About to read Roberto Saviano, "Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia" (2007) to get a better understanding of the Putin regime.

Trying to "verify" my hunch that Russia is a mafia organisation, a crime syndicate, in the form of a nation state – with the means, tools, and sovereign rights of a nation state. That is: It's not that organised crime may have occupied some state layers and functions, a partial symbiosis still resisted by the, but that Russia as a nation state, it's whole make-up, is the newest version of a full-fledged mafia organisation. If that is true, then crime and autocratic states may have reached a new quality that typical analysis doesn't grasp. At least I miss this component in the works of Masha Gessen, Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Jessica Berlin, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others. We'll see...

#Russia #Putin #mafia #crime