rime!?

The good news is that the six-year long Russian economic collapse has ended. Moreover, the worst post- Soviet nightmare, rampant crime, is dramatically receding. Or is it?

The bad news is that Russia's official statistics agency, Goskomstat, has just been caught fiddling the figures to turn a 6 per cent economic downturn into an unexpected spurt of growth. As for those glad tidings about crime, well, sociologists aren't too sure.

"All figures carry a message, and there is a real danger of manipulation when we are dealing with complex indicators of sensitive social or economic trends," says Nugzar Betanelli, director of the Institute for the Sociology of Parliamentarism.

"A clever person can do almost anything with numbers."

For two months running Goskomstat has issued figures showing that the Russian economy's long slide was finally going into reverse. The agency has claimed that Russia's gross domestic product -- the indicator of overall economic health -- grew by 0.3 per cent in January and then by 0.9 per cent in February, compared with the same periods of last year.

The increases seemed modest, but coming after years of unremitting slump and a particularly disastrous 1996 -- in which GDP plunged a staggering 6 per cent -- the data arrived like a bright beacon of hope. Editorialists from Toronto to Tokyo hailed the "first stirrings of growth" Russia's perennial bad news economy.

In his state of the nation address a month ago, President Boris Yeltsin assured weary Russians that the long descent into poverty was over. He claimed that economic growth was already beginning and would total 2 per cent this year.

But last week an independent think tank revealed that it was all smoke and mirrors. Experts at the Russian-European Centre for Economic Policy churned over the figures and discovered they didn't add up.

"Goskomstat arbitrarily increased their estimates of the size of the gray economy, but failed to tell anyone about the change in method," says Al Breach, an economist working with the Centre.

Goskomstat, which collects data from all Russian regions and government ministries, holds a virtual monopoly on basic statistics covering economic and social trends.

"There is no competitor to Goskomstat," says Andrei Kortunov, director of the independent Russian Scientific Fund. "Virtually everyone relies on it, which makes any doubts about its credibility very troubling."

Some Western economists have long argued that unregulated and unmeasured activity in the gray economy make Russia's situation less grim than it seems. They have urged Goskomstat to alter its methods of calculating in order to account for this.

But Mr. Breach says the official statistics agency's secret and unexplained decision to award new values to gray market activity makes a mockery of proper reporting. And its failure to adjust past statistics into line with the new methodology made the month-on-month comparison extremely deceptive.

"That distorted the real picture completely," he says. According to the Centre, if the same methods used in the past had been employed they would have shown a 6 per cent drop in the Russian economy from January to January instead of the=20 growth claimed by the government.

A similar problem is emerging with feel-good crime statistics reported last week by Russia's ambitious Interior Minister, Anatoly Kulikov. According to Mr. Kulikov, the incidence of "serious" crimes like murder and violent robbery in Moscow fell last year by 19 per cent while the efficiency of police in solving crimes jumped impressively.

"Despite the difficulties of the transition period, the criminal situation is under control," Mr. Kulikov recently said. But sociologists note astounding discrepancies in the figures. While violent assaults have reportedly decreased by 19 per cent, and theft is down 22 per cent, drug-related crimes have risen a whopping 54 per cent and the ill-defined offense of "hooliganism" is up by 13 per cent.

"It is really hard to believe narcotics violations are up but theft is down. No one has ever seen this combination of trends anywhere," says Olga Basmachnaya, a sociologist at Moscow University.

"I suspect we're looking at massively doctored statistics." Decreases in crimes such as murder (-9 per cent), extortion (-28 per cent) and hostage-taking (-64 per cent) announced by the Interior Ministry could actually reflect refinement in the methods of organized criminals rather than any improvement of police efficiency, she says.

"The Interior Ministry also tells us that 'economic crimes' have increased by 67 per cent in one year. What does this mean?," she says.

"It means that organized crime is still alive and well, and still robbing the country blind. Perhaps the criminals are just better organized than ever, and are now able to conduct their business without slaughtering each other as they did in the past. I can't see this would be anything for the Interior Ministry to brag about."