A Soviet Who Sees a World of Crime : Law enforcement: Drugs? Gangs? They’re common woes, says Andre Bolotnikov, a Leningrad cop attending a USC program.

It was a typical scene in the national war against drugs. Citizens had complained about strange activities in an apartment, so late one night four detectives decided to poke around a bit.

The first thing they noticed was the pungent aroma of acetone. Then they spotted two men who abruptly turned and started briskly down the sidewalk.

The detectives followed. The suspects walked faster. Finally, the cops broke into a run and confronted the men. One suspect struggled, cursing about harassment as the police wrestled him into handcuffs. A passing cabdriver told the cops he had seen the suspect toss something.

The detectives retrieved a vial containing the residue of a narcotic with the suspect’s fingerprints all over it.

Armed with a search warrant, the detectives returned to the apartment. With their 9-millimeter automatics ready, they kicked in the door and stumbled into a makeshift laboratory where two more suspects were processing opium poppies into tar heroin.

“It’s very bad stuff,” detective Andre Bolotnikov said of the drug. But it is only one of many illegal substances he and his colleagues in Leningrad routinely encounter in their efforts to control a growing drug problem in the Soviet Union.

For six weeks, Bolotnikov, 29, has been learning about the war on drugs from the American perspective. As one of four foreign exchange students enrolled at USC’s respected Delinquency Control Institute, he plops down each weekday at a desk to study crime alongside 41 colleagues from police departments as near as Hawthorne and as far as Ghana, Thailand and South Korea.

He sees more similarities than differences between crime in Los Angeles and Leningrad.

On the first day of class, for instance, instructors asked students, mostly active law enforcement professionals, to make poster-size charts listing their names, positions and their city’s problems. Bolotnikov’s poster blended with posters from Redwood City, Palm Springs and Los Angeles: Gangs. Family Violence. Drugs . . .

For years, he concedes, the Soviets were reluctant to discuss such issues. But with glasnost, the situation changed. The Leningrad militia--the Soviet term for its urban police--now regularly releases crime statistics, which the media routinely publish and broadcast.

“The militia has become very much open to the society,” Bolotnikov said. “Now people want to let us know about all kinds of crimes. I think it’s good. It raises the level of public awareness.” And that inspires citizens to come forward with more tips. “We get a lot of calls and letters sent to the department. . . .”

At the same time, many problems in the militia--a manpower shortage, lack of good equipment--have become public, he said. “It made our jobs a lot easier. People came to understand the difficulties.”

“The general attitude” in Leningrad, he said, “is that the whole country is undergoing profound changes and there are all kinds of difficulties connected with that. People are experiencing the loss of conditions they believed were eternal. Some people have lost their direction in life. Everyone understands that with these quick changes, the militia will have more challenges.”

As Soviet society opens up, new forms of crime blossom, he said, noting that gang violence is increasing. “We don’t have Crips and Bloods. We have groups of criminals, often juveniles, who use knives and nunchakus (martial arts weapons) to rob people.”

Overall, Soviet criminals are not as well armed as criminals in the United States, although many do carry weapons, which they dig up from World War II battlefields and use, for example, to extort money from merchants running small business and cooperatives. Also, he said, “People are deciding to go into the drug business and make themselves wealthy with the production of illegal drugs.”

With demand for drugs rising, the militia must deal with both traffickers and users, he said. Opium poppies have traditionally been grown in Soviet Central Asia; drug traffickers are skilled at getting raw materials into Soviet cities. Marijuana use is rising, criminals are manufacturing a drug with effects similar to those of methamphetamine, and enterprising Soviets have even developed “designer drugs,” including a form of synthetic heroin.

Contrary to stereotypes, the Soviet justice system is no more Draconian than that of the United States, Bolotnikov said, adding that possession of an illegal drug, generally, would draw a one- to three-year prison term, depending on the amount of drug. Convictions for drug thefts and other drug-related felonies earn longer sentences. “The criminal code says that if it is established that the drugs were possessed with the intent to sell, the criminal can get up to 12 years in jail.”

