From De-Russification to ‘the Thief’s Law’: Informal Crime Control in Latvia’s Russophone Community

A nation’s linguistic landscape plays a key role in shaping cultural identity, governance, and social integration (May, 2012; Ricento, 2006). Where language functions as both a communicative tool and a marker of heritage and political belonging, reductions in multilingualism can facilitate exclusion, discrimination, and segregation (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Wacquant, 2008), prompting marginalized communities to develop alternative systems of support and regulation. Over the past decade, Latvia has intensified policies phasing out Russian language, culture, and historical narratives through linguistic, administrative, and socio-political barriers, which have become increasingly discriminatory and segregationist since the renewed Russia–Ukraine conflict (Galbreath, 2006; Hughes, 2016). Combined with the persistence of non-citizen status that restricts many Russian speakers from participating in criminal justice institutions (Latvian Human Rights Committee, 2026), these developments have contributed to the re-emergence of informal self-policing structures rooted in Воровской закон [the “Thieves’ law”], a well-established yet arbitrarily adapted normative framework from the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian-speaking criminal circles (Pareniuc & Nastas, 2024). Using semi-structured interviews with 35 self-identified “order-keepers” or “self-policing activists” in Daugavpils, this study examines the perceived causes, aims, and rationale behind self-policing practices. Specifically, the objectives were to examine whether ethnic and national belonging play a significant role in shaping engagement between state-controlled institutions and Latvia’s Russian-speaking population; to investigate whether recent “de-Russification” policies are perceived as compelling individuals to adopt practices of self-policing; and to determine whether Воровской закон or “the Thieves’ Law” commonly underpins the self-policing mechanisms at play. Findings indicate that linguistic barriers, administrative exclusion, and perceived discrimination have rendered formal crime control mechanisms ineffective and undesirable for a section of Russian-speaking residents. In response, self-policing grounded in familiar, historically embedded norms has become a preferred alternative. The article argues that this development was foreseeable considering historical precedents and concludes by proposing pragmatic measures to improve the accessibility and effectiveness of institutional crime resolution while reducing reliance on informal self-policing. The need to further study both the prevalence of self-policing as well as the reasons behind it are emphasised and further work on a follow-up quantitative study is being undertaken.