Oh dear me. That where we are?

During the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army, after sustaining huge losses defending European Russia from the Nazis, was so desperate for manpower they started recruiting common criminals from labour camps, many of them members of the Soviet mafia, offering them pardons in exchange---a promise the authorities rarely bothered keeping. Almost all gang members in uniform who survived the war were set back to the camps.

The mafia never forgave those members who collaborated with the authorities, even under circumstances like a war that posed an existential threat to Russia. The suki (literally "b---hes," because they were supposedly Stalin's whores), cast out of criminal society, started their own groups for their own protection, and after the GPW a "Suka War" broke out in the camp system that lasted longer than the GPW itself (1945 to 1953). Prison authorities did little to stop it, seeing it as a cheap way to reduce overcrowding.