September 28, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4543• 4544 •4545

Johnson's Russia List
#4544
28 September 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com


******


From: Matt Taibbi <exile.taibbi@matrix.ru>
Subject: A Day on The Beat
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 


Here's the lead from our next issue, about a day on the beat with a Russian 
cop.


A Day on The Beat
The eXile tours a shithole with Moscow's finest
By Matt Taibbi
www.exile.ru


This is the end of the line-- the ass-end of Moscow. The hollowed-out 
Brezhnyev-era apartment projects look a lot more beat up than most around 
town, and beyond them is a wall of trees marking the end of the city 
limits. There's nothing for tens of miles beyond those trees, except a 
cemetary. There are a lot of car thefts around here, because there are 
escape routes to various highways all over the place. Jack a Zhiguli and 
you can be lost in Balashikha or Lyubersty in ten minutes.


The cop I made a deal with to walk the beat for the day made me promise not 
to use either his name, or the name of his neighborhood. Fair enough: we'll 
call him Valery, and his neighborhood Novozhopovo. The name actually fits 
because that's something that people say about this place-- that's not even 
the ass of Moscow, but the beyond-ass. You drive to the ass, and then you 
drive five kilometers beyond it-- and you're here, the sleepiest, poorest, 
down-and-outest place you're likely to find anywhere in the capital.


Our cop guide, Valery, is no youngster. He's been on the force since 1980 
and is now forty years old. Almost every neighborhood in the city has a guy 
like this manning a little office somewhere in a dug-out corner of an 
apartment building. The beat cops, the uchastkoviye, don't always work out 
of police stations. They have little rooms without cells which they call 
their operativniye-basically resting spots with a couple of desks where the 
beat cops can come in, take phone calls, and stash the cash they've 
accumulated while making the rounds.


Valery belongs to that breed of policeman who for whatever reason remains a 
beat cop all his life. He told Alexei, the professional clown friend of 
mine who joined us, that that he made his career choices based on a desire 
to stay in the neighborhood he'd grown familiar with. The claim seemed at 
least somewhat believable, given that he was personable on the one hand, 
and seemingly not too ambitious on the other.


The Russian beat cop has a tough rep, probably most of it deserved. Human 
rights organizations like Helsinki Watch have repeatedly condemned this 
particular arm of the Russian police--particularly the Moscow police-- for 
their habit of making "home invasion" apartment checks, which frequently 
result in deportations for non-Russians and other residents who for 
whatever reason lack the proper registration documentation. They are also 
notorious for taking bribes, beating drunks, falling asleep on the job, and 
other excellent habits.


Valery's decision to let us join him on his shift-- from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. 
last Wednesday-- gave us an opportunity to see just exactly how justified 
the criticism is. It also gave us a tour with an armed escort of the sort 
neighborhood that you never hear anything about, unless you happen to read 
the crime pages of Moskovsky Komsomolets every morning, and have a passion 
for stories about domestic throat-slashings and drunks who stab each other 
to death. Novozhopovo is very conspicuously the sort of place where these 
stories are born; we were about to get a close-up glimpse of these dramas 
in their incubation stage.


What follows is a minute-by-minute account of a day on the beat.


3:05 p.m. Alexei and I wait outside the Novozhopovo police station. Valery 
comes here at the beginning of each shift to attend the celebrated 
station-house meeting with the detectives and the police captains. In point 
of fact this is not his office, but some 400 yards away from his 
operativnaya. We're not allowed in.


In the thirty minutes we spend on the street waiting for the meeting to 
end, we see no less than four cars full of dark-skinned Caucasians pull up. 
In each instance, the passengers end up pulling large sacks of watermelons 
and other produce out of the trunk and carrying them into the station.


3:32 Valery comes out of the station. He invites us back to his office. We 
drive in his personal old-model red Zhiguli-- he has no squad car.


3:40 We'd only been in Valery's office-- about the size of three bathroom 
stalls-- for about ninety seconds when the phone rang. An old woman on the 
other end of the line complained that the people in the neighboring room of 
her communal apartment are not only drunk and causing a scene, but are, in 
addition, "not local."


"We'll be right there," Valery said.


3:45 On foot, on the way to the apartment building where the call came 
from. Valery's beat covers four apartment buildings, with the attendant 
corpuses. The buildings house about 3,500 people in total. He says he knows 
and likes everyone in the neighborhood, and the feeling is mutual. But then 
he says that there's a lot of small crime in the area, and that for the 
most part, the people who are the problem are the "non-Russians", i.e. the 
Caucasians. "The Georgians are the worst," he said. "Everyone thinks the 
Chechens are the worst, but from our point of view, the Georgians are the 
biggest headache." There is a mild edge to his voice which leaves us with 
the impression that he's got a definite personal thing about "blacks." But 
this is, of course, no surprise.


3:58 The first apartment entrance. Here's how it's done: Valery bangs on 
the door, yells "Police!", then walks in when it is opened for him. In this 
case a plump, exhausted-looking badly-bleached blonde in her late twenties 
opens the door. She has the remnants of a black eye and a slightly split 
lip. Music is playing in the background. The apartment is ratty, the 
furniture stained from cigarette smoke, and the whole place wreaks, for 
some reason, of bleach.


Valery walks in. In addition to the girl, there is a bored-looking redhead 
sitting on a couch smoking, and a young man, obviously drunk, passed out on 
a bed. Down the hall the door to the other room of the communal apartment, 
from whence the original call came, remains closed.


4:00 Valery demands that all three produce documents. The man opens his 
eyes, sees the cop, and then, amazingly, goes back to sleep. Meanwhile, the 
two women strike out. The girl who answers the door produces a passport 
which shows that she's married to a resident of that apartment--who isn't 
there at the moment--but she herself is registered in the Vladimir oblast. 
The redhead is registered there, too. "You're not registered!" Valery 
shouts at the redhead. "What are you doing here?"


4:02 Police work, 101. Valery takes the first girl, the wife aside and asks 
her what the passed-out man's name is. She doesn't know. "How can you not 
know? What are they doing here?" he barks.


