Crime to pass the time

Press, 8 December 1988, Page 12

Crime to pass the time

XAN SMILEY

of the “Daily Telegraph” reports from Moscow

I FEEL much safer on the streets of Moscow than I do in London. I have yet to meet anybody who has been mugged, though it does happen. Children go happily unaccompanied on the Metro, Moscow’s underground, even at night. Rape and murder are among 18 crimes that can earn a death sentence. Yet the Soviet murder rate, per head, is three-and-a-half times Britain’s, according to statistics, that are trickling out for the first time. Most killings, I strongly suspect, are drunken domestic affairs done in those depressingly tiny, drab, uniform apartments where most Soviet people live. “We suffer such frustrating boredom and humiliations in our public life, at work, in the meat

queue, that we take out our anger at home,” a woman doctor told me, amid the usual complaints of practically all Russian women I meet, who say their husbands drink too much. Although the press is starting to report Mafia-type crime rings and racketeering, sometimes said to be linked to the vilified Brezhnev political fiefdoms, it is small beer compared with organised crime in the West. There are three reasons for this. First, the web of intrusive controls still enmeshing Soviet life, such as the internal passport system, make it much harder for people to cover up their misdeeds. Second, the penalties are exceedingly tough: a drunken brawl can easily get you a year in a labour camp; street violence

involving a knife or weapon can get you seven years. Third, there is so little worth stealing. There is probably far less burglary, car theft or physical crime against the person than Britain has, and youthful violence seems less rampant than in British inner cities. But gang warfare is spreading, especially in the gloomy industrial towns of under 50,000 or so people. A report just published says that the situation is so bad that an “emergency co-ordinating council of law-keeping authorities” has met in Moscow.

This year in Moscow alone, say the police, they have stopped 36 gang battles involving more than 4200 youths, with a kind of Soviet Sharks and Jets scene worsening in the past two months.