Black Russians: The mob makes a bid to rule Russia.

Mr. Satter, the author of Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf), is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

THE murder of a Russian politician, Galina Starovoitova, Russia's leading female deputy and an unbending champion of democracy, demonstrates that Russian gangsters, having amassed huge commercial holdings, are now determined to use terror to acquire political power. Perhaps more important, her murder in the hallway of her apartment building in St. Petersburg also demonstrates the absurdity of the claim advanced by Russia's "young reformers" that once Russia's gangsters amassed their capital, they would evolve into normal businessmen and begin obeying the law.

Russia today is in a state of legal anarchy. The government operates like a business in which official decisions are not deliberated but sold; businesses use the methods of criminals, bribing officials and eliminating competition; criminals pretend to legitimacy; and ordinary citizens live in fear, convinced that they cannot count on the slightest protection from the law.

In the first days after Starovoitova's murder, Russian politicians took advantage of the situation to try to settle scores. Anatoly Chubais, who directed the corrupt privatization process, said that Starovoitova had stood in the way of "Communists and gangsters." Not to be outdone, the Communist speaker of the Duma, Gennady Seleznyev, said that the murder could have been useful to "democratic extremists."

In fact, the weight of the evidence is that Starovoitova died not because of her well-known opposition to the Communists but because of her courage in resisting organized crime in St. Petersburg.

Several months before her death, Starovoitova predicted to colleagues that there would be shooting in connection with the upcoming elections to the St. Petersburg legislative assembly, and the tension surrounding the elections only increased thereafter. By some estimates, there are no fewer than 50 persons tied to criminal structures running for the St. Petersburg city council; their methods reflect their criminal backgrounds. In many electoral districts, liberal candidates were surprised by the entry into the race of two or three candidates who shared their last names. St. Petersburg voters began receiving telephone calls at three or four in the morning urging them to vote for liberal candidates, and a mailing ostensibly from the liberal "Yabloko" bloc was sent to persons who had recently died. Worse, liberal campaign workers were beaten, and a car and campaign headquarters were bombed.

It was in this atmosphere that Starovoitova attempted to organize a bloc of liberal candidates who were pledged to fight organized crime. She also, according to the newspaper Noviye Izvestiya, acquired a tape of phone conversations linking St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev to leading gangsters.

The tape does not contain direct conversations with the governor, but there are conversations about him that suggest he is linked to criminal organizations involved in the lucrative cemetery business. Criminals have sold and reused burial plots and used cemetery crematoria to dispose of murder victims. In recent months, 13 persons connected to the St. Petersburg cemetery business have been killed and a number of others have been assaulted or have disappeared. In the aftermath of Starovoitova's murder, the governor, Yakovlev, stunned St. Petersburg by not attending the memorial service for her.

Now what? The Starovoitova assassination represents a turning point. Either Russia cracks down on organized crime now or no politician will have the courage any longer to stand up to the gangsters. Unfortunately, the portents are not encouraging. Organized crime has eaten into the fabric of Russian society to such an extent that it may prove impossible to overcome it.

Organized crime existed in Russia under the Soviet regime, but it spread during the perestroika period. The first cooperative businesses were denied police protection at a time when it was illegal to hire private guards. Rich and unprotected, the cooperatives became easy targets for gangs that formed all over the country to extort money from them.

When the Soviet Union fell, the democrats' first priority was the destruction of the Communist system. They believed they would be supported politically only by those who were wealthy, and the only wealthy persons they saw were those who had accumulated capital in the shadow economy, including gangsters. Their attitude toward the rule of law was therefore tempered by a desire not to create problems for their "allies."

In the absence of effective law enforcement, gangsters began to seize medium-sized businesses and, finally, banks. They became the partners and enforcers of Russia's leading oligarchs and destroyed moral standards throughout Russia because businessmen, unable to resist them, became their partners, and the law-enforcement agencies, instead of fighting them, began to compete with them, offering law enforcement to private clients for a price. Russia's gangsters are now the trusted advisers, debt collectors, and enforcers of Russian business and the paymasters of the country's corrupt and burgeoning bureaucratic apparat. It is because of this that any investigation into criminal activities, including contract killings, is inevitably sabotaged by interference at the highest levels of government. In fact, Russian law enforcement has all the material it needs to arrest the leaders of Russia's criminal gangs-not one of whom can explain his income-but effective law enforcement awaits a sea change in Russian attitudes.

Galina Starovoitova was working to create just such a change. It was this that got her killed.