"They're just visiting," she said. "He's my girlfriend's boyfriend, you 
know..."


4:03 Valery to the first girl: "This is a mess. I come in here and I find 
people in here who aren't supposed to be here. Who is this guy?"


"I don't know," she said.


"Your husband, how much does he make?" he said.


"Um," she said, not believably. "I don't know."


"Well," he said. "Today you're going to have to find out."


4:06 Valery goes over to the man and pulls him by the ear. "Wake up!" he 
shouted. "Why won't you wake up?"


"Rashid, honey, please wake up," the redhead said.


After a surprisingly long time Rashid wakes up. He, too, has no 
satisfactory documents. He claims to be in the military, and serving at a 
nearby base, but he produces a passport, which causes Valery to scoff. "You 
see this?" he said, turning to us. "Soldiers don't have internal passports. 
They carry army IDs. This guy is no soldier."


"I am, too," the kid says, drunkenly.


"What do you do there?" Valery demands.


The kid answers unconvincingly, repeatedly mixing the words "work" and 
"serve" when describing what he does at the base. Valery snatches away his 
passport.


"Ok, here's the deal," he said. "I'm taking all of your passports. You will 
come to my office today at six o'clock, and you will all bring 
documentation proving who you are. You," he said, pointing to the wife, "I 
want your husband to come by, so that I can have a talk with him.


"Now," he continued. "I want to make something very clear: I don't want to 
see you two here again." He pointed to the couple. "You're not registered 
here. This is a very small apartment. Other people live here. I have this 
impression that you're living here."


"We're not," the girl said.


"Never mind," he said. "That's the deal. God forbid I find you here again."


We left.


4:15 Across the street. Valery enters a building on the first floor and 
goes into an apartment without knocking. This is a bomzhatnik, a house full 
of winos. The apartment's owner is a former film director named Meshatkin. 
According to Valery, he was a big deal once, in the seventies, then drank 
himself out of society. Now he lives in this truly filthy hole of an 
apartment, with bare stained mattresses on the floor, flies everywhere, 
carrot ends and empty bottles the only evidences of life. There are five 
other men in the apartment, one an Ossetian with bushy hair and a mustache, 
the others all Russian. Only the Ossetian and one other are awake. Valery 
knows them so he leaves them alone. There is one who he doesn't recognize, 
asleep in a sitting position next to the similarly sleeping "Director".


Valery yanks the newcomer awake by his jacket lapel, pulls him up. Stone 
drunk, he wakes up slowly. In the meantime, Valery goes through his 
pockets. There is a bag on the floor: he picks it up, opens it, looks 
inside. "What's in here?" he asks. There's nothing in there; they drank it 
already.


Valery figures out that the stranger is registered at a nearby apartment, 
drops him back on the floor, and then walks out.


"These guys are harmless," he said. "No trouble at all. But I like to check 
in on them."


4:22 On the eighth floor of the same building, we again enter without 
knocking. This is a genuine hole, worse even than the wino pad on the first 
floor. It belongs to a family of ten, eight kids and their alcoholic 
parents. The father is passed out in a room with human feces on the floor. 
There is urine in the hallways. Piles of half-torn clothes, clearly pulled 
out of the garbage, fill the other rooms. There are three naked children 
running around in the place.


"Everybody in place," Valery said. Then he pokes his head in to the 
father's room.


"You ought to get a job," he said.


"Huh?"


"I said, get a job. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."


4:30 Two floors up, the apartment of a young woman who's been caught twice 
for theft turns out to be clean. "Nobody I don't know here," he said.


4:34 Two more floors up. This is the apartment of a girl whose boyfriend 
recently went to jail. The girl is not at home. Her young sister says 
she'll be back later.


4:35 Apartment across the hall with a drinking history. We go in far enough 
to see a little girl on crutches lying in bed. Otherwise, looks clean. We 
leave.


4:36 Back out on the street, we see a drunk with a beaten face wobbling 
around. Valery asks him how much he's had to drink, checks his papers, then 
tells him to go home.


4:37 On our way to check out another bomzhatnik, an unlucky teenager, a 
tall, lanky fair-haired kid, makes the mistake of coming down the stairs 
just as we come in the building. Valery interrogates him, determines that 
he knows who the kid's father is. Without warning he thrusts his hands in 
the kid's pockets, pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He opens the pack, 
clearly looking for a stash.


Valery stands back. "Show me your arms," he said.


Sighing, the kid rolls up his jacket sleeves. There are a few faint dots in 
the wrong places.


"You playing around with heroin?" Valery asks.


"I did at one point, before," the kid said.


Valery shrugs. "Get off it. Get out of here."


4:39 Upstairs. We knock on a door. Unlike a lot of the others, it is bare 
metal, without vinyl covering. "The drunks' doors are often metal like 
this," he said.


4:40 Nobody answers the door. Valery then teaches us a trick. He goes and 
checks the electricity meter in the hallway to see how much electricity is 
being used in the place. "Nobody there," he says.


4:42 Outside, we ask Valery if people have the right to not let him in 
their houses. "Some people take the attitude that their house is a 
fortress," he said. "Of course, by law, they don't have to let us in. But 
it's just like the United States. If we have a pressing reason to go in, we 
can go in. If I think a crime is being committed, for instance."


"Sure, but in the States, the police don't go door to door, asking for 
people's papers," I said.


He shrugged. "Still, they have the same rights you do in the States," he 
said.


"But does anyone ever tell you they don't want you to come in?" Alexei 
said. "It seems like everyone lets you in."


"Why wouldn't they?" he said.


4:48 On the way to another apartment building, Valery checks the documents 
of another guy standing on the street.


4:49 He checks another guy.


4:50 We're on our way to an apartment owned by a couple of teenagers who've 
been in trouble for dealing drugs. "Junkies sell each other out worse than 
anyone. They're the worst gossips of all." He paused. "What we do with them 
is we pick them up for some administrative violation and throw them in 
jail. Then, as soon as they start going through withdrawal, they cough up 
everything we need to know. They'll tell us all kinds of stories."


