COLUMN ONE : Tracking the Russian Connection : Former Soviet republics have become what one Moscow newspaper calls ‘Narcostan’--the Land of Drugs. Post-breakup chaos creates a tempting ‘bridge’ to Europe for smugglers and a boom in illegal labs.

The pills were snow white, a quarter-inch across and illegal. Taking one would cause jabbering, drooling and flashbacks for eight hours. Two of the 300-milligram tablets would induce hallucinations. Four would be fatal.

They were one of the most noteworthy products to date of the “Russian Connection.”

Over a six-month period, the state-run Latbiofarm pharmaceutical plant, a short drive from here, churned out more than 11 million amphetamines. An estimated 50 people, from the plant manager to workers handling shipping and transport, were kept busy.

Each tablet sold for $5 to $6.25 on the underground Western market. A fortune’s worth--at least 4 1/2 tons--poured from a gleaming, ultramodern pill press and were wrapped in lots of 1,000 in brown or black plastic.

To fool customs agents, the product was labeled as Remantadin, a prescription remedy for influenza, and shipped in crates with official-looking but bogus medical certificates.

Because of its scale and boldness, the Latbiofarm operation has astonished even seasoned professionals of the international fight against drug dealing.

“Here’s a state-owned factory taking orders from drug traffickers to deliver illegal drugs!” U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief Robert C. Bonner marveled in a telephone interview. “They just needed the business.”

The amphetamine mill in the suburb of Olaine was shut down by police last winter. But its operations were just one of many incidents highlighting the arrival of a new big-league player on the world narcotics scene: Russia and the other former republics of the Soviet Union.

Still being forged, the “Russian Connection” already has many links. In Russia itself, cannabis grows wild on more than 3.7 million acres--an area bigger than Connecticut.

Opium poppies have been cultivated for years in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and are now reportedly being sown in the foothills of the northern Caucasus.

Once a totalitarian state, Russia faces a breakdown of order that makes it a weakly policed, tempting “bridge” for Europe-bound opium, heroin and hashish from Afghanistan, the “Golden Triangle” of Southeast Asia and nearby drug producers like Turkey and Afghanistan.

“Tons of drugs are being smuggled via our country, but we’re catching only a few kilograms,” said Aslanbek A. Aslakhanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s committee on law, order and crime.

The Moscow-based newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said the old Soviet Union has turned into “Narcostan”--the Land of Drugs.

Police in Western Europe, which lies at the other end of the drug pipeline, offer a more muted concern. “It’s not our biggest problem today, but it’s growing and we’re worried,” said Leo Schuster, head of the German Criminal Drug Commission in Cologne.

Off the record, German police officials dismiss anti-narcotics measures being taken in the former Soviet republics as a “finger in the dike.”

To add to the new challenges facing law enforcement authorities, in a spasm of post-Soviet liberalism, Russian lawmakers decriminalized the use of all drugs in December, 1991.

“The Dutch have only legalized soft substances (like marijuana and hashish),” lamented Col. Arkady G. Kuznetsov, an expert on narcotics and organized crime at the Russian Interior Ministry. “But in our country, everything became legal--all at once.”

The illogic in the lawmakers’ approach makes the police colonel grimace: The Supreme Soviet left production, transport and dealing in narcotics as criminal offenses. By decriminalizing use but not supply, an explosion of drug-linked crimes was guaranteed.

Kuznetsov estimates that 3 million to 4.5 million Russians are regular narcotics users--and their ranks are growing. That’s at least twice the figure of a few years ago, and a turnaround for a land that, according to Soviet propaganda, never had a problem with the “bourgeois” scourge of drug abuse.

The war in the Balkans has also forced international dealers who target the European market to reorient delivery routes from the battle-torn region to a more easterly north-south axis: through Romania, Hungary and what once was Czechoslovakia, or through Russia, Belarus and the Baltic states.

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For the West, this is the main danger, the bear-like, affable Kuznetsov affirms--that Russia is becoming a conduit for the transshipment of high-quality heroin, hashish and other drugs. Because of climate and soil conditions, top-grade cannabis or opium poppies do not grow well on Russian soil, he said, although there is a surfeit of low-grade product.

In one unprecedented episode that set off a warning signal for the DEA in faraway Washington, more than a ton of Colombian cocaine, disguised as part of a shipment of canned food, was seized a few months ago at the Russian-Finnish border. The deal was so big that customs officials are still opening cans, said Gennady Bolonkin, a spokesman for the St. Petersburg office of Russia’s Security Ministry.

Bonner calls the Vyborg bust proof that Colombian traffickers have begun to exploit Russia’s political and economic chaos to use the country as a “back door” to make deliveries to the Western European cocaine market.

