Part I The Shadows of the Past

The Mafia

Russian winter freezes landscapes, breath crystallizes into spectral frost, yet blood rages—defiant, unyielding, burning through veins too narrow to contain its own fury. Russia does not forget, nor does it forgive. It lives by an unspoken code, one older than empires, etched in blood and silence. This was the world I entered—naïve, yet unwavering—drawn to a land where the ghost of Fyodor Dostoyevsky still roams, his fists clenched, his teeth bared. I was a priest, yet it was not the sacred that lured me here—it was the forbidden.

My first discoveries were surprising. I had a vague notion about the notorious Russian Mafia and the concept of Vory v Zakone (thiefs with code), based on a simple-minded claim that they rose from Gulag, hardened by forced labor, only to emerge as architects of a mafia state today and are nothing more than just a bunch of thugs. The truth extends far beyond Stalin’s camps, where Western analysts have anchored their origin story. The Vory were always there, their symbols—the raven and the knife—etched into history itself. The mafia they represent is not an organization. It is not a syndicate. It is a force—shapeless, timeless, embedded in the human soul. I stumbled upon the common thread—the interconnection of power—but at first I failed to grasp its full significance, not only for my work but for my own life that was going to change forever.

The West seems incapable of creating its own myths and legends about the mystical land of Russia, about which most know less than diddlysquat, as much as myself, essentially, nothing at all, without adding their own coat of paint to it. Reading our slanted, meager literature on the Vory made me suspect a deception I had unwittingly followed thus far. I tore it down, banished it from my mind and built from a blank slate. Sure, the Vory are no different, their lure and lore steeped in deception, myth, and legend. But none of that is the point.

The truth behind the fiction is.

The Fear

Back in 2024, fear enveloped the world. While the threat of World War III and nuclear annihilation was shrugged off at will, an unspeakable dread suffused the souls of so many. We lived in a time of almost universal angst. Only Bhutan, the kingdom of happiness nestled on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, was spared from the anxiety virus. The rest lived in a world of maddening deception. Unbeknownst to most, the Vory had killed the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, while bloodied white horses ran through London as an evil omen of times to come. They had also murdered the titan of money, Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, in one fell swoop per the orders of the Khazars and George Soros’s smurf-looking, evil offspring. And yet, the mendacious claims about the endearing little agency—the CIA—being involved, if not pulling the trigger like in the JFK case, persist. And that despite the Agency’s stellar record of freedom-loving honesty? It was Jackie O. scooping up the President’s brain—not any of us—nor was our brain on the hood of that polished 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible getting some tan.

So, why the fear? Dr. Joseph Mengele lives a reclusive life as a lawnmower business owner in Asunción, so you’re safe. So you might fear Tuesday the 7th, when the shadows are long and zombies like him are hungry, but frankly, that would be too much. Perhaps, if you’re an Ivy League student dying of thirst while longing for that one glass of water in the “Oasis of Madness” called America’s Privilege of the Undeserved—as it’s called in Moscow’s Chertanovo Severnoye District, where giving head is not immortalized in hoity-toity slandering fantasies but commodified as a valuable skill—you’d have something to fear. Otherwise, not really. After all, interested Moscow ladies willing to set aside about ₽3,500.00 (Russian rubles or €36.27 per exchange rate at the moment of writing) have the opportunity to attend a course called “The Art of Oral Sex.”

Despite the omnipresence of cheap oral pleasures—not only in Moscow—such dogged worldwide fear remains a true mystery. Some think it’s because the world rests upon a snake so big that it could swallow the world if she weren’t afraid of Allah. Others zealously believe it’s because of the Joe Rogan Cult, as presented in The New York Times’ Babylon Bee column, written by Paul Krugman. A third, equally ignorant, group swears it’s because of Vladimir Putin’s nukes—sold to him by Donald J. Trump—that keep them at bay. Rather than cowering in dread, sweating cold like the triple-cursed coward Count de los Infiernos of the province of Cáceres—that dastardly cocksucker Johão Tilmão d’Almada Canpos, who betrayed the legendary matador Manolete to the Miura bull Islero on that fatal Friday the 13th, August 29, 1947—we march on.

I guess we’ll never know. We’re all dead already. Or at least mad.

