district.

I definitely want to do an episode, too, like speaking of all this stuff on the like the Illuminating Wars, you know, and all the sort of oligarch battles that happened in Russia. It really is just a fascinating element. But also, I think I want to point out, if I'm not mistaken, I think it comes from Misha Misha Glennie's book, Make Mafia, which we reference a lot. He kind of talks about how the the mafia soldiers, right, where the vets became the mafia soldiers as opposed to the kingpins. No, no.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading that. Interestingly, I've been in touch with Misha Glennie. I think I'm going to get him on the show. So that'd be cool. Oh dude. He is like the, the epitome of the OG, right? Yeah. Of what we want to be. Yeah. His book's incredible. Yeah. It's amazing. Says the Russian magazine Dilettante quote criminal gangs quickly realized that the enterprise that's Lada was a real El Dorado in Soviet times. No one dared to crush it for themselves.

And pay attention here, because there are a few of these gangs in 1980s Togliatti. One of them is called the Napanikovskia, named after its founder Vladimir Vodvin, nicknamed Napanik, or The Partner.

These guys first make money, believe it or not, make their illicit cash running Thimbles games, which is basically the shell game, an ancient scam. You get someone to guess which of three shells a ball is under. You obviously do them over, right? Like proper end of the pier circus clown stuff. But apparently in one single city in southern Russia, this is enough for like gangsters to make a few quid from. I mean, I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe. It's three card Monty, right? Like the same thing. Exactly. Yeah. But also I want to say, uh, the partner, great nickname for a mafia. So yeah, the partner is good. And it's like something out of like, I can't say his fucking name. Yeah. It's like something out of a Tarantino movie, you know, like I'm going to see the partner. Yeah. We've got, we've got a few of these. We've got a few of these. So,

Another two old school racketeers at the time of Vladimir Agi or Aggie and Alexander Voronezhsky, who formed the brilliantly titled Aggie Voronezhsky gang. I mean, seriously, man, Russian mob names. They can't light a fart to the Glasgow ones we went for a few weeks back.

You're doing pretty well on pronunciations. I got to say, it really makes up for me being terrible. But like, what is this phrase? Couldn't light a fart. I've never even, I've never heard that before. Like who says that? I don't even know where that came from.

Is that a phrase? Maybe it exists. Maybe, maybe send it back anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And then in Togliatti, right, there are younger guys. A major new gang in the city is the Volkovskia or Volgas for short, named after a nearby hotel. And of course the river, the groups led by a duo named Alexander Maslov and Vladimir Karapetian.

Don't worry about the names too much. I'll make sure you remember them by the end. The Volgas, they're kind of the mad upstarts of this show. And they would eventually become known as some of 1990s Russia's most violent and durable mobsters. That's really saying something, right? Because weren't there thousands of mafia murders a year during that time? Oh, yeah. Plenty of them are going to get dropped as well. But for now...

They're ambitious kids, and they meet up regularly at the Volga Hotel's ground floor bar. They get wasted, and they plot to take over Little Toyati, or Big Toyati. They call themselves the, quote, Boys from the Bar, but they're really serious stuff. Another name that I like. Yeah, it's pretty good, huh? They break off into smaller, more nimble groups to plot their campaign, and they actually enlist the help of a boxer and a former Special Forces soldier for advice on how to combat their potential enemies.

And then there's a fourth major outfit in Togliatti called the Podarsk... Podarkovskia. Podarkovskia.

And that's led by a bodybuilder named Oleg Koroshev, a.k.a. The Gift. Now, that nickname might not be quite as immodest as it sounds. Gift in German means poison, and I think it means the same in Russian. I may be wrong, but Koroshev could actually be the poison, but that's pretty cool too. Yeah, I think Glennie also talks about how a lot of these mobsters, or like enforcers at least, came from sport, right? From like wrestling, which is really big in the former Soviet Union. So these guys naturally gravitated towards being enforcers and...

