They certainly have a sense of alarm. In 1989, crime rose 31.8 percent nationwide, with big cities like Leningrad and Moscow hit even harder. Theater directors report a falloff in ticket sales because audiences are afraid to be on the streets at night. Iron doors and bars for windows are in hot demand. Polls show that law and order tops the list of public concerns, with many urging a tougher crackdown on “hooligans” and racketeers. Some Soviets are grumbling that an “iron hand” is needed. “When the country is destabilizing, crime naturally grows,” says Vladimir Komochkov, director of the investigative unit in Leningrad. “Crime is like a thermometer of social disintegration.”
In an economy of chronic shortages, crimes against property predominate. Burglary accounts for about half of all crime and in some cities rose by almost 80 percent last year. One Leningrad policeman says he remembers exactly when the boom in carpet thefts began: the month after carpets disappeared from the stores. Says an investigator for Moscow’s Railroad District, “We see a direct correlation between the things that get stolen and the things that you can no longer buy.”
Perestroika has come to the underworld, too. Racketeers operate nationwide networks trading in scarce luxury goods, icons, even narcotics, and many of them do an international business with Soviet emigre gangs in the United States. Like mafiosi in any country, they drive nice cars, hold congresses, have shoot-outs over gang turf and bribe people in the government. Leningrad police recently uncovered a pair of underground drug laboratories, where chemists worked processing a homegrown psychedelic known as trimetil phentonil with a street value of 16,000 rubles per gram–more than five years’ worth of the average Soviet wage. “In America, you see this kind of thing more often, but for us, it was really astonishing,” said Arkady Kramarev, head of Leningrad department for investigating criminal rackets. Soviets are also shocked by the easy availability of firearms. A Kalashnikov can be had on the black market for 1,500 rubles; a pistol runs about 800.
Some say the crime wave is overplayed, perhaps by Gorbachev’s enemies. The late ’70s saw an increase like the current one, but during the hermetic Brezhnev years it never became a public issue. Yuri Golik, head of the Supreme Soviet committee on legislation, legality and public order, points to a slowing in the growth of crime so far this year. Then there’s the question of how to define crime. Ethnic and nationalist unrest, such as last winter’s violence in Azerbaijan, is counted along with murders and muggings. By Soviet law, “profiteering” is a crime, which makes lawbreakers of most middlemen selling fruits and vegetables in urban free markets.
Poorly equipped: The Soviet police are ill equipped to deal with crime of any kind. Kramarev complains that his Leningrad unit doesn’t possess a single computer. Finding out whether a detainee has a previous criminal record is a weeklong bureaucratic nightmare. Patrol cars are often limited to five gallons of gasoline a day, and even minor repairs take a whole day. By American standards, municipal police departments are woefully understaffed. “People complain that the police arrive at the scene of the crime 45 minutes after they call,” sighs Kramarev. “They don’t realize that the one patrolman in their neighborhood is taking a drunk to the tank.” At the police control room in Moscow, emergency calls are routed by antique manual switchboards. “Everything in here’s a piece of old junk,” complains one officer. He gestures to a small Japanese-made fax machine in one corner of the room. “That’s the newest thing we’ve got, and it’s run out of paper.”
Not surprisingly, people have lost faith in the police. Bribe-taking is widespread. Factories and even citizens’ groups are forming self-defense detachments to protect themselves. Private detective agencies are doing a booming business. particularly hiring out bodyguards to nouveau riche cooperative businessmen. Meanwhile, law enforcement is changing only slowly. The police no longer round up hundreds of people in the search for a single suspect. Sentences are not so harsh and the prison population, though still higher per capita than that in the United States, has fallen to 800,000, half its size during the Brezhnev days. Beatings and forced confessions still occur, but rarely. “We’ve always been a highly criminal society,” says a Moscow sociologist. “But we used to use criminal methods to discourage it.” The question in the face of today’s rising crime is whether the Soviet government will have to take the law back out of law enforcement.
