Where`s the KGB when you really need it?
Across the nation, citizens concede they miss the bad old days of Kremlin-imposed law and order-at least the order, if not the restrictive laws. An example is the republic of Armenia, which for more than three years has been locked in civil war with neighboring Azerbaijan over a territorial dispute.
There was a time when Moscow`s iron hand never would have allowed such feuds between sister republics. If something had started, the Kremlin`s security organs would have quickly put an end to it with quiet arrests or, failing that, would have dispatched troops to solve the problem now and ask questions later.
No more. There remain only competing centers of power. And this political dissolution of the former USSR has liberated the underworld.
”The widespread presence of firearms due to the nationalist fight with Azerbaijan is a completely new phenomenon and has greatly influenced the criminal situation in the republic,” said Ashot Eritsyan, who is in charge of the militia unit assigned to combat organized crime here in the Armenian capital.
”In my 22 years of militia duty, I cannot remember when firearms were so plentiful. These weapons change the approach of criminals to crime. They are so much more brazen. Therefore it demands a much more professional approach from us in choosing our personnel and in their training, and then in how we investigate crimes, arrest and detain criminals.”
Although the disintegration of public order makes the beat cop`s job that much more difficult, the crucial long-term challenge for Soviet crime-fighting is the ability of 15 newly sovereign republics to coordinate the campaign against organized underworld groups.
While the West has long accepted the need to cooperate with foreign powers to curtail narcotics trade and the like, political leaders in republics of the former Soviet Union are rushing toward autonomy with little thought to coordinating such things as law enforcement.
It`s easy to understand why.
For decades the KGB and Interior Ministry were viewed not so much as protectors of the people`s security, but as keepers of the Kremlin`s way. Most recently the feared Black Beret troops of the Interior Ministry were used not to combat organized crime-their statutory role-but in a bloody suppression of Baltic independence and separatist movements in other republics.
”There has to be a central structure linking law-enforcement agencies, and they should embrace the independent republics throughout the territory of the country,” Eritsyan said. ”We need to create a system of exchanging operative information, not only with the center, but with departments in all of the republics.”
The problem is not only logistical ties among republican crime-fighting organizations. It is also a question of how to set up legal guidelines for crushing organized crime in a nation where the government has for decades been accused by Western states and human rights agencies of making a mockery of the law.
International politics aside, the Interior Ministry now is struggling to find its way through a maze of legal questions long ago resolved for the FBI in the United States.
”There is no article in the criminal code setting the parameters of organized crime,” said Gennady Chebotarev, deputy commander of the Interior Ministry`s Sixth Department, which oversees the anti-organized crime campaign. A 25-year veteran of crime-fighting in Moscow and the republics, Chebotarev is an advocate of a law-based system to better define criminal activity-and of giving his department the mandate to go after it.
He said Soviet laws do not account for such concepts as influence-peddling or money laundering.
Nor are there clear legal norms for basic crime-fighting tools such as wiretaps and witness protection, or funding for a nationwide computer network consolidating information on specific criminals and criminal groups.
The Sixth Department, created by an Interior Ministry order in 1988, was given a boost in status Feb. 4 when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev issued a decree ordering the establishment of a Main Administration to combat the most dangerous forms of crime, organized crime, corruption and narco-business. About 85 people now work in the Sixth Department, under the direction of Alexander Gurov, an academic expert on organized crime. When Gorbachev`s decree is fully implemented, the Interior Ministry`s anti-organized crime department will have a staff of more than 400, each receiving a salary 20 to 30 percent higher than at present and granted official security for themselves, their families, their informants and witnesses.
Officials in the Russian Parliament say that Republic President Boris Yeltsin also is preparing a major new decree on organized crime. But sources say the decree would mean unnecessary duplication of much of the Sixth Department`s work.
”It only seeks more men and more money and has no new thinking whatsoever,” said a Russian official who has read the document. He said the decree would simply featherbed the Russian Republic`s bureaucracy with more patronage positions.
Although the world cheered the democrats` victory after the coup, the law enforcement community reports that many new appointees are encountering the same political pitfalls as their disgraced predecessors-they are simply doing it under the mantle of democratization.
For example, the new Moscow police chief was responsible for a large page one headline in one of the city`s main newspapers, Komsomolskaya Pravda, on Oct. 3, which read: ”Corruption in the City Can Be Weeded Out By Winter.”
Incredulous law-enforcement agents from the level of street patrolman to senior investigator had the ridiculous exhortation-which sounded like Brezhnev-era boilerplate-pasted up on bulletin boards in precinct houses and central stations all over town.
Besides changing the legal framework for fighting organized crime, law-enforcement professionals must alter a deeply ingrained distrust among the population that was fostered by the failures of communism-and the excesses of reform.
To the average citizen, it was shortages and deficits under communism that made organized crime inevitable; they blame Marxism for the black market. But at the same time they ironically blame democratic reforms and the advent of a market economy for the rise of a new business class and the mob.
In this polarized climate, it was not at all unusual for a newspaper such as Rabochaya Tribuna, a popular labor daily, to run an article entitled, ”Who is a Soviet Businessman: Bribe-taker, Apparatchik or Racketeer?”
One of the most vociferous critics of the government`s past crime-fighting policy is Anatoly Volobuev, who recently retired from his senior position at the Interior Ministry`s all-union research institute.
”To vest all hopes in fighting organized crime with the Interior Ministry is as helpless as to pretend that major help can be rendered by the KGB,” he said. ”The Interior Ministry, as well as the KGB, for decades was cut for solving entirely different tasks.”
He said both agencies, even under their new pro-democracy leaders, remain highly politicized, which can only hinder their ability to fight the mob.
At best, he said, these agencies have only been able to round up the lowest pawns of organized crime, while gangland leaders remain free.
