Didn't Ashcroft suggest something like this?
In Moscow, Volunteers Keeping An Eye on the People Next Door
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 16, 2004; Page A21
MOSCOW -- In her former life as a top Communist Party official at a closed military factory in Samara, a city on the Volga River, Albina Tsareva helped enforce ideological conformity and general discipline among the workers.
Now living in retirement in northwest Moscow, Tsareva, 66, is still on the lookout for anti-social behavior. "We want to make our community better," she said. "Safe, secure and healthy."
Tsareva heads a network of 190 volunteers who keep an eye out for suspicious people and questionable behavior at 51 apartment buildings, courtyards and parks in Moscow's Shukino district. In her role as chairwoman of the Public Order Council in Territorial Administrative Unit No. 4, she describes herself half-jokingly as "Czar and God."
The Moscow city council this month passed a law and appropriated $3 million to create public order councils in each of Moscow's 676 subdistricts. Backers describe the measure as a kind of neighborhood watch that will involve ordinary people in the fight against terrorism, crime, public drunkenness and vandalism.
"Without the help of the citizens it is impossible to have security," said Inna Svyatenko, a Moscow city council member and the bill's sponsor. "And our goal is to promote the people's participation."
But critics view the public order councils as an attempt to return to Soviet-style monitoring of the citizenry and the resurrection of the feared stukach, or informer, in Russian life.
