BOOK REVIEW : The Cold War’s End Creates Seedy Underworld in Russia : THE MOSCOW CONNECTION <i> by Robin Moore</i> ; Affiliated Writers of America $20, 500 pages

Among the many unfortunate souls whose livelihoods were put at risk by the end of the Cold War were aerospace engineers, career Army officers, nuclear scientists, and authors of spy novels and techno-thrillers. But Robin Moore, author of “The French Connection,” has managed to reinvent the genre by conjuring up the latest bogyman to emerge from the former Soviet Union--the so-called Soviet mafia.

The nominal villain of “The Moscow Connection” is Slava Yakovlev, a criminal mastermind who drew his first blood when he was only 12, and then went on to achieve the status of “Thief-in-the-Law,” the Russian equivalent of a Mafia don. When we first meet him, Slava is a prisoner of the crumbling Communist regime, but he lives in unlikely luxury as he oversees his own evil empire; the guards, well-bribed, do not enter his plush quarters for fear of muddying the carpets in his cell.

“The easiest thing to do in the U.S.S.R. is to go to jail,” the Russian saying goes, according to Moore, but the proverb takes on a new and twisted meaning when it comes to Slava.

Slava’s foil--and, at times, his crucial ally--is a beguiling young woman named Oksana, the daughter of a Communist Party leader from Irkutsk and a would-be KGB operative who turns against the regime when she is brutally gang-raped by her supposed comrades. Oksana is drop-dead beautiful, a high-minded woman with a taste for rough justice, and she is forever attracting the sexual attention of both men and women.

What brings Slava and Oksana together is an elaborate criminal conspiracy that encompasses counterfeiting on a global scale, the sale of nuclear weapons to “terror states,” and a bloody free-for-all among Russia’s criminal elite that coincides with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“I see communism turning to anarchy before the end of the year,” intones Slava, “and we must be ready to move.”

Now and then, “The Moscow Connection” shifts to the United States, where the Russian plotters have caught the eye of American law enforcement, including a charming Russian emigre named Peter Nikhilov who works as a prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. As the corpses of murdered Russians begin to appear on the streets of New York, Nikhilov quickly recognizes the work of Russian mobsters--and he embarks on a secret mission that brings him, fatefully, into Oksana’s and Slava’s world.

“The black hand from Moscow,” Nikhilov announces, “reaches right into Brighton Beach.”

Rather like Russian novels of higher literary aspiration, the characters in “The Moscow Connection” tend to pile up in great numbers. On a single page, early in the book, we encounter Pavel and Tofik and Zekki Dekka, Nikolai and Oksana and Karamuschev, not to mention Slava and his tattooed prison concubine, Maria. And Moore uses so much of the patois of the Russian underworld that he decided to include a glossary.

Along the way, Moore enlivens the proceedings with sexual encounters of various kinds and configurations, and frequent bloodlettings with weaponry ranging from screwdrivers to high-tech min176805873318476207121634624544 “The Moscow Connection” is full of knowing asides that are presented as plot points but sound more like the kind of overheated gossip that insiders whisper to each other.

The cops in Moore’s book, both Russian and American, are decent enough, but he betrays a grudging admiration for many of the bad guys in “The Moscow Connection.” According to his peculiar moral code, Russia’s most ruthless criminals are entitled to greater sympathy than the corrupt and cynical politicians whose laws they defy.

“I am coming to realize that good and evil are not so clear,” says Oksana to Slava.

“The Moscow Connection” suggests that the power vacuum created by the self-destruction of the Soviet Union was filled not by aspiring democratic nation-builders but by a shadow government of vicious gangsters. The fact that Moore seems to admire the crooks more than the politicians is not very comforting, but it’s hardly surprising.