Lawmaker’s Funeral Spotlights Russia Crime : Violence: Communist deputy died after being mugged. He is the second member of Parliament this year to be slain.

With tearful outbursts against the erosion of legal order, colleagues and kin buried legislator Valentin S. Martemyanov on Wednesday in a politically charged goodby to one of Russia’s best-known mugging victims.

“He did all he could in his life to establish legality. Now let the people in power do something about it!” declared Ivan B. Rybkin, chairman of the lower house of Parliament, from the foot of his fellow deputy’s open casket in the stained-glass chapel of a Moscow morgue.

Rybkin’s somber, defiant tone captured the mood of hundreds of mourners who crowded the room and spilled outside. It heralded a new showdown between Parliament and President Boris N. Yeltsin--this time over crime, the issue that most gnaws at Russians.

Martemyanov, 62, was walking home from work at 11:45 p.m. on Nov. 1 when he was felled by skull-fracturing blows a few steps from his Moscow apartment building. The assailant or assailants fled with his watch, briefcase and $125. He died in a hospital Saturday, the second member of the Parliament elected in December to be fatally wounded by criminals.

His death struck a vulnerable nerve. Unlike lawmaker Andrei Aidzedzis, a wealthy banker who was ambushed by a hit man in April after publishing a list of 200 “career criminals,” the modest Martemyanov, who commuted to work on the subway, was apparently the victim of a random assault--the kind most Russians fear.

The latest tragedy was magnified by Martemyanov’s stature as head of the Moscow State Legal Academy and author of more than 200 works in his field.

The Communist Party to which he belonged said his death reflected “the loss of control over the country and the paralysis of state power.”

Russia recorded 16,000 homicides during the first half of 1994, a 12% increase over the same period last year. Overall crime rose at a similar rate as gunmen invented brazen new schemes to get rich.

Bandits wearing police uniforms have been flagging down truckers on Russia’s highways and robbing them. A gang of 40 thieves stopped a train south of Moscow a few months ago, locked the crew in freight cars and stole 19,000 sewing machines.

Minor traffic accidents in Russia occasionally end with the shakedown of the weaker driver or the theft of his vehicle. When a Russian employee of the Los Angeles Times stopped at night last week to help three motorists start their stalled car, they stole his--after holding a pistol to his head, gagging him and handcuffing him to a fence.

“We live in a society with the motto ‘rape, rob, steal and you will prosper,’ ” Nikolai Skatov, a friend of the slain legislator, said in a eulogy.

Fear of violence helped an alliance of ultranationalists, Communists and other reform-resistant politicians win a majority of seats in Parliament in December.

Seizing the issue, Yeltsin decreed a wide-ranging anti-crime bill over the summer. But the Draconian measure, which allows police to hold suspected gangsters up to 30 days without charge, hasn’t made Russians feel safer.

Meanwhile, Yeltsin has been on the defensive for the past month, since the ruble lost a quarter of its value in one day and a Russian journalist probing corruption in the army was killed by a bomb in a briefcase. Recently, the president barely survived a no-confidence vote in his government.