GOODWILL GAMES : Looks More Like the KGB Than TBS : Scene: Homeless are hidden and visitors from other cities in Russia are harassed in St. Petersburg.

Deep inside the Smolensky Cemetery, several elderly babushkas sat on benches, soaking up sun, listening to birds sing. Usually they can be seen begging in front of St. Petersburg churches, but this week--which ought to be a bonanza, with thousands of foreigners in town for the 1994 Goodwill Games--they have been driven into hiding.

“The police told me I couldn’t beg during this holiday (the Games) in front of Prince Vladimir’s Cathedral,” one of the women said in a quavering voice, a blue kerchief on her head. “It’s too close to the Jubilee Sports Palace.”

The Goodwill Games, a 16-day sporting event founded by media mogul Ted Turner, have brought thousands of journalists and visitors to St. Petersburg, and TV coverage is bringing the city’s streets into millions of homes worldwide. Mayor Anatoly Sobchak wants those streets to look clean and inviting, especially given St. Petersburg’s new reputation as a crime capital--a reputation Sobchak considers unfair.

So Sobchak has backed a police campaign of spot “document checks,” random searches and veiled threats that has driven the city’s estimated 30,000 homeless and drifters into hiding and that police say has been invaluable in foiling would-be criminals.

Aided by President Boris Yeltsin’s recent crime-fighting decree, which has made probable cause and search warrants ideas of the past, police have spent weeks stopping and frisking anyone they wish.

They have done so in bars, on trains, at the markets and even by walking unannounced into apartments. They are often looking for violations of a decree Sobchak issued in November requiring Russian visitors to St. Petersburg to have a St. Petersburg residency permit--a stamp in a Russian’s internal passport known as a propiska . Those who lack the proper propiska are subjected to petty harassments, fines and, in some cases, “deportation” from the city.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov issued a similar decree last winter, but it was aimed only at citizens of other former Soviet republics; Sobchak’s decree applies to Russian citizens as well.

Naturally, the rules are selectively enforced. Sobchak has expansively invited guests from across Russia and the Soviet Union to come watch the Games, and police have standing orders to be polite and courteous to visitors. The document checks and threats are only for the wrong kind of visitors: those police suspect of being thieves--usually dark-skinned people from the Caucasus region--or drunks, the homeless and other elements deemed distasteful to television viewers.

Valery Sokolov, a homeless activist whose soup kitchens feed 1,000 people daily, has hours of film of police on patrol, searching for residency permit violations. In one of many scenes, two officers pound on the door of a communal apartment. “Good day,” they say, swaggering past the surprised woman in a nightgown who answers the door. They open an inner apartment door, and a young man in a gray sweater stands up in surprise.

“Who are you?” one officer asks.

“A relative,” the young man answers.

“Documents,” the officer says.

In another room of the same apartment, an elderly drunk man frets as an officer pokes among the trash on the floor, saying, “What’s all this? I think there’s a crocodile living under your bed.”

“I haven’t had a chance to clean up,” the man says apologetically.

Sokolov’s camera shows officers frisking young boys on trains bound for St. Petersburg. Those without the proper passports are put off the train at the next stop.

At the Finland Train Station, police rouse a man asleep in a chair, his head in his hands. He’s tired but sober, a muscular working man in a clean blue short-sleeved shirt and black jeans. Sheepishly and sleepily, he explains that he has lost his passport; his friend, sitting next to him, vouches for him.

“It looks like you’re a BOMZH,” says one officer, using the Russian acronym for a person “Without a Determined Place of Residence.”

“Seriously?” the man asks, suddenly wide awake and pale. The police lead him off.

State auto police, or GAI, have also been flexing their new, Yeltsin-pumped muscles. At St. Petersburg’s city limits, cars are lined up to be searched before entering. “Not one car now enters the city after midnight without being searched,” said Vitaly Gulyayev, deputy chief of the city’s auto police. “We understand that we’re creating some difficulties for city dwellers returning from their summer cottages on the weekends, but believe me, these are necessary measures.”

Gulyayev and others claim the random searches have allowed them to confiscate many weapons and drugs.

Searches filmed by Sokolov show GAI officers discovering wooden or metal clubs in trunks or under seats, then putting them back and “finding” them again for “witnesses” recruited from among passers-by.

“Well, here you have it, a metal club that telescopes out,” a GAI officer says, pulling it out from under the taxi driver’s seat where he himself had put it seconds before. “You citizens are witnesses, step over here and give us your passport information and signatures.”

The two recruited passers-by silently comply.

At a news conference Saturday, Sobchak reaffirmed his commitment to the residency permit regime, saying that if Russia can’t control its borders, St. Petersburg would have to draw a line of its own at the city limits. “Until we have normal, controlled borders, I will do all I can to keep the propiska system in our city, to control who is arriving into the city,” he said.

“They say it’s undemocratic to control entrance (to the city). Wrong, it’s democratic. In every developed state, entering and leaving are strictly controlled.”

“There’s no country in the world that does this,” Sokolov countered. “Everyone controls illegal immigrants. But to harass and jail and deport citizens of your own country who arrive in the (czarist) capital but don’t live there--that’s criminal.”

In the days of the Soviet Union, the government prepared for the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow with mass arrests of prostitutes, drunks and anyone else deemed suspicious by roving police patrols. Those arrested were placed on sealed trains or buses and shipped in any direction at least 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) from the city. That practice gave rise to the expression, “Taken to the 101st kilometer,” a phrase as storied in Soviet law-enforcement lore as “Be out of town by sunrise” is in America.

According to Vladimir I. Vlasov, head of the St. Petersburg transportation police, “There’s no analogy between today and the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Those days when we loaded them onto buses and shipped them to the 101st kilometer, they’re over.” But Vlasov said police are still “cleaning the city” of the homeless--only doing it more subtly. The reason, he added, is “to avoid having to make explanations--there’s nothing a law-enforcement man hates more than explaining himself.”

Sokolov said: “Patrolling police and the homeless speak to each other and understand each other. The police have told the beggars and the homeless to disappear for 10 or 15 days or there will be trouble, and so they’ve gone and hidden their noses until the Games are over.”