Russia has a long history of rule by criminals.
Channeling French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous dictum “property is theft,” the Bolsheviks emerged in the early 20th century as a semicriminal organization partly financed by the “expropriation of the expropriators” — in other words, armed robbery. Young Joseph Stalin allegedly participated in these “exes,” as the Bolsheviks called them.
The story of Alexander Orlov, one of Stalin’s spies, underscores the criminal tendencies of the Soviet regime. After presiding over the controversial — and some say illegal — transfer of the Spanish gold reserves from Madrid to Moscow in 1936, Orlov defected to the West once he became the operation’s lone survivor. Before leaving, he stole the entire operational fund of the Soviet station in Spain. Yet Stalin did not have him assassinated, as one might expect, because Orlov threatened to disclose the mission and the large network of Soviet spies.