A country boss (also referred to as a rural boss) was the name typically given to rural Russian gangsters who controlled swaths of territory in the western part of the country. While rural clans had always been influential, country bosses became an integral piece of Russian informal government and the black economy following the devastation of the Russian Civil War and the chaos of the Great Eastern War. The rural bosses have been compared in influence to Chinese provincial warlords in their affect and it was not until mass urbanization in Russia in the late 1950s that their power began to wane. Peasant irregular soldiers wielded by country bosses were a crucial component of Sebastien Bonaparte's Free Russian Army both in his March on Moscow as well as a large component of his European Army in the following French Civil War. Country bosses still wield considerable power in modern Russia; however, the Rusian Mafiya is a much larger, international organization.
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