If in any part of Russia two criminal powers clashed over a certain question, he would set off on his travels and, using his Authority, would force people to negotiate, to find the ways towards a peaceable solution. When I asked him questions about this role of his as a ‘man of peace’, he would reply that the people who made war were those who didn’t follow the true principles, who had no dignity. There was nothing in this world that could not be shared in such a way as to make everyone happy.
‘He who wants too much is a madman, because a man cannot possess more than his heart is able to love. Everyone wants to do business, to see his family happy and bring up his children in goodness and peace. This is just. Only in this way can we share the world that Our Lord created for us.’
Grandfather Kuzya dedicated his whole life to keeping peace in the criminal community; as a result everyone was fond of him and he had no enemies. My father told me that once, when Grandfather Kuzya was in a maximum security prison, a group of young criminals from St Petersburg – people of the ‘new style’, who didn’t respect the old rules – had broken a truce that had been agreed some time earlier between various communities thanks to his assistance. They had killed a lot of people, gaining control of a large area of business, after which they had tried to prove to others, the people who followed the old criminal rules, that those rules were no longer valid and had no real power behind them. To do this they needed to strike at some great Authority, and they chose the figure of Grandfather Kuzya, because he represented the highest power in the Siberian community. They devised a simple and very offensive plan, sending to him in prison a letter of invitation to a meeting that was to be held in St Petersburg, informing him that if he did not attend they would no longer consider him to be an active criminal.
This kind of blackmail is a very serious matter for a criminal, far more serious than the murder of a relative or a personal insult, because it affects the prestige that is attributed to an individual by the entire community, so the insult extends to the whole community and its representatives.
Well, Grandfather Kuzya forced the prison administrators to grant a week’s release to him and five other Siberian Authorities who were being held in different prisons in Russia, by threatening a mass suicide, which none of them would have hesitated to implement.
In the middle of the meeting, when the young St Petersburg criminals were already planning in minute detail how to compel all the supporters of the old Authorities to hand over control of the area to them, taking it for granted that none of them would attend, Grandfather Kuzya and the other five prisoners arrived.
After that encounter the young men disappeared, they just vanished into thin air: many thought of the old Siberian ritual which involves the bodies of enemies being minced up to the point of complete disintegration and then mixed in with the soil of the woods.
According to the Siberian criminal law, every active criminal can give up his post and retire – become a kind of ‘pensioner’. Once he has done this he no longer has the right to use his name or express his opinion on questions connected with criminal affairs or the resolution of conflicts. The criminal community supports him by giving him enough money to live on, and in exchange he takes on the responsibility of educating the young. He becomes, as has already been mentioned, a ‘grandfather’: a name that is given as a mark of great respect. People who are so called are regarded by the rest of the community as wise men able to give essential advice to younger criminals, and usually criminal meetings are organized at their homes.
Grandfather Kuzya had retired from business – or, as we say, ‘tied the knot’ – in the early 1980s, when I was born. His retirement had caused considerable tension in the criminal community: many feared that without him a lot of old truces would be broken and there would be war.
Grandfather Kuzya said that with or without him things were bound to change, because it was the times and the individuals that were different. When he discussed the matter with me, he explained it like this:
‘The young want easy money, they want to take without giving anything in exchange, they want to fly without first having learned how to walk. They’ll end up killing each other. Then they’ll come to terms with the cops, and when that happens, I hope for your sake, my dear, that you’ll be far away from here, because this place will become a graveyard of the good and honest.’
Naturally I considered everything Grandfather Kuzya said to be the highest expression of human intelligence and criminal experience.
We talked about the future, about what our life would be like and how things would be organized. He was very pessimistic, but he never feared that I would disappoint him; he considered me to be different from the other youngsters of our community.
After 1992, when the military forces of Moldova tried to occupy the territory of Transnistria, our town was abandoned by everybody; we were left to fend for ourselves, as in fact we always had done. All the armed criminals resisted the Moldovan soldiers, and after three months of battles they drove them out.
When the danger of an all-out conflict had passed, Mother Russia sent us her so-called ‘help’: the Fourteenth Army, led by the charismatic general Lebed. When they arrived in our town, which had already been free for several days, they applied the policy of military administration: curfew, house-to-house searches, the arrest and elimination of undesirable elements. During that period the river often brought to the bank the bodies of the people who had been shot, their hands tied behind their backs with wire and signs of torture on their bodies. I myself fished out four corpses of people who had been executed, so I can confirm with all my youthful authority that shootings by the Russian military were very common in Transnistria.
The Russians tried to exploit the circumstances to install among us, in the land of criminals, their government representatives, who would have the job of administering what had previously been solely in our hands. Many Siberian criminals during that period ran a serious risk of being killed; my father, for example, was the target of three attacks, but he miraculously escaped and, not wanting to wait for a fourth, left Transnistria and moved to Greece, where he had friends as a result of some old trading connections.
The criminals of the town tried to join forces to fight the Russian military, but many members of the communities were frightened and in the event proved willing to collaborate with the new regime. The Siberians renounced all contact with the rest of society, and by 1998 were completely isolated; they didn’t collaborate with anyone and didn’t support anyone. Other communities reached a compromise with the regime, which had proposed one of its own men as president of the country and political watchdog over all business. Very soon new government forces eliminated the people involved in those terms, taking over the administration of affairs.
Grandfather Kuzya told me everything he knew:
‘Our law says that we mustn’t talk to the cops: do you know why it says that? Not just out of caprice. It says this because the cops are the government’s dogs, the tools the government uses against us. My son, they shot me when I was twenty-three years old, and ever since then I have lived my whole life in humility, without possessing anything – no family, no children, no house: all my life has been spent in prison, suffering, and sharing my sufferings with others. That’s why I have power, because many people know me and know that when I cross my arms on the table I don’t speak in my own private interest, but for the good of everyone. That, my boy, is why in our world everyone trusts me. And now tell me why we should trust those who have spent their whole lives killing our brothers, locking us up in prison, torturing us and treating us as if we didn’t belong to the human race? How is it possible, tell me, to trust those who live thanks to our deaths? Cops are different from the rest of humanity, because they have an innate desire to serve, to have an employer. They don’t understand anything about freedom, and they’re scared of free men. Their bread is our sorrow, my son; how is it possible to reach an agreement with these people?’