COLUMN ONE : In Russia, Disorder Is the Law : From the time of the czars, leaders big and small have lived by their own rules. Under Yeltsin, the country remains mired in a tangle of fiefdoms run by bosses and bureaucrats.

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia —  “The law is like a horse cart. It goes whichever way you turn it.”

--Old Russian proverb

The day Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from a 20-year exile, a short, balding admirer with thick glasses and a weak heart struggled into the seaside crowd and handed the famous author a bouquet. Suddenly the two men were parted by the crush of other welcomers and they never met again.

“I did not get to speak to him,” Viktor I. Cherepkov says in wistful recollection. “He did not notice whom the flowers were from. He did not even know who I was.”

Cherepkov is--legally, at least--the mayor of Vladivostok. A retired submarine captain, he had quit the Communist Party in 1989 to embrace democratic politics. As the highest elected official in this Pacific port city, he should have shared the limelight with the celebrated crusader against the vanquished Soviet state.

But the new Russia is an unruly place. The 51-year-old mayor has been sprayed with Mace, locked in a car trunk and beaten unconscious as part of a power struggle with the appointed regional governor. Weeks before Solzhenitsyn’s homecoming in May, Cherepkov lost control of City Hall when police carried him out.

Two local newspapers that defended the mayor were temporarily shut down; a sympathetic journalist was tortured by thugs, then warned by the acting mayor to leave town. The pretext for Cherepkov’s ouster, an allegation that he took bribes equaling $1,700, has been forgotten. A prosecutor has given back the rubles seized from him as “evidence”--but not the powers of his office.

Three years to the day after Communist hard-liners mortally wounded the Soviet Union with a failed putsch against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, its Russian successor state is so mired in lawlessness that the recent coup in this city of 660,000 people caused barely a ripple elsewhere.

Gone is the totalitarian law under which Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the gulag nearly 50 years ago and later exiled for writing the truth about Soviet repression. Russia is freer, wilder, torn by contending powers and truths. Despite a new constitution promising Western-style legal order, the country resembles a federation of fiefdoms where regional political bosses, bureaucrats, army officers, police chiefs, prison wardens and mafia dons can bend the law or ignore it.

“Three years ago we had different hopes, but I do not think those hopes were justified,” said Sergei A. Kovalev, a gulag veteran and human rights champion in Parliament. “The country’s political, economic and social atmosphere does not allow us to expect a breakthrough anytime soon toward the ideal of a state ruled by law.”

It is an age-old lament. Rooted in Russia’s 1,000-year history is an impulse to act above or outside the law. So is a talent for creating stifling bureaucracies to impose order on people’s lives. And so is a fatalism that discourages Russians from resisting arbitrary rule, from controlling their own destinies.

As Russia lumbers away from seven decades of communism, these burdens weigh like an ancient, self-imposed yoke. The despots, outlaws and bureaucrats are impeding the growth of democracy and a free-market economy, and only slowly, painfully, are Russians mustering the independence of mind to overcome them.

“I cannot say whether it is the character of the Russian nation which has formed such autocrats or whether it is the autocrats themselves who have given this character to the nation,” mused a German diplomat in Moscow.

Baron Herberstein of the Holy Roman Empire was writing to Vasily III, a 16th-Century Russian czar. The riddle survives. “Leaders have never voluntarily parted with power in Russia,” President Boris N. Yeltsin noted in memoirs published this year. “Why has this medieval principle enthralled us for so long?”

Perhaps the sheer force needed to hold such a vast territory together, to lead it anywhere, must be despotic by nature. Or maybe it is because Russia, then under Mongol rule, missed the Renaissance and was trapped in medieval ways.

While the czar claimed divine power, the law became whatever his appointed local despots decreed. Russians perfected the art of evading it. Peasants vanished into the wilderness to avoid tax collectors. Secret societies of smugglers and highwaymen thrived, surviving into the Soviet era to control black-market commerce.

