The present growth and scale of crime is an
extraordinary phenomenon...
The plot of this myth is usually colored with a flood of statistical
information from the 1990s and comparisons with figures from the 1960s—1980s.
“Since 1976 the total number of registered criminal attempts in Russia has
increased by 3.4 times...”[8], “between 1991
and 1994, there were 4 times more crimes per 100,000 people than during the
period from 1961 to 1964...” [25].
This looks frightening indeed. Incomplete information about crime and its
inaccessibility even for law enforcement workers and professional lawyers make
us take interpreters of this information at their word
[11; p. 6].
Let us try to examine the same criminal statistics in a wider context as far
as our possibilities allow.
Russia has not reached its own record on the total number of all registered
crimes: in the mid-1920s the crime rate in our country was 150—200% higher
than in the 1990s. The rate of growth in crime in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s
has not exceeded average figures for developed countries, and still the crime
rate in our country is 2—6 times lower than in Western European countries and
U.S. [11, p.85]. The number of crimes solved in
Russia is higher than that in Western countries [20].
However, it would be more correct to compare the number of murders (per
100,000 of the population) rather than general crime. One of the reasons in
favor of this is that murder, unlike theft, bribery or rape, is more difficult
to conceal from the authorities. With regards to murder our statistics are, in
fact, considerably higher than European countries and, most recently, they have
reached the U.S. level.
But a place amongst the “group leaders” of murder is traditional for
Russia, at least, since regular records began. In a comparatively calm period of
our history (the end of the XIX century — beginning of the XX) this
indicator was about 10—13.
Only in 1992 did the Russia of today exceed these figures (15.5). We would
like to note that a 1.5—2 time increase in crime rate (within a decade, not a
century) is common for many countries during the last quarter of the century.
The most available and complete information about crime in the last century
is on 33 provinces of Russia [9]. The number of
registered crimes in 1894 was 7,637; the population of these provinces as of
1896 was 67,240,824 [10]. In 1894, the population
was 65,371,000, taking into account the coefficient of natural growth in the
population. Thus, in 1894 the number of murders per 100,000 of people was 11.7.
In 1994 — 21.8. In 1990—1991 the rate of murders was even lower than a
hundred years ago. It should also be taken into consideration that current
statistics record murders alongside with attempted murder.
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