4:53 Nobody home at the junkies' place.


5:05 Valery spends the next thirty minutes or so checking the commercial 
documents of the various kiosks and stores on the block. He asks us to stay 
outside during this portion of the trip.


Everywhere Valery goes, he leaves his business card. Each card has a 
standard police logo on the front, and a section on the back which has his 
name, address, phone number, title, and office hours carefully written in 
by hand. He has hundreds of these cards, all carefully hand-written.


Alexei and I share a cigarette as we watch him slide his card through a 
slot in a money-changing window.


5:45 Back in the office. His "reception", which he holds twice a week, last 
for two hours. During this time, residents of his beat can come in, discuss 
their problems, ask for legal advice, and, most frequently, complain about 
their neighbors.


But sometimes other things come up. In this case, Valery's first client was 
a man he'd never met before-- older, with a mustache, tinted red glasses 
and a cheesy-looking maroon leather jacket. In a halting, whispering voice 
he explained that his wife had just died, and that he needed a document for 
the estate proceedings which indicated that he had been a resident of his 
wife's apartment.


There was clearly something weird about this one, and even Valery-- whose 
curiosity for the most part seemed limited to the status of peoples' 
passports-- picked up on it. The man clearly wanted to have the apartment 
transferred into his own name. But upon closer inspection the man was 
revealed to have been separated from his wife for more than five years. 
Odder still, he was still registered in his passport as being married to 
the deceased woman, but her passport-- which he carried with him-- showed 
that she was no longer married to him. This state of affairs, Valery 
explained, was a practical impossibility.


Valery was at a loss to understand what the man wanted. There was no 
document which the police can give which can determine ownership of an 
apartment. Beyond that, Valery had never seen the man before and therefore 
could not possibly provide a reference for him.


Then there was this snippet of conversation:


"So," Valery said. "How did your wife die?"


The man shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "She just died."


My first thought was: he fucking killed her! But Valery ignored him and 
asked, "Do you have any children?"


"Yeah," the guy said. "We have a son. He's in one of your jails."


"So?" Valery said. "The son automatically is the heir of the apartment, as 
far as I understand it."


"Yeah," the guy said. "But he's in jail, and the apartment's empty."


"And?" Valery said.


"And the apartment's empty," the guy repeated.


"Get a lawyer," Valery said. "This is all handled through the courts. I 
can't help you. Good bye."


The man left.


5:55 An woman of enormous girth, not quite elderly, enters the room.


"You have to do something about my husband," she said. "I need your help."


"Is he abusing you?" Valery asks.


"Yes," she said, sniffling.


"Physically abusing you?" Valery asked. "Beating you?"


"No," she said. "He's abusing me quietly and politely."


"Um," Valery said. "What do you mean?"


"He's always telling me to wash things. Wash his shirts. He orders me 
around. And then he has the nerve to bring younger girls back to our 
apartment and sleep with them in my bed!"


All three men in the room shot each other little smiles.


"You understand," Valery said. "There has to be some kind of crime... 
something he did..."


"I'm going to chop him up with an axe. Set him on fire," the woman said, 
crying now. "I swear I will. I came home one day and found a videotape. He 
was screwing his whores on it! I'm going to chop him to bits!"


"Well, you don't want to do that..." Valery began.


But the woman was on a roll. She went on to unload a full history of her 
entire failed marriage, describing her husband's infidelities, bringing up 
any old thing she thought might get him in trouble. The problem was that 
they were married, both registered in an apartment that she technically 
owned, and she was still in love. So she wouldn't give him a divorce, nor 
would she agree to trade in their two-room apartment for two one-room 
apartments. And he didn't want to be left with nothing.


"He sleeps with women in my own bed!" she screeched suddenly. "Aren't there 
any human rights anymore?"


"Well, I'll have a talk with him," Valery said.


"I'm going to chop him up," she repeated. "With an axe."


"Now just calm down," Valery repeated. "We'll be there later tonight to 
talk it over."


She left.


6:08 Valery receives an old woman who inherited an apartment where her 
relatives had been living. The relatives wouldn't leave. Valery promises to 
do what he can.


6:10 The husband of the girl with the black eye, from the very first 
apartment we had visited, walks in the door. He is incongruously old, 
wizened, completely bald, and bearing the gray complexion of a habitual 
drunk. A strange other half for a relatively young, if not pretty girl. 
When Valery checks his passport, he discovers that the man's ex-wife is 
still registered in that same apartment, meaning that she could 
theoretically come back at any time and reclaim half of their room.


"Don't worry, it won't happen," the guy said.


"It might!" Valery said.


"I promise," the guy said.


Valery warns him to keep the "strange young people" he had discovered in 
his place out of the neighborhood. "That kid you had over," he said. "I 
could barely wake him up. Can you imagine, he wouldn't wake up!"


"I know," the guy said. "They told me."


6:32 A woman comes by and complains that one of her neighbors, a 
schizophrenic, had long ago been locked out of his apartment by his wife, 
and had been living in the stairwell ever since. "They won't let him back 
in," she said. "I think they've left town, actually. His door is locked. 
Now he just wanders around drinking. He's scaring everybody."


Valery promises to check it out.


6:45 A pair of older women come by to complain about some kids who smashed 
some windows in their building the previous week. Valery advises them at 
length to pool their money to hire a concierge.


6:52 A woman comes by to complain about some "non-Russian" neighbors who 
let water leak through their floor through her ceiling, and have only paid 
"part" of the repair money. Valery promises to check it out.


7:02 Two more women come in to complain about the same schizophrenic living 
in the stairwell. They said they tried to call an ambulance to have him 
taken to the mental hospital, but he refused treatment. The cops from the 
local station, meanwhile, can't take him away because the man's face was 
bruised. According to police rules, cops can't take in a prisoner in need 
of medical attention; they have to send them to the hospital first. But if 
the prisoner refuses, they can't take them in. This seemed to me to make no 
sense, but Valery explained to me that the system exists theoretically in 
order to protect the police from allegations of abuse.


"We have between two and five guys a year die in jail," Valery said. 
"They're always drunks, you know. You think they're passed out, they're 
actually having a stroke."


