It’s possible to talk about pessimistic resistance: a refusal to accept the status quo, while at the same time holding a deep scepticism about the ability to change it
Volkov (2002:24): starts story of private protection in 1992. “The period between 1987 and 1992 entailed a rapid proliferation of racketeering gangs and informal protective associations of various kinds, which discovered and perfected methods for exploiting new opportunities in emerging markets.”
Volkov (2002:24): Second phase begins in 1992 and runs to 1997: “The year 1992 was significant in many ways. Sweeping economic liberalization and the beginning of massive privatization are well-known facts. Less well known is the pivotal Law on Private Protection and Detective Activity, which legalized private protection agencies and for several years formally sanctioned many of the activities already pursued by racketeering gangs and other agencies. It turned many informal protective associations into legal companies and security services, and their members into licensed personnel. Tens of thousands of former state security and enforcement employees transferred to the private security industry after 1992. The years between 1992 and 1997 saw ferocious competition between violence-managing agencies for the expanding commercial opportunities. The peak of violence was passed in 1995. During this period, private protection and enforcement be came institutionalized and a market of protection emerged. At the same time, the state lost its priority in the realm of protection, taxation, and adjudication.”
Volkov (2002:24): third phase begins in 1998. “By 1997 the elimination contest had brought about a consolidation of larger protection agencies with greater financial resources and sustained relations with regional authorities. Large criminal groups turned to longer-term investments and transformed themselves into financial-industrial holding companies. At the end of 1998 the first signs of a new policy to strengthen the state became visible.” Particularly from 1999-2000 onwards, the state tried to reassert its monopoly on violence.
Volkov (2002:25): “Pure economic relations existed only on paper; in reality, they were closely intertwined with relations of force, as economic enterprises coordinated their activities with their protective agencies, while the latter established safe avenues for future economic relations between their clients.”
Volkov (2002:25-26): “The ‘iron cage’ created by private protection and enforcement agencies contained the source of its own decline. First, as economic relations stabilized, the use of force was recognized to be increasingly costly. As the violence potential of economic enterprises increasingly became a source of deterrence and thus altered the expectations of the participants in economic exchange, violence was employed less frequently in daily business and began to lose its supreme value. The hundreds of thugs making up each criminal group became obsolete. Second, the leaders of criminal groups and other enforcement agencies began capitalizing their incomes and accumulated substantial economic assets. This altered their interests and their role in the sphere of economic exchange: having become capitalists, they preferred to hire security specialists and lawyers rather than rely on their original enforcement teams of former sportsmen. This, however, did not exclude the pointed use of strong-arm tactics against competitors.”
Volkov (2002:49): “As a study of Russian business relationships has revealed, ‘courts are not used partly because they are seen as destroyers of relationships.’ Managers, especially those whose careers became intertwined in Soviet times, regard their networks as a valuable asset.”
Kennedy (2022): in one of his case studies, violence was less prominent than in the 1990s and the business no longer had a krysha, but it was nevertheless available - for example, in dealing with the failure to pay debts.