The intent was to create a law-based state, and reformers started rewriting all major legislation in order to confine the executive to proper limits and to allow the courts to so something about bureaucrats who evaded the law. There was a two-pronged rationale for these reforms: one was to protect individual rights, and the other was to respond to the spiraling crime rate accompanying perestroika. This is much the same as the conflicting purposes seen in American law--protecting individual rights while satisfying the desire of the public for greater safety.1.

             The organization known as the Mafiya is "a distinctive form of organized crime [that] reflects more than just the temporary dislocations and uncertainties of the country's transition from a Soviet state to a free market democracy. Rooted in Russian tradition and Soviet practice, it is also a formidable obstacle to this evolution. This has serious implications for the new Russian polity: weakening central authority, diluting the state's monopoly of coercion, discrediting the market economy and ultimately usurping and distorting the very functions of the state. Any solution will have to come not from tougher policing (which itself would threaten a return to authoritarianism) but from a wider political and cultural response."2 .

             The Russian mafiya emerged as a particularly distinctive, flexible, and violent form of organized crime. Its ascension has been on of the side-effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Galeotti finds that it is not just a creature of the new capitalism but something "rooted in Russian tradition and Soviet practice, not solely a product of the temporary dislocations and uncertainties of the country's transition from a Soviet state to a free market democracy.