I guess from that, you end up picking up AKs and you get to what you've got here. I mean, it still goes on with the Chechens today, right? They're all like boxers and MMA fighters and they're all involved in like, well, they're all, some of them are involved in like Chechen gang crime. But yeah, so there's your four major gangs in Togliatti in the dying years of communism, right? There are two older ones and there are two new kids on the block.

And then in November 1989, East Berliners tear down the city's wall. I don't know if you know this history, it's pretty vague. Germany's reunited and the communist dictatorships of the Iron Curtain fall away like dominoes. Except for Albania, of course, which soldiers on until 1992. I mean, you've got to hand it to them. It was really mad there. In 1991, the Soviet Union officially collapses and out of its shell comes a number of independent nations entirely captured by oligarchs, despots and gangsters.

And David Hasselhoff. And David Hasselhoff. I mean, you've gone into this stuff for like a bunch in a couple of episodes, so we don't need to retread it too much here. But in Togliatti, the end of the Politburo is like the starting gun on a mad dash for larger riches. Here's a quote from Secret Magazine, roughly translated, of course. Quote,

The huge factory quickly became the main source of income for local gangs. There were several types of business. In addition to the already mentioned theft of spare parts, members of the organized crime group collected tribute from intermediaries who traded cars and also took control of the store at Vaz, which was the only official dealer in the early 90s. In some periods, the bandits did not hesitate to run the plant. Many of them even had passes to enter the territory.

So these gangs have basically what they want. Newly minted Russia is a basket case. There's barely any rule of law. And Lada and this giant Vaz plant is just sitting there like a great big something waiting to be somethinged.

That's good. We're getting bigger. We got to keep Russian gang stories family friendly. And people who know that quote, know that quote. So we don't, we don't have to dive into the details. The first thing they do is set up a black market in car parts. They've stolen off the line, quote, money flowed like a river, according to that Delatante piece. Great name for a magazine too. It is. It's awesome. The piece is really good. I've stuck it all on the reading list. Like it's, it's worth Google translating.

And for now, everyone's happy in Togliatti. There's tons of money. There's more than enough to go around. Parts, cars, fuel, it's all going missing off the Lada production line, disappearing into the black economy. And you could argue at this point in Russia's history, it's just hustle. The Russian economy is going insane. Hyperinflation, depression. In 1992 alone, retail prices across the country go up over 2,500%. That's like...

Zimbabwe level shit. And on one single day in 1994, called Black Tuesday, the ruble loses over a quarter of its value. The Soviet Union's safety net has disappeared and joblessness is skyrocketing. No wonder the Kremlin barely had any time to give a toss about its little old clown cars disappearing off the line.

Informal grey or black markets are propping up millions of people's lives at the time. Says a Max Planck Institute paper, quote, In the post-communist era, entrepreneurial behaviour was legally rehabilitated and publicly legitimised. Shadow dealers became legal or semi-legal entrepreneurs. In the 1990s, it gave way to a mass of small cross-border traders, or shuttle traders, or chelnoki. Bring

bringing imported goods independently or by themselves from Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia and Poland.

Yeah, Glennie also talks about how the people who became oligarchs, a lot of them had experience in like the shadow market before the collapse of communism. And that's why they were best suited to come in and take over businesses. You know, they had networks. They knew how to get things done. They were essentially operators, you know, so that kind of lends itself towards the sort of wheeling and dealing that is necessary for, you know, to profit off this sort of situation. Yeah, he's looking at you, Abramovich.

So this quote carries on from the Max Planck piece. This grassroots entrepreneurship did not become very prestigious, but it was quite a legitimate activity. The people started to back shuttle traders when the state authorities tried to suppress them. So in other words, the rule was going mad. Moscow barely has a clue what to do, and it's run by shysters and idiots, and everyone else, it's like the Hunger Games.

