SARATOV, Russia -- His friends call Igor Lykov the last honest cop in Russia. They always chided him for it, telling him his crusade to uphold the law was lunacy in a country like this one.

Lykov laughed off the admonitions. He couldn't live any other way, and he didn't.

The doorbell rang at 10 on a Saturday night. Lykov was going over some papers, evidence related to corruption. His 15-year-old daughter, Lida, was in the kitchen with a girlfriend. When he opened the door, two shots rang out from the shabby, dark, fourth-floor hallway. He staggered into the kitchen, calling Lida's name, and then he fell. He died in front of her.

Lykov was a provincial policeman in a solitary battle. He felt a compulsion to slash away at the tentacles of corruption that gripped nearly every institution in this country.

"He was killed because he was better than others," says Sergei Grigoriants, chairman of the Glasnost Public Foundation, a Moscow human rights organization. "He was braver and more honest than others. It's a very great loss for the country. I personally don't know anyone else like him."

Lykov was a tough but gentle 47-year-old police major assigned to the port in this Volga River city 500 miles southeast of Moscow. He had the deceptively sleepy-eyed look of a Robert Mitchum. His job was catching the brigands poaching sturgeon and caviar, but when he stumbled upon corruption in other departments, among policemen or court officials or intelligence officers, he was morally unable to look the other way. He insisted on intervening. He was killed in a contract murder, his family and friends say, because he spoke up once too often.

"Maybe there are other honest policemen," Grigoriants says. "There are other policemen who don't take bribes. But there are none fighting as effectively as he did, and it's awful that it all ends in murder."

Corruption in Russia is staggering in its pervasiveness. It is a condition inherited from the past, from a system where everyone was entitled to the same kind of food and housing and jobs and vacations, but there was never enough to go around, so citizens had to resort to bribery to get their share. The new system has encouraged them to refine those arts.

In Moscow, police Chief Vladimir Abramov says 60 percent of the city's robberies and assaults are committed by criminals wearing a police uniform -- many of them former police officers who quit and went over to the other, more profitable, side.

Saratov is no different, says regional Gov. Dmitri Ayatskov. "Unfortunately, the police are very corrupt," he says. "In the last few months, there have been crimes committed almost every day where police take part. They take bribes. They sell drugs. They sell weapons."

Police have both opportunity and need -- even an experienced policeman like Lykov, with 25 years on the force, earns only $200 a month. With salaries low and living costs high, many public servants feel they have no choice but to live on bribes. Bribes have become an expected part of their salary.

Russians spend $6 billion a year bribing officials, says Georgy Satarov, a former aide to President Boris N. Yeltsin who is president of the Information Science for Democracy fund.

In addition, he reports, 10 percent of the profits of small and medium businesses are siphoned off into corrupt deals, which result in higher prices for goods and services. He estimates $50 billion a year is lost to corruption -- more than the nation spent on science, education, health and culture last year.

How could any one person stand up to all of that?

Not a day passed that Inna Grigoryevna Shvidenko, Lykov's sister-in-law, did not remind him he was in danger, that he should think of his two motherless children, Lida, 15, and Ilya, 20. Their mother, Alyona, died nine years ago from cancer. She was a doctor, and her family blamed her illness on exposure to faulty equipment used to administer sonograms.

"Not many people could understand his idealism," says Shvidenko, also a doctor. "Such character is rare, and most people didn't understand it.

"He acted according to his ideals, his convictions and his upbringing. He never changed his convictions. If that's good or bad, it's not up to us to make judgments."

Grigoriants and Lykov met about six years ago, after Lykov was arrested and charged with violating state secrets because he criticized the KGB in Saratov. Lykov had been quoted in a local newspaper complaining that the KGB recruited informers by entrapment, pushing them into compromising situations and then threatening to expose them unless they worked as informants.

He was fired for that, but appealed his dismissal in court and was reinstated. Many of his superiors thought he was nothing but a troublemaker. They disciplined him 17 times. They harassed him constantly. He refused to bow to pressure and managed to get 15 corrupt policemen fired. Recently he got a young woman out of jail who had been arrested not because she had broken any law, but because a policeman was angry with her.

"A person who won't compromise is not very easy to be around," says Shvidenko. "Always telling your boss what you think -- no one wants that."