Even the most enlightened czarist reform, which in 1864 created a modern court system with jury trials and rights for the accused, did not stop the czar’s police from banishing anyone they deemed politically dangerous. Seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks banned juries and forged a new legal order. Law itself became an instrument with which to smash the enemies of the new socialist state.

Under Marxist theory, the army, the police, the courts--the law itself--would “wither away” as citizens became disciplined Communists. To regiment the society, Josef Stalin killed at least 20 million of his own people.

Yeltsin used similar logic for his tank assault on the Russian White House last October: Blow away the reform-resistant Soviet-era Parliament, elect a compliant one under a modern constitution . . . and coercion would become unnecessary.

For the first time since the pivotal summer of 1991, Russia is experiencing what passes for political and economic stability. Threats of hyper-inflation, hunger and social conflict have receded. People are busy changing jobs, buying shares of companies, scraping to save money. Consumption is up. Yeltsin’s ideological foes are disorganized; his hold on power seems safe until the 1996 elections.

But this apparent normalcy has a weak base. Like all its predecessors, the constitution drafted by Yeltsin and adopted by voters last December does not reign supreme. Its bill of rights is under attack in jurisdictions across the land.

Murtaza Rakhimov, an ethnic Bashkir who was elected president of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan on the day the constitution passed, launched a Stalinist-style crackdown three months later in Dyurtyuli, a Tatar-dominated town of 35,000.

His pretext was the March 9 grenade assassination of Mayor Razil Musin. Over the next several weeks, police rounded up more than 500 critics of Rakhimov, parading many of them in handcuffs through the streets and holding nearly 100 for up to a month without charges. The schoolmaster, chief doctor and 16 other community leaders lost their jobs.

Although such wholesale repression is no longer common in Russia, Yeltsin’s Human Rights Commission warned in its first report this summer of widespread, systematic abuses in the armed forces and in prisons.

Hazing claimed the lives of 169 army conscripts last year. Police routinely beat criminal suspects to extract confessions. Pretrial detention centers are overcrowded and trial dockets so backed up that many inmates plead guilty just to get on with sentences in less-crowded prison camps.

One big difference from the old order is that the media can, and do, air such complaints. But most of the time, local authorities ignore the laments. And in a few cases--in Klin, Arkhangelsk, Vladivostok and St. Petersburg--critical newspapers or television programs have been shut down.

More than any other local boss, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak personifies the gap between reformist ideals and undying autocratic ways.

Elected to the Soviet Parliament as a reformer in 1989, law professor Sobchak denounced the Russians’ “astonishing indifference toward the law” and appealed brilliantly for a law-governed state.

Elected mayor in 1991, he became, by his own standard, an outlaw. He fired the elected deputy mayor. Ignoring the constitution, he raised the voting age from 18 to 21.

Sobchak has also joined Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov in enforcing a Soviet-era residency requirement that had been struck down by the Constitutional Court.

The two mayors have expelled thousands of non-residents from their cities, many of them dark-skinned merchants. Sobchak justified his latest roundup, just before hosting the recent Goodwill Games, as a popular--and therefore “democratic”--anti-crime measure.

“Sobchak is acting in the finest Russian tradition,” Leonid E. Kesselman, a St. Petersburg sociologist, said. “The man in power decides what the law is. He does not answer to it.”

Unwilling to alienate the police, army and regional bosses in a country that last year seemed headed for civil war, Yeltsin has taken few steps to enforce the civil liberties his constitution enshrines. In fact, he moved this summer to restrict those rights in a struggle against organized crime, identified by the Kremlin as public enemy No. 1.

Ordering the police to “cleanse Russia of criminal filth,” Yeltsin signed a decree allowing them to hold suspected gangsters for up to 30 days without charges--the constitutional limit is 48 hours--and to search offices, vehicles and bank records without a court order.

The crackdown has touched off a furious debate that goes to the heart of Russia’s lawless nature. Noting that Stalin’s mass terror employed simplified court and police procedures, nearly every faction of Parliament joined in attacking the decree as an ominous infringement of individual rights.