Music to a gangster's ears. In Togliatti, the different gangs split up the company and the city into separate fiefdoms, and for a very, very short while there's peace. But the older boys quote, yesterday's racketeers, as one article I read called them. These guys are not happy with the young bucks, and that these guys are taking a piece of their pie.

These old guys are grizzled factory workers, most of them war vets. Why the hell are they ceding ground to Gen Zers who probably sit around all day playing Nintendo and listening to Nirvana or Kino or whatever Russian Gen Zers do?

I just want to also add Zed means Z in American. So for our listeners that are American, yeah, Gen Zers. But also I think I just remembered as you were reading that, the thing I said about the, um, the, the collapse of communism and the guys that were operators and, and you had to work in the black market that might've actually been from Amy Chua's world on fire. So that's also a great book if anyone wants to read something else. So yeah, it's excellent.

Cool. So anyway, yeah. And in particular at this time, the Volgas, that's those boys from the bar under Maslow, Karapetian, they're making banks selling spare parts. Others just look on with envy. It's clear at this point that a war is coming.

Aggie and Voronezhki, that's obviously the Aggie-Voronezhki clan, they hook up with the Gift, and that's the bodybuilding guy, to take out the younger Volgas. And the Gift has got a clique of young triggermen ready to carry out his orders. Their arsenal includes two Sornoffs, two Makarov pistols, one Tokarev pistol, that's like this old 1930s Soviet model, which I guess makes sense in a larder factory, and an AK, because of course there's an AK, and grenades and explosives.

That's not much of an arsenal. You know, it sounds like what guys in Texas keep in their basement.

Yeah, my former father-in-law, I think, had that in his wardrobe. Their principal target is Vladimir Vodvin, a.k.a. the partner. And he's head of that Napolnikovskaya gang, which is the weaker of the older gangs. He's a thimbles guy, right? He's a softer target, perhaps. But the gifts, young men, they're no professionals. And the partner spots a sniper on the roof of his building and runs off.

Soon after, they go after an associate of the Volga's called Sergei Kupiev, but they back out because of the Kupiev's bodyguards. I mean, these guys, they're a bit clownish. But on September 16, 1992, the First Racketeer War begins. Great name for a war.

I can't believe this hasn't been reported, man. This is like so crazy. Armed bandits head towards the house of Vladimir Bilichenko. He's the head of Togliatti's glass tinting division who hasn't been playing ball with the old boys. He's walking down his home street at the time.

is expecting something he's been getting threats for ages from these punks and he's surrounded by four friends literally at this point if even if you're a middle manager in toliati your head's potentially on the block and you need protection it's crazy anyway these young bandits working for the gift on behalf of the older aggie voronetskis they screw up again vilachenko's wife spots them out the window and cries out to her husband i mean it's all kind of comedic at

At this point, the bandits have been rumbled and they run away. Bilicenko, or more accurately his wife, has diverted an assassination attempt. But he gets angry and he chases after them, and that is a bad move.

After heading around a corner, the young gunmen reposition and blast them with the saunas. Vyachenko dies on the spot. One of his friends slash henchmen actually steals the body from Togliatti's morgue. He buries him in Ukraine, which is a long way to go for a dead pal.

A few weeks later, the Giftsmen go back after Sergei Kupiev. This time they kill him. Then, on November 13, 1992, the young guys get a massive scalp. Alexander Maslov, one of the leaders of the Volgas, he's cornered at the entrance to his house and he's shot twice in the back, killing him.

The killer himself, who's a guy called Sergei, okay, of course, there's a lot of Sergeis here. It's more clown show stuff, right? His pistol jams when he tries taking out Maslov's bodyguard and he gets identified and is an associate of the Gift.

and his older allies, the Aggie Voronezkis. Oops. The Volgas decide to turn Maslov's funeral into a show of might for their gang, and they invite a funeral cortege of dozens of cars and high-ranking politicians and cops to a procession that snakes along Togliatti's Karl Marx Street, where its city hall is, for hours. Bars and brothels close. It's like a king died. And of course, Maslov gets buried in the Banikinsky Cemetery, which will pretty soon be called the Alley of Heroes.

