COLUMN ONE : Moscow’s Brothers Yakovlev : The three children admit they killed a man and say they steal to survive. Their life of crime reflects a boom in juvenile delinquency fueled by a breakdown in the post-Soviet social system.

They knocked the drunk down and beat in his face with paving stones, kicking him and punching him with all the viciousness coiled in their wiry boys’ bodies, until his rattling grunts stopped.

They watched him die.

Then the three Yakovlev brothers, all younger than 15 at the time, cleaned out his pockets--although they did not kill him to rob him, said the youngest.

“He swore at us, and we’re just kids, and he said bad words about our mother, we beat him for that, that’s what we killed him for,” 11-year-old Volodya piped in his choirboy soprano.

If you happen to visit Moscow this summer and gravitate to the famous McDonald’s on Pushkin Square, you could run into Volodya, still out on the streets, one of a gang of smudge-faced, sour-smelling boys in filthy clothes who beg from foreign tourists and hire themselves out as car-watchers to Mercedes owners.

For Russia, Volodya and his brothers are a new phenomenon, and perhaps the most ominous symptom of the rot afflicting the heart of this society, whose moral bearings and basic order were swept out along with the obsolete ideology of the old Communist regime.

Stanislav Govorukhin, the eternally gloomy Russian director, warned in “The Great Criminal Revolution,” his latest film: “A new tribe is growing up now--dark, criminal. An uneducated tribe of slaves.”

“Russia’s future is being stolen,” he said. “Children are the future of a country, and what the country will become depends on how its children grow up.”

Juvenile delinquency is booming in Russia, fueled by daily proof in this mob-ridden country that crime pays and helped along by disorder in the courts, schools and city councils that used to help keep it under control.

In 1993, crimes by minors jumped 13%, nearly 10 times more than the overall crime rise of 1.4%, and they are multiplying even faster this year. Officials say Russia now has 60,000 homeless juveniles, while money for boarding schools and rehabilitation dwindles, producing a class of what social workers refer to as “children in crisis.”

“A generation of criminals is growing up right before our eyes,” said Vladimir Kolokoltsev, chief of the 108th Police Precinct that covers the very center of Moscow.

On the city’s streets, it has become common to see children of 8 or 9 weaving through traffic to hawk drinks and newspapers or to beg from drivers in the middle of what should be a school day. Train stations host bands of urchins, and police report a sharp rise in juvenile prostitution.

It is in this context that the Yakovlev family--Volodya, his six siblings and widowed, semi-invalid mother--have gained a certain renown as the face of Russia’s rapid social decay. The Izvestia newspaper called them “The Little Killers From the Underpass” and the Kuranty daily used their tale of murder as a jumping-off point for a list of recent hideous crimes by minors.

Natalia Ptushkina, the juvenile officer at the 108th Precinct, first noticed the Yakovlevs early last year, when they started coming downtown from their working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Moscow.

“What could literally be called a children’s gang was forming,” she said. “It began from a common interest in money--first they washed cars, then begged in the streets, and soon took to stealing.”

Gangs are not uncommon in Russia, though with their heavy emphasis on money-making they tend to resemble Prohibition-era packs of criminals rather than modern L.A.-style street fighters. But a children’s gang, and such an aggressive one, was something new.

When the police pulled in the four youngest Yakovlevs--Volodya, 11, Dima, 12, Vitya, 14, and Andrei, 15--they often found packets of money, expensive toys and personal stereos on them. The boys admitted to rolling drunks for the money, but because no victims ever came to complain, the police could not file charges.

A similar legal loophole has kept Volodya and Vitya on the streets even after they admitted to participating in murder. Russian law says that children can be held responsible for crimes beginning at age 14. Vitya turned 14 after the killing; Andrei, who also took part, is in a juvenile detention center, possibly for years.

Last year, about 100,000 Russian minors younger than 14 committed crimes for which they cannot be held responsible, according to police statistics.

“Technically, we can send them to reform schools, but unfortunately we now have very few such institutions and only about 3,000 of those kids who committed crimes last year were sent to such schools,” said Lt. Gen. Vyacheslav Ogorodnikov, head of the Russian Interior Ministry’s public order division.

In California, violent youths are ushered into an elaborate juvenile justice system, although it too has been overburdened by a sharp rise in teen-age crime. Each year, more than 40,000 youthful offenders pass through that system in Los Angeles alone, with at least 4,000 housed on any given day in one of the county Probation Department’s three juvenile halls or 20 probation camps.

But a minor accused of murder in California may be tried as an adult, and receive a sentence as harsh as life in prison without parole, if he or she was at least 16 at the time of the killing. Murderers younger than 16 usually are sentenced to the California Youth Authority, a sort of juvenile prison system, where state law requires that all inmates be released when they turn 25.

For Moscow’s Brothers Yakovlev, however, the boys who admitted to coldblooded, lighthearted murder, no such punishment awaited their crime.

It was on Feb. 24 at 2 a.m. that Volodya approached a 60-year-old mechanic who was staggering through the underpass at Pushkin Square and asked for a cigarette. The man sent him off with a curse, and Volodya enlisted his two brothers in taking revenge.

