The wild east.

• Author: Satter, David
• Position: Organized crime in Vladivostok, Russia

The Bluish gray waters of the Golden Horn Bay separate Vladivostok like a moat from the more distant hills, and as the stiff winds blow in from the Sea of Japan, people and cars slip on the ice that coats the city's sidewalks and streets.

The striking vistas and the silhouettes of ships at sea give Vladivostok the feel of a portal to a better future, but the weathered wooden houses and concrete blocks that ascend the crests of hills are a reminder that the settlement Russia created here has never been worthy of its magnificent physical setting. Indeed, it is the contrast between the setting and the grim monotony of daily life that best characterizes this city, where all of the problems of contemporary Russia have reached their most extreme expression.

Home to the once formidable Pacific Fleet, Vladivostok is a place where heat, water, and electricity are now cut off at regular intervals, factories stand idle, resident workers have not been paid for months, and the majority of the population of 800,000 is isolated from relatives by air and rail fares that have become unaffordable.

And these are the least of Vladivostok's problems. Sinking into poverty amid its natural riches, the city is almost totally controlled by organized crime, which creates an atmosphere of generalized fear or, as Mayor Viktor Cherepkov put it, "grudging acceptance of the status quo behind which is terror."

No one feels this pressure more than Cherepkov. Every night, shortly before midnight, he leaves the headquarters of the Vladivostok mayoralty surrounded by armed guards, hurriedly descends the steps leading to the street and, with his guards, enters a waiting car for the ride home. The person Cherepkov believes would like to kill him is Evgeny Nazdratenko, the governor of the Primoriye Krai (region), who was also recently elected, although only after having created in the region a system of nearly totalitarian power.

For four years, the two men have struggled for control of the future of Primoriye and they embody two tendencies that, to varying degrees, are in conflict all over Russia. Nazdratenko, the former president of the "Vostok" mining company in the city of Dalnegorsk, embodies the tendency toward the criminalization of political and economic power and the despoiling of the country's natural wealth. Cherepkov, a former naval officer, is an heir to the democratic movement that overthrew the Soviet Union. He stands for honest practices and the demand that economic transformation take place within a framework of law.

Shortly after the freeing of prices in Russia in January 1992, 213 Primoriye factory directors formed an organization called the Primorsky Corporation of Goods Producers (PAKT). The founders sold the produce of their factories to PAKT at minimal prices, PAKT resold them at market prices, and the factory directors split the difference, using the money to buy up shares in factories as they became privatized. The founders of PAKT then began to seek control of the region's budget, quotas, and licenses, and to this end, they used their connections in Moscow to engineer the removal in May 1993 of Vladimir Kuznetsov, the region's governor, and his replacement with Nazdratenko, a member of the Russian parliament. Nazdratenko named the principal leaders of PAKT as his deputies.

Nazdratenko's advent to power marked the beginning of the rapid criminalization of the region. In October 1993, after the disbanding of the Russian parliament, the regional soviet (local council) in Primoriye was disbanded as well and Nazdratenko began to intimidate the press. In a case that stunned Vladivostok, a young reporter was kidnapped and tortured in a cemetery for nearly twenty-four hours after he aired an ironic political commentary on a local radio station.

The only problem for Nazdratenko was the election of Cherepkov as mayor of Vladivostok in the summer of 1993. Cherepkov, a deputy in the krai soviet, became famous for his role in exposing the conditions at the Naval Base on Russky Island near Vladivostok, where four sailors died of starvation...