Yeltsin’s security chiefs, who get far more of his attention than does his Human Rights Commission, countered with the refrain that fighting crime is popular among Russians and therefore “democratic.”

“Will there be violations of human rights?” asked Sergei V. Stepashin, the counterintelligence chief. “Probably, yes. But only in the interest of 99% of the population.”

Indeed, Russians have become so alarmed by the violent scramble for newly privatized businesses and natural resources that they may be willing to sacrifice their fragile new liberties to stop the contract killings and other felonies that plague every major city. In a survey by the weekly Moscow News, 83% said Russia needs order more than it needs democracy.

In another poll of Muscovites, 21% said the mafia controls the country; 5% thought Yeltsin does.

The government’s own statistics give the impression that gangsters run things: 5,600 criminal gangs with 150,000 illegal guns deal in drugs, oil, minerals, arms and money laundering across porous borders. They extort protection money from at least 70% of private companies, control a third of the turnover of goods and services, most of it untaxed, and transfer up to $1 billion a month abroad.

Criminals killed 30 bankers and 183 policemen last year. Vladivostok, with a hilly terrain and a swagger like San Francisco’s in its Gold Rush days, recorded 490 murders--23 more than similar-sized Washington, D.C. A member of Russia’s Parliament was assassinated in a mob hit in May. Days later, another lawmaker killed a gangster in a shootout.

Lured by easy money and the high life of crime bosses, children raid cargo trains near the Chinese border, rip up bronze statues of heroes in St. Petersburg and sell the booty.

“In the West, you have this James Bond character, this gentleman who fights crime, but in Russia people admire the man who does evil,” said Viktor A. Babchenko, the top anti-racketeering cop in Ekaterinburg, the mining, manufacturing and murder capital of the Ural Mountains. “They exaggerate his invulnerability, his wealth, his glamorous life.”

Law officials say Yeltsin’s crackdown has driven some mob bosses into hiding and encouraged more people to report crimes. But police are also committing abuses.

Armed with the new decree, police in the southern town of Novokuibyshevsk arrested Yuri Y. Shustanov, a geometry teacher and outspoken human rights activist, purportedly for defying a long-forgotten court summons over a 1992 slander suit. More than a month later, he is still in jail.

“The decree has untied their hands,” his daughter Victoria said. “The police have become bold again and feel they can get away with anything.”

A more serious criticism of the crackdown is that the government and the police may be too corrupt to wage it. Yeltsin’s aides admit there are strong ties between gangsters and bureaucrats.

A Moscow kiosk owner who refused to pay off racketeers found his rent hiked by the city administration, which owns all land in the capital. Criminals bribe real estate registrars to identify poor, elderly loners who have acquired their apartments from the state, then swindle them out of the property and murder them.

“There can be no organized crime without the support of organized state structures,” said Sergei A. Pashin, a Yeltsin adviser on legal reform. “Everywhere the bureaucrat has power, there is fertile soil for organized crime.”

Nobody knows this better than the retailers who sell produce, clothing, cosmetics, toys and household appliances from hundreds of tiny outdoor stalls at Ekaterinburg’s Central Market.

Like hundreds of thousands of street-level pioneers in Russia’s capitalist economy, they lead a tense existence. They must pay rent and taxes to municipal bureaucrats, bribes to the police and protection money to the gangsters allowed to prey on them. And they must dodge the violent turf wars.

An upstart group of Afghan War veterans, who run a mix of legal and illegal businesses to finance charity work for war invalids, widows and orphans, took over the market’s protection racket last spring by kidnaping the bureaucrat who runs the place.

Uralmash, the city’s premier gang, exploded a couple of bombs and regained the racket two weeks later, then attacked some uncooperative traders. About 40 large young men in warm-up suits attacked with metal rods, knocked over fruit stands and calmly jogged away, leaving 15 people injured.