What's more, because Maslow's assailant was such a useless idiot, everyone in the Togliatti underworld and its police knows him. Normally, the local cops don't bother with organized crime, much less in times of war. But it'd just be too much of a joke not to arrest Sergei. And in December 1992, they do just that. For most members of the GIFs, young, bungling bandits with them. But the bodybuilder gang leader himself, the GIF, he just slinks off into the background.

Aggie, one of the two older guys who used the gift to fight the Volgas, but lost and they hand him a 15-year sentence for his part in the first racketeering war. Boronetsky doesn't get quite so lucky. December 18 that year, Boronetsky, who's taken to wearing a bulletproof vest, is nonetheless shot dead by Volga's hitmen.

And that was pretty much the end of the first racketeering war in Togliatti. But if the locals thought that was the worst they'd seen, it was like dropping off a Ferrari at the dealer and getting a larder. It was about to get a hell of a lot worse.

After the death of the Agi Voronezhkys and the gifts young Podarkovskia hoodlums, the Volgas, these bright-faced young drunkards from the hotel bar, it's fair to say they stock up for the winter. They move into Toliady's Avtovadovsk neighbourhood, which is home to most of its larder factories, and they ally with a Chechen group hit up by a former police officer. Note to potential Russian underworld leaders, always team up with the Chechens.

That's solid advice. I feel like that should have been what you said in the intro. But I feel like the Ukrainians right now seem to be doing pretty well at fighting them off at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, God, that is crazy. The Chechens are bad boys to a one, right? I was working on a piece about Chechen mobs in Berlin a while back, but I'm pretty sure I'd end up dead if I followed that one through. Nice hat, though.

Anyway, the Volgas used the Chechens to arm themselves for a second war to take even more control of the massive Vaz plant. And this isn't like the half-assed couple of pallets they'd managed before, right? The Chechens sought them a full convoy of weapons smuggled into Togliatti in secret bottoms in the back of Vaz trucks, enough to fill four warehouses.

I mean, we're talking Dragunov sniper rifles, NATO Aggram 2000 assault rifles, AKs, of course, PP-90 subs and BOSS, which are homemade Chechen submachine guns produced during the early 90s. And this is a time, remember, when Chechnya is trying to break free from Russia, is holding referenda in Ingushetia and actually winning an extremely short-lived independence in 1996. I mean, we should definitely do a Chechen episode soon because the place is just mad.

Yeah, and fascinating, you know, presence in Underworld as well. I mean, have you been? I have not been. I would love to go. Yeah, I've been right up on that board, but not been. It's also, I mean, Khararov, he's basically a Mafioso kingpin when it comes down to it too. So maybe just an episode on him. Yeah, didn't people love like doing stories about his IG profile or something a few years ago? Yeah, I remember that being a thing. Yeah.

Anyway, this firepower, this Chechen firepower, plus, of course, a job lot of grenades, and the Volgas are pretty well placed to launch a second racketeering war in Toileate.

In the meantime, the Lada production line is getting rinsed to an insane level. In 1993, 45 cars disappear in the central production department and 130 in the assemble and body shop. I mean, whole cars. And on July 21, 1994, this is just one night. Car parts worth almost 10 million rubles are stolen from the factory. According to my maths, and I could be wrong, I think that's like hundreds of thousands of dollars in today's money.

In car parts alone, says de la Tante, quote, everything that was good or bad was dragged from the Volga automobile plant and then resold. And then when you can't steal anything anymore, you light a match. Beautiful.

Mobsters also started doing something called Kidnyak at this point, which is a scam where cars were sold under fake bank guarantees and none of the money would make its way back to Vaz, of course. And this makes the gangs of Togliatti many millions of dollars each year.

