A Bit Wild in the Big City

Youth crime grows, as booze spreads and Babushka recedes

Mark Kasakevich, 19, a Soviet emigrant to the U.S., has a haunting recollection of his old life in Moscow. "It is amazing how cruelty to animals was so accepted," he says. "Boys, totally unprovoked, would kick dogs until they were half dead. You would see cats and dogs limping around with an ear cut off or stab wounds in the side."

Animals, sadly, are not the only targets of destructive youths, who account for about half of the nation's street crime, theft and burglary, and one out of ten murders. In Georgia last year two girls of 15 were charged with killing two other teen-agers just to get their prized blue jeans. In Belorussia, eleven youths were arrested after a rampage in which they beat a policeman to death. In Leningrad vandals thought to be youths smashed 29 statues in the garden of the Summer Palace.

Moscow is still safer than New York City, but the U.S.'s high juvenile crime rate is small comfort to Soviet officials. What they call hooliganism--public disorderliness, minor assault and vandalism --is widespread; gangs of youths often lurk around the paths and stairwells of Moscow's apartment complexes, bullying residents. As a result, the city is encouraging the growth of volunteer auxiliary police and bolstering the already highly visible regular police force.

It is not only the extent of juvenile crime that worries the Soviets but the ideological contradiction that is involved: in a Communist society antisocial behavior should be on the wane. "It hits the regime where it hurts most," says the University of South Carolina's Gordon Smith, who has written extensively on Soviet youth and criminal justice. At the root of the problem are such social ills as alcohol abuse, broken families, crowded living conditions--and boredom. "Drunkenness," says Police Lieut. General Pyotr Oleinik, "is the mother of hooliganism."

A Leningrad study found that in most families of youthful offenders one or both parents had a drinking problem. According to an official Soviet report, 84% of young people begin drinking before the age of 16. Because of the high divorce rate and because most wives have jobs, youngsters are too frequently left to their own devices. The days of the extended family, when Babushka (Grandmother) was a stabilizing influence, are disappearing.

Urbanization, restricted living space (many Moscow families still live in a single room) and growing independence mean that Grandmother is no longer available to care for grandchildren. With no supervision and little to do, particularly in the suburbs, youngsters are primed for trouble. Explains Criminology Professor Louise Shelley of American University in Washington, D.C.: "One of the stereotypes in the U.S.S.R. is the kid who lives on the edge of Moscow, comes in for the day, gets drunk in the train station and goes a bit wild in the big city."

Offenders may be tried in adult courts if they are over 16 and the crime is serious. Otherwise they are handled by the Commissions on Juvenile Affairs, which emphasize rehabilitation by counseling rather than imprisonment (though in some cases parents may be fined for their children's transgressions). There are exceptions, though. Last year two technical school students were sent to a labor camp for seven years after they stabbed to death three of the Moscow Zoo's kangaroos.

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