The production and consumption of pornographic products featuring children is especially pronounced in Moscow and St Petersburg. In the mid-1990s, pornographic images were mostly imported into Russia. They were expensive and distributed in narrow circles. Nowadays, one can buy videocassettes with child pornography at practically any railway station or marketplace in these towns.

Prices for child pornography on the Moscow market are practically the same as for a licensed film cassette, 165 to 170 roubles (US$6-7); huge demand makes these low prices possible. A well-known 12-part pornographic film called Malyavki (Little Ones) features boys as young as 6 years old. The popular Russian web search system Jandex yields no less than 405 sites and 19,864 pages in reply to the request for “child porn in Moscow”.

Text above is a piece of a larger article from March 2004, which is property of ECPAT International

Since 1980 there has existed virtually no commercial production of child pornography whatsoever anywhere in Russia - until recent years.

The recent explosion of Russian produced soft core child pornography, targeted at English language customers, contains clues that point to the involvement of governmental agencies - either through some knowledge of illegal activity or worse - direct profit.

The FBI’s own statistics claim that the cumulative commercial profits from the international child porn industry have gone from virtually nonexistent ten years ago to an estimated 20 to 30 billion dollars annually. And while this 20 to 30 billion figure may be an exagerration typical of agencies eager to justify their expanding budgets, there is nevertheless an unmistakable and expanding commercial component to this recent upsurge in production - judging by the Visa, Mastercard and American Express logos plastered prominently on the front pages of these new child pornography sites.

Welcome to the New World Order.

This highly professional network of Russian child pornography web sites operate right on the world wide web with dot com suffixes, secure sockets, modern interfaces, and slick graphic design. All seemingly risky business for any would be pornographer, considering that any server’s location can be now be precisely mapped by modern law enforcement methods of network propagation analysis to within feet of it’s location. What gives then? Why are these sites still operating openly?

Considering the cold reality of organized crime in Russia today, it would be impossible for such a lucrative trade to go unnoticed. Yet we know for a fact that corrupt members of Russian Intelligence would never allow such profits to slip through THEIR FINGERS - they would almost assuredly be cashing in as well.

The brazenness of these operations implies that they are permitted to operate at the very highest levels of law enforcement in Russia. We know, for example, that since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian intelligence has simply shifted over to working for the only paymaster in town - the various gangs of the Russian Mafia. And the few agents still officially working for the Russian government have earned a reputation for building partnerships with the Russian Mafia, who are most assuredly the producers of the new toxic wave of child pornography.

Text above is a piece of a larger article from October 2002, which is property of www.voxfux.com