The Truth

Blame it all on Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, the truth you’re going to read herein. No, really, blame him—the beast that keeps me awake at night as I fear his glowing eyes and savage, alien brain. I don’t want him near me, and yet, like dark matter or demons, he’s everywhere. When I think of Dostoyevsky, I know fear only a truth-teller like him can invoke. In the end, I believe the answer lies in Dostoyevsky’s writing. One should approach it as one would a cipher, a code, a puzzle, a labyrinth... or perhaps a mirror to the soul, leaving breadcrumbs to guide us toward the answers. Alas, it would open Pandora’s box of new questions we are utterly unqualified to answer. And that’s the beauty of our terrifying collective madness: we strive for answers even when told not to. So yes, blame the greatest Russian mystic, in front of whom even Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin—a man whose name spelled the doom of the last Russian Empire, that of the Romanov dynasty—would have trembled like a wet, frightened little puppy for what you are about to discover if you follow my path of discovery.

Like almost anything else in life, it all started with a mistake. I wanted to follow C.G. Jung and his studies of Dostoyevsky, and as I sought to explore the real village from The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants: From the Notes of an Unknown, I went astray—led by none other than my guide and translator, Nastassia Filipovna Smirnova—and ended up at 55°22′N 37°52′E, according to Google, in the village of Stepanchikovo, Moscow Oblast, under the administrative jurisdiction of Domodedovo, not too far from the airport, which had nothing to do with Dostoyevsky’s fictitious place.

Yes, I am ashamed of myself, but ponder this:

• You should have seen how Nastassia Filipovna looked like; even my celibate blood boiled hot. I prayed for absolution for my impure thoughts more than once.
• Have you never made a stupid mistake in your life? If not, cast the first stone, please.

I dived deep into the cold, dark waters of netherworlds and my own subconscious, which opened to me the very moment I saw the symbol they had used for centuries: a crude triangle with the Russian word for “one” (один) at the first mosque built by the Vory in Stepanchikovo. Like “a needle with hands desperately reaching toward the heavens,” as one overly convoluted, fifth-grade attempt at describing it put it, that was the glorious mosque Stalin razed in 1953—the last year he was alive. The weeping wounds were covered with mud, dust, and pain, hidden from sight. As I traveled through rasputitsa, the melting snow and ice saturated the ground, turning dirt roads into rivers of thick mud that no vehicle could pass through. But I could smell and feel those wounds.

An occasional scream from the steppes—an echo of terror. The land had seen too much to believe it was real… or perhaps it was, and Dostoyevsky merely bore witness.

Figure 1: The “One”

I got it as I stepped onto that vast land—the spiritual decline that plagues Russia and the Shadows behind it, the Vory, are omnipresent. It has been rumored that the Vory killed Stalin precisely because of the Al-Murad Mosque (Ал-Мурад мечеть) he destroyed, so I embarked on trying to find out. All the witnesses are dead, and even those over-100-year-old kefir drinkers refused to talk to me. They looked at me with suspicious eyes when I mentioned the mosque—the ancient, cobalt eyes of Russian peasants harboring a mistrust usually reserved for soulless Soviet commissars. They stared at me silently, munching on chyorny khleb—black rye bread—with their toothless mouths. An occasional crumb that fell from their lips was readily gobbled up by vorobyonki (little sparrows) that freely and fearlessly prowled around their swollen feet. Some of them made the sign of the Cross toward me. Nastassia, somehow startled by the gesture, whispered to me in English, “The cross is a murder tool, used to kill Jesus Christ.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by it, but for sure I was glad as hell the cobalt eyes did not understand her, and we left them behind scot-free. To celebrate our newly attained status as survivors, we opened a bottle of cheap Russian champagne and indulged in some expensive Beluga caviar.

This way or another, my heart sank when I saw a symbol in a book one little kid with cobalt eyes gave to me. He ran after us for almost a mile to a gostinitsa, a guest house with a restaurant called “У Степана” (U Stepana)—”Stepan’s Place.” We stayed there to save money on more posh hotels. It was a rustic, simple two-story place I liked, serving down-to-earth cuisine such as borscht, pelmeni (dumplings), and bliny (pancakes). The kid barely caught his breath, hastily handed the ancient-looking book to me, and mumbled something to Nastassia, who, astonishingly, understood him and translated it to me:

“Mой деда (my grandfather) gave me this for mister.”

