Supporting the gang wasn't a spur-of-the-moment idea from Perfikot, nor did she have a screw loose somewhere.
The current situation has determined that a big city like Chernobyl needs a gang force and a black market to help stabilize social order and supplement the insufficient supply of resources.
This is not difficult to understand; the resource control adopted by Perfikot can be understood as a planned economy, while the black market is the market economy.
In times of insufficient resource supply, naturally, a planned economy is needed, where all resources are centrally deployed, which can avoid waste and concentrate limited resources where they are most needed.
But at the same time, one can't completely discard the market economy; some spontaneous actions of the civilian market can supplement the official planned economy.
Moreover, a particularly important point is that gang forces are indeed beneficial for stabilizing social order in this era.