His last supervisor, Lt. Col. Anatoly D. Shteinberg, says Lykov wasn't particularly useful in port matters. "He was always going to court, and someone had to fill in for him," he says. "So it wasn't very convenient for us. Of course we all knew about him. He destroyed the career of many officials, and many of his colleagues kept their distance because he had many enemies."

Lykov wasn't motivated by ideology -- only by the undeterrable pursuit of justice. His best friend was Aleksandr F. Pronin, who was a KGB agent in Saratov until he retired last year. He also had a warm, trusting friendship with Grigoriants, who had been a dissident pursued by the KGB in Soviet times.

Lykov met Pronin in 1984, when Pronin was assigned to the KGB department responsible for watching the police department.

"He of course was an extraordinary person," says Pronin, 52. "Nobody could understand why he was involved in problems that didn't affect him directly. I told him he had to think of his children."

Lykov was never vindictive, he says. "His idea was not to punish everyone but to stop crime," Pronin says.

Once Lykov complained to Pronin that his telephone was being tapped. Pronin the KGB manlaughed at him.

"I told him telephones exist to be tapped," says Pronin, who runs a business offering protection from bugging.

Grigoriants had emerged unchastened after 9 1/2 years in Soviet prisons, still fighting for human rights and determined to force the KGB into becoming a law-abiding organization. For the past several years he has arranged annual conferences called "KGB: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow."

On a sunny afternoon at the end of April, Grigoriants organized a news conference in Moscow to discuss corruption among the police and intelligence services. He invited Lykov.

Lykov sat at his right, talking about how he had come to the human rights fight in 1992 after discovering that a group of policemen was swindling elderly citizens out of their apartments in Saratov.

Afterward, Lykov chatted with a reporter and invited her to visit Saratov. She agreed. They shook hands and parted. As Lykov walked toward the subway, he mentioned someone was following him. The next day he left on the 16-hour train journey home. The day after that, he was dead.

That Saturday night, Svetlana Baronova, a lawyer, neighbor and former police detective, talked with Lykov by telephone. They had worked together until 1990, when Baronova left the police force.

"I didn't get along there," she says. "Like Lykov I sometimes liked to speak the truth, and people don't always like it."

On the phone that night, Baronova says, Lykov told her he was working on something affecting people in high places, and that the case was coming together for him.

"I told him, 'You're an idiot. You'll be killed. You have motherless children. Do you want to leave them without a father, too?'

"He laughed. He said, 'You live nearby. You'll take care of them.' Two hours later, he was killed."

She saw him as a quixotic figure. "Maybe you catch one or two of the bad ones," she says, "but it's not worth your peace of mind and your happiness. You can't change the system. I know. burned myself out on it."

She says Lykov must have been killed by what's known as the mafia -- a fusion of law enforcement officials and criminals.

"I believe those who ordered the murder are from somewhere within law enforcement," Baronova says. "I can't say whether they were the police, the security services, the prosecutors or who it was. But I do believe they were from law enforcement."

Lykov left two unusually self-possessed and studious children. Ilya is in medical school and wants to be an anesthesiologist. Lida is in high school and thinking of either medicine or languages. So far, they have money for food. About 200 people pressed into the courtyard of their apartment building the day of the funeral and left what little money they could. They both have jobs for the summer. They have a loving aunt. But their parents are gone, and so is any income.

They are proud of their father. He taught them honesty. But they don't know if anything will change. And though police and prosecutors are still investigating, they don't know if the murder will ever be solved.

"Even 10 people like him can't stop the corruption," Ilya says. "It's a political matter."

Still, others go on. "We live in a dangerous country," says Grigoriants. He bows his head for a moment. His hands tremble. "I know," he says. "I know."

Three years ago, someone who didn't like Grigoriants pursuing the KGB called him. "If you don't stop, we'll kill your son," the voice said.

Not long after, his son was hit and killed by a car on a quiet street where an accident seemed unlikely.

"There should be a happy ending, as in a fairy tale," Baronova says. "If you didn't believe that, you couldn't go on living.

"I think Igor did not fight in vain, even though I told him he couldn't change the world. I believe everything that is good in life is based on good deeds like his. That's why they were afraid of him. That's why they killed him."

Pub Date: 7/06/98