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of Odessa’s gangsters and their lives,’ one chronicler wrote about his home town, ‘the city’s history is simply unintelligible.’

For most of Eastern Europe the bare-knuckled gangster capitalism that followed the collapse of communism in the 1990s came as a genuine shock. But Odessa knew what was coming. The Odessites had no option but to embrace the new era – and, it should be said, they did so with a certain brio. Red lights extinguished red stars overnight. Dingy casinos sprouted like weeds behind the Primorskaya Boulevard and it was not long after 1989 that the restaurants and saunas became the scenes of gluttony and bloodshed.

Further out from the centre, in the housing estates, drugs became the currency of choice. Penniless youngsters took to shooting up boltushka, a home-made amphetamine mix, leaving them scarred, mentally damaged or dead.

Gunmen and clans from as far away as Chechnya and Moscow battled with local Robin Hoods for control of the city – because although Odessa was theoretically part of a new independent Ukraine, it was entirely Russian-speaking and, even more important, was the only warm-water port able to handle Russia’s gas and oil exports.

Hyperinflation and nationalism destroyed the value of the ruble, the karbovanets, the hryvnia or whatever else the government claimed at any time was ‘real’ money. Only the Yankee dollar provided any real stability.

For most ordinary people, Odessa in the 1990s was about two things: survival and dollars. Nobody cared or disapproved of how you managed the first or acquired the second. In fact, they admired those that achieved either, although sudden wealth was no guarantee of a long life.

In this atmosphere, who could blame thirteen-year-old Dimitry Golubov for selling vehicle registration documents and driver’s licences with the forged signature of the head of the Municipal Transportation Bureau? If businessmen were prepared to pay for this, surely the trade must have a real value?

So far, so Odessa. But young Dimitry had something that placed him in a different world from the traditional city gangland of protec- tion rackets, brothels, oil and caviar. Instead of packing a knife, he could drop down from the streets into smoky dark cellars where computer games like Street Fighter, Pacman and that Russian classic, Tetris, were busily turning teenage brains into mush. In this subter- ranean culture the only light emanated from soft-coloured neon shapes

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