Volodya tells the story differently every time, and Vitya communicates mainly in monosyllables or belches, but the consensus is that after the murder the boys called an ambulance to see what would happen. When the doctors reported that they had encountered a bunch of kids near the corpse, the police knew whom to seek.

The boys, meanwhile, brought the money they had found on the drunk to their mother and went to school the next day--a rare event--because they knew that bananas, rice and other food aid would be distributed there. At school, they pretended that nothing had happened. When arrested, however, they confessed immediately.

And kept confessing. According to Izvestia, the boys claimed to have killed several other drunks, including two in the town of Oryol and one whom they followed off a tram and ambushed because, they said, he had insulted a girl they were with and tried to avoid paying his fare.

“Mama knows we killed him,” Volodya told a police officer. “She told us not to do that anymore. We agreed that we wouldn’t.”

Police say they have been able to confirm only the Pushkin Square killing and that it is likely the brothers’ other “killings” were actually beatings in which the victims managed to survive.

The one-family crime wave continues. Kolokoltsev said the two younger boys were recently caught stealing bottles of liquor from the Night Flight disco near Pushkin Square. Once again, because they were underage, they were let off.

“They promised they wouldn’t kill again but couldn’t promise that they wouldn’t steal,” Kolokoltsev said.

The Yakovlevs steal, they say, to support their mother, Svetlana, a 44-year-old who acknowledges that she looks more like 70, with her hair thinning and many teeth gone. Social workers and police say she actively sends the boys onto the streets to bring home money, but she denies it vehemently, saying she believes that they neither stole nor killed.

“I don’t send them to steal or gather bottles,” she said. “I pull them home with both hands.”

Home, however, is not a good place--a foul apartment in the working-class district of Strogino. It is big by Russian standards but not big enough for six sons, the oldest of which already has a wife and baby, and one daughter. The stairwell still smells of smoke from a recent attempt, probably by hostile neighbors, to burn the Yakovlevs’ door; the elevator stinks like a public restroom. The interior looks as if it had been attacked by some kind of urban locust--almost stripped of furniture, room doors missing, wallpaper peeling, scattered mattresses where the children sleep when they sleep at home.

The boys scramble about, monkey-like, throwing karate kicks in the air, eating spaghetti with their hands, scrabbling at adults and dipping into visitors’ pockets, practicing their only English: “Give me one dollar.”

The Yakovlevs’ father died last year of alcohol-related poisoning. He used to beat the children so badly that they would run away for months, Svetlana said; a night clerk in a food store, he drank through his salary and most of the family’s possessions.

She lives on a disability pension of about $50 a month, she said, plus some state support for the children. The boys “feed themselves,” and on a recent evening they brought home bread, cheese and butter for her as well. She has fought every attempt to institutionalize them and, at least for those 14 and younger, has won.

“They don’t want to go to an orphanage because this is home; here they’re their own masters,” she said. If they are taken away, “I just know they’ll either run away or kill themselves. Vitya at first didn’t know where to cut himself,” she said, slicing at her wrist with her index finger. “Now he knows where.”

In the old Soviet days of totalitarian control over private lives, the problem of the Yakovlevs would have been solved simply, police say.

First, there was a curfew that did not allow children younger than 16 to be out on the streets without their parents after 11 p.m. Second, Ptushkina of the 108th Precinct said, district Commissions on Juvenile Affairs had the power to deprive abusive or neglectful parents of their children and send the kids to orphanages or reform schools. Authorities could also fine parents for their children’s crimes.

“Before, there were levers,” she said. “If parents didn’t take care of their kids, you could go to their workplace and hold meetings to put pressure on them. And the Commissions on Juvenile Affairs worked much better than now--during the reorganization of Moscow for a couple of years they ceased to exist altogether.”

Now, she said, “I can’t even say we have a system” to deal with troubled children, “so much has been destroyed or made so complicated.”

The school system too is caught in disarray and financial crisis. Once, teachers would have come to the Yakovlevs’ home to get the truants back to school; no more, not on current salaries.

Police say that money troubles have also led to an increase in family problems. Economic reforms and the massive inflation they have brought have made it nearly impossible to live on an average salary. Many parents become so preoccupied with scraping out a living that they have far less time for their children.

Lack of money has also cut back drastically on healthy recreation for children. In the summertime at least, the Yakovlevs could once have gone to Communist youth organization camps. Now, Kolokoltsev said, the camps are largely either given over to refugees or priced out of the range of most families.

A bureaucratic battle is still being waged over the Yakovlev children, with authorities trying to prove that Svetlana is an unfit mother who should be deprived of the right to keep her children at home.

But even police and social workers seem to suffer from a confused lack of will these days.

“The political situation has changed--many things we were taught have been turned upside-down and even for an adult it’s hard to figure out what’s right and wrong,” Ptushkina said.

Though she sent many children away during 10 years of working in a neighborhood like the Yakovlevs’, the idea of institutionalizing kids no longer much appeals to her.

“I can’t really do anything,” she said. “I can’t really help the Yakovlevs. I’d only deprive the mother of her parental rights and make things worse,” by sending the kids to schools where they would become hardened criminals.

No matter what she does, she is sure, there is only one possible outcome for the Yakovlevs: “Their road leads straight to prison.”

Times staff writer Jesse Katz contributed to this report.