Around the time the Soviet Union ceased to exist, I was waiting in the entry queue at Fiumicino Airport in Rome when I noticed a party of several dozen young Russian girls being fast-tracked past a freshly opened control window. By young I mean perhaps 15, and by Russian girls I mean beautiful adolescents with pale gold hair, perfect skin and the figures of child ballerinas. These wide-eyed coltish kids weren’t dancers or on a school trip. They were hustled along by a stocky middle-aged man with a short mustache and a stash of passports in his hairy hand. It was an unforgettable image of lambs to the slaughter — or, more precisely, of children to the brothel. You sometimes glimpse them, older now, dispersed around the world, and how they were engulfed by the criminal universe is one of the things Misha Glenny describes in “McMafia,” his dizzy tour of the forms of global crime born in the late ’80s, when finance capital shook off restraints and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Read full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/Robb-t.html?scp=574&sq=russian%20mafia&st=cse
