Crimes are mirrors of society. This article analyzes the contents of the Russian criminal statistics that began to be released to the public from the end of the Soviet era and examines the changes of the Russian society behind the crimes.
There are three particular periods when crimes in Russia rapidly increased from 1982 to 2002. The first period is 1983, one year after the general secretary Brezhnev died. In 1983, the number of thefts remarkably increased, but the increase rate is not as prominent as the other two periods. The second period is 1989-1992, before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the number of crimes increased because morality and social order collapsed due to the following: introduction and expansion of the market economy, the social maladaptation of the returned soldiers from Afghanistan, and the confusion brought by the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1992, atrocious crimes such as murders, rapes and robberies especially increased. The third period is 1998-1999. The financial crisis in 1998 deprived millions of people of their savings and wages. From 1998 to 1999, the number of robberies, thefts and drug-related crimes increased. After Putin was officially elected as president of Russia in 2000, however, the crime rate increase slowed and, crimes started to reduce in number in 2002.
Today the most serious crimes are crimes related to drugs, psychotropic medicines and deadly poisons. Drugs such as heroin and poppy seeds come to Russia mainly from Afghanistan and Tadzhikistan through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz and Turkmenistan, and the part of them flows out to Ukraine and Western Europe. Drugs are expanding to smaller cities in Russia, not to mention the large cities. A large number of crimes, including drug-related crimes, are rapidly increasing in Khabarovsk, Tyumen', Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, Novosibirsk, and so on. Of late, the number of crimes in Moscow is more than that in Sankt-Peterburk. Behind that, there exist movements of Russian Mafias.
The unemployment rate rose after the collapse of the Soviet Union and became the highest in 1998 (13.2%) . The number of crimes, criminals and prisoners increased in proportion to the unemployment rate. Moreover, the number of crimes caused by the unemployed especially increased. This phenomenon, of course, was related to the economic conditions behind it. Among the young, those who don't go to school and have no job, increased in number and they tend to commit crimes such as robberies and thefts. In 2002, the number of crimes in Russia reduced a little, but the number of murders and drug-related crimes were larger, and the number of thefts were smaller compared to America, Japan, Britain, France and Germany. It seems that a large amount of illegal drugs flows underground in Russia.
Now not only does the Russian government have to reinforce anticrime and anti-Mafia measures, but also have to reinforce the redistribution of wealth for the week, to promote national welfare, to regulate corruption of government officials and to promote tax collection in order to reduce the number of crimes. To do so, first of all, the government must further develop the economy and accumulate wealth.

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ボリシェヴィキ革命から1991年12月の消滅に至る旧ソ連について, 人名が付けられた都市地名の改称の流れを, 長老都市地理学者が検討する. 特に注目される改称の波には,(a)政治的・軍事的指導者を讃えた1920年代・1930年代,(b)スターリン色を払拭し, 自国の作家・作曲家・詩人を讃え, 社会主義圏諸国との友好関係を持ち上げた1950年代,(c)共産主義時代の好ましくない痕跡を消し去ろうとする1980年代後半から現在に至る時期のものがある.

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As a result of a series of centralization reforms, initiated in 2000, a great number of studies have discussed that the center entrenched its control over regional subjects in Russia. Yet, several regional unrests observed in the recent years demonstrates an urgent need for an overhaul of the Russian center-periphery relationship, to which only limited attention has been paid yet. This study explains this instability by the increase of outsider governor deployments. Exploiting an original dataset of all governors from 1991 to 2019, patterns of outsider deployments and the effect of such deployments on the regional political processes are examined. Although President Boris Yel’tsin initially held the right to appoint and dismiss most governors in the first half of the 1990s, he did not try to dispatch outsider governors not firmly embedded in the regional societies. Whereas governors began to be elected through the popular gubernatorial elections in almost all of the regions since 1995, outsider candidates rarely won the posts of governors. In Vladimir Putin’s first and second terms (2000-2008), the power balance between the center and regions radically changed in favor of the center. In addition, scholars have argued that the center’s dominance over regional elites increased rapidly due to the de facto appointment system of governors was introduced in 2004. Nevertheless, even then, outsider governor deployments remained exceptional cases. Since the influence of United Russia as a dominant party was limited at that time, federal elites had to receive the endorsement of governors, as regional bosses, to secure the stability of the regime. However, after the triumph of United Russia in the 2007 parliamentary election and the advent of President Dmitrii Medvedev, the Presidential Administration embarked on active replacements of regional bosses with outsider governors loyal to the center. Consequently, while the center got capable of controlling regional political processes more tightly, these radical cadre reorganizations caused dissatisfaction and protests of regional elites, as a result of which electoral performances in the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections declined in the eyes of the center. As a compromise to massive protest movements brought about by the immense size of electoral frauds, popular gubernatorial elections were reinstated in 2012. However, the influence of the center over the recruitment of governors continues to be remarkable and the number of outsider governors is still growing. Yet, in the late 2010s, the decline of the regime’s popularity caused instability at the regional level, as demonstrated by the fact that several candidates backed by the federal government lost in gubernatorial elections. While outsider deployments have merits for the federal elites to control regional political processes through them as loyal agents of the federal government, their lack of embeddedness in local elite communities has detrimental effects on regional unrests. To test this argument, this study investigates the relationship between outsider deployments and regional electoral performances. The OLS estimate and Inverse Probability Weighted estimate demonstrate that outsider governors deliver fewer votes than local governors. Those findings imply that the center-periphery relationship in Russia is still in flux even though the rules of the game have changed since the 1990s.

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