And anyone convicted of a drug-related crime in the Soviet Union is put through a medical anti-drug abuse program, he asserted.

Meanwhile, with larger and larger sums of money involved in crime, even cops are occasionally tempted, he said: “It happens. Not often. But it happens.”

There is no such thing as the “code of silence” that allegedly exists in some U.S. police forces, Bolotnikov claimed: “It is always considered honorable to find traitors within the service. If we find someone (breaking the law) we prosecute him. We don’t want anybody, even if he’s your partner, who engages in criminality. If he’s engaged in criminality, he has betrayed you. You get rid of him.”

Bolotnikov studied chemistry in college and planned to use his fluent English to teach at a foreign language university. But, like all Soviet men, he entered the military after earning his degree and decided that police work would be more rewarding: “I liked the action. I felt that was where my knowledge and skills could be best used.”

The Soviet drug problem was growing, and he thought his understanding of chemistry would help in examining the complex evidence involved in drug crimes. After starting out in street robberies, he moved to the narcotics division, where he has worked four years.

“I like the discipline, the camaraderie. It’s a manly thing to do, I believe,” Bolotnikov explained, as he sat in an empty classroom at the USC institute, dressed in a casual striped shirt, Levi’s, and running shoes.

Between classes, he has addressed local criminal-justice classes, civic groups and the Rio Hondo police academy. His audiences, eager to learn about police work in the Soviet Union, are surprised by his willingness to talk. “They give him standing ovations,” said Robert J. Barry, a 30-year veteran of the FBI and institute director.

At the institute, Bolotnikov and his fellow officers joke and banter casually in the halls or around the “roach coach” that arrives each morning with food and coffee. Like most officers, he is clearly more comfortable talking with his colleagues than with outsiders.

In private, he is self-effacing, almost shy, as he discusses himself, but open and enthusiastic in talking about his profession--almost to the point of boosterism.

The Leningrad militia, he says, maintains a force of about 1,500 detectives, most of whom have gone through a six-month academy training class. Detectives work mainly in plain clothes. Like their Los Angeles counterparts, they are equipped with 9-mm semiautomatic handguns, batons, handcuffs and flashlights. The force’s patrol cars are yellow jeeps or minivans with blue stripes, red lights and sirens. But the militia spends more time on foot patrols than the cops in this country.

Soviet detectives work eight-hour days, five days a week. The militia does not have overtime and detectives do not expect to be reimbursed or given time off for working long hours on a case. “But when a case is real hot, you work all the time necessary,” he said. “The chiefs sometimes have to shoo people out of work.”

Starting salary for a detective is about 260 rubles ($418) a month--a middle-income Soviet salary, Bolotnikov said.

He has a wife, Irina, a daughter, 3, and a son, 10. Because their girl has not adjusted to preschool, his wife, a teacher, stays home. Their marriage, he said, endures the same stresses as those of his U.S. colleagues. Still, he would not discourage his son, who sometimes boasts to his classmates about his dad’s work, from pursuing the same career: “He’s interested in police work, but I don’t want to push him. I want him to see what it’s like.”

Since arriving in Los Angeles, Bolotnikov has been to a Dodger game, the beach and other tourist sites. What he has enjoyed most are the unofficial ride-alongs comrades from the program have offered through their turf.

These close-ups of crime have not overwhelmed him. The difference between Los Angeles and Leningrad, he said, is that here “in one area you have no crime, and in other areas, you can’t walk at all,” while in Leningrad, the crime problem is spread evenly across the city. “Leningrad only has apartment houses,” he said. “No district is much different than another. We don’t have good income and bad income areas. The population is very much mixed. The affluent live in the same buildings where hooligans and winos live.”

As a result, the city as a whole has much less crime than some parts of Los Angeles and “the crime is much worse than in the good parts of L.A.” But there’s really no difference in crime fighting, “because the criminal is the same. Crime is the same. A rapist is a rapist is a rapist.”

By the same token, the time he has spent with his colleagues from America, as well as the cops from Ghana, Thailand, and South Korea have convinced him of one thing: “It’s just made me more sure that cops are cops everywhere.”