And some criminals may range even farther afield. Moscow police recently arrested Rafail Bagdasaryan, an ethnic Armenian, at a hotel across the street from McDonald’s. The 62-year-old, a legal invalid, carried a short-barreled Italian-made automatic fitted with a silencer.

He is believed to be the mastermind who set up drug routes linking Russia with Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and Japan. But that may not have been enough for him. The man known in the criminal world as “Rafik Svo” was arrested after submitting a falsified application to the U.S. Embassy to get a visa to fly to America.

There are other signs that Russians, who now can travel abroad at will, are engaging in international trafficking. Bonner says DEA intelligence indicates that Colombian dealers have leased Soviet-built, Antonov-32 cargo planes, complete with Russian crews. Each twin-engine turboprop could carry four tons of cocaine.

Russian sailors who work aboard one of the world’s largest merchant fleets are also moonlighting as contraband couriers. In Melbourne, Australia, seaman Igor Obcharuk was recently arrested as he tried to smuggle in 12 pounds of heroin and cannabis resin worth $7 million Australian. He faces the possibility of up to 30 years’ forced labor.

Last year, two Russian sailors were detained in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge in possession of 24 pounds of cocaine. One crew mate on the Greek-registered banana boat Free Atlantic claimed that half of the Russian sailors on ships plying the Colombia-to-Europe route collaborate with the Colombian cartels.

The collapse of Russian industry left thousands of world-class chemists without jobs or slashed their earnings to poverty levels. Narcotics gives them a whole new career.

Last summer, near the cemetery where former Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev is buried, three men detained by police were carrying 18 capsules of a powerful synthetic opiate, known to chemists as trimethylfentanyl.

Police raided a homemade lab and found a chemistry major from Moscow State University in charge. Of the white powder he was concocting, two grams--about the equivalent of two packets of sugar--would make enough solution to inject into the arms of thousands of users.

The Russians believe that trimethylfentanyl, hundreds of times stronger than heroin, may have been discovered by illicit chemists in their country. Americans such as the DEA’s Bonner doubt that. But there is no denying the man-made opiate’s dangerous potency. In the United States, DEA agents recently shut the chief lab manufacturing the drug, blamed for the deaths of 130 Americans, Bonner said.

The collapse of authority in much of the old Soviet Union gives traffickers free rein, because customs checks of baggage on, say, overnight trains between Russia and Latvia are virtually nonexistent. Through civil-war-convulsed Tajikistan, contraband of all sorts can flow from major drug producers like Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In 1992, at least 189 illegal narcotics labs were raided by Russian police. Many admittedly were hole-in-the-wall operations extracting low-grade opium from dried poppies, or “poppy straw.” But Kuznetsov says one operation turning out trimethylfentanyl involved four star students who borrowed equipment from the chemistry department at Kazan State University and then shipped the powder to Moscow.

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The drug known in street jargon as steklo , or glass, was liquefied and put into glass ampuls by other chemists in Azerbaijan, then reshipped for retail sale.

“The military-industrial complex is in a crisis situation,” lawmaker Aslakhanov explained. “A lot of people with good brains worked for them. Such people, chemists, are being recruited for the illegal production of drugs. They in turn recruit talented graduates of medical institutes.”

The improbable story of Latbiofarm shows the daunting challenges posed by the growth of drug production and distribution in the former Soviet Union. Most likely the operation would still be humming along, churning out millions in profits, if German police hadn’t impounded wooden crates filled with more than three tons of the pills at the Frankfurt airport in December.

A test showed the pills to be analogous to the drug known in the United States as Ecstasy. The quantity seized in Frankfurt was valued at $170 million.

The amphetamines were traced to a shabby, gray, four-story building at the Latbiofarm plant. In a raid organized by Latvian authorities on a Friday morning when the complex was idle, 100 police and law enforcement officials swooped down.

What they found in the white-tiled rooms still makes Alexander P. Kostenko, chief of Latvia’s narcotics police, shake his head in wonder.

The illegal drug makers had acquired a German-made pill-producing machine, a contraption of stainless steel and glass that pressed specially mixed amphetamine powder into tablets.

“Such state-of-the-art gadgetry is far beyond anything possessed by Latvia’s pharmaceutical industry,” Kostenko said.

Plant director Ilmar F. Penke, his deputy and the chief of Latbiofarm’s central laboratory were arrested. Under interrogation, Penke said his only goal was to provide job security for his employees, who were paid from 14 to 17 cents an hour.

If found guilty of unlawful narcotics production and trafficking in contraband, Penke and his subordinates could get up to 15 years in prison and have their property confiscated.

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Economic pressures may prove overpowering for other people who have not been able to earn a decent livelihood under post-Communist conditions. According to Russia’s Interior Ministry, a single ruble invested in the “narco business” reaps up to 1,000 rubles in profit.

