Ivan the Hooligan

"Krimtekhnika-74" completed its 14-day run in Moscow this week as a big success--at least among the Soviet police. No wonder. It is a display from 66 firms in a dozen countries of such police-state paraphernalia as listening devices disguised as pens, battery-powered nightsticks that sting like cattle prods and special truncheons that leave no marks. Because of the adverse publicity raised by Senator Henry M. Jackson about the desirability of U.S. sales of such repressive equipment to the Kremlin, only two American firms showed up at the fair; their wares ranged from a $35 fingerprint set to a $28,865 mobile crime lab. What Krimtekhnika-74 showed, beyond the inventiveness of the law-and-order industry, is that the Russians are having a serious crime problem.

Press Campaigns. Three months ago, the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. called for "an unwavering struggle against hooliganism," the Soviet euphemism for such personal crimes as mugging, vandalism and drunken brawling. Press and administrative campaigns against juvenile delinquency, illegal firearms, bribery and graft have grown over the past two years. Considering the strict state regulation of Soviet newspapers, there can be little doubt that the news reports reflect the Politburo's concern over the U.S.S.R.'s growing crime rate.

Press reports, including interviews with high-ranking law-enforcement officers, admit that there has been an "acceleration" of juvenile delinquency. A recent television program in a series on law enforcement was devoted to the story of a teen-age gang that killed two tellers in a Ukraine bank robbery. Literaturnaya Gazeta not long ago ran a detailed account of an incident reminiscent of a macabre scene from A Clockwork Orange: two teen-agers beat to death four drunken adults in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk.

Though the purchase of handguns is illegal in the Soviet Union, shotguns and rifles can be bought through hunting clubs--and many Soviets are buying them to protect themselves from robbers. In Moscow, there is a long waiting list to subscribe to a $3-a-month electronic anti-burglar system that links apartments to local militia stations. Soviet papers report citizens' electrifying their doors or installing a harpoon-like device that is supposed to spear an intruder who opens the door.

Hardly a week goes by without the report of a large-scale embezzlement or graft. In Tadzhikistan recently, a male employee was sentenced to death for stealing goods worth 130,000 rubles (about $174,000) from a retail store. In Azerbaijan, a man was executed for diverting more than $700,000 worth of state-owned building materials, truck tires, fertilizer and other goods in an elaborate black-market operation.

The possible link between the pattern of crimes and the rising standard of living in the Soviet Union has not been overlooked. Writing in Komsomolskaya Pravda (Young Communist), Political Scientist Vladimir Kudryavtsev noted that "one occasionally hears that once a society has achieved affluence, crimes for gain disappear. However, as Aristotle observed, greed can also be engendered by prosperity. When examining the motives of crime for gain, we cannot automatically attribute them exclusively to relics of the past. Today, a number of 'accretions of the present,' so to speak, are to be observed."

Beyond the press campaigns, the Soviet government is trying to curb crime by beefing up voluntary public-order squads and increasing the severity of punishment. But like its Western counterparts, the U.S.S.R. appears at a loss to slow its burgeoning incidence of crime, as at least one Westerner found out last week. On a sightseeing excursion to Leningrad, a salesman from Krimtekhnika-74 draped his jacket over a chair in a hotel bar and got up to dance. When he returned a few minutes later, the jacket --and about $850--had been stolen.

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