Elvira Bary

What Jeffrey Epstein did was monstrous.  The victims deserve justice. Full stop.

The public conversation keeps getting trapped on the most cinematic details — the island, the plane, the photos, the “who was on the list”, but that’s like staring at the bloodstain… and never asking who fired the gun. And why.

Epstein wasn’t just a predator. He was a service.  A broker. A gatekeeper to a private zone where certain people could test one another, bind one another, and quietly trade protection. In Russian, there is a word for it: blat.

Blat Explained

Blat is not just corruption. Blat is an operating system: a shadow network of favours, introductions, exemptions, and mutual compromise — where the real power doesn’t live in institutions. It lives in access. The clean definition is: you use personal networks to get what the formal system cannot give you.

The Epstein saga is not primarily a sex story… but a governance story. The elite behaves less like citizens under law… and more like a closed circle that runs on “I can fix this for you” and “you owe me”.

In the Soviet Union, this was normal life. My friend Olya explained this to me. Her mother worked as a flight attendant on international routes. She brought home things other people couldn’t get — colorful hair ties, pens with caps, sometimes even lace underwear. People who wanted these kinds of things needed someone like her. So, they turned her into a “friend”.

They never said, “You’ll owe me later.” They said, “We’re friends.”

They showed up with gifts. They stayed in touch.  They did small favours before you even asked. Over time, something invisible accumulated, a quiet debt that could be called in when it mattered. The sucker believes the official story: “Do the right thing and the system will reward you.” The connected person knows the real story: “The system is a stage play.  Real decisions happen backstage.”

And the most important character in this world is not the politician. It’s the broker.

Olya’s mother wasn’t a minister. She wasn’t a genius. She had something much more practical: access. Access to planes and foreign stores selling items that became social gold in a shortage economy. That made her valuable to powerful people. And once powerful people need you, you become a node in their informal network.

You become the person who can connect, arrange, smooth over, and quietly solve. Everyone understands the rules are fake, so skirting the system becomes the system.

The Forbidden Zone

Blat can only flourish where there is scarcity.  If everyone has enough, people simply look for the best seller and the best price. They don’t need brokers and unofficial networks.

But in the West, there is something that remains acutely scarce — something no amount of money can buy. Membership in the club of those who shape destinies.

America is full of millionaires and even billionaires. That alone does not make you special. And yet being special is precisely what modern culture demands of the ambitious person. It’s not enough to succeed. You must demonstrate something extraordinary.

There is an older force at work, a behavioural program inherited from our distant ancestors.

It pushes in one direction: You must do whatever it takes to be accepted by the Big, Powerful Hunters who rule the tribe. And not merely accepted — accepted as an equal.

If you look at people striving for success, you’ll notice how carefully they signal their uniqueness. “I won this competition.” “I received that award.” And very often — photographs embracing famous figures.  If a celebrity stands next to you for a camera, it instantly marks you as someone important.  In the eyes of the viewer, you are the one who have access to fame, money, and power.

The same logic operates at the very top. But there, a photo is not enough. Something stronger is required. Something exclusive. And it doesn’t need to be invented. It emerges automatically from our ancient behavioural code.

In a prehistoric tribe, you were admitted into the brotherhood of hunters only after passing an initiation ritual. It had to be difficult. At the early stages, that meant pain, public humiliation, or a test of fear. But the next stage is more revealing: the violation of taboos. The very rules that bind everyone else no longer bind you. They are still sacred for the tribe, but not for you, because you are now different.

And the same logic echoes today. A priest may enter the altar; ordinary worshippers may not. No one is allowed to run a red light, except a police car or a fire truck. VIP passes at Disneyland let some people bypass lines that everyone else must endure. Access signals status. Exemption signals power. And people instinctively crave this exemption.

Institutions are meant to restrain that instinct. That’s one of their core purposes. But the instinct itself never disappears. It simply looks for a channel. If the channel is healthy, that same drive turns into competition, bold but lawful risk-taking, building companies, funding innovation, and practicing transparent, accountable philanthropy — ambition that still operates within guardrails. The hunger for status remains. But it is civilized.

If the channel is rotten, it turns into a “forbidden zone”. A private world where rules exist mainly to be broken. The forbidden act sends a signal inside the circle: We are different. We are above. But the second half of the mechanism matters even more. It’s not simply crossing a line. It’s crossing it without consequences.  It’s doing something that would destroy anyone else and walking away untouched.

That protection becomes intoxicating. And it becomes a social glue. If you and I have crossed a line together, we are no longer just acquaintances. We share exposure. Not friendship — dependence. This is where blat enters the forbidden zone.  In a favour-based system, networks are not held together by contracts or transparency. They are held together by mutual compromise — by secrets, by dirt, by the quiet fear that if one falls, others fall too.

And layered on top of that fear is something else: the thrill of exemption. The intoxicating sense that accountability applies to everyone else. That is why Epstein matters beyond the lurid details. He was not merely facilitating crimes. He was managing a forbidden zone inside a modern country that insists such zones do not exist.

Epstein the Fixer

Jeffrey Epstein was not the centre of the story. He was a service. If you look at him as a “monster”, you end up hunting for names like it’s a murder mystery. If you look at him through blat, you see a different thing: a broker who made the forbidden zone run smoothly.

In the Soviet world, a broker doesn’t need an official title. He needs leverage, introductions, and a reputation for making opportunities appear and obstacles quietly vanish. That’s it. People came to him because they craved something they couldn’t obtain through official channels. He becomes the hallway between locked doors.

Epstein was not selling lace lingerie or imported toothpaste. He was selling access to a modern initiation ritual. Entry into a circle where power was so concentrated that it appeared to guarantee something priceless: impunity. And this, in a country that officially insists no one stands above the law. That is the seduction.

If this were only about private perversions, the visitors to Epstein’s island could have satisfied their appetites quietly, without creating a trail and risking exposure. But discretion was never the point. The point was visibility — not to the public, but to the other mighty hunters in the circle. To demonstrate that you could cross a forbidden line and walk away untouched. That you could break a taboo and nothing would happen. And if nothing happens to you, it sends a message: “You are one of us.”

Institutional Collapse

Blat does not start with evil people.  It starts with weak institutions. In the Soviet Union, the state promised everything and delivered shortages. So, people built a second system, made of favours, friends, and quiet debts. Trust and confidence in major institutions have been sliding for years, across parties, but in different directions at different moments. People argue about who “caused” it, but the outcome is the same: cynicism becomes rational, not edgy.

And cynicism creates demand for blat. When people believe the system is fair, they try to win inside the system. But when people believe the system is theatre, they try to win outside it. The real action moves into informal networks, and the formal system becomes a performance for the public. That is exactly how the late Soviet Union felt. You still had slogans, procedures, and rules posted on the wall. But everybody knew the real question was who can make the rule bend.

So, hold on to that disgust. It isn’t hysteria. It’s a moral reflex, the instinct of a society that still believes in laws, not circles. And share this story with other persons who keep asking, “How is this even possible?” Because that’s the point: it becomes possible when people lose faith, when institutions turn into theatre, and fixers become the real government.