Solntsevskaya Bratva
Russian organized crime group
The Solntsevskaya Organized Crime Group (Russian: Солнцевская организованная преступная группировка), also known as the Solntsevskaya Bratva (Russian: Солнцевская братва), is a Russian crime syndicate group.
Other simplified versions of the name are Solntsevskaya Brotherhood and Solntsevskaya gang.
Rise to power
The Solntsevskaya gang was founded in Russian SFSR in the late 1980s by Sergei Mikhailov, a former waiter who had served a prison term for fraud, and Viktor Averin. Based in the Solntsevo District of Moscow, the gang recruited local unemployed, aggressive young men as foot soldiers and also made use of thief in law Dzhemal Khachidze to enhance their reputation amongst established criminals. The Solntsevo District was also strategically located near the M3 highway leading to Ukraine, the MKAD, Moscow's ring road, as well as the Vnukovo International Airport. Controlling these transport hubs allowed the Solntsevo group to muscle in on the car import business. But by the early 1990s, the Solntsevo's dominance was challenged by the Chechen mafia. Together with the Orekhovskaya gang and other Slavic mobs, the Solntsevo made an alliance to drive the Chechens out. The gang war claimed many casualties, such as a gun battle at the Kazakhstan Cinema where six Chechens and four Russians were killed. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the gang utilized the chaos to empower themselves by establishing relationships with politicians.
The public source identifies “Solntsevskaya Bratva” as russian organized crime group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Solntsevskaya, Bratva and Russian.
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This entry incorporates text from “Solntsevskaya Bratva” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.