Russian Police Warn of Cocaine Blizzard : Drugs: In wake of record seizure, officials fear that dealers will see former Soviet Union as land of opportunity.

Top police officials warned Friday that Russia is in for a new kind of snowstorm--an onslaught by drug dealers who see the former Soviet Union as one of the last great untapped cocaine markets.

“Russia is a blank spot for them, and all the drugs are directed here,” said Sergei Volokhov of the Security Ministry’s anti-smuggling unit.

Volokhov’s service had just netted the biggest cocaine shipment by far it has ever caught--a ton of the white powder concealed in cans marked “Meat and Potatoes.”

Russian television showed St. Petersburg police officers, using awkward mechanical can openers, laboriously opening 20 tons of cans from Colombia, one by one, to determine which held food and which held packets of cocaine.

Volokhov said Russian authorities had caught tons of hashish on its way from Afghanistan in 1990 and 1991 and dealt often with marijuana and opium grown in Central Asia.

But mass quantities of cocaine are new to them.

As the former Soviet Union’s strict border control crumbles, Russia has found itself newly plagued by illegal traffic in everything from arms to oil. The collapsing economy and general disorder have also spurred hundreds of new domestic drug producers to set up shop and to seek access to Western markets. Police say they raided more than 70 synthetic-drug laboratories in Russia last year, with an average of 50 people working in each.

“When a living being becomes weak, hawks begin circling over it,” Security Ministry spokesman Vladimir Tomarovsky said of Russia’s general vulnerability in this topsy-turvy period. “Disaster is not just knocking on our door, it is already bursting into our house.”

Vodka has been Russia’s drug of choice for centuries. But statistics show illegal drugs are gaining a strong foothold here. Moscow police say that in the capital alone, 15 times more narcotics were used in 1992 than in 1987.

It is hard to imagine cocaine attracting much of a following in a country where the average salary now hovers at $20 a month. But economic reform has created a new elite of young wheeler-dealers who add to their prestige with showy Western cars, clothes and vices.

And security officials argue that cocaine dealers are making an effort to develop Russia as a market because they have exceeded demand almost everywhere else.

“They have really enormous reserves of cocaine in the world,” said Nikolai Kuzmin, chief of the Security Ministry’s anti-smuggling unit. “And according to United Nations data, practically the entire adult population of the world could be supplied with cocaine for a year.

“They are looking for any ways and means to conquer new markets, thus threatening the interests of Russia,” Kuzmin said.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, using the familiar terminology of a “war on drugs,” signed a special decree on combatting traffic in narcotics this month; the Security Ministry added 2,000 people to its staff this year to help in the battle.

But with Russia’s borders now full of holes and Russian customs officials infamous for their corruption, prospects of stemming a new flow of drugs into the old Soviet Union are dim.

“I see disaster here,” Tomarovsky said. “Let us recall the popular hero of Mario Puzo’s novel, the godfather Don Corleone. What stopped this known Mafia leader? He was afraid of drug trading. He was afraid of the business’s disastrous consequences.”