A municipal law and order committee is hoping to push a law through the city council that would fund a 15,000 member part-time volunteer police force.
The Law and Order Committee of the City Council, headed by former city police chief Arkady Kramarev, wants to massively revamp the once mighty Soviet-era system of Dobrovolnikh Narodnikh Druzhin (people's volunteer units).
The new law seeks a 1996 budget allocation of up to 7.5 billion roubles ($1.6 million) to fund about 15,000 volunteer officers in 20 districts of the city, including equipping them with uniforms, communications devices and gas weapons.
But while many St Petersburg citizens are concerned about the city's increased crime rates, only two of their elected deputies attended the committee's debate on the volunteer police draft law.
And early readings of the draft law have already had problems.
Committee spokeswoman Tatiana Levina said, "like many important municipal laws, the draft law on Volunteer Policing Units has not been approved by the city's 50-member strong council for lack of a quorum."
That does not bode well for the future of the law when it appears before the full 50-member council. A quorum of 33 would be needed to ratify it.
Nonetheless, the Law and Order Committee hopes to have the volunteer force's budget approved at the same time as the city's 1996 municipal budget is approved.
Opponents of the law point to the dangers of arming -- even with gas weapons -- such a large group of people.
They also argue that the volunteers will abuse their free transport passes by using them outside their patrol hours, and that the money spent on them could better be spent on the city's professional police force.
One of those who drafted the law was German Ezhov. He said that its inspiration was not any old notion of communist morality, which dictated that every person should dedicate part of his free time to bettering his socialist society -- -- in this case to guard it by patrolling the streets.
He said one basic difference between the former Soviet volunteers and the new volunteers was that the latter could expect some pay for their services, if they acted as security guards at specific state, political, cultural or sporting events, while the earlier volunteers had only their sense of civic pride to spur them on (as well as the promise of two extra days vacation a year).
St Petersburg's first volunteer police unit was formed in 1959 by workers at the massive Kirovsky plant. In the force's 1970s heyday there were more than 160,000 volunteers patrolling the city's streets nightly.
"Just the presence of people wearing the red armbands made an impression on street hooligans" said Peter Vasekha, 68, an electrician and a member of the Kirovsky Zavod unit since 1959. "That's why people could walk more safely on Leningrad's streets during Soviet times."