7:20 A woman comes by to complain that that a friend of her son's stole her 
wedding ring a week ago. Valery tells her he'll check it out, but that the 
ring was likely sold that very day.


7:30 The "soldier" who was passed out in the first apartment comes by for 
his passport. With him is his commander from the army base. Turns out the 
kid had lost his army ID the week before, so the base gave him back his 
passport. Everything was in order, it seemed. Nonetheless, Valery said: "If 
I see you back at that apartment, I will punish you."


7:52 Woman comes by to complain that her neighbors' dog pissed off the 
balcony above onto her balcony below. Valery finds the number of the 
neighbors and calls. "We don't have a dog. We've got a cat."


"They don't have a dog, they have a cat," Valery tells the woman.


"Then it was a cat that pissed," she said.


8:20 On the way to check out the various applicants' problems, Valery tells 
us the story of one couple in his neighborhood that sent some forty letters 
to various bureaucratic offices to complain about each other. Unfortunately 
for Valery, he gets sent a copy of every letter sent by a person from his 
neighborhood to any government office.


"They even sent a letter to Putin," he said. "I told them: Putin's busy."


8:40 In the building where the schizophrenic was rumored to be living in 
the hallway, Valery finds a bunch of boxes full of clothes in a corner. It 
looks like somebody had been sleeping there. In search of some information, 
he rings the doorbell next to the boxes. The door opens and two 
carefully-dressed men, both looking like academic types, answer. One, who 
clearly just came to visit, was on his way out.


"See you later, Vas," he said to the apartment owner, turning to leave.


"Hold it right there," Valery said. "Show me your documents. What do you 
have in that bag?"


The man looked at him in astonishment. "Are you kidding?"


Valery reached his hands into the man's bag. He wasn't kidding.


"I've got books in there," the man said.


"Books and what else?" Valery demanded.


"Just books," he said.


Valery looked at the man's passport. "You're registered in Vuikhino," he 
said.


"Yeah," the guy said. "I was just on my way there."


"Don't come back," he said.


Once this blitz-interrogation was over, Valery turned to the apartment 
owner and asked, in a polite voice, about the boxes in the hallway. I got 
the impression that he had not even considered that the interviewee would 
have been put off by the rough treatment of his friend in the previous 
minute.


He wasn't. "Oh, the crazy guy?" he said. "Yeah, he's here a lot. Or up on 
the 12th floor."


8:42 We were on our way to the 12th floor anyway, to check on the woman who 
wanted to chop up her husband. When the elevator opened, the schizoid was 
there, carrying some boxes and a blanket.


Valery interrogated him briefly. The homeless man was rational and polite. 
He said his wife had thrown him out for drinking and left town. He promised 
to be out of the neighborhood by the weekend.


Valery let that slide and buzzed an apartment door down the hall.


8:47 We went inside. The same girthful, nervous woman opened the door. From 
the doorway we could see the husband sitting in the living room, watching 
television. He was wearing a shiny white terrycloth robe and playing some 
kind of odd-looking bongo set. He was a virtual dead ringer for Nikita 
Mikhailkov, silver-haired, with a Napoleonic general's mustache, probably 
an enthusiastic consumer of colognes. He looked every bit the part of the 
older man striving to live the life of a rake.


Valery went into the living room and sat down beside him, sending the woman 
to the kitchen.


"Listen," he said, in a back-slapping, masculine sort of way. "I know life 
is tough here. But you've got to be more careful with your wife. She's not 
stable. I would advise finding another place to bring your girlfriends."


The man snorted and waved his hand. "Oh, that," he said. "That was just... 
you know, by accident it happened that way."


"Sure," Valery said. "But you've got to be extra special careful, you 
know..."


"Tell me about it," the guy said calmly. "My wife is crazy. Just last week 
she tried to kill me with an axe. See, look over there at the bathroom 
door!"


He pointed. Alexei and I turned. Indeed, there was a giant hole, about the 
size of a manhole, in the bathroom door. It was marked around the edges 
with straight wedge-like cuts-- clearly the blows of an axe. My jaw dropped 
and so did Alexei's. Valery, however, took this more calmly.


"You see?" he said. "You've got to take her more seriously. If you're not 
careful, you know, with that axe, you'll end up an invalid."


"Or dead," I thought. "Or on the front page of Moskovsky Komsomolets." But 
Valery didn't say that, or anything like it.


"Okay, okay," the guy said.


"Have a nice night," Valery said.


The wife came in from the kitchen. "Did you talk to him? The swine! Five 
years I've put up with this!"


"Good night," Valery said. We walked out.


8:58 Innocent-looking man on street outside the building, quietly consuming 
a beer. We check his documents.


9:15 Checks documents of couple on street.


9:34 Checks documents of another couple.


9:47 Four kids sitting outside a building, drinking beer and eating 
sunflower seeds. Valery checks their documents. They're registered in 
another neighborhood a few kilometers away.


"What are you doing here?" he said.


"Hanging out," they said.


"Do it somewhere else," he said. "If you don't know how to behave yourself 
here, get out."


They didn't move.


"What, you don't understand orders?" Valery barked. "Outta here!"


Valery never swore. Maybe it was just not in front of us that he didn't, 
but he didn't all the same. The kids finally got up and languidly walked 
away.


10:01 Back inside the apartment of Meshatkin, the film director. We again 
walk in without knocking. Everyone is asleep. In one room, the room we'd 
been in the afternoon, four drunks are asleep on the floor.


We walk down the hall. I hadn't been this way during the day. A piece of 
tapestry sets off another bedroom. We walk in.


Meshatkin the director is asleep in his overcoat on his bed. His light is 
still on. On the wall facing us is an enormous rack for books. He has a 
whole library in here. I spot the complete works of Shakespeare in English. 
There's a book on cinematic lighting. A collection of famous sea stories. A 
leatherbound edition of Proust. Leskov. Lewis Carroll.


