A book on the street gangs of Kazan inspires a hit TV show and raises questions about Russia’s turbulent economic transition.
The “Kazan phenomenon” was an infrastructure of youth street gangs that existed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Kazan, the capital of the then Soviet Union’s republic of Tatarstan.
A Lad’s Word, the basis for a highly popular Russian television series, is basically 600 pages of mostly first-person recollections by former gang members and others who lived through those times of what went on in Kazan in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as what preceded and followed.
Garayev’s method makes a strong contrast to an earlier account of the Kazan phenomenon. In her book The Gangs of Russia, largely based on academic research, Svetlana Stephenson traced a broad history of Russia’s street gangs, with a specific focus on Kazan.
Another major difference is an autobiographical element to the book – Garayev belonged to a Kazan street gang called Nizy in 1989–1991, and he adds his memories to the multitude of voices gathered in the book.
Out of the Shadows
Many topics were taboo in the Soviet Union that weren’t in line with an image of a prosperous socialist society that the communist authorities wanted to project. That applied to the youth gangs that had sprung up since the 1970s. Tyap-Lyap, one of these pioneer gangs, stemmed from Kazan and is largely considered a precursor to the later “Kazan phenomenon.”
Starting in the second half of the 1980s, more attention could be paid to the less-than-favorable facets of Soviet reality when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost reforms enabled the media to tackle a number of previously banned subjects.
The first article about the Kazan phenomenon appeared in the popular magazine Ogonyok in July 1988. Titled “Dryannye malchishki” (Bad Boys), the piece shocked many Soviet citizens with a detailed description of gang warfare in Kazan – then the capital of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, located in the Volga region.
This was a battle for territory, street by street, as young gang members employed knives, steel bars, and other makeshift weapons to injure and sometimes kill their opponents.
Many other stories and TV reports followed, but, predictably, gang members were reluctant to talk to the press, and their voices have hardly been heard to this day.
As Garayev explains in the foreword, one of the main motivations for him to write this book was a lack of insiders’ voices and opinions in various attempts to explore the Kazan gangs – from scientific research to documentaries and books.
“I decided that my book would consist of interviews with gang members,” he writes. He created a “Kazan phenomenon” group on VK, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, enabling him to get in touch with numerous individuals who agreed to share their stories. Understandably, many of them spoke on condition of anonymity, although some revealed their names.
Garayev structures A Lad’s Word around various aspects of youth gang life in the 1980s and beyond, rather than telling the story chronologically. Sections titled “Structure and rituals,” “The lads’ code,” “Lifestyle,” “Family and women,” or “Gangs and authorities” offer detailed – although sometimes conflicting – accounts of what the life of a Kazan street gang member in the final decade of the Soviet Union looked like. A separate section is devoted to the 1970s gang Tyap-Lyap.
Gangbangers Into Executives
The passage of several decades gave former gang members more freedom to discuss things that they, for a long time, preferred to keep to themselves.
Garayev – a musician, DJ, and currently a tour guide at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow – doesn’t single out his personal experience as a gang member, adding his recollections to those of many other people he interviewed for the book. However, his memories do important work, with insights into how and why a teenager from a normal family would join a youth gang.
“I was an ideal target for extortion, except for the fact that in the late 1980s, my family barely made ends meet,” recalls Garayev. “But no one cared about that. Once a big guy named Iskander, who was in another class of the same year, decided to take advantage of my helplessness.”
Iskander demanded three rubles from him, a sum he was totally unable to come up with. Fourteen-year-old Garayev was saved from the extortionist by joining a street gang. “This was a significant social elevator,” he observes. “I became a ‘lad.’ “
Garayev stayed in a gang for just a couple of years. He left after he moved to another neighborhood and entered university. Meanwhile, as the 1990s progressed, many former youth gangs across Tatarstan and beyond turned into full-fledged criminal enterprises.
Overall, the 1990s in Russia are often labeled as a “bandit decade” or a “wild decade,” and those labels are in many respects accurate. The stories told by various interviewees in A Lad’s Word paint a grim picture of criminality that dominated Russia as the country moved from communist rule to a capitalist economy.
One former Kazan gang member recalls a gruesome – and characteristic – episode from the late ’90s, when some of his gang went to Moscow to settle a business dispute with a local mob. A brawl ensued, ending only when a machete-wielding attacker sliced off someone’s hand, still holding a gun.
The book takes the story into the early 2000s with a section on the police crackdown on gangs – and the convergence of criminal, political, and business elites around the same time.
Boot Camp for Young Hoodlums
Anyone who looks into Kazan’s experience inevitably asks why youth gangs in this city were so well-organized and well-structured, as opposed to elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
Those old enough to have witnessed life in the late Soviet era remember that youth gangs existed – in one way or another – across the entire country, from Brest to Vladivostok. But they were mostly chaotic and anarchic, compared with Kazan’s gangs.
In Kazan of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as A Lad’s Word clearly shows, street youth gangs were not only numerous but also strictly organized into age groups, each having its own name; they had regular meetings and banned members from drinking alcohol or smoking.
This rule was quite atypical for Russian youth gangs, and although Tatarstan has a substantial Muslim population, its gangs usually comprised boys from different ethnic groups and the ban on drinking had nothing to do with religion. Older gang members enforced the ban on younger ones, claiming drinking and smoking would weaken them and undermine self-discipline. As the book reveals, however, the veterans generally ignored the bans.
There is no definitive explanation for that high level of organization. One speculative answer Garayev mentions is that the Soviet secret service, the KGB, set up the Kazan youth gangs as a kind of street force it would be able to control.
“Numerous supporters of the idea that the Kazan phenomenon was born in KGB offices claim that guys on the street wouldn’t have been able to come up with efficient tools for controlling youths, and that someone must have told them about it,” explains Garayev.
“I don’t have direct proof of KGB involvement, or access to the archives of the most powerful law enforcement service of the USSR,” he goes on. “But it wouldn’t be wise to completely discard that theory.”
When the same-named TV series – subtitled “Blood on the Asphalt” and loosely based on episodes in the book – hit Russian screens late last year, it turned out to be very popular with young viewers, taking some observers by surprise, although some critics accused it of romanticizing criminality.
Incidentally, although most of the events described in the book took place 30-40 years ago, the reality of those times could be easily projected onto that of contemporary Russia. The surviving members of the 1980s and 1990s street gangs may be working menial jobs or be prosperous entrepreneurs and legislators who left their criminal past behind, but the country at large seems to have never abandoned the criminal code of that era.
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Vladimir Kozlov is a Belarusian/Russian author and film director currently living in exile in Germany.
