Russia: Crime Pays, the State Doesn’t

When his wages failed to materialize for three months, Nikolai S. Lashkevich did what thousands of other Russians do when their government neglects to pay them and they have children to feed: He ripped off his workplace.

Lashkevich’s factory manufactured guns. In the evening, in his bedroom, he assembled stolen pieces of metal into guns while his two sons watched TV in the next room. The illegal pistols were being snapped up by the underworld to be used in gangland shootouts and contract killings. In 1994, after six months of producing the bootleg guns, the engineer ended up in jail.

“I wouldn’t have started doing it if my wages had come on time. I’m not a criminal type,” said Lashkevich, an articulate man in his early 40s with an engaging grin.

Cash Shortage is Self-Perpetuating

Lashkevich sees himself as a victim of the vicious cycle of debt gripping Russian industry: The government says it is too poor to pay wages and budget allocations, so firms have no funds to pay other firms for parts and services, and unpaid workers have no money to pay taxes back to the government.

The Russian government owes state workers about $7 billion in back wages. When President Boris N. Yeltsin feared that a Communist challenger would beat him in elections earlier this year, he paid off most of his government’s salary obligations. But since he was returned to power in July, the wages have stopped coming again.

So no one in Russia is unsympathetic to the notion of petty theft by hungry workers struggling to survive as their livelihoods dry up. It is widely believed that unpopular and corrupt government leaders--commonly described as a “state mafia”--are enriching themselves by robbing workers of their wages.

“Even when they paid us, it was never enough. So when a guy came up to me at work and said he’d get hold of pistol parts if I’d put them together at home, I jumped at the chance,” Lashkevich said cheerfully.

The money--about $100 a month on top of a theoretical salary of about $60--was attractive, Lashkevich said, but “it wasn’t enough for a Mercedes or luxuries, just enough to buy proper food and to put clothes on the kids’ backs.”

Lashkevich’s schoolteacher wife never asked where the cash was coming from, he added, and he never felt guilty.

“I never connected what I was doing with the crime stories I used to read in the papers. I was shocked when I read about gangland murders, but at the time I took the view that there were a lot of new rich people about these days who just wanted pistols for self-protection.”

The dangers of exposing large numbers of people to a future of destitution are nowhere more obvious than in Izhevsk. This desolate military-industrial town in central Russia is best known for the Kalashnikov rifles and Makarov pistols it turned out by the millions in Cold War days, when the Soviet Union ran a thriving business supplying weapons to its socialist allies abroad.

State Sector Loses Out in New Market Economy

The Soviet collapse ended the age of ideological warfare, and Izhevsk’s gun factories have fallen on hard times.

The problem of nonpayment by Yeltsin’s market-oriented government, which in addition to being short of money wants to eliminate the old dependence of smokestack factories on handouts from Moscow, affects Russia’s whole state sector.

But the situation is especially difficult in an industry already in crisis, in a town where old women in rags rummage through garbage cans for food scraps and where shortages left over from the Soviet era still keep shops empty because hardly anyone has the energy or the start-up funds to go into private business.

Factories that work at all run at 40% to 50% capacity. Official figures show unemployment of 10%, but most people, from laid-off workers to lawmakers, agree that the real figure is far higher. Long, unpaid “holidays” are forced on workers in a system of disguised layoffs whose acronym, ChAO, is repeated with a farewell wave and a derisive laugh by its victims: “Ciao!”

More and more people in Izhevsk are coming to the conclusion that there is only one way out in a country whose government does little to honor its responsibilities to them: to ignore their own responsibilities to society.

“One factor pushing people into this is that if a worker hasn’t been paid for three months and he knows that a stolen component can be sold for such-and-such a price, and he takes it, then what you have is a state at war with its workers,” said Oleg L. Kuzmenko, a member of the regional parliament.

And while there may be no socialist guerrilla armies crying out for new Russian Kalashnikovs, the appearance of a violent new criminal underworld--the shadow of Russia’s new capitalism--has created a huge local market for illegal guns.

Underground weapons production is flourishing, and catching the criminals is almost impossible. Because of a loophole in Russian law--which makes smuggling a ready-made gun out of the factory a crime but not slipping a few components out in your pocket--it is easy for crooks to avoid arrest.