There is a desk, on which a loaf of bread which had been carefully sliced 
rested next to a jar of pickles and a small wheel of cheese. There is a 
bottle of vodka with the top replaced and a little bit of vodka still in 
it. A shot glass, empty, lies next to it.


The walls are filled with framed photos of the director in better days. 
Alexei and Valery recognize some of the faces in the pictures. They're 
minor film stars of some kind.


"What an interesting person," I said, at the same time extremely 
uncomfortable to be taking part in this wholesale invasion of privacy.


"Do you want to talk to him?" Valery said, moving toward the bed. "I'll 
wake him up."


"No," Alexei said. "Let's let him sleep."


"Yeah," I said.


We left.


10:24 Back at the office. Valery took out a stack of papers and began to 
fill out protocols. "Most of my job is paperwork," he said. "It's a pain, 
to be honest. Keeps me from doing my job."


As he filled out his papers, he kept referring to a book which he had been 
carrying around with him all day. The book was an indexed list of all the 
apartments on his territory, with the names of all the people registered at 
each place, along with various notes about warrants, habits, and other 
behavior. In writing the name of a person he'd visited in a report, he'd 
consult the book to check their date of birth, their priors, etc. It struck 
me how much intelligence he had-- lists of associations, drinking habits, 
marital histories, complaints from neighbors. And he was gaining 
intelligence every day.


"I check the book to make sure I've got the right people," he said. "I've 
got a little bit of information about everyone that I need to write about."


"Great," I said.


It was almost 11. Alexei and I left him to do his paperwork.


Valery's decision to let us join him on his shift-from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. 
last Wednesday-gave us an opportunity to see just exactly how justified the 
criticism is. It also gave us a tour with an armed escort of the sort 
neighborhood that you never hear anything about, unless you happen to read 
the crime pages of Moskovsky Komsomolets every morning, and have a passion 
for stories about domestic throat-slashings and drunks who stab each other 
to death. Novozhopovo is very conspicuously the sort of place where these 
stories are born; we were about to get a close-up glimpse of these dramas 
in their incubation stage.


What follows is a minute-by-minute account of a day on the beat.


3:05 p.m. Alexei and I wait outside the Novozhopovo police station. Valery 
comes here at the beginning of each shift to attend the celebrated 
station-house meeting with the detectives and the police captains. In point 
of fact this is not his office, but some 400 yards away from his 
operativnaya. We're not allowed in.


In the thirty minutes we spend on the street waiting for the meeting to 
end, we see no less than four cars full of dark-skinned Caucasians pull up. 
In each instance, the passengers end up pulling large sacks of watermelons 
and other produce out of the trunk and carrying them into the station.


3:32 Valery comes out of the station. He invites us back to his office. We 
drive in his personal old-model red Zhiguli-he has no squad car.


3:40 We'd only been in Valery's office-about the size of three bathroom 
stalls-for about ninety seconds when the phone rang. An old woman on the 
other end of the line complains that the people in the neighboring room of 
her communal apartment are not only drunk and causing a scene, but are, in 
addition, "not local."


"We'll be right there," Valery said.


3:45 On foot, on the way to the apartment building where the call came 
from. Valery's beat covers four apartment buildings, with the attendant 
corpuses. The buildings house about 3,500 people in total. He says he knows 
and likes everyone in the neighborhood, and the feeling is mutual. But then 
he says that there's a lot of small crime in the area, and that for the 
most part, the people who are the problem are the "non-Russians", i.e. the 
Caucasians. "The Georgians are the worst," he said. "Everyone thinks the 
Chechens are the worst, but from our point of view, the Georgians are the 
biggest headache." There is a mild edge to his voice which leaves us with 
the impression that he's got a personal thing about "blacks."


3:58 The first apartment entrance. Here's how it's done: Valery bangs on 
the door, yells "Police!", then walks in when it is opened for him. In this 
case a plump, exhausted-looking badly-bleached blonde in her late twenties 
opens the door. She has the remnants of a black eye and a slightly split 
lip. Music is playing in the background. The apartment is ratty, the 
furniture stained from cigarette smoke, and the whole place wreaks of 
bleach.


Valery walks in. In addition to the girl, there is a bored-looking redhead 
sitting on a couch smoking, and a young man, obviously drunk, passed out on 
a bed. Down the hall the door to the other room of the communal apartment, 
from whence the original call came, remains closed.


4:00 Valery demands that all three produce documents. The man opens his 
eyes, sees the cop, and then, amazingly, goes back to sleep. Meanwhile, the 
two women strike out. The girl who answers the door produces a passport 
which shows that she's married to a resident of that apartment-who isn't 
there at the moment-but she's registered in the Vladimir oblast. The 
redhead is registered there, too. "You're not registered!" Valery shouts at 
the redhead. "What are you doing here?"


4:02 Police work, 101. Valery takes the first girl, the wife aside and asks 
her what the passed-out man's name is. She doesn't know. "How can you not 
know? What are they doing here?" he barks.


"They're just visiting," she said. "He's my girlfriend's boyfriend, you 
know..."


4:03 Valery to the first girl: "This is a mess. I come in here and I find 
people in here who aren't supposed to be here. Who is this guy?"


"I don't know," she said.


"Your husband, how much does he make?" he said.


"Um," she said, not believably. "I don't know."


"Well," he said. "Today you're going to have to find out."


4:06 Valery goes over to the man and pulls him by the ear. "Wake up!" he 
shouted. "Why won't you wake up?"


"Rashid, honey, please wake up," the redhead said.


After a surprisingly long time Rashid wakes up. He, too, has no 
satisfactory documents. He claims to be in the military, and serving at a 
nearby base, but he produces a passport, which causes Valery to scoff. "You 
see this?" he said, turning to us. "Soldiers don't have internal passports. 
They carry army Ids. This guy is no soldier."


"I am," the kid says, drunkenly.


"What do you do there?" Valery demands.


The kid answers unconvincingly, repeatedly mixing the words "work" and 
"serve" when describing what he does at the base. Valery snatches away his 
passport.


"Ok, here's the deal," he said. "I'm taking all of your passports. You will 
come to my office today at six o'clock, and you will all bring 
documentation proving who you are. You," he said, pointing to the wife, "I 
want your husband to come by, so that I can have a talk with him.


