You read Vedomosti’s new investigation into Putin’s friends-allies-accomplices from the 1990s and realize that the famous phrase, “we ran wild in the ’90s,” really comes from the heart and from personal experience.
There are not many politicians in Russia or anywhere else in the world who were so directly and personally tied to real organized crime groups. Put simply, he made money together with gangsters.
This, incidentally, easily explains Putin’s tolerance for things that make people across Russia shudder, like the murders in Kushchyovskaya (a notorious mass murder case in southern Russia), where Governor Tkachev, who was obviously implicated, and the local prosecutors got away with it. For Putin, the fact that the authorities and actual murderous gangsters work together is nothing shocking — all sorts of things happen when you’re carving out your own 4% cut, just part of life.