If factory guards catch workers stealing gun parts, they can bring criminal charges only if the components they find are worth a minimum monthly wage--and no gun component is worth that much.

“You catch some guy at the gate with a box full of gun barrels, say, but he tells you he likes using them to crack nuts with, and there’s nothing you can do but let him go,” said Airat N. Mardakshin, Izhevsk’s prosecutor in charge of prisons. “By themselves, weapons parts are worth virtually nothing. What can a piece of metal be worth?”

Mardakshin blames the surge in illegal gun-making on the out-of-date law, unrevised since Soviet days of strictly enforced stability when the idea of underground gun production was unthinkable.

Mardakshin wants Russia’s new penal code, which comes into effect in 1997, to specifically outlaw the theft of gun parts and stop the illegal trade.

Laws Will Address Gun Problem--Someday

The job of reforming the law has already started, said lawmaker Kuzmenko. Next year’s penal code is expected to contain tougher clauses on gun parts, he said, and a whole new gun law is also being prepared. When that law will be passed is not yet clear.

Kuzmenko was quick to stress that gun factories are not primarily to blame for the illegal weaponry flooding into the criminal world. Most criminal guns, he says, are bought on the sly from the army or police or stolen in the war zones that have sprung up around Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed.

“The overall number of weapons in criminal hands is hundreds of times bigger than what is stolen and made from our factories; only a tiny percentage of the problem comes from here. But all the same, it’s very important and that’s why we’re changing the law,” he said.

Changing the law will help, but investigators Col. Anton V. Voitsytsky and Lt. Col. Nazim Y. Shamilov, who have caught 17 gun-making gangs in the last year, say they are not breathing a sigh of relief yet.

The hardest part of their job is putting the ringleaders--who dream up the illegal schemes without getting their own hands dirty--behind bars. It would be a mistake to underestimate the criminal creativity of the “brains” behind the underground gun shops, they say, or to assume they will not find new ways around new laws.

“They organize themselves meticulously and work together with discipline. And that’s the whole problem. You get three men in a gang, and it’s almost impossible to prove there’s a conspiracy among them and arrest every link in the chain,” Shamilov said.

One of the investigative duo’s biggest coups--rounding up eight criminals who had turned out hundreds of home-made weapons in a garage--came after a gang member was hospitalized with gunshot wounds to the stomach. He had soldered a gun barrel on wrong and tried to pull it off again.

Most of the rest of the group--the workers who stole the parts and the engineers who assembled them--confessed. They implicated the man who had masterminded the scam.

But the group’s leader is still denying involvement, Shamilov said, and his lawyers are running rings around the Police Department.

“The rest of them are simple workers, but this guy is obviously smart, well-educated, erudite and much harder to deal with. He knows the law inside out,” Shamilov said.

“We caught the gang at the end of 1994, and the case has just been sent back from court for further investigation--again,” he said, shaking his head as he pondered the heaps of battered weapons turned out by the gang during the two years their garage workshop was in operation.

Often, the ringleaders are the only people in illegal gun-making groups who know who else is involved. Lashkevich, the jailed gun assembler, found out only after his arrest that 11 people had been in his gang, each stealing a separate component or selling the guns. All the members of the gang are now in jail.

The only ones he knew were the man who originally asked him to help and who brought gun barrels and other parts to his house every few weeks, and a man who came later to take away the weapons Lashkevich had assembled.

Almost Better Off in Prison Than Working

Lashkevich has no complaints about having been caught. He realizes his moonlighting was criminal, he said. His wife has forgiven him. The judge who tried him was also sympathetic and gave him a lenient sentence of 2 1/2 years. And his life in prison is hardly any worse than his life without pay before, he said.

“The conditions here are fine,” he said. “We get fed, we work, we earn money. If it wasn’t for the restrictions on seeing my family, I’d say I’m better off here than I was when I went to the factory but never got paid.”

Nor is he bothered that the factory where he worked for a decade will not take him back. When he gets out of jail at the end of 1997, he plans to get out of the state sector altogether.

“The factory won’t want a man with a criminal record. But I wouldn’t go back there for such pitiful wages, anyway. No, I’m going to set myself up in some sort of private business--but not the gun-making business.”