Crime Russia

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin declared on Friday that organized crime is now "the No. 1 threat to Russia's strategic interests" and outlined steps to break its corrupt hold on the government. Speaking to law enforcement officers, Yeltsin and Vice President Alexander V.

Double suicide bombings struck the strife-ridden Russian republic of Dagestan on Wednesday morning, killing 12 people and injuring dozens. The attacks came as violent punctuation to this week's bombings aboard Moscow's subway, which killed 39 and stirred fresh fears that volatility in Russia's mostly Muslim Caucasus region is seeping deep into the rest of the country. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin again lashed out at militants, saying this week's bombings could be linked and calling for reinforcement of police ranks in the north Caucasus.

The economic and social crises in Russia have triggered a countrywide crime wave, top law enforcement officials said Tuesday. In Russia's first six months as an independent country, crime was up 30% over the same period last year, before the Soviet Union broke up. Murder and other violent crimes increased by 23%, while property crimes and burglaries rose almost 50% and accounted for 72% of the 1.3 million crimes reported in the first half of this year.

In a land where organized crime is posing one of the greatest threats to elected government, a variety of suspected criminals and thugs have discovered the best way to avoid arrest and prosecution: Win a seat in the Russian parliament. Under Russia's 6-year-old constitution, no member of parliament can be prosecuted while in office--even for crimes that have nothing to do with parliamentary affairs. "A deputy in Russia is like a deity--he is absolutely untouchable," said Alexander I.

To FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, organized crime in Russia today bears disturbing similarities to Chicago's in the 1920s and 1930s--violent but fractionalized, a danger to itself as much as to the rest of society, and with a potential for much more. The likes of Al Capone, unchecked by the FBI or any other law enforcement body, welded the Chicago mob into a unified force that preyed on the community for decades.

Russians buried the most beloved victim of their post-Soviet crime wave Saturday amid an outburst of politically charged grief and an open feud between President Boris N. Yeltsin and the mayor of Moscow over who is to blame.

It's a familiar sight in Russia these days: the nervous businessman in his tailored lilac jacket, with a mobile phone over his ear and an emaciated beauty on his arm--and a pack of beefy bodyguards at his back. Private security has become one of Russia's biggest growth industries. Menacing men with guns are the brawn behind the brains of these operations.

"The law is like a horse cart. It goes whichever way you turn it." --Old Russian proverb The day Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from a 20-year exile, a short, balding admirer with thick glasses and a weak heart struggled into the seaside crowd and handed the famous author a bouquet. Suddenly the two men were parted by the crush of other welcomers and they never met again. "I did not get to speak to him," Viktor I. Cherepkov says in wistful recollection.

Your trading partners failed to deliver? Business associates backed out of a deal? Debtors refused to pay? A growing number of Russians have developed their own remedy for such behavior: Kidnap the culprit. It may sound extreme, but in Russia it's becoming trendy. Not to mention lucrative. In fact, kidnaping is now the crime of choice among some biznessmeni out to make a quick buck (or a trunkful of rubles) in Russia's anarchic transition to capitalism.

Russia's Parliament sent President Boris N. Yeltsin a resounding nyet Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to reject a presidential anti-crime plan that foes say would wipe out many hard-won new constitutional rights. Despite a crime wave that has terrorized and enraged many Russians, lawmakers protested that Yeltsin's harsh cure smelled too much of the odious practices of Soviet days.

To Swiss authorities, Sergei Mikhailov is a dangerous man who heads one of Russia's largest crime groups from the isolation of his Geneva jail cell. He has been locked up without trial since October 1996 and going to occasional court appearances in an armored Mercedes with a SWAT team escort. Police arrested one of his Swiss lawyers, accusing him of smuggling Mikhailov's letters out of jail and passing them to an accomplice who faxed them to Moscow.

It's a familiar sight in Russia these days: the nervous businessman in his tailored lilac jacket, with a mobile phone over his ear and an emaciated beauty on his arm--and a pack of beefy bodyguards at his back. Private security has become one of Russia's biggest growth industries. Menacing men with guns are the brawn behind the brains of these operations.

The wind lifts the nets drying on the beach. A caviar poacher's rowboat has been pulled up on the hot sand. Muscles gleam on a fisherman's bare shoulders, and his pale, watchful eyes reflect the dance of the tides. Magomed the smuggler limps down the beach in southern Russia where he has come, most days this year, to buy supplies for his underworld trade: basins of gleaming black fish eggs, straight from the slashed belly of the sturgeon.

Russian Interior Minister Anatoly S. Kulikov last summer was a leading hawk in a Kremlin Cabinet of hard-liners pursuing a war against separatists in Chechnya. But a year is a long time in Russian politics. This summer, there is peace in Chechnya. Kulikov, now a lone figure in a new Cabinet of energetic young reformers, has been reduced to pursuing a very different war--against the prostitutes, known in Russian as "night butterflies," who flit through central Moscow in ever-increasing numbers.

In most countries, a cop's job is to catch robbers. But Russians are beginning to wonder if that is the case in their crime-ridden homeland, where officers often are as likely to be working for mafia bosses as putting them behind bars. When a notorious don was killed in a drive-by shooting here this year--under the noses of his burly bodyguards--what shocked ordinary people most was not the already commonplace juxtaposition of a snowy street, a flashy BMW and a bloody corpse.

When his wages failed to materialize for three months, Nikolai S. Lashkevich did what thousands of other Russians do when their government neglects to pay them and they have children to feed: He ripped off his workplace. Lashkevich's factory manufactured guns. In the evening, in his bedroom, he assembled stolen pieces of metal into guns while his two sons watched TV in the next room.

Alyosha didn't like the looks of the five men loafing around the train station, brazenly sizing up his car. Leaping from the driver's seat, he warned them to clear out. They didn't. So he whipped a gas-spraying pistol from his belt and began counting to five. Four of the men scattered; the fifth, too intoxicated to run, lurched away. Calmly, Alyosha took aim and pumped a jet of burning, temporarily paralyzing tear gas at the drunk's stomach.

Admitting that Russia is mired in chaos and crime, President Boris N. Yeltsin proposed a new regime of law, order and political cooperation on Thursday in his first State of the Nation speech to the new Parliament. He struck such a conciliatory note that he did not even mention the lawmakers' defiant vote on Wednesday to pardon all his political foes who face charges for their roles in the 1991 coup attempt and last October's Moscow clashes.

It's harvest time in Russia, and for Uncle Kolya it is an unhappy one. Digging in the fields by hand is tedious, back-breaking work, but that is not really Kolya's complaint. Nor does his foul mood result from a drought that augurs the poorest national grain crop in three decades. Kolya is a struggling potato thief. The root of his problem is a "garden revolution" in rural Russia.

A visiting American met some friendly Russians outside the Bolshoi Theater earlier this month, stopped by their home for a drink and woke up the next morning in a field outside Moscow minus his Rolex watch, money and credit cards. The Mickey Finn they had slipped him left him with hallucinations for three days, but he was relatively lucky. One young foreign woman was recently given a drugged drink near a train station and gang-raped while unconscious, according to her doctor.