Says an investigative journalist at the time, quote, At the factory, everyone soon became used to the presence of guys in tracksuits with shaved heads. Just sounds like home, really. They would walk up to the conveyor and say, that car, that car, and that car, those are ours. And they would put a marker on the windshield so that everyone knew who the cars belonged to. Everyone understood that the factory had been occupied. There existed an internal administration that was controlling the whole process.

I really wish some fashion magazine would just do a history of the tracksuit in Eastern Europe. There's some feature on it. I feel like it'd be incredible. Feel free to deck us out in gear if anyone's listening to this as well. I'm all up for that time of life where I can do a tracksuit and a flat cap.

By now, two main gangs remain from that first war, right? There's the Volgas and the Naparnikovskaya, led by Vladimir Vodin, a.k.a. the partner. He's one of the old school guys who'd been making cash on thimbles back in the day before things got quite so wild. After Maslov's death, remember him from the Volgas, the Volgas get a new leader. That's Dmitry Razliev.

a.k.a. Dimitri Bolshoi or Dimitri the Great. Just so you know when you actually hear about the Bolshoi Ballet, I think it just means the big or the great ballet. It's pretty boring.

Dimitri's actually still on Lada's books as a security guard as his Volgas take over more and more of the factory, squeezing out the partners gang until war becomes inevitable. I actually read some stuff suggesting the Volgas are by this point actually a puppet of corrupt politicians in the FSB, which is the successor to the KGB. And Dima at this time, Dima Bolshoi, is just a figurehead, but who knows?

I mean, whatever the truth, the second war kicks off in May 1994. And that's when assailants murdered Gary Kupiev, a Volga ally, in his home. Then on May 30, gunfire breaks out at one of the Vaz factory's many checkpoints. Several members of both gangs are killed, signalling a resumption of full violence in Togliatti. Incredibly, that summer police manage to arrest the partner and keep him in custody.

But it does little to stem the bloodshed of a war many times bigger than the one that had gone before it. Then Tatar ethnic gangs move into Togliatti and they're part of something called the Kazan phenomenon, named after the capital of Tatarstan in Siberia. Basically, they're this Turkic ethnic group sidelined and killed during the Soviet years. And they get involved in the mafia in the 90s, a bit like the Chechens are doing today.

These Tatars are running a protection racket at the spare parts centre of Vaz, working alongside the partner against Dima and his Volgas.

And they just show up and are like, we want in. Yeah, they do. I think they're like, I think they're pretty feared at this point across Russia. So no one's really messing with them. And there's still loads of money to go around, right? So that people can siphon off bits of the factories and stuff. Both sides of the second war are tooled up to the eyeballs and the violence just goes through the roof. At one point in the fall of 1994, an average three contract killings are carried out in Togliatti every day.

Christ, that's a long way from the guys with like two pistols and two shotguns in the beginning. Yeah, man, it's nuts. I mean, gunfire rings out around the streets of Togliatti and civilians are getting caught in the crossfire, blown up in car bombs. The two battling gangs are hiring muscle and hitmen from outside town. I mean, it's like Burning Man for Russian gangsters.

That kind of makes no sense, but, you know, I'm not going to stop you. You're doing good. Thanks. If you're making literal millions, right, and you've got pretty much free range on one of your country's most lucrative industries, I mean, don't kill so many innocent people that the cops have to get involved. But that's exactly what this war is doing. Again, dropping so many people in this one single city that the authorities just can't afford to let the killing continue.

Cops go for the low-hanging fruit, the Tatars, and one by one they arrest the partner allied ethnic group's trigger men, deflating the second war. They even get to partner himself, of course, although he won't have quite so tough a time laying low under police protection.