"Now," he continued. "I want to make something very clear: I don't want to 
see you two here again." He pointed to the couple. "You're not registered 
here. This is a very small apartment. Other people live here. I have this 
impression that you're living here."


"We're not," the girl said.


"Never mind," he said. "That's the deal. God forbid I find you here again."


We left.


4:15 Across the street. Valery enters a building on the first floor and 
goes into an apartment without knocking. This is a bomzhatnik, a house full 
of winos. The apartment's owner is a former film director named Meshatkin. 
According to Valery, he was a big deal once, in the seventies, then drank 
himself out of society. Now he lives in this truly filthy hole of an 
apartment, with bare stained mattresses on the floor, flies everywhere, 
carrot ends and empty bottles the only evidences of life. There are five 
other men in the apartment, one an Ossetian with bushy hair and a mustache, 
the others all Russian. Only the Ossetian and one other are awake. Valery 
knows them so he leaves them alone. There is one who he doesn't recognize, 
asleep in a sitting position next to the similarly sleeping "Director".


Valery hanks the newcomer awake by his jacket lapel, pulls him up. Stone 
drunk, he wakes up slowly. In the meantime, Valery goes through his 
pockets. There is a bag on the floor: he picks it up, opens it, looks 
inside. "What's in here?" he asks. There's nothing in there; they drank it 
already.


Valery figures out that the stranger is registered at a nearby apartment, 
drops him back on the floor, and then walks out.


"These guys are harmless," he said. "No trouble at all. But I like to check 
in on them."


4:22 On the eighth floor of the same building, we again enter without 
knocking. This is a genuine hole, worse even than the wino pad on the first 
floor. It belongs to a family of ten, eight kids and their alcoholic 
parents. The father is passed out in a room with human feces on the floor. 
There is urine in the hallways. Piles of half-torn clothes, clearly pulled 
out of the garbage, fill the other rooms. There are three naked children 
running around in the place.


"Everybody in place," Valery said. Then he pokes his head in to the 
father's room.


"You ought to get a job," he said.


"Huh?"


"I said, get a job. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."


4:30 Two floors up, the apartment of a young woman who's been caught twice 
for theft turns out to be clean. "Nobody I don't know here," he said.


4:34 Two more floors up. This is the apartment of a girl whose boyfriend 
recently went to jail. The girl is not at home. Her young sister says 
she'll be back later.


4:35 Apartment across the hall with a drinking history. We go in far enough 
to see a little girl on crutches lying in bed. Otherwise, looks clean. We 
leave.


4:36 Back out on the street, we see a drunk with a beaten face wobbling 
around. Valery asks him how much he's had to drink, checks his papers, then 
tells him to go home.


4:37 On our way to check out another bomzhatnik, an unlucky teenager, a 
tall, lanky fair-haired kid, makes the mistake of coming down the stairs 
just as we come in the building. Valery interrogates him, determines that 
he knows who the kid's father is. Without warning he thrusts his hands in 
the kid's pockets, pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He opens the pack, 
clearly looking for a stash.


Valery stands back. "Show me your arms," he said.


Sighing, the kid rolls up his jacket sleeves. There are a few faint dots in 
the wrong places.


"You playing around with heroin?" Valery asks.


"I did at one point, before," the kid said.


Valery shrugs. "Get off it. Get out of here."


4:39 Upstairs. We knock on a door. Unlike a lot of the others, it is bare 
metal, without vinyl covering. "The drunks' doors are often metal like 
this," he said.


4:40 Nobody answers the door. Valery then teaches us a trick. He goes and 
checks the electricity meter in the hallway to see how much electricity is 
being used in the place. "Nobody there," he said.


4:42 Outside, we ask Valery if people have the right to not let him in 
their houses. "Some people take the attitude that their house is a 
fortress," he said. "Of course, by law, they don't have to let us in. But 
it's just like the United States. If we have a pressing reason to go in, we 
can go in. If I think a crime is being committed, for instance."


"Sure, but in the States, the police don't go door to door, asking for 
people's papers," I said.


He shrugged. "Still, they have the same rights you do in the States," he 
said.


"But does anyone ever tell you they don't want you to come in?" Alexei 
said. "It seems like everyone lets you in."


"Why wouldn't they?" he said.


4:48 On the way to another apartment building, Valery checks the documents 
of another guy standing on the street.


4:49 He checks another guy.


4:50 We're on our way to an apartment owned by a couple of guys who've bee 
in trouble for dealing drugs. "Junkies sell each other out worse than 
anyone. They're the worst gossips of all." He paused. "What we do with them 
is we pick them up for some administrative violation and throw them in 
jail. Then, as soon as they start going through withdrawal, they cough up 
everything we need to know. They'll tell us all kinds of stories."


4:53 Nobody home at the junkies' place.


5:05 Valery spends the next thirty minutes or so checking the commercial 
documents of the various kiosks and stores on the block. He asks us to stay 
outside during this portion of the trip.


Everywhere Valery goes, he leaves his business card. Each card has a 
standard police logo on the front, and a section on the back which has his 
name, address, phone number, title, and office hours carefully written in 
by hand. He has hundreds of these cards, all carefully hand-written.


Alexei and I share a cigarette as we watch him slide his card through a 
slot in a money-changing window.


5:45 Back in the office. His "reception", which he holds twice a week, last 
for two hours. During this time, residents of his beat can come in, discuss 
their problems, ask for legal advice, and, most frequently, complain about 
their neighbors.


But sometimes other things come up. In this case, Valery's first client was 
a man he'd never met before-older, with a mustache, tinted red glasses and 
a cheesy-looking maroon leather jacket. In a halting, whispering voice he 
explained that his wife had just died, and that he needed a document for 
the estate proceedings which indicated that he had been a resident of his 
wife's apartment.


