GROUP FIGHTS DRUG PLAGUE WITH VIOLENCE

Vigilantes Allege Russia Needs Bitter Medicine

YEKATERINBURG, Russia -- Igor Varov, wearing a pistol on his hip, opens the
sun roof of his big Mercedes 600 to remove the illegal flashing light he
uses to maneuver through traffic on the icy streets of this industrial city
in the Ural Mountains.

He and his colleague, Andrei Kabanov, are on the prowl in a poor
neighborhood where the heroin addicts are out at dusk searching for dealers
in the snowy courtyards and darkened stairwells. ``Look, there's some
addicts,'' he says, as the silver sedan swings into an alley next to a
dilapidated apartment block.

Two teenage boys eye their arrival warily. Varov and Kabanov jump out and
start barking orders in almost one voice. ``Get over here! Show me your
arms. Tell me where they are selling drugs, and don't lie.'' Varov is
unfazed by protests from the teenagers -- one is visibly shaking -- that
they are not addicts and do not know where drugs are being sold.

Two other young men approach, believing that they have also been summoned
by Kabonov's repeated shouts to ``get over here!'' But now Varov wheels
toward them. ``What are you doing here? Get out of here or I will break
your legs.''

Here at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, where the supply lines of opium
and heroin out of Central and South Asia run into big population centers
near the frontier of the drug trade, a group of tough guys have organized
themselves as a foundation called City Without Drugs. They are leading a
brutal civic campaign to take the streets of Yekaterinburg back from the
drug dealers and the corrupt police who are widely believed to be
protecting them.

``We call ourselves the angered public,'' said Varov, 36, who runs a
construction-materials company. ``And we are doing this for people who want
to be rid of these drug dealers. We go to these drug-selling sites with
baseball bats and flashlights and find out where the drug dealers are and
beat them like wild dogs.''

In the lawless vacuum that afflicts much of Russia today, Varov and Kabanov
regularly incite acts of vigilante violence against alleged drug dealers.
They have also founded a ``drug-treatment center'' where addicts are forced
to withdraw from heroin use cold turkey while handcuffed to their beds --
or sometimes just to the nearest radiator.

They, and a loose knit band of business associates, are a sign of the
jarring social transition under way in many parts of this country, where
vigilante violence and paramilitary organizations have assumed a greater
role in policing and guarding Russian business owners and ordinary
citizens. In the process, they often intimidate and extort money from
people who get in their way.

They are up-from-nowhere street toughs, gang leaders or sportsmen who in
the last decade have muscled their way into one business or another. As
their power and wealth have grown, they have embraced religion or taken up
public causes. In some cases this was genuine, but in others it was a means
to clean up their image and wrap themselves in the mantle of
public-spiritedness while staving off prosecutions.

``We are all for killing drug dealers on the spot without trial because
they are poisoning our children,'' said Kabanov, 40, a onetime professional
card player and former heroin addict himself, who built a yacht club for
the nouveaux riches of this region.

He dresses in a natty black outfit and has a stubble of red beard that
enhances his roguish presentation. He and Varov have decided that the
heroin plague that is sweeping across Russia is a conspiracy by Muslim
nations and Chechen warlords to lay low their motherland.

``No one wants a strong Russia,'' Varov said, ``including America.''

There is no dispute about the problem they confront. The opening of borders
and of formerly closed cities in Russia, along with the collapse of the
Soviet-era economy, ignited a wave of illicit trade in everything for which
there is a market in the world: weapons, drugs, prostitutes.

In the space of less than a decade, the number of heroin addicts here
increased from a few dozen to an estimated 60,000 to 80,000. Drug addiction
across the country is expected to reach 3 million victims in Russia this
year. That is well behind the United States, where there are an estimated
12 million drug users, but the rate of growth in Russia is phenomenal.

In the first half of 1999, heroin use in Russia was up 4.5 times compared
with the same period in 1998. And the number of HIV infections, many of
them from shared needles, doubled in 1999, according to an Interior
Ministry report issued in November.

``This is one of the most serious problems facing the country because it
could take away an entire generation of Russians,'' said Boris M.
Tepliakov, a psychiatrist and the head of the state-run hospital here that
treats drug addicts.

The loss of government control, or feckless enforcement by the central and
regional law enforcement authorities, has given rise to the spread of gangs
and private security groups that assert their own authority. On some days,
it is difficult to sort out the criminals from the non-criminals. Varov and
his associates say they stepped into the vacuum last summer, when the law
enforcement authorities were either overwhelmed or unwilling to act.

They teamed up with another business syndicate here called Uralmash, and
together they sent several hundred security guards from their various
enterprises to the Gypsy Village neighborhood that serves as the center of
the drug trade in the city.

The security guards beat some alleged drug dealers and went to the homes of
others, threatening to burn them down if drug dealing did not stop.

Not long after, Uralmash security guards who patrol an open-air market on
the other side of town seized a drug-dealing suspect. They tied him to a
tree, hung a sign on him saying he was poisoning the city's youth, pulled
his pants down and jabbed old hypodermic needles into his hindquarters
while a video crew was summoned from a local television station.

A senior police official, Fedor Anikeyev, said he had received
``unofficial'' reports of vigilantism. The police were powerless to act
unless one of the beating victims walked into the police station to swear
out a complaint, which was not likely, he said, because that would only
subject him to further threats and beatings.

By all accounts, the anti-drug crusade has significant public support --
although it is impossible to measure -- from citizens who are struggling in
an economy of high unemployment, industrial contraction and cynicism toward
anyone who claims to be working for the public good.

Mothers of drug-ravaged teenagers have staged rallies and organized drug
patrols in courtyards and apartment building stairwells. An electronic
pager system set up by City Without Drugs to enable the public to inform on
drug dealers has received more than 6,000 calls since last fall.