Latbiofarm contracted for “Remantadin” with a shadowy Slovakian firm, Weinwurm S.A. Chemicals, and instructions on amphetamine manufacture were shipped here from France, Latvian authorities said. The Slovakian firm claims its Latvian partner made an error and produced something it didn’t want--the white pills.

Since the pills were unmasked, German police have arrested two people, and the Slovaks have arrested four. The affair shows how rapidly commercial ties have sprung up among Western dealers and willing associates in the soft legal underbelly of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The whole incident makes Latvian officials shrug and admit that their country--a land on the Baltic Sea about the size of West Virginia--is unable to cope with the mounting flow of drugs by itself. “We have no customs service to speak of, we have no means to stop this wave,” Kostenko said.

The port of Riga, once one of the Soviet Union’s busiest, is virtually unpatrolled by Latvia’s fledgling customs service, he said. In Kostenko’s division of the Interior Ministry, the Unit for Combatting Organized Narcotics Crime, there are a total of three officers.

Corruption is another problem. Latvian police and customs officers typically take home about $60 a month. “Now they have ample opportunities to ‘compensate,’ ” Kostenko joked grimly.

Even with the best intentions, Latvia is hamstrung by a dearth of law enforcement talent. Because of the end of rule from Moscow, 50% of Latvia’s police inspectors and 90% of its customs agents have departed.

The end result: Latvia is on the way to becoming a “new Colombia,” Kostenko said.

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Conscious of the problem posed by newly independent states like Latvia, German drug police say they are establishing liaison offices in former Soviet cities such as Riga and in Eastern European capitals including Prague, Budapest and Bucharest. But German officials say such cooperative efforts are still inadequate.

Meanwhile, the drugs flow into this city by the Baltic: the animal tranquilizer PCP--”angel dust”--and amphetamines like Pervitine illegally manufactured in St. Petersburg; loads of hashish; marijuana and opium from Central Asia, the Caucasus and countries of Asia.

But it is Russia, now in the throes of economic and political turmoil, that poses the greatest challenge to the international fight against narcotics. In February, operatives from the Security and Interior ministries made the biggest cocaine bust in Russian history: 1.1 metric tons valued at more than $100 million.

The cocaine had arrived in Finland by sea from Colombia and was loaded into a truck for transport to the Russian customs checkpoint at Vyborg. Wrapped in plastic film, the cocaine was stuffed in cans labeled “meat with potatoes.” Some had been doused with vinegar to fool drug-sniffing dogs. To further reduce the chance of detection, the powder was scattered throughout a 20-ton load of canned goods.

The preparations were for naught. The Russians are tight-lipped about the operation, but they apparently were tipped off by Israeli police. One arrest--that of a Russian-born Israeli--has been made. According to Kuznetsov, the cocaine was preceded by a Russian-born “emissary” of the Colombian cocaine traders, who spent two weeks scouting the scene. The man, he said, then flew to the United States.

Fully aware of the new challenges posed by the Russian connection, the DEA last year trained 117 Russian narcotics officers, although former KGB Chairman Vadim V. Bakatin once told Bonner that he needed 5,000. To Bonner, the weaknesses of the Russian operation are readily evident.

“You don’t have the police capable of doing sophisticated drug operations,” he said. “You have a very critical lack of drug (detection) apparatus and training.”

Russia’s government has beefed up its anti-drug force, and by the end of 1993, 3,500 to 4,000 narcotics agents should be on the job.

The top drug policeman in Russia, Maj. Gen. Alexander N. Sergeyev, figures he needs about three times that; in Moscow alone, city police estimate, 15,000 to 20,000 people are engaged in drug trafficking and dealing.

Because Russia’s new borders are dangerously porous, improving things at home isn’t enough. Already in desperate economic straits, Central Asia has long been fertile ground for poppy and cannabis cultivation. In Soviet times, economists estimated that per acre, an illicit opium poppy crop generated 200 times more profit than a wheat crop.

Last year in Uzbekistan, the acreage planted in opium poppies increased tenfold, according to a fact-finding mission of the Paris-based Geopolitical Drug Observatory, an independent watchdog group. In Tajikistan, authorities reported on May 24 the destruction of opium poppy plantations covering almost half a million acres.

Stanching the flow north from the Caucasus is also an urgent priority for Moscow. Last year, of the drugs that entered Russia from former Soviet republics, 38.6% came from Azerbaijan.

Sources in Russia’s Ministry of Security believe that Azerbaijan, like the Colombia of yore, has made drug trafficking into almost a government-sponsored activity. In Moscow, 82% of the drug arrests last year were of Azerbaijanis. Drug profits are reportedly used to fund the war against the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Where the narcotics money goes as post-Communist economies rapidly and extensively privatize themselves is also of great concern. Col. Valentin Roshchin of the Moscow Criminal Inspectorate estimates that fully one-third of Russia’s new entrepreneurs are linked to drug dealing or the laundering of drug profits.

