Monday, April 27, 2009

Requiem For A Godfather

In St. Petersburg they called him the "Nighttime Governor," and the moniker fit.

Throughout the 1990s and for a good part of the current decade, Vladimir Barsukov appeared to be the true ruler of Russia's second city regardless of who was formally in power.

Officially he served since 1998 as vice president of the St. Petersburg Fuel Company. But Barsukov -- who was known as Vladimir Kumarin until he changed his name in the late 1990s just prior to that appointment -- derived his true power as the alleged leader of a highly feared and politically connected criminal gang called the "Tambovskaya gruppirovka" or the Tambov Gang.

Read full article here: http://www.rferl.org/content/Requiem_For_A_Godfather/1617107.html