Viggo Tarasov: The boss who knew exactly who the Baba Yaga was, and so knew he could not stop him

In John Wick (Chad Stahelski, 2014), Viggo Tarasov, the boss of New York’s Russian mob, played by Michael Nyqvist, gets a call from Aurelio, who runs a car shop. He has heard that Aurelio struck his son, and he wants to know why. Aurelio explains politely: because Iosef stole John Wick’s car and killed his dog. Viggo answers with a single word, “Oh,” and hangs up. Soon after, he summons Iosef to his office, punches him in the stomach and explains what he has failed to understand: it is not what he did that angers him, but who he did it to. Iosef asks who this nobody is. That nobody, his father tells him, is John Wick, the man they called Baba Yaga, the one they sent to kill the Boogeyman. Viggo was his boss. He saw him kill three men in a bar with a pencil, and when John wanted out for a woman, he gave him an impossible task in exchange for his freedom. The bodies he buried that day, Viggo says, laid the foundation of what they are now. This file reveals the ending of the film.

// The theoryThe punishment you have to see coming

Deterrence theory begins with Cesare Beccaria, who argued in On Crimes and Punishments (1764) that what prevents crime is not the cruelty of the penalty but its certainty and its swiftness. Jeremy Bentham turned the idea into a calculus of pleasures and pains. Two centuries later, Daniel Nagin’s review (2013) confirmed the core of it: the certainty of being caught deters far more than the harshness of the punishment. But research added a condition Beccaria took for granted: the threat works through perception. What deters is not the real risk but the risk each person believes they run. Mark Stafford and Mark Warr (1993) explained where that perception comes from: from one’s own and others’ experience with punishment and, above all, with punishment avoidance, the times one got away with it. Someone who has always gotten away with it learns that the threat does not apply to them. And Bruce Jacobs (2010) separated deterrence from deterrability: there are people on whom no threat weighs, because they have nothing left that the threat could take.

// The subjectRaising the price on a man who has no price

Viggo is neither a madman nor a thug: he is a businessman who knows exactly what he is up against, and the film shows him trying, one after another, every lever of deterrence. First, words. He calls John at home, offers his condolences for his wife and proposes that they not resort to their baser instincts and handle this like civilized men. John listens and hangs up without a word. When he is asked what John said, Viggo answers with one word, enough, and sends a crew to kill him that same night. John kills them all. Second, price: Viggo puts two million dollars on his head and offers the job in person to Marcus, John’s old friend. When he learns that John is staying at the Continental, the neutral hotel where business is forbidden, he doubles the bounty for whoever dares to break that rule, and the assassin Perkins tries. Third, the power that really holds him up: in the vault of a church in Little Russia he keeps cash, artwork and what he calls his leverage over the city, audio recordings, physical evidence, blackmail. John burns it all. (Spoiler warning.) After escaping capture, John holds him at gunpoint, and Viggo pulls the contract and gives him the address of Iosef’s safe house in Brooklyn in exchange for his life. Iosef dies that night. Viggo takes his revenge on Marcus, whom he blames for having had every opportunity to kill John, and kills him. The end comes at the harbor, in the rain, with a knife. Viggo tells John that they used to be professionals, civilized. John asks him whether he looks civilized.

// The crackThe only place where the threat is carried out

The film tests the theory on the side Nagin identified as the weakest: Viggo only knows how to raise severity. More men, more money, double the bounty. None of it changes John’s behavior, because John has already lost the last thing he had, and a man in that state is outside what Jacobs calls deterrability. The only place in the story where deterrence works as Beccaria imagined it is the Continental. Its rules are few, known and always enforced: when Perkins does business in the hotel, Winston informs her that her membership has been revoked by her own hand, and has her executed. That penalty did not deter Perkins, but it keeps the threat credible for everyone else, which is what general deterrence is for. What the theory cannot do is what the fiction asks of it: the unstoppable avenger is an extreme case, and in real life the likelihood of being caught does weigh on the decisions of many offenders.

Nor should Viggo be read as a victim of his son’s blunder. Explaining him is not excusing him. His power was born of the dead John buried for him and was maintained by blackmail, which is deterrence in its purest form: it does not punish, it threatens. When his son breaks the pact, Viggo neither hands him over nor repairs the harm, even though he knows better than anyone that he cannot win: he tries to kill the man he had let go, and later kills Marcus. The film grants him a clarity rare in a villain, that of seeing his own end coming, and denies him the one decision that would have done him any good.