Crackdown in Russia Nets a Mayor

President Boris N. Yeltsin’s latest campaign to stamp out corruption in Russia moved into higher gear Wednesday, when Moscow police arrested the scandal-tainted mayor of a Siberian coal town.

Gennady Konyakhin was surrounded by riot police in Moscow as he set off for the lower house of parliament to listen to a speech by a friend, the arch-nationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky.

The Russian media said Konyakhin is accused of siphoning off $80,000 from the public coffers of Leninsk-Kuznetsky.

Konyakhin was elected mayor in April, despite having spent a year in jail in 1990 on a fraud charge. His campaign promise was that he was so rich he didn’t have to steal.

After taking charge of the town of 140,000 people, the 38-year-old entrepreneur kept himself in the headlines. One of his more flamboyant public acts was to buy the city’s main market and name it after himself.

An expose in the respected Moscow newspaper Izvestia brought him to the Kremlin’s attention last month. The report investigated his alleged criminal activities and his business doings, raising questions about whether, among other things, he had forced local agencies to patronize his gas stations and construction firm.

Yeltsin--trying to overcome public skepticism about the likely outcome of his seventh anti-corruption campaign in five years--ordered an investigation. “The criminalization of power is a serious offense,” Yeltsin said in a September radio address. “We have to quickly enact laws that will block any possibility of criminals gaining power, and plug legislative loopholes.”

Yeltsin stressed that this time his government of young liberal reformers really means to make progress in stamping out graft and that the prosecutors had at last begun to move.

About 2,500 Russian officials are currently under investigation on corruption charges, including Anatoly A. Sobchak, the once-powerful former mayor of Russia’s second city, St. Petersburg. He collapsed with heart pains when he was arrested last week and is now in the hospital awaiting surgery.

Many Russians remain unconvinced that the campaign will have any more success than its predecessors, since common wisdom holds that corruption here stems from the very top, making such campaigns meaningless. The targets of the present probes are either out of power, like Sobchak, or far from the powerful center, like Konyakhin, and are widely viewed as scapegoats who take the blame for crimes that today’s politicians are still committing.

“This is what happens when you put corrupt rats ‘in charge’ of the anti-rat crusade,” the English-language St. Petersburg Times said.