In another analogy with Colombia, where cocaine became king, there is a blurring in today’s Russia among criminals, business people and elected leaders. Granted, the narcotics problems have not reached “Miami Vice” levels. But many Russians see their country at the stage where America was in the “flower power” era of the late 1960s, when marijuana, hashish, LSD and other drugs zoomed in popularity.

As he looks over the statistics, Sergeyev of Russia’s Interior Ministry sees nothing less than the “narcotization” of his country.

Over the last 10 years, drug-related crime in Russia has risen threefold. In some areas, up to 70% of economic crimes and thefts are said by police to be related to drug addiction. Last year, 21.8 tons of drugs were confiscated, or more than 20 times the 1980 figure.

Even with drug use decriminalized, Russian authorities registered 29,805 narcotics-related crimes last year, or 54.3% more than in 1991. The trend continues upward this year.

Punishment is so light that police publicly complain. Of the 10,366 people convicted by Russian courts last year of drug-related crimes, only five individuals received prison terms of eight to 15 years. The law makes no provision for longer sentences.

The Interior Ministry in Moscow wants a new law making use of at least “hard” drugs like heroin a crime. A bill is being drawn up only now. President Boris N. Yeltsin has also sent a “conceptualization” of his leadership’s battle against narcotics to the Supreme Soviet, but the legislature, locked in a brutal political struggle with the executive, has other priorities.

The government of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin is also reassessing the cost of a multimillion-dollar interagency campaign against narcotics dealing; it must be overhauled to take account of the collapsing value of the ruble.

Widespread lawbreaking, easy money, illicit pleasures--Kuznetsov considers the great challenges faced by drug agents in Russia and the other former republics of the Soviet Union and searches for a parallel. He finds one he knows from the movies--the Prohibition-era struggle between Al Capone and Eliot Ness.

“The way it was in Chicago in the 1920s for you? That’s the way it is now for us,” he said.

Dahlburg is a Times correspondent in Moscow. Moscow reporter Igor Baranovsky, Moscow Bureau reporter Sergei L. Loiko and Times Berlin correspondent Tyler Marshall contributed to this report.

Comparing Drug Activity

Drug problems in the United States still dwarf those in Russia.

Number of annual drug-related deaths: U.S.: 6,601* Russia: 1,741* Russia’s figures on drug-related deaths and drug abuse are for 1992; U.S. data in that category is for 1991, the lastest available.

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Number of people who use illicit drugs at least once a month: U.S.: 12.8 million Russia: 1.5 million +

Number of federal drug agents: U.S.: 3,631 Russia: 4,000** ** Estimate for late 1993

Russia’s Growing Addiction

Drug-connected crimes (1992): 29,805, up 54% over 1991

Drug-connected crimes (first quarter of ‘93): 10,975

Confiscation of illegal drugs: 1992: 22 tons 1990: 16 tons 1985: 4 tons 1980: Less than 1 ton Source: National Institutute on Drug Abuse

Post-Soviet Drug Problems

Illegal drugs have made quick inroads into the former Soviet Union on many levels: production, consumption and trafficking. The maps below show some of the problem areas in selected categories:

Illegal Cannabis Grown

Cannabis grows wild on more than 3.7 million acres in Russia alone. GEORGIA LITHUANIA BELARUS UKRAINE TURKMENISTAN KAZAKHSTAN ARMENIA KYRGYZSTAN TAJIKISTAN *

Transport Points

Russia and other former Soviet republics are becoming a back door for drug shipments into Europe. Kaliningrad St. Petersburg Brest, Belarus Chop, Ukraine Odessa, Ukraine Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow *

Poppy Production and Opium Trade

The acreage planted in opium poppies increased tenfold in Uzbekistan last year, a watchdog group found. UKRAINE BELARUS LITHUANIA UZBEKISTAN *

Hashish, heroin, Amphetamines and Cocaine

Heroin and hashish producers of Southeast Asia and Afghanistan are exploiting weakly policed borders. There has been at least one attempt to ship a large quantity of cocaine from outside. LATVIA Vyborg (Cocaine Entry Point) Riga and Olaine (Pill Factory and Amphetamine Route) Kazan, Russia (Underground Lab) Baku, Azerbaijan (Underground Lab) UZBEKISTAN *

Crime and Addiction

Lawmakers decriminalized drug use but not supply, triggering a surge of drug-linked crime.

Areas of addiction or drug-related crime 1. Kaliningrad 2. St. Petersburg 3. Moscow 4. Krasnodar 5. Sochi 6. Stavropol 7. Astrakhan 8. Samara 9. Kazan 10. Kirov 11. Omsk 12. Tomsk 13. Vladivostok Sources: Russian Ministry of Interior; Russian Supreme Soviet Committee on Law, Order and Crime; Geopolitical Drug Observatory, Paris