RUSSIAN ORGANIZED CRIME: ROSNER vs. ALBINI AND ROGERS

EDITOR’S NOTE:

The following is an unedited letter written by Professor Lydia S. Rosner in which she discusses an article ("The New Stage of the Fight Against Organized Crime in Russia" by Victor Shabalin, J.L. Albini and R. E. Rogers) that was published in the fall 1995 issue (Vol., No. 1) of Criminal Organizations. Professors Albini and Rogers’s response to Rosner’s criticism follows her letter. Professor Rosner requested that her letter be published in the last issue of Criminal Organizations. However, that issue had already gone to press before I received her letter. Rosner not only finds fault with the article but also with Criminal Organizations for publishing it. Therefore, I, being the one responsible for publishing it ,have responded to her comments, at some length, in "From the Editor’s Desk." Dr. Rosner is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and a recognized expert on Russian organized crime. Professor Albini, of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is the Co-Director of the Joint Russian-American Academic Committee for the Promotion of the Study of Comparative Criminal Justice. Dr. Rogers is the American Co-Director of the Joint Russian-American Academic Committee for the Promotion of the Study of Comparative Criminal Justice at Eastern Michigan University. We thank Professors Rosner, Albini, and Rogers for expressing their views.

To the Editor:

With due respect to Dr. Joseph Albini, whose friendship I value, the article entitled "The New Stage of the Fight Against Organized Crime in Russia" seems to have been mainly the work the second author and Russian national, Victor Shabalin. Nowhere does Criminal Organizations indicate that we were to be the recipients of a polemic, a biased view of Russian Organized crime --with a political agenda, to boot. The second sentence of the article provides the first hint of what is to come. "At this time the magnitude of criminal activity has become very threatening to our society" (emphasis mine.) The second hint comes from the very Russian concept that "efficient criminal justice control can be taken against traditional spheres of crime, (drugs, prostitution pornography, gambling) if urgent measures are used against economic organized criminal groups."

Certainly the kind of thinking evidenced in this article does not reflect the thought of American criminologists. The article discusses the "great work done by a creative group of lawyers with Professor Asalia Dalgove, President of The Russian Criminological Association, as its leader in creating a body of laws that advocate "the examination [of someone under suspicion for having committed serious crimes] before the charges are brought against someone, and its results might be used as the proof of guilt.

For an IASOC publication to print, even in a section entitled "A forum on Critical issues" an article so outside the very human rights objectives which we espouse, to seem to advocate the indiscriminate "examination" (and we all know what that means) of suspected organized crime figures in a society without a civil legal structure, without any history of monetary dealings, without any civil rights guarantees, is truly outrageous.

We must be most careful that when we announce ourselves as an international journal, we not become party to the kind of authoritarian, police-state measures that are part of the political agenda of law enforcement agencies in countries that espouse democratic agendas while continuing the police state behavior of their recent past.

Lydia S. Rosner

Dear Professor Clare:

We would like to respond to the letter to the editor, written by our distinguished colleague, Professor Lydia Rosner, that was critical of our article "The new Stage of the Fight Against Organized Crime in Russia" (Vol. 10, No. 1, 1995).

First, Professor Rosner states, "‘The New Stage of the Fight Against Organized Crime in Russia’ seems to have been mainly the work [of] the second author and Russian national, Victor Shabalin." If she would observe the sequential listing of the co-authors, Victor Shabalin, J. L. Albini and R. E. Rogers, it should be obvious that Professor Shabalin is the senior co-author and not Professor Albini. In addition, in number 1 of the notes, the contributions of the senior Russian co-author, Shabalin, and the American co-authors, Albini and Rogers, are quite explicit:

Colonel, Professor Shabalin, the senior co-author of this study is a member of the Russian Criminological Association and has been an active participant in drafting legislation to control organized crime. Consequently, the resource/reference materials in this study, with the exception of general information provided by the American co-authors, are derived from the Russian Criminological Association, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the expertise of Colonel, Dr. Professor Shabalin.

Secondly, we would like to emphasize that Colonel, Dr. Professor Shabalin is a leading member of the Russian Criminological Association, which is associated with the Russian Duma and is considered to be one of the foremost scholars on Russian Organized Crime. Furthermore, it was the request of Russian President Boris Yeltsin that induced the Russian Duma and the Criminological association to draft the legislation that was discussed in our article "The New Stage..."

Third, the purpose for writing the article was to enlighten American criminal justice professionals about the serious problem of syndicated crime in Russia and the reasons why Russian criminologists and the state Duma were drafting legislation to implement President Yeltsin’s decree "On the Urgent Measures to Defend the Population Against Gangsterism and Other Kinds of Organized Crime." The American co-authors believed that it would be beyond the scope of the article to offer suggestions, from American criminal justice professionals, to our Russian counterparts about additional or alternative approaches that could be employed in ameliorating the problem of pervasive syndicated crime. However, we have offered suggestions and recommendations in our paper "A Proposal for Solutions to the Organized Crime Problem in Russia: Lessons Learned from Social and Legal Approaches Employed in the United States, Great Britain, and Sicily" which was presented at the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Conference on "The Problems of Fighting Crime Under the Present Conditions" in Irkursk, Russia, May 27, 1995; in our article (in collaboration with V. Shabalin, V. Kutushev, V. Moiseev, and J. Anderson) "Russian Organized Crime: Its History Structure, and Function," Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol 11, No. 4, December 1995; and in our article "A Proposal for Solutions to the Organized Crime Problem in Russia: Lessons Learned from Social and Legal Approaches Employed in the United States, Great Britain, and Sicily," Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Vol. V, No. 3, Summer l1996. In Press.

We would hope that our replies to Professor Rosner’s criticism will address the concerns that she had about our article.

Sincerely,

Joseph L. Albini, Ph.D.

R. E. Rogers, Ph.D.