Dead drops, PR stunts and punishment beatings: the rapid rise of Russia’s powerful darknet drug industry

At any one moment in towns and cities across Russia, thousands of drug packages lie buried in the ground, attached by magnets to lamp-posts or taped underneath window sills, waiting to be picked up by their intended customers.

From the streets of Moscow to remote towns in Siberia, hand-to-hand buying of illegal drugs – as is the norm in most of the world – is on the wane. Instead, retail-size bags of drugs are secreted using spycraft by an army of young kladmen (stash men) who upload dead-drop locations, which are unlocked when customers make an online purchase.

“Everyone above the age of 14 in Russia knows about kladmen and dead drops,” said a Russian lawyer specialising in the drug world. There is even a how-to guide, the Kladman’s Bible, which instructs couriers in how to package and hide drugs while avoiding police and “seagulls” – specialist thieves who hunt for dead-dropped drugs. They are encouraged to take the Russian winter weather into consideration by covering telltale footprints in the snow.

But it goes further than dead drops. Behind this new way of buying drugs, according to a report from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), are a new breed of tech-savvy organised crime groups characterised by self-promotion and violence. Against the backdrop of Russia’s strict anti-drug regime and geopolitical isolation, a powerful darknet drug industry has developed. Fronted by lavish websites, Hollywood-quality promotional videos and audacious PR stunts on Moscow’s streets, it now dominates the trade from production to sale – and is taking root outside Russia, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the streets of Tbilisi and Seoul.