And Aggie, remember him? That's the old dude who got defeated in the first war. He gets sent down after his arrest back then, but incredibly, Russia's Supreme Court overturns the decision and he just clean vanishes. No idea where he went. Some people say he was shot dead. Others that he got out of the country. Who knows? Same for the Gift, the bodybuilding thug whose henchmen had been so clueless in the first conflict. Could be a block of ice at the bottom of the Volga. Could be on a beach in Thailand.

Either way, there is a lull in the violence. Over 100 people have died in these wars so far. Cops set up a special task force for export cars and they stop some of the extortion. Some people in Togliatti think the arrests have actually stopped the violence, but what do you reckon?

I'm going to go with no. Definitely, definitely a no. You win. You win the prize. Yeah, of course not. On October 8, 1996, a businessman named Alec Gasanoff is at the local theater. He's one of the richest and most influential men in Togliatti, and he owns, among other things, its biggest dealership, a fish factory, a football stadium, and a TV station.

Oh yeah, and he also happens to be the biggest supplier of Sol and Vaz stuff to the Volgas, led by Dima Bolshoi, of course. Well, of course, up strides a hitman working for the partner, and he shoots Gazanov dead.

Now, this killing really hits Deamer hard. And his vulgar boys go on the offensive. They knock out a bunch of low-ranking hoods using similar tactics to that of the Second Racketeering War. They hire outsiders to keep the cops on their toes. And in February 1997, cops arrest Deamer and find a gun in his jacket pocket. They accuse him of murder. But he gets out on bail and he just disappears. Probably not someone I'd veer mark for bail, to be honest.

But he gets arrested again a few months later, and amazingly, they let him out on bail again, and this war simmers on. One of the few rays of hope for the police around this time is a local detective, an absolute fearless badass, called Dmitry Ogorodnikov, nicknamed Ogorod. I mean, he literally runs into gunfire during shootouts, and he's responsible for nabbing a bunch of the Tatars that ended the Second Racketeering War. Says a reporter at the site Titgorod,

Tickrod. Funny. Quote, Criminals knew if Dima Ogarov was there, it was time to put the guns away. The respect and fear they had for him overcame any other feelings. That's kind of how I want to be described in the future. Is that not how you describe now? No, no, unfortunately now.

The partner, meanwhile, he lays low. He slowly expands his criminal empire beyond Togliatti. Perhaps the partner knows that by this point, officials in Moscow have fully had enough of the violent embarrassment in Togliatti.

At the Kremlin, Anatoly Kulikov is not a man to be messed with. A former Soviet army general, he's instrumental in the Chechen war, including the brutal and disastrous Battle of Grozny in 1996, which, somehow politically, he survives as Boris Yeltsin's Minister of the Interior.

By 1997, Kulikov has set up a special anti-gang unit to combat the Izmajowska mafia, which was then led from Israel and since has been heavily rumored to have worked with Vladimir Putin to help his political rise, got them on the list. We're definitely going to do a show on them. Is that related to Mogilevich or no? I think yes. I'm going to say yes. I'm pretty sure. But yeah, probably someone's going to write it now.

Anyway, as part of Kulikov's anti-gang measures, he sets up something called Operation Cyclone, good name, with SOBR SWAT teams of cops, and they just pile into Togliatti. And this will be the beginning of the end for the city's mobs. They can't just waltz into the larder factory and steal everything.

What's more, on April 13, 1998, masked men burst into the Afghan veterans bar in Togliatti and peppered the place with machine gun fire to kill over a dozen men in what will become the bloodiest and most shocking event of all three racketeering wars.

Eleven days later, on April 24, gunmen open fire on Dima Bolshoi's car, a Lada, shockingly, killing him and two of his bodyguards. His headstone in the Alley of Heroes reads, quote, Don't worry, Dima, we got the guy who did you. First, great headstone. Second, all of this occurs after the police crackdown? Yeah, it's like everyone just sort of takes their chance to off each other while the police are piling in.

