Outlaws Inc. Read Online Free PDF

away, very quickly.
    Like so many former Soviet towns, it had its pet industries beyond the air base and military-transport regiment, and like all of them, the clues are in the football teams. The two big local names are Lokomotiv Vitebsk (in the Soviet workers’ paradise, the Lokomotivs were originally teams of engineers and railwaymen, just as the Dynamos were power-plant workers), also known simply as Vitebsk FC, and Kimovets Vitebsk (workers at the town’s KIM tights and hosiery factory). After a disastrous 1995 season, they went under.
    Eight miles out of town as you go northeast toward the lorry-choked E95 motorway and the Russian border, there’s a rather bleak military field with a conning tower, planes, gates, and a few scattered concrete buildings: the ghost of a once-mighty air base that, give or take tours of duty in Afghanistan and across the Union, was home to Mickey and his crew and the hundreds of men and planes of the Third Guards Military Transport Aviation Division. It had all seemed so permanent: The men, the base, the planes—some thirty giant Il-76s and more An-22s—were part of the greatest standing armed force the world had ever known. And then one day that force simply evaporated.
    Looking at it from this historical distance, in the rain on the deserted perimeter, it’s hard to see how the empire’s sudden collapse and so many former Soviet states’ crazed “transition” to freewheeling capitalism could have ended up producing anything but a pan-global underground network of airborne traffickers. Or how the world could have expected anything but a proliferation of organized crime, profiteering, black markets, terror, and instability in its wake.
    For ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians, the sudden, galloping disintegration of the Soviet Union and its subsequent carve-up by privatizing entrepreneurs was nothing short of a disaster. A universal share-voucher issue by the Russian state went disastrously wrong when starving and impoverished ordinary Russians, with little or no idea what it meant to be a stakeholder in anything, swapped their shares almost immediately for food or vodka. As a result, almost 100 percent of the shares in newly privatized state operations and utilities worked their way back to the few men already wealthy enough to buy them up, share by share, with booze and bread.
    Meanwhile, many among the first generation of Western firms to do business in former Soviet lands more than lived up to the Soviets’ image of the robber-capitalist adventurer, turning up with much-needed liquid capital and tying Russian companies into swingeing and impenetrable contracts. Some Russian businessmen—soon dubbed “new Russians,” or biznesmeny —caught on quickly: Coca-Cola’s head office in Ukraine reportedly hired its own militia after being raided by gunmen who forced their way past reception demanding the directors sign a “partnership agreement.” A Russian friend in credit control succeeded in tracking down a debtor with an invoice inquiry, only to be told by a voice on the telephone that he recognized her accent and her family wouldn’t be too hard to trace should they not be able to “write off the debt amicably.”
    As the economy seized up, ordinary people across the former Soviet Union became increasingly desperate. The World Bank’s chief economist Joseph Stiglitz noted in disgust, “Not only was the [former Soviet states’] national economic pie shrinking; it was being divided up more and more inequitably so the average Russian was getting a smaller and smaller slice.” The effects were clear: From being a society in which only 2 percent lived below the poverty line—then defined as living on the equivalent of two dollars a day or less—by 1998 Russia’s poverty trap had claimed one in four, with over 40 percent living on less than four dollars a day.
    But if it was a