Standing outside the chain-link fence around the dusty market, a 27-year-old retired army captain who identified himself only as Sasha spoke with fear and resignation about the kind of society emerging from this lawlessness.

Unable to find any other work after the Soviet army pullout from Eastern Europe, Sasha earns a modest profit selling scarves, summer dresses and shoes he brings from Turkey on twice-a-month shopping trips organized by the gangsters who watch over him.

“The fact that mafia groups have divided up the city narrows my opportunities as an entrepreneur,” he said. “I can sell things only in places controlled by the group I pay. I’m afraid to imagine what might happen to me if I dared to cross into somebody else’s territory. This cannot be called free and fair competition.”

But like many entrepreneurs, Sasha accepts a new order in which criminal behavior feeds on itself. Confronted with ineffective courts and indifferent, corrupt policemen, honest entrepreneurs turn to thuggish methods to collect debts and protect themselves.

“To break this order would be painful and senseless,” Sasha said. “People have never trusted the state. They would rather turn to tough guys with steel rods. The funny thing is that the state is beginning to like this attitude: They can say, ‘People prefer to sort things out themselves.’ ”

Fed up with the criminal atmosphere, voters turned last December to the tough guy of politics--Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, a lawyer who promises to convene special tribunals and have criminals shot on the spot. His neo-fascist party won the second-largest bloc of seats in Parliament.

Suddenly, the ideals of “free enterprise” and “democracy” so widely proclaimed three years ago have become so tarnished that a victory by some reactionary in the 1996 presidential election seems plausible. No longer able to count on leadership from the Kremlin, reformers warn that the road to a democratic, law-governed state will at best be slow and uneven, at worst interrupted.

Ultimately, they say, it will depend on a new generation educated to assert its rights, to use the law as a means of defense, to shape new institutions that protect the individual from abuse by the state.

Such buffers are forming here, but slowly.

Sixteen regional legislatures that disbanded when Yeltsin destroyed the old Parliament in Moscow have yet to be restored through elections. The Constitutional Court, also suspended then for siding against Yeltsin, is still being restructured. Jury trials have returned to a few of Russia’s regions. And Kovalev, the gulag veteran, has been named Russia’s first ombudsman, or people’s defender, but awaits Parliament’s confirmation before he can open a complaint bureau.

At the same time, the generally uncritical support for Yeltsin from President Clinton and European leaders has deprived Russia’s human rights movement of its most powerful weapon from the latter Soviet days--public disapproval from the West.

Last month, however, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Assistant U.S. Secretary of State John Shattuck traveled to Moscow to lobby for keeping Yeltsin’s war on crime within Western standards of justice. Freeh hammered the point seven times in a half-hour lecture at the police academy.

More important, the reformers say, is pressure from the Russian people. But the building blocks of a civil society--independent political parties, trade unions, neighborhood organizations--are few and weak. And some of the most energetic movements, such as the war vets in Ekaterinburg, have drifted into crime.

“We are waiting for a person who will do something for us,” Solzhenitsyn scolded audiences across Russia during his homecoming rail journey from Vladivostok to Moscow. “We waited for the Communists, we waited for Stalin, we waited for the democrats and now we are waiting for you. We should stop talking and begin working.”

NEXT: How the bureaucracy chokes progress.

Measuring the Change

Three years later, consumers struggle with skyrocketing prices that reflect the change to a free market. Some examples:

Product November, 1991 August 1994 (government Low quality/ High quality subsidized) domestic imported Sausage, 1 lb. 32 cents* 65 cents $5.50 Beef, 1 lb. 7 cents* $1.10 $5.40 Lemon, one 14 cents n/a 29 cents Bread, 1 loaf** 1 cent 26 cents $1.50 Butter, 1 lb.** 9 cents 65 cents $1.05 Sugar, 1 lb.** 4 cents 16 cents 91 cents Milk, 1 gallon 5 cents* $1.26 $4.00 Cigarettes, pack 1 cent 30 cents $1.00 Men’s dress shoes $4.40 $21 $250.00 Pantyhose 30 cents* 85 cents $1.70 Gasoline, 1 gallon*** 2 cents 63 cents $1.15

