Zoot-Suiters in Moscow

The shooting was Chicago-style, but the setting was Moscow. A cop surprised four masked burglars trying to break into a store. There was a burst of gunfire, and the four leaped into a taxi and fled, leaving the policeman dying from seven bullet wounds. Eyewitnesses provided one useful clue: the gunmen wore the narrow trousers, oversized jackets and ducktail haircuts of stilyagi, the Russian version of zoot-suiters.

Police grabbed Viktor Shashkin, 19, an awkward, gangling youth with big, vacant eyes; Vadim Vorobiev, 17, with a dangling forelock and a crooked smile that revealed a gold cap set on a healthy tooth--a standard affectation of the stilyagi; Igor Kostiuk, known as "Harry,"* and pockmarked Viktor Sergeev. Usually, by Russian definition stilyagi are the no-good children of the well-to-do--"spoiled brats with plenty of money, time on their hands, a doting mother, father's Pobeda car." But all four of these youths, workers at the Moscow ball-bearing plant, came from workers' families.

What had gone wrong? Komsomolskaya Pravda blamed it on "a passion for foreign clothes, foreign dances and foreign names," which led to the further deviation of listening to rock 'n' roll and the Voice of America. From such evil habits it was only a step further to hard drinking and absenteeism. Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted with horror a passage from Kostiuk's diary: "I don't understand how one can find any satisfaction in work. Study is also useless." In retrospect, the newspaper blamed the plant collective for failing to apply "corrective measures" in time, and the mothers for narrowing their sons' trousers for them.

Tried in Moscow city court, the four were sentenced to prison terms--but not enough to suit Komsomolskaya Pravda, which complained especially because Shashkin, who did the actual shooting, got only 25 years. Why not death? demanded the paper. Under Soviet law, either the defense or the prosecution can appeal. Last week, on the prosecutor's appeal, the Supreme Court of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic ordered death by firing squad for Stilyaga Shashkin.

* Stilyagi, aping Western names, call themselves Tom, Dick, Harry or Bob.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.