There was clearly something weird about this one, and even Valery-whose 
curiosity for the most part seemed limited to the status of peoples' 
passports-picked up on it. The man clearly wanted to have the apartment 
transferred into his own name. But upon closer inspection the man was 
revealed to have been separated from his wife for more than five years. 
Odder still, he was still registered in his passport as being married to 
the deceased woman, but her passport-which he carried with him-showed that 
she was no longer married to him. This state of affairs, Valery explained, 
was a practical impossibility.


Valery was at a loss to understand what the man wanted. There was no 
document which the police can give which can determine ownership of an 
apartment. Beyond that, Valery had never seen the man before and therefore 
could not possibly provide a reference for him.


Then there was this snippet of conversation:


"So," Valery said. "How did your wife die?"


The man shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "She just died."


My first thought was: he fucking killed her! But Valery ignored him and 
asked, "Do you have any children?"


"Yeah," the guy said. "We have a son. He's in one of your jails."


"So?" Valery said. "The son automatically is the heir of the apartment, as 
far as I understand it."


"Yeah," the guy said. "But he's in jail, and the apartment's empty."


"And?" Valery said.


"And the apartment's empty," the guy repeated.


"Get a lawyer," Valery said. "This is all handled through the courts. I 
can't help you. Good bye."


The man left.


5:55 An woman of enormous girth, not quite elderly, enters the room.


"You have to do something about my husband," she said. "I need your help."


"Is he abusing you?" Valery asks.


"Yes," she said, sniffling.


"Physically abusing you?" Valery asked. "Beating you?"


"No," she said. "He's abusing me quietly and politely."


"Um," Valery said. "What do you mean?"


"He's always telling me to wash things. Wash his shirts. He orders me 
around. And then he has the nerve to bring younger girls back to our 
apartment and sleep with them in my bed!"


All three men in the room shot each other little smiles.


"You understand," Valery said. "There has to be some kind of crime... 
something he did..."


"I'm going to chop him up with an axe. Set him on fire," the woman said, 
crying now. "I swear I will. I came home one day and found a videotape. He 
was screwing his whores on it! I'm going to chop him to bits!"


"Well, you don't want to do that..." Valery began.


But the woman was on a roll. She went on to unload a full history of her 
entire failed marriage, describing his infidelities, bringing any old thing 
she thought might get him in trouble. The problem was that they were 
married, both registered in an apartment that she technically owned, and 
she was still in love. So she wouldn't give him a divorce, nor would she 
agree to trade in their two-room apartment for two one-room apartments. And 
he didn't want to be left with nothing.


"He sleeps with women in my own bed!" she screeched suddenly. "Aren't there 
any human rights anymore?"


"Well, I'll have a talk with him," Valery said.


"I'm going to chop him up," she repeated. "With an axe."


"Now just calm down," Valery repeated. "We'll be there later tonight to 
talk it over."


She left.


6:08 Valery receives an old woman who inherited an apartment where her 
relatives had been living. The relatives wouldn't leave. Valery promises to 
do what he can.


6:10 The husband of the girl with the black eye, from the very first 
apartment we had visited, walks in the door. He is incongruously old, 
wizened, completely bald, and bearing the gray complexion of a habitual 
drunk. A strange other half for a relatively young, if not pretty girl. 
When Valery checks his passport, he discovers that the man's ex-wife is 
still registered in that same apartment, meaning that she could 
theoretically come back at any time and reclaim half of their room.


"Don't worry, it won't happen," the guy said.


"It might!" Valery said.


"I promise," the guy said.


Valery warns him to keep the "strange young people" he had discovered in 
his place out of the neighborhood. "That kid you had over," he said. "I 
could barely wake him up. Can you imagine, he wouldn't wake up!"


"I know," the guy said. "They told me."


6:32 A woman comes by and complains that one of her neighbors, a 
schizophrenic, had long ago been locked out of his apartment by his wife, 
and had been living in the stairwell ever since. "They won't let him back 
in," she said. "I think they've left town, actually. His door is locked. 
Now he just wanders around drinking. He's scaring everybody."


Valery promises to check it out.


6:45 A pair of older women come by to complain about some kids who smashed 
some windows in their building the previous week. Valery advises them at 
length to pool their money to hire a conceirge.


6:52 A woman comes by to complain about some "non-Russian" neighbors who 
let water leak through their floor through her ceiling, and have only paid 
"part" of the repair money. Valery promises to check it out.


7:02 Two more women come in to complain about the same schizophrenic living 
in the stairwell. They said they tried to call an ambulance to have him 
taken to the mental hospital, but he refused treatment. The cops from the 
local station, meanwhile, can't take him away because the man's face was 
bruised. According to police rules, cops can't take in a prisoner in need 
of medical attention; they have to send them to the hospital first. But if 
the prisoner refuses, they can't take them in. This is theoretically in 
order to protect the police from allegations of abuse.


"We have between two and five guys a year die in jail," Valery said. 
"They're always drunks, you know. You think they're passed out, they're 
actually having a stroke."


7:20 A woman comes by to complain that that a friend of her son's stole her 
wedding ring a week ago. Valery tells her he'll check it out, but that the 
ring was likely sold a long time ago.


7:30 The "soldier" who was passed out in the first apartment comes by for 
his passport. With him is his commander from the army base. Turns out the 
kid had lost his army ID the week before, so the base gave him back his 
passport. Everything was in order, it seemed. Nonetheless, Valery said: 'If 
I see you back at that apartment, I will punish you."


7:52 Woman comes by to complain that her neighbors' dog pissed off the 
balcony above onto her balcony. Valery finds the number of the neighbors 
and calls. "We don't have a dog. We've got a cat."


"They don't have a dog, they have a cat," Valery tells the woman.


"Well, it was a cat that peed, then," she said.


8:20 On the way to check out the various applicants' problems, Valery tells 
us the story of one couple in his neighborhood that sent some forty letters 
to various bureaucratic offices to complain about each other. Unfortunately 
for Valery, he gets sent a copy of every letter that gets sent to every 
government office.


"They even sent a letter to Putin," he said. "I told them: Putin's busy."


