POLITICS-RUSSIA: New Concern over Rising Crime

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW, May 20 2002 (IPS) - Russian officials have been ordered to make renewed efforts to check an alarming rise in crime.

The crackdown has been ordered by Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov. New policing measures will seek to check murders, street crime and widespread corruption.

The measures follow strong concern expressed by President Vladimir Putin. “Murders, kidnappings, assaults and robberies are becoming virtually everyday occurrences,” Putin said at a meeting on crime last week.

Russian police have been asked also to solve more crime cases. Last year about half the cases of serious crime remained unsolved.

More than three million crimes were recorded last year, Ustinov announced last week. Close to two million of these were serious crimes, and of these about 884,000 remain unsolved, Ustinov said.

In all 14,848 people had been murdered in the whole Soviet Union in 1986, according to crime figures given by Ustinov. By 1990, 16,122 murders were recorded in Russia. Last year more than 34,000 murders were recorded. Besides, about 30,000 people went missing in Russia last year.

The number of murders in Moscow remained high last year, though the capital has seen worse. There were 1,700 murders, up 21 per cent from 2000. In 1994, at the height of market reforms and property redistribution, 2,863 murders were registered in Moscow. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, there had been 200 to 300 murder cases a year in Moscow.

Business related killings now directly account for almost 20 per cent of all murders, the Moscow police say. In Soviet days, they were less than 1 per cent of the total.

Not all of the rise in crime is directly related to market reforms, the police say. The collapse of the district police system is behind much of the rise in crime. In Soviet times, for example, several categories of men and women released from prison had to report to the district police regularly. But lack of funding and control means the system no longer works effectively.

Criminality has been growing also within the police. About 16,000 law enforcement officers were disciplined last year, and 200 were given prison terms, Ustinov said. At the same time corruption has been growing within other government agencies. Ustinov says about 25,000 Russian officials were charged with criminal offences last year. Of these, 1,326 were sentenced to imprisonment.

In the face of growing demands for cleaning up government agencies Ustinov said he saw no need to carry out a new anti-graft campaign in Russia. He said a growing number of officials are being prosecuted already for taking bribes.

But Russian authorities are a long way from ending corruption. Chechnya has become Russia’s biggest ‘black hole’. Last year about 711 million rubles (24 million dollars), or 6 per cent of the money allocated for the restoration of Chechnya was reported to have been misspent. Interior minister Boris Gryzlov says another 567.5 million rubles (19.1 million dollars) were stolen in Chechnya last year in 1,147 cases of theft.

In an attempt to tackle corruption, funds will now be transferred only for designated projects, deputy economic development and trade minister Mohammed Tsikanov announced last week.

Officials in Russia are notorious for their thirst for bribes to supplement their meagre official salaries, which average about 100 dollars a month. Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has signed an order boosting prosecutors’ salaries by 160 per cent this year. But this move is seen as hardly sufficient to deal with widespread corruption among law enforcement officers.