Crime Inc. Comes to Moscow

By John Kohan/Moscow

As soon as the poster appeared in the perestroika display window on Gorky Street in downtown Moscow, passersby paused to stare and snicker. The hulking, black silhouette shown atop an awards stand was unmistakably that of Leonid Brezhnev, bushy eyebrows and all. But in place of his numerous military ribbons, the deceased Soviet leader wore a row of stripes labeled CORRUPTION, EMBEZZLEMENT, GRAFT and MONEYGRUBBING. The lower tiers of the stand, two caricatured gangsters -- one American, the other Italian -- stared up at Brezhnev with apparent surprise. The caption beneath the cartoon said it all: SO, MAFIOSO, YOU FINALLY "DIG" WHO IS THE REAL GODFATHER.

There was a time when Mafia and Godfather were alien words in the official Soviet vocabulary, and organized crime was considered an inevitable by-product of decadent capitalism. No longer. Inspired by Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign for greater honesty and openness, criminal investigators have begun unraveling a web of crime and corruption, dating back to the Brezhnev years, that stretched from the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan to the highest levels of government in Moscow.

This week the most famous defendant netted in the five-year Uzbek investigation will go on trial before the military tribunal of the U.S.S.R.'s Supreme Court in Moscow. Yuri Churbanov, 51, Brezhnev's son-in-law and a former First Deputy Minister of the Interior, stands accused of accepting more than $1 million in bribes from Uzbek officials during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Eight other officials will be in the dock, including the former Uzbek Interior Minister and several regional police chiefs. If found guilty, the defendants could be sentenced to death. Churbanov's wife Galina, who is Brezhnev's daughter and has been linked to a Moscow diamond-smuggling ring, may be called to the witness stand.

Despite public demands that the trial be turned into an expose of the Brezhnev era, Defense Lawyer Andrei Makarov last week denounced any attempt "to try to judge Brezhnev under Churbanov's name."

Nonetheless, high-level indignation over the Churbanov affair and the moral decay of the Brezhnev years was registered last week in Pravda. In a scathing article titled "The Son-in-Law and His Clan," Churbanov was depicted as a vain and ambitious man of limited abilities who exploited his connection with Brezhnev to climb up the hierarchy of the Soviet police. The newspaper made clear that he was only a tool in the hands of others, who were operating a mammoth racket in Uzbekistan to falsify cotton-production reports and swindle the state.

Organized crime first began to flourish on a large scale during the Brezhnev years in what has come to be known as the "shadow economy." Underground businessmen, who amassed wealth by siphoning off funds from the state budget for lucrative private ventures, proved an easy target for blackmail by small- time thugs. After gangsters began to demand "protection" money, a deal was reportedly cut at a conference in the northern Caucasus in the mid-1970s, with the illegal millionaires agreeing to pay 10% of their income to the crime lords.

In the Soviet criminal hierarchy, the Churbanovs are, in the words of Police Inspector Alexander Gurov, "two-bit messenger boys." As Gurov recently told Literaturnaya Gazeta, most of the real Soviet Godfathers, some of them low- level bureaucrats and even pizzeria waiters, are so inconspicuous they would not be singled out in a crowd. The new anticorruption campaign has exposed many other mobster operations, including prostitution rings, drug dealing and illegal vodka sales. Meanwhile, perestroika, the policy of economic restructuring, has opened virgin areas of opportunity for the Soviet Mafia, notably among newly legalized forms of free enterprise. Small entrepreneurs have been strong-armed to pay for protection or enter into forced partnerships with criminals seeking to "launder" funds by investments in cooperatives.

Another disturbing trend that reflects the growing influence of Soviet crime gangs has been a sudden upsurge in youth violence. During the past two years, 90 teenagers have died in 51 clashes with rival gangs. Police have been surrounded and attacked by young thugs while attempting to keep order. Arguing that such violence threatens his reforms, Gorbachev says, "((Gang warfare)) may be a natural process, as if a spring long pressed down has been released, but it is a potent weapon in the hands of the enemies of perestroika, who claim that nothing like this existed before."

Soviet law-enforcement officers consider themselves ill equipped and underfunded to combat the increased activity of organized crime. Senior Investigator Telman Gdlyan, who survived death threats while ferreting out the Uzbek case for the prosecutor's office, says the Soviet Union needs to create a single, independent investigatory commission with a department devoted solely to combatting organized crime. In an article he co-authored last June for the weekly Ogonyok, Gdlyan wondered "how it could happen that in a state as civilized as ours, such an enormous number of officials could rob many millions in riches and still remain in power." Even if the Churbanov trial provides some of the answers, the question is bound to resonate long into the future.