8:40 In the building where the schizophrenic was rumored to be living in 
the hallway, Valery finds a bunch of boxes full of clothes in a corner. It 
looks like somebody had been sleeping there. In search of some information, 
he rings the doorbell next to the boxes. The door opens and two 
carefully-dressed men, both looking like academic types, answer. One, who 
clearly just came to visit, was on his way out.


"See you later, Vas," he says to the apartment owner, turning to leave.


"Hold it right there," Valery said. "Show me your documents. What do you 
have in that bag?"


The man looked at him in astonishment. "Are you kidding?"


Valery reached his hands into the man's bag. He wasn't kidding.


"I've got books in there," the man said.


"Books and what else?" Valery demanded.


"Just books," he said.


Valery looked at the man's passport. "You're registered in Vuikhino," he 
said.


"Yeah," the guy said. "I was just on my way there."


"Don't come back," he said.


Once this blitz-interrogation was over, Valery turned to the apartment 
owner and asked, in a polite voice, about the boxes in the hallway. One got 
the impression that he had not even considered that the guy would have been 
put off by the rough treatment of his friend in the previous minute.


He wasn't. "Oh, the crazy guy?" he said. "Yeah, he's here a lot. Or up on 
the 12th floor."


8:42 We were on our way to the 12th floor anyway, to check on the woman who 
wanted to chop up her husband. When the elevator opened, the schizoid was 
there, carrying some boxes and a blanket.


Valery interrogated him briefly. The homeless man was rational and polite. 
He said his wife had thrown him out for drinking and left town. He promised 
to be out of the neighborhood by the weekend.


Valery let that slide and buzzed an apartment door down the hall.


8:47 We went inside. The same girthful, nervous woman opened the door. From 
the doorway we could see the husband sitting in the living room, watching 
television. He was wearing a shiny white terrycloth robe and playing some 
kind of odd-looking bongo set. He was a virtual dead ringer for Nikita 
Mikhailkov, silver-haired, with a Napoleonic general's mustache, probably 
an enthusiastic consumer of colognes. He looked every bit the part of the 
older man striving to live the life of a rake.


Valery went into the living room and sat down beside him, sending the woman 
to the kitchen.


"Listen," he said, in a back-slapping, masculine sort of way. "I know life 
is tough here. But you've got to be more careful with your wife. She's not 
stable. I would advise finding another place to bring your girlfriends."


The man snorted and waved his hand. "Oh, that," he said. "That was just... 
you know, by accident it happened that way."


"Sure," Valery said. "But you've got to be extra special careful, you 
know..."


"Tell me about it," the guy said calmly. "My wife is crazy. Just last week 
she tried to kill me with an axe. See, look over there at the bathroom 
door!"


He pointed. Alexei and I turned. Indeed, there was a giant hole, about the 
size of a manhole, in the bathroom door. It was marked around the edges 
with straight wedge-like cuts-clearly the blows of an axe. My jaw dropped 
and so did Alexei's. Valery, however, took this more calmly.


"You see?" he said. "You've got to take her more seriously. If you're not 
careful, you know, with that axe, you'll end up an invalid."


"Or dead," I thought. "Or on the front page of Moskovsky Komsomolets." But 
Valery didn't say that.


"Okay, okay," the guy said.


"Have a nice night," Valery said.


The wife came in from the kitchen. "Did you talk to him? The swine! Five 
years I've put up with this!"


"Good night," Valery said. We walked out.


8:58 Innocent-looking man on street outside the building, quietly consuming 
a beer. We check his documents.


9:15 Checks documents of couple on street.


9:34 Checks documents of another couple.


9:47 Four kids sitting outside a building, drinking beer and eating 
sunflower seeds. Valery checks their documents. They're registered in 
another neighborhood a few kilometers away.


"What are you doing here?" he said.


"Hanging out," they said.


"Do it somewhere else," he said. "If you don't know how to behave yourself 
here, get out."


They didn't move.


"What, you don't understand orders?" Valery barked. "Outta here!"


Valery never swore. Maybe just not in front of us, but he didn't. The kids 
finally got up and languidly walked away.


10:01 Back inside the apartment of Meshatkin, the film director. We again 
walked in without knocking. Everyone is asleep. In one room, the room we'd 
been in the afternoon, four drunks are asleep on the floor.


We walk down the hall. I hadn't been this way during the day. A piece of 
tapestry sets off another bedroom. We walk in.


Meshatkin the director is asleep in his overcoat on his bed. His light is 
still on. On the wall facing us is an enormous rack for books. He has a 
whole library in here. I spot the complete works of Shakespeare in English. 
There's a book on lighting. A collection of sea stories. A leatherbound 
edition of Proust.


There is a desk, on which a loaf of bread which had been carefully sliced 
rested next to a jar of pickles and a small wheel of cheese. There is a 
bottle of vodka with the top replaced and a little bit of vodka in it. A 
shot glass, empty, lies next to it.


The walls are filled with framed photos of the director in better days. 
Alexei and Valery recognize some of the faces in the picture. They're minor 
film stars of some kind.


"What an interesting person," I said, at the same time extremely 
uncomfortable to be taking part in this wholesale invasion of privacy.


"Do you want to talk to him?" Valery said, moving toward the bed. "I'll 
wake him up."


"No," Alexei said. "Let's let him sleep."


"Yeah," I said.


We left.


10:24 Back at the office. Valery took out a stack of papers and began to 
fill out protocols. "Most of my job is paperwork," he said. "It's a pain, 
to be honest. Keeps me from doing my job."


As he filled out his papers, he kept referring to a book which he had been 
carrying around with him all day. The book was an indexed list of all the 
apartments on his territory, with the names of all the people registered at 
each place, along with various notes about warrants, habits, and other 
behavior. In writing the name of a person he'd visited in a report, he'd 
consult the book to check their date of birth, their priors, etc. It struck 
me how much intelligence he had-lists of associations, drinking habits, 
marital histories, complaints from neighbors. And he was gaining 
intelligence every day.


"I check the book to make sure I've got the right people," he said. "I've 
got a little bit of information about everyone that I need to write about."


"Great," I said.


It was almost 11. Alexei and I left him to do his paperwork.


*******