What, you ask, is the urki ? The urki were thieves, the common criminals who were imprisoned in GULag labor camps during the Soviet era. The turmoil of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Civil War had the effect of leaving sections of the country, and its economy, in the control of criminals. As the Bolsheviks established order, the criminals were imprisoned and then sent to the GULag. The Revolution also left large numbers of homeless and orphaned children, street kids, who turned to crime and so also ended up in the camps.
The urki had a hierarchy, at the top of which were the real badasses, the Thieves in Law. Since the Bolsheviks considered the urki to have more politically correct class origins, being closer to the people than the politicals, the NKVD allowed them to ride roughshod over those sentenced under Article 58. The depredations of the urki are described by Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Ginzburg and other politicals who survived to write about their ordeals. What has all this to do with our present-day bankers and austerity ? More below ...
The favorite activity of the urki was gambling. Card-playing was strictly prohibited by the NKVD camp administrators but that didn't matter to the thieves, who manufactured their own decks and held high-stakes card games in the barracks.
Here's where the behavior of the urki resembles that of our bankers. This passage appears in Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History :
The card-playing rituals were another part of the terror that the thieves exerted over the political prisoners. When playing with one another, the thieves bet money, bread and clothes. When they lost their own they bet the money, bread and clothes of other prisoners. Gustav Herling first witnessed such an incident on a Stolypin wagon bound for Siberia. He was traveling with a fellow Pole, Shklovski. In the same car, three urki, among them a "gorilla with a flat Mongolian face," were playing cards.
... the gorilla suddenly threw down his cards, jumped down from his bench and came up to Shklovski.
"Give me the coat," he yelled, "I've lost it at cards."
Shklovski opened his eyes and, without moving from his seat, shrugged his shoulders.
"Give it to me," the gorilla roared, enraged, "give it, or - glaza vyrkolu - I'll poke your eyes out!"
Only later, in the labor camp, I understood the meaning of this fantastic scene. To stake the possessions of other prisoners in their games of cards is one of the urka's most popular distractions, and its chief attraction lies in the fact that the loser is obliged to force from the victim the item previously agreed upon.
Sound familiar ? The
Urki of High Finance gamble on Derivatives, others of their brethren bet with Credit Default Swaps on the outcome of the first bet, all of it with borrowed money, then the losers claim Systemic Risk and Too Big To Fail, forcing governments to beat the money out of their citizens with Austerity. At least that's how I see it.
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