* Scarce, usually requires wait in line; ** Quality of import and domestic roughly equal; ** Rationed

Researched by STEVEN GUTTERMAN and BETH KNOBEL / Times Moscow Bureau

Russian Reform: What Was Supposed to Happen

In spring 1991, Boris N. Yeltsin, then chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, ran for the newly created post of president of Russia, which was still part of the Soviet Union led by Mikhail Gorbachev. Yeltsin was by far the most radical pro-reform candidate, and his campaign set the stage for what he would try to accomplish in office. Yeltsin won the election with about 58% of the vote and has been in office more than three years. Here are some of the goals he set for Russia during his campaign:

ECONOMIC GOALS

Introduction of a Western-style market economy.

Economy led not by bureaucrats but by entrepreneurs freed from government regulations that block economic growth.

Privatization of state-owned enterprises.

Decentralization of the economy, granting more freedom to regions.

Institution of land reform by breaking up unprofitable state and collective farms and distributing land to individual farmers.

Reduction of the massive military-industrial complex.

Lower taxes.

Free prices.

End to foreign aid.

Making ruble exchangeable on the world market.

POLITICAL GOALS

A sovereign and democratic Russia.

Direct elections for leadership posts on regional, district and city councils.

Removal of Communist Party cells from factories and offices, end of Communist power and creation of real pluralism.

SOCIAL GOALS

Easier access to travel abroad.

Reliable food supplies.

More apartments.

Higher wages.

Shorter working hours.

Return of Russian Orthodox churches to religious use.

End to nuclear testing.

Researched by STEVEN GUTTERMAN / Times Moscow Bureau

Russia’s Crime Wave

Russia has seen a 12% rise in muders in the first six months of 1994, according to the prosecutor general’s office. In 1993, a total of about 2.8 million crimes were committed in Russia, affecting 2 million people.

Total Crimes 1992 1993 Murders 23,000 29,000 Armed assaults and robberies 170,000 225,000 Apartment burglaries 437,000 450,200 Grievous bodily harm 53,800 70,000

***

Total Convictions 1992 1993 Murder 16,200 21,560 Bodily injuries 35,700 45,742 Theft 291,000 336,000 Embezzlement 14,000 20,000 Drugs 10,726 19,773 TOTAL* 685,984 890,000

* includes other crimes not listed

***

Moscow in 1993

Crimes: 82,556

Change Total from ’92 Murders 1,353 +52.7% Assaults 1,937 +34.0% Rapes 395 +7.3%

***

Crimes solved: 60%

Organized gangs: 5,600 (compared to 785 in 1990)

Bomb attacks: 545

Bribe cases: 20,000 (up 27% over 1992)

***

Legal Contradictions

Russia’s surge in lawlewlessness spurred President Boris N. Yeltsin to sign a wide-ranging anti-crime order this summer. But the decree, which restricts certain civil liberties guaranteed in the constitution, has drawn intense criticism. Some points where Yeltsin’s decree and the constitution conflict:

YELTSIN’S DECREES

Gives security organs the right to detain suspects without a charge for 30 days.

Gives security organs the right to search apartments, offices and vehicles without a warrant, and makes evidence found during such searches admissible evidence in court.

Gives security organs the right to examine the bank accounts of any person suspected of illegal dealings, as well as of any relative living with this person for more than five years.

CONSTITUTION

Says no person may be detained for more than 48 hours without a court order.

Says no has the right to enter someone’s home without permission in cases stipulated by federal law or court.

Says that everyone has the right to privacy, and that telephone calls, mail, cables and other communications are private. Restrictions of this right require a court order.

Source: Ministry of Justice, prosecutor general’s office

Researched by BETH KNOBEL / Times Moscow Bureau