UNIFORMED police were notably absent this week when a few hundred tough-looking, leather-clad men arrived in black Land Cruisers and Mercedes to pay their last respects to a man reputed to be Russia’s mafia boss. Journalists and photographers were told to stay out of the cemetery—for their own sake.

The 75-year-old Aslan Usoyan, known as Ded (Grandad) Khasan, was shot dead by a sniper on January 16th as he walked out of a central Moscow restaurant where he often received visitors. He was Russia’s most important “thief-in-law”, a term coined in the Gulag for a criminal bound by a code of honour. “To the Great Patriarch of the thieves’ world, the legendary Grandpa Khasan”, read a banner on one wreath of white roses.

He was buried beyond the city limits. The funeral was arranged hurriedly and lacked the pomp usually reserved by the Russian criminal world for its leaders. A plan to bury Mr Usoyan in his native Georgia was aborted when Georgian officials said they did not want him. Clearing the country of mafia bosses has been a main achievement of Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president. Yet in Moscow Mr Usoyan had almost folk-hero status, with his funeral shown on state television.

For many Russians it looked like an episode in a crime drama on television. But such scenes usually belong to the 1990s, a period of gangster wars which Vladimir Putin supposedly ended. Russian crime watchers say the killing of Mr Usoyan, who survived an attack in 2010, may have been ordered by a rival who is currently in jail. Or it could have been the work of Russia’s security services. It could even have been a joint project, given the fuzzy line between the two.

The attack could also have been related to next winter’s Olympics in Sochi. Mr Usoyan had property and construction interests there. According to Vedomosti, a business daily, the cost of the Olympics has quadrupled from the original estimate of 314 billion roubles ($10 billion) to 1.4 trillion roubles, making it far more expensive even than the London 2012 Olympics.

Mark Galeotti from New York University says the pressure to change the status quo in the criminal underworld has been building for some time but has been intensified by fears of political instability. “Many mafia bosses are worried about what might happen next and are revising their dormant alignments.” And attempts to change things by violence extend beyond the criminal underworld.

Two days after the assassination of Mr Usoyan, a masked man flung sulphuric acid into the face of a 42-year-old director of the Bolshoi Theatre Ballet, badly burning his face and damaging his eyes. Sergei Filin had been threatened before: his e-mail was hacked, his car tyres slashed and his mobile phone disabled. Mr Filin told Anatoly Iksanov, the general director of the Bolshoi, that he felt he was on the front line; Mr Iksanov said he did too.

The Bolshoi has long been an emblem of the country, reflecting its ills and its glory. In recent years it has been plagued by scandals. Its six-year reconstruction took longer and cost far more than planned. In 2009 Russian police opened a criminal investigation into the alleged embezzlement of funds, with little result so far. Two years ago Mr Filin’s predecessor, Gennady Yanin, was forced to resign after somebody posted sexually explicit photographs of a man resembling him on the internet and e-mailed the links to theatre professionals at home and abroad.

The Russian mafia and the Bolshoi may be at opposite ends of the social spectrum, but a fight for redistribution of assets and influence has brought them disturbingly close to each other. A historian writing about Russia in 20 years’ time may come to see the recent outbreak of violence as a precursor of broader instability.