Mind you, at that time, I still had no real clue about the Vory, only a cursory idea, much less about Михаил Воронов (Mikhail Voronov), who was later known to me as The Raven and the incarnation of Koschei the Deathless. That book was—what else could it have been?—a symbol, a manifestation of Carl G. Jung’s collective unconscious that prompted that unnamed деда to part with what was soon to be proven a priceless gift—Professor Anatoly Evgenovich Morozov’s extraordinary book, the rare volume of The Vory’s Origins, Volume 1: Prophets of Doom: 1498–1507. It tells the story of Елизавета Федорова (Elisaveta Fedorova), widow of Дмитрий Иванович (Dmitry Ivanovich), the Vory’s first kingpin, and her memories of times long gone, when the Vory galloped across the steppes and fought Genghis Khan’s armies with fierce bravery that bordered on the madness of men possessed. But the symbol seen on the first inner page of the book—a crude triangle with the Russian word for “one” (один) inscribed within, which I reproduced above—shattered my world. No, the Vory did not originate in the gulags of the Soviet Union; they are as old as our civilization. That symbol marked the first mosque built by the Vory, the one I had inquired about in vain, and now I was looking at its rendering—a crude graph placed in the middle of the very name Vory. The portal to the human universe had opened and sucked me in—rather, into a dark, dangerous world I had not even dreamed existed. I had to know more.

I said that to Nastassia, and she handed this image to me. What was that primitive thing? An Iron Maiden cover art, Soviet style?

Figure 2: Dark Emblem from The Vory’s Origins

At this point, I ought to justify placing such a kitschy, trivial-looking illustration in the book, given the high artistic value of all the others. To do that, I must tell you how it came to me.

As I immersed myself in the book the kid with cobalt eyes gave me, drinking kvass with herbs alongside Nastassia Filipovna Smirnova, I noted what any The Idiot aficionado already knows—her name was taken from Dostoyevsky’s tragic beauty, Nastasya Filippovna. I write it as Nastassia to set her apart in my mind from the literary character who had lingered in my thoughts long before I ever set foot in Russia. So, she handed me that illustration she carried in her purse. It looked like a dark, foreboding emblem or insignia that seemed to belong to a shadowy, powerful crime syndicate or secret society—something a teenager might create in Photoshop. I shared my thoughts with her, and she burst into hearty laughter that pierced my heart. I was right. It had been given to her father, Professor Filip Grigorievich Smirnov, a leading expert on both Dostoyevsky and the Night Wolves, to pass to me “if the right moment presented itself,” by none other than the notorious leader of the Night Wolves, Aleksandr Zaldostanov’s grandson.

I looked into those emerald eyes—deeper than Lake Baikal (forgive me such a frivolous metaphor, but her eyes do look like it)—as she smiled at me. “I told you so,” her eyes gently mocked me, “you have no idea what you’re getting into.” At that same moment, when I realized I had hit the motherlode, I also knew that I couldn’t remain a priest or those very eyes would drive me utterly insane. So, I ripped off my clerical collar, wanting to kiss Nastassia more than I had ever wanted to see God. I threw it away as her eyes widened and her gaze intensified, and as it was clear she deeply understood what my act of defiance meant to the God I served, I entered a world ruled by the Devil. A drunk-as-a-skunk peasant, who had been ogling Nastassia from the corner of Stepan’s Place all evening, cheered, started to dance the kazachok, and drunkenly fell on his face.

Everyone laughed.

The Night Wolves

“Night Wolves?” I inquired. “Who they are? What do they have to do with the Vory?”

Nastassia gave me one long, deep, meaningful gaze and astonished me with her passionate yet pensive monologue. I felt lured and drawn into her strange, mystical world; there was Russia in her, that mythical country of Dostoyevsky and Gulags, a vast, wide esoteric land filled with beauty and pain. I felt close to her. “You know why wise people often suggest living life like a wolf? You’ll never see a wolf performing in a circus. You’ll never see a wolf beg for a treat or roll over upon hearing a command. Unlike some people and animals, wolves don’t mate with their mothers or sisters. A wolf mates with one wolf for life. In the event of a mate’s death, the remaining spouse mourns for no less than three months, and the mourning can last for a whole year. Also, they care for the young and sick. As humans, we have a lot to learn from wolves.”

“You in the West always say Russian bear this or Russian bear that. But that’s just half of the story,” she let that uniquely Russian smile, toska, Nabokov described as “a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause” and said:

“The bear represents Russian strength, but the wolf embodies the Russian soul.”

Explore the illustrations that bring this enigma to life