The Crime on Everyone's Lips

While Soviet authorities maintain that crime is a bourgeois phenomenon that will wither away under Communism, they have found capital punishment no easier to abolish than the illicit pursuit of capital. The death penalty was dropped in 1947 (not counting secret executions in the cellar of Lubianka Prison, of course), but during the '50s. capital punishment was gradually restored--for murder, treason, espionage and sabotage. Last year, to cope with a rash of get-rich-quick racketeering, the courts were permitted to decree death for counterfeiters, big-time embezzlers of public property and currency speculators. Fortnight ago, Moscow broadened the list of capital crimes to include such offenses as graft by public officials, assault on policemen, and rape.

The West will probably never learn if the harsh new penalties work, since the Russian press never publishes crime statistics and carries few police-beat stories.

Possibly in order to discourage other Soviet spivs, the papers last week reported that a court had condemned to death a Red racketeer whose crime was on almost everyone's lips. Nikolai Kotlyar, alias the Lipstick King, amassed a fortune before his arrest last winter by operating a hot lipstick syndicate from the basement of his house in a Moscow suburb (TIME, Dec. 15). Through nine strategically placed accomplices in a state-owned plant at Riga, said Izvestia. Kotlyar in 1960 alone got hold of 59,000 lipstick tubes, which an underground labor force filled with homemade batter and distributed nationwide. Top executives at the plant who, complained the paper, "considered the factory their patrimony," were paid from $220 to $1,660 a month each, while Kotlyar's go-between got all travel expenses plus 55-c- a tube. No playboy, Kotlyar plowed his profits into jewelry and state bonds, and. according to the press, "dreamed of accumulating more valuables." He will face a firing squad.

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