Abolish the Police, Arm the Citizens: The "Sagra Model" of Privatized Security

No surrender, no retreat: Andrei (l) and Viktor Gorodilov at the bridge.

 “What would things have been like ifevery Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had beenuncertain whether he would return alive? Or, if during the periods of massarrests ... people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terrorat every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, buthad understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up anambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else wasat hand?"

AlexanderSolzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

  

“They are coming to kill us!” exclaimed a young resident of Sagra,Russia as he spied a column of vehicles approaching the tiny village at thefeet of the Ural Mountains. Responding to the alarm, several dozen residents musterednear the town entrance, bearing whatever weapons they could find. Some of them grabbed pitchforks,chains, or knives. Three men arrived on the scene with shotguns.

The leader of the approaching convoy was Sergei “The Gypsy” Lebedev,head of a criminal gang that had tormented Sagra for months. Lebedev's followers swipedanything of value that was left unguarded.  Power tools, appliances, and other householdproperty disappeared; homes were vandalized as copper tubing and wiring wereripped out to be sold to scrap metal dealers. An onslaught of shopliftingthreatened the survival of the village’s only significant retail store. 

Exasperated citizens complained to the police in nearby Yekaterinberg,only to be treated with a mixture of amusement and impatient annoyance.Mounting hostility against Lebedev and his underlings prompted the gangster towithdraw – but only to gather reinforcements.

Lebedev was no petty cut-purse; his entourage included atleast one vory v zakone (“thief inlaw”) – that is, a member of a politically protected mafia. 

The gang leader’sintent was to seize control of the village as a base of operations for a drugoperation, and he clearly enjoyed the covert support of the region’s “lawenforcement” establishment. Thus it was that late in the evening of July 1, Ledbedevassembled a contingent of about 60 armed thugs and mounted a punitiveexpedition against the village of 130 people.

As the headlights from the 15-vehicle convoy probed thegathering darkness, the men of Sagra formed a human roadblock across the bridgeat the entrance to their town. The infernal column came to a halt, while itsleader tried to decide how to deal with the unanticipated resistance. Suddenlya voice from behind them exclaimed, “Grenade!” An object that appeared to meetthat description landed in the midst of the raiders, causing several to bolt inpanic.

 

In fact, the weapon was a pine cone that had been hurled by Andrei Gorodilov, who had taken cover beside the road. At that signal, the air erupted in curses and insults hurledby many of the women of the village, who had hidden themselves behind trees. 

The resulting diversion was brief, but effective: Andrei’s father, Viktor, letloose a blast from his shotgun. Two other defenders followed suit. The rest,bearing whatever improvised weapons they had found, lit into Lebedev’s hiredkillers with the unalloyed ferocity of men fighting on their own soil with their backs to theirhomes. 

One of the invaders was killed, several more were wounded,and Lebedev was forced to retreat. At some point in the skirmish, Sagra resident Tatyana Gordeyeva contacted the police, who – displaying the efficiencyand timeliness for which their profession is known – arrived long after the battlewas over, and immediately began to treat the defenders as criminal suspects.Their first priority was not to pursue and arrest Lebedev and his cronies (whowere eventually taken into custody), or to collect evidence for their eventualprosecution; instead, they attempted to clamp down a cover-up of the matter.They didn’t succeed. 

Within a few days, news of the battle had been propagated throughoutRussia, and Sagra quickly became “a catchword for a spate of violence aroundthe country in which people have banded together to defend themselves in theabsence of police protection,” noted the NewYork Times. An entrepreneur captured the public mood in a commemorativet-shirt with the inscription: “If the government can’t help people, it doesn’thave the right to forbid them from defending themselves – Sagra 2011.” 

Thanks for nothing: Russian police at Sagra following the battle.

 “What’s going on in this country is that the government isn’tprotecting anyone,” observed Mr. Gorodilov, who spoke with the invincible authority of personal experience. That assessment was seconded byKonstantin M. Kiselyov of Ykaterinberg’s Institute of Philosophy and Law: “Thepolice are corrupt or lazy or politicized, and it’s the same all across thecountry. So people must protect themselves. They can’t count on the governmentor its structures. That is why the country is turning into one big Sagra.”

The most remarkable reaction to the Battle of Sagra camefrom Alexander Torshin, the Speaker of the Federation Council (a positionroughly analogous to Senate Majority Leader). Invoking the Second Amendment tothe U.S. Constitution, Torshin announced that he would propose an amendment tothe Russian Constitution guaranteeing “that a Russian citizen has the rightunder the law to bear arms.”

“We must give our citizens a chance at survival,” Torshintold the Interfax news agency, insisting that widespread private gun ownershipdoesn’t lead to “a surge in killings,” but rather “the reduction in streetcrimes and the murder rate.” 

 What makes Torshin’s stance all the more remarkable is thefact that roughly half a year earlier he had expressedsupport for banning private possession of “non-lethal” handguns. 

