Russians may seek a “dictatorship” to protect themselves from rampant crime if ties between criminals and officials continue to deepen, Constitutional Court chief justice Valery Zorkin said.

There’s a critical mass of evildoers in government nationwide that threatens to turn Russia from a “criminalized into a criminal” country, Zorkin said in Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Friday.

The massacre in the Krasnodar region village of Kushchyovskaya that killed 12 people last month is a model of “the grafting of criminals onto officials” that is taking place across the country, Zorkin said. Investigations into the Nov. 5 murders led prosecutors to conclude that some local officials had been aiding criminal groups in terrorizing the region for more than a decade.

The population will be divided into a minority of “predators” stalking a majority of “walking beefsteaks” if such precedents become the norm, Zorkin said.

“The state will no longer be able to protect its citizens from mass violence,” Zorkin said. Such a scenario “is no longer a dystopia.”