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 Vol. 30 No. 13, June 25, 2008
- McMafia:
Crime without Frontiers by Misha Glenny
Karabas
was gunned down in 1997. He and his mob had taken over the port city of Odessa
as law and order disintegrated in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. One
might call his reign a comprehensive protection racket. But, looked at in
another way, Karabas became the only reliable source of authority and social
discipline. He arbitrated the city’s commercial disputes (10 per cent of net
profits was his price); he kept the drug peddlers to one area of Odessa, and
prevented the horrific people-smuggling in the harbour district from infecting
the rest of the town. Using a bare minimum of thuggery, he kept the peace.
Karabas seldom carried a gun. Everyone looked up to him, and levels of violence
stayed lower in Odessa than in other Russian and Ukrainian cities. His murderers
were probably Chechens hired to break Odessa’s grip o n the local oil industry,
a grip coveted by Ukraine’s then president, Leonid Kuchma, who ‘during his ten
years in power . . . presided over the total criminalisation of the Ukrainian
government and civil service’.
The
modern history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education
Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most
important piece of education legislation of the 20th century, but was expected
to reform an educational system already deeply divisive and inequitable. In some
ways it promoted the hopes of wartime democracy; in others it betrayed them. It
raised the school-leaving age to 15 and made secondary education universal and
free. It equalised the payment of teachers in all state secondary schools and
devised procedures by which nearly all the religious elementary schools were
incorporated into the state system. It didn’t specify what kind of secondary
education local authorities should establish, and as a result they fell back on
what already existed and what conventional opinion thought appropriate: grammar
schools for the academically inclined, junior technical schools for those with
superior technical aptitudes and secondary moderns for those of a ‘practical’
turn of mind.
The
‘you can’t understand until you’ve lived there’ argument had kept me from
visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me
understanding about apartheid, I preferred to stay away. But now it had to be a
very different place, 18 years after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, 14
years on from the day when South Africa had its first democratic election. I was
going to be there anyway – Cape Town was the end point of another journey – and
I thought I’d spend a couple of weeks and look around; be a regular tourist in a
place where minds had been changed.
Also
in this issue
At the Movies:
Michael
Wood on David Lean
Short Cuts:
Daniel
Soar: David Davis v. Miss Great Britain
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