Soviet Hijackers Have Officials Seeing Red : Air piracy: The latest of 11 attempts in one month is foiled by passengers and crew. Sweden has agreed to extradite a 17-year-old who took over an airliner June 9.

After a quarrel with his parents, a Soviet teen-ager hijacked a plane by threatening to blow it up with a dummy grenade. Another young man held up three candles tied together, announced that it was a bomb and said he would use it if the plane were not redirected to Sweden. And a 30-year-old mother of two attempted to hijack a plane with a kitchen knife in her hand and a baby in her lap.

In the last month, six Soviet airliners have been hijacked to Sweden, Finland and Turkey, and five other attempts were thwarted, the latest apparently on Thursday, when a 17-year-old tried to hijack a Leningrad-to-Murmansk flight to Stockholm before being overpowered by passengers and crew. On Tuesday, the same thing had happened on the same route; that time, the thwarted hijacker had wanted to go to Paris.

“A chain reaction has been started,” said Vasily A. Fomin, the deputy director of the transportation security department of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. “Nothing like this has ever happened here.”

Until a month ago, there had been no successful hijackings of a Soviet aircraft since late 1988. Between 1978 and 1988, there were only 20 attempts--and only four were successful.

The latest crop of hijackers has a distinct profile, Fomin said. Most are males, between the ages of 17 and 20, trying to run away from troubles or unattractive futures. Two were trying to avoid military service, one had recently been kicked out of his technical school and another had just argued with his parents and been asked to leave home.

The profile of the youthful male hijacker is new, Fomin said, because in the past “young people had a lot more discipline.” Most hijackers in the past were older, politically motivated and, frequently, desperate.

None of the recent hijackers had real explosives or firearms, although in most cases they pretended to be armed, according to Fomin. All have asked for political asylum in the country where they landed, and not one has been returned to the Soviet Union, despite Moscow’s repeated requests.

The hijacking spree, Fomin said, does not represent an upsurge in terrorism, since no one has been hurt and nothing destroyed.

During an interview, Fomin frequently laughed at humorous elements in the hijackings and the unsuccessful attempts. He seemed to consider them to be closer to juvenile delinquency than real crimes.

When checking the baggage of one man who had attempted to hijack a plane, Fomin recounted, the police found about 15 pounds of sugar and six pounds of buckwheat porridge, both scarce commodities in the Soviet Union, instead of the bomb that the hijacker said was in the case.

“We have a lot of propaganda on television about the Western lifestyle. But we have a lot of economic troubles in our own country,” Fomin said. “Without a doubt, this has encouraged the hijackings.”

Local media attention also encourages hijackings, according to Fomin.

“The newspapers all write about it, and it is talked about on the radio all the time; this aggravates the problem,” he said.

Before recent reforms freed the Soviet press to write “negative” stories without censorship, hijackings were not even mentioned in the news media.

In 1973, a Soviet man attempted to hijack an Aeroflot plane over Siberia. The Soviet press ignored the story even though the plane crashed, killing all 81 aboard. The bomb that the hijacker was brandishing apparently went off as he was demanding to be flown to China.

Sweden seems to be the destination of choice for Soviet air pirates today. Three of the recently hijacked planes were forced to land in Stockholm.

Sweden is popular as a destination, said Yuri I. Arshenevsky, the Interior Ministry’s deputy spokesman, “because there’s a stereotype that everyone lives well in Sweden. Besides, America is far away and Sweden is nearby.”

Soviet officials continue to push for extradition of the offenders.

“The ideal situation would have been if everyone was sent back immediately,” Arshenevsky said. “Then this problem would have stopped right away.”

There seems to be movement on that front, however. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the supreme courts of Finland and Sweden issued rulings clearing the way for their governments to decide whether to extradite young hijackers.

And on Thursday, the Swedish government said it would send 17-year-old Dmitri Semyonov back to the Soviet Union, where he faces a 10-year sentence if convicted of hijacking a Soviet plane on June 9.

The hijacking of an Aeroflot plane to Israel in December, 1988, showed how would-be hijackers are discouraged when the destination country extradites an offender, Fomin said.

In that incident, a group of men hijacked a bus full of children and demanded $2 million and a direct flight to Tel Aviv. Authorities gave in to the demands. On landing in Israel, the offenders were arrested and two days later sent back to the Soviet Union, where they were tried and sentenced. No successful hijackings from the Soviet Union were reported for the next year and a half.

Although hijackings were far less frequent in the past, when they did occur they were likely to end in bloodshed. In the last 32 years, according to the Soviet data released this month, 120 people died and more than 200 were injured in hijackings. Most of them were passengers.

The last such incident in which people were injured took place in March, 1988, when Soviet commandos stormed an aircraft that had been hijacked by a family of jazz musicians wanting to be taken to London.

The pilot tried to trick the hijackers by landing near the Finnish border but pretending that they were already out of Soviet territory. But the hijackers realized that they had been deceived and fought back. Six hijackers, a cabin attendant and three passengers died in the ensuing battle.