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93
Kaliyev.
94
Spirin.
95
Mikhail Lvov, The Northwest: The Criminal Element, Freelance Bureau [Moscow] Internet report, 10 June
2002 (FBIS Document CEP20020613000225).
96
Afghanistan Political Revival Seen Letting Central Asian Drugs Traffic Flourish, Nezavisimaya Gazeta
[Moscow], 4 February 2002.
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Library of Congress Federal Research Division Narcotics Trafficking in Former Soviet Union
allow large-scale trafficking through those countries have permitted widespread sales within
their borders. Recent drops in the price of heroin have made it available to a wider range of
users. According to the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, in mid-
2002 Kazakhstan had an estimated 186,000 narcotics addicts, Kyrgyzstan had 80,000 to 100,000,
Uzbekistan had 65,000 to 91,000, and Uzbekistan had 45,000 to 55,000.97 However, the Centre
for Medical and Social Problems of Drug Addiction in Kazakhstan estimates that there are more
than 250,000 addicts in Kazakhstan;98 similar disparities are likely to exist for the other
republics. The number of trafficking groups already was increasing in the late 1990s, when
Kyrgyzstan reported 64 groups and Kazakh authorities identified 125 groups moving drugs in
Central Asia.99 In 2001 about 3 percent of people arrested in for drug-related offenses in
Kazakhstan were foreigners; Kyrgyz and Russians comprised most of that number.100 However,
such statistics are skewed by the tendency for little fish to be caught and identified while the
big fish remain anonymous.
As Uzbekistan has applied pressure to its domestic trafficking routes and, with less
success, to the Tajik government to improve its interdiction activity, Kyrgyzstan has become a
primary center of all aspects of the narcotics industry: manufacture, sale, and drug trafficking.
Kyrgyzstan s location adjacent to major routes across the Tajik mountains from Afghanistan
combines with ineffectual domestic smuggling controls to attract figures from what a Kyrgyz
newspaper report characterized as an international organization uniting an unprecedentedly
wide circle of members in the United States, Romania, Brazil, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
Authorities also identified at least one Nigerian who had established an identity as a legitimate
businessman in Bishkek and developed a profitable narcotics enterprise behind this facade. Says
the report, These are no half-literate Tajik-Afghan drug runners, but professionals who have
passed through a probation period in the mafia clans of the world narcotics system& . 101
Although a variety of non-Kyrgyz mafiosi obviously are taking advantage of
Kyrgyzstan s vulnerability, the specific place of Russian organizations in the complex of
97
Interfax [Moscow] report of analysis by United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, 27 June
2002 (FBIS Document CEP20020627000105).
98
Internet report from Kazakhstan Today [Almaty], 26 June 2002 (FBIS Document CEP20020626000186).
99
Olcott and Udalova, 18.
100
Report by Interfax-Kazakhstan agency [Almaty], 14 May 2002 (FBIS Document 20020515000042).
101
Aleksandr Gold, Bishkek, Heroin, Interpol? Vecherniy Bishkek [Bishkek], 28 December 2001 (FBIS Document
CEP 20020107000187).
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Library of Congress Federal Research Division Narcotics Trafficking in Former Soviet Union
narcotics operations is not clear. Kyrgyzstan generally provides more information about such
matters than the other Central Asian republics; the situation in the other republics is even more
opaque.
DISTRIBUTION POINTS AND ROUTES IN RUSSIA
Reports of increased heroin addiction in and around cities designated as transit points
indicate that Moscow and St. Petersburg do not receive all of the narcotics shipped to Russia
from Central Asia. According to Vladislav Ignatov, a narcotics expert in the State Duma, such
widely distributed regions as the Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets national districts (in the
European far north and Western Siberia, respectively); the Primor ye and Khabarovsk territories
in the Far East; and the Tyumen , Kemerovo, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, Ul yanovsk,
Volgograd, and Rostov provinces (concentrated in Western Siberia and the European south)
showed substantial increases in narcotics addiction in 2001, and the Far East has developed into
a major distribution center. Ignatov attributes growth in the Far East to organized criminal
groups rather than individual dealers.102
Several cities in southwestern Russia have reported extensive drug trafficking and a
significant upsurge in narcotics addiction since the beginning of the second Chechen war in
1999. That activity has been traced to trafficking routes passing through one or more of the
former Soviet Caucasus republics and Chechnya and then into Russia through Dagestan and
Ingushetia. According to Mikhail Fetisov, a representative of President Vladimir Putin in the
Southern Federal District of Russia, in recent years many urban centers in the southern part of
the country have seen rapid increases in drug addiction, drug-related HIV infection, and drug-
related crime. The Southern District includes all of the Russian republics bordering the Caucasus
(Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachayevo-Cherkessiya).
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