So with Bolshoi dead, partner laying low, the gift, Aggie and others missing, presumed dead and hundreds of others either buried in the alley of heroes or tossed in the river or the nearby reservoir from the dam. The era of two big mafias duking it out for control of Russia's motor city is pretty much over.

Kulikov gathers his new anti-gang squad too. They roll into town. They've got armored vehicles. And this is what Russians affectionately can name the Battle of Kulikovo, which is also a major defeat of the Mongols by the Russians in 1380. I mean, Dan Carlin, eat your heart out. From what I read, this operation sounds pretty nuts though, right? They roll in with military equipment. They clear the factories one section after another.

Since one report I read, quote, the heads of the factory had asked for help from city authorities, regional authorities and from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to help clean out the factory because they were facing threats to their lives. Those who were in charge of things like the sale of spare parts or accessories, for example, would be attacked and beaten with iron rods. So, yeah, it's getting pretty out of hand.

And throughout 1998, 99 and 2000, it's basically this dirty war scrapping for, well, actual scraps at the Vaz plant. Beaten back from the crown jewels of Lada, mobs begin extorting small businesses like pharmacies and convenience stores. This is also the bloodiest period in Toi Ate. 20 businessmen are killed. In 2000, assailants strike famed detective Oggerod's car with AKs and they hit him 30 times.

So the crackdown maybe saves the factory, but it just like spreads out every, the violence just spreads out everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. They basically keep them away from like the real lucrative stuff. So the big mobs kind of died down, but they just sort of like each other turned into these like real scrappy little horrible gangs and a blaze at a local police station at this time kills 57 people, but officials aren't sure whether it's arson or not. I mean, 57, the body count in this episode is nuts. It's,

Tons of files about the previous gang wars. They're also lost in the fire, which is, I mean, I suppose it was a police station, but yeah, pretty useful for anyone who's doing that. A bunch of would-be dons come and go, usually via a bullet or two. Essentially, the police are finally getting a grip, the big boys are dead, and their acolytes are reduced to stealing. The plant's back in the hands of the state, and Togliatti isn't quite the cash cow it once was.

When is this? Like what year is this about? So it's like 2000, first couple of years of the 21st century.

And this doesn't stop, though, a bunch of small-time crooks, right, just like we said, from causing what would still be a shocking, shocking level of violence in any city thereafter. And by the turn of the millennium, right, over 400 people have been killed in these wars. Journalists take a particular battering. And in 2002, the editor of the city's biggest newspaper, the Tollietti Observer, is shot several times with a silenced gun outside his home as he's off to buy sweets for his daughter. So it's awful.

In 2003, courts hear the cases of dozens of mid-ranked players in the Togliatti gang wars. But crucially, the partner? He gets out. He flees to Spain, where he lives out his days in relative luxury, getting pink and fat on the beach somewhere between Malaga and Seville, according to reports. Although, of course, in true Underworld podcast style, he's got companies supposedly registered him in, guess where, Dubai.

And that's pretty much your Togliatti gang car wars, guys. 500 to 1,000 people dead, full-on military arsenals, a national brand completely taken over, stripped, hero detectives, a state assault mission, all in a city you'd never heard of. And what a great time to do an episode of Russia, which is a totally normal and cool country. So, boycott Lada.

Yeah, that was great, man. Thank you for doing that. I hope you get to report it out sometime and someone sends you to Siberia to get this done. But yeah, guys, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast, you know, ad-free episodes, bonus stuff, all that, which we've been slacking a bit on because we've both been on the road. But yeah, give us some support so we can stop doing things we don't want to do and start doing things we want to do.

If all of you start doing it, or if each of you that do it tell 10 people to do it, we're good, man. We're chilling. Yeah, talking of things we don't want to do, I'm just about to step onto the beach and have a beer. So it's a tough life. Yeah, have fun. Have fun doing the story that I did, that I pitched, that's now taking you to Belize. Anyway, great, great. Things are working out great. Yeah, love it.