It’spossible that this dramatic volte-facewas the product of a sincere conversion. It’s likelier that Mr. Torshin knewwhich way the winds of public outrage are blowing, and aligned his sailsaccordingly. In any case, Torshin’s proposal is tangible evidence of a growing-- and thoroughly commendable -- Russian contempt for the very institution of government. 

Totalitarianism is based on the assumption that human naturecan be permanently altered through the systematic application of state terrorism.Lenin described his regime as a “scientific dictatorship” exercising “powerwithout limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutelyunrestricted by rules.” Within a generation or two, Lenin believed, hisdictatorship would beget a new creature – homosovieticus, the selfless, state-focused New Soviet Man. The gulag statewould act as an alembic, refining troublesome individualism out of the species,even if this meant pitilessly liquidating millions of specimens regarded as unsuitablefor the collectivist future. 

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Communism wasn’t ascientific doctrine for the perfection of the human species; it was, in R.J.Rummel’s phrase, a “plague of power.” After the Hammer and Sickle was furledin 1991, the plague of ideological Communism mutated into form of stategangsterism incapable of reproducing itself beyond Russia’s borders. The Party Nomenklatura abandoned the conceit thatthey were History’s infallible vanguard, and settled into a very comfortablenew role as Russia’s crony capitalist oligarchy. 

While Russia’s criminal oligarchy has little use forideology, they still embrace the idea of “power without limit, resting directlyon force.” Valery D. Zorkin, chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court, lamentsthat Russia’s contemporary political model is based on “the fusion ofgovernment and criminals,” with the country increasingly “divided betweenpredators, free in the criminal jungle, and sub-humans, conscious that they areonly prey.” 

In his November 2010 State of the Nation speech, Russian PresidentDimitry Medvedev acknowledged that in many parts of the country localgovernments have entered into a “direct merger with criminals” at the expenseof the rights of law-abiding individuals. While this will surprise nobody whounderstands that the State is, and has always been, a criminal enterprise, thisadmission is striking when offered by a 46-year-old political leader who graduated from LeningradState University. 

One acutely horrifying example of the merger described byMedvedev was provided by a November 2010massacre in Kushchevskaya, a city of 35,000 about 700 miles from Moscow. Thecity was the site of several major state-controlled collective farms during theSoviet era. After the USSR was dissolved, the local branch of the Nomenklatura created a quasi-privateagricultural firm called Arteks Agro, which was controlled by a career Party functionarynamed Sergei Tsapok.

For the past decade, a criminal clique headed by Tsapok, andthat included current and former members of the city government, conducteda reign of terror in Kushchevskaya, plunderingand raping as they saw fit and killing anyone who complained in a voicelouder than a whisper. 

Complaints to the police availed nothing, since theirduty was to maintain “order” – that is, to enforce the will of the local elite –rather than to protect the rights of the innocent. At public meetings,terrified and outraged local citizens would barrage municipal leaders withprotests about the criminal onslaught, only to be told that “There are no criminalgroups here.”

LastNovember 4, Tsapok’s gang invaded the home ofServer Ametov, murdering himand eleven others, including four young children. The victims were stabbed,strangled, and set on fire. Ametov was a successful farmer, and since about1998 Tsapok’s gang had been carrying out a modified version of Stalin’s collectivizationprogram by drivingsmall farmers off their land, murdering those (including Ametov’s brother)who resisted. 

The ensuing outcry was sufficient to prompt officialintervention, leading to Tsapok’s arrest. For millions of Russians, the Kuschevskayaatrocity demonstrated the fatal futility of seeking protection from the enforcementarm of the ruling criminal elite. The Russian disaffection toward government has grown so widespread and intense that the ruling establishment is actually reducing the size and power of its law enforcement apparatus. This a development without precedent in the country once terrorized by the Oprichniki, the Okhrana, and the Cheka.

Two victims of the Kuschchevskaya massacre.

In Russia, as elsewhere, the role of the police “is tocontrol situations and to control the people rather than help them,” observesLeonid Kosals, a professor of economics at Moscow’s National ResearchUniversity. As a result, people “turn to their neighbors and to relatives andlocal networks to solve their problems by themselves…. [I]n Russia we havethousands of such cases.” 

The trend toward privatization of security in Russia islikely to grow as a result of President Medvedev’s recent initiative to reformthe country’s militia – that is, its police force – by purging about 200,000officers from the ranks. Sociologist Mikhail Vinogradov, who estimates that one-third of Russia’s police force is composed of alcoholics and psychopaths,points out that in 1991, the militia was reduced by about thirty percent – andthe result was a sharp reduction in the crime rate.

During the past decade, the crime rate in the United Stateshas declined, terrorism has been all but nonexistent – and the country has beentransformed into a fair approximation of a high-security prison, complete withfull-spectrum surveillance of the population and undisguised militarization of “local”police departments. At the same time, the political elite in charge of the formerSoviet Union is addressing a legitimate crime crisis by drawing down the policeforce and recognizing (however tentatively) the right of citizens to armed self-defense. 

For all of its problems, Russia clearly is no longer theland of Lenin. For all of our advantages, it’s just as clear that the UnitedStates of America is no longer the Land of the Free. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!