There wasn't much organized crime, in the sense of street gangs, in the more urban areas of the Soviet Union. (The various rural provinces, especially in the Soviet-occupied middle east are another story.) There was, of course, plenty of petty crime, smuggling, and un-organized property and violent crime, etc. [1]

The reason for this isn't surveillance or the harshness of punishments.

The reason for it was that when there's an easy default roadmap for your life (School -> Gainful employment), you're not going to drop out of civilized society, and into criminality at the age of 15.

It's not that there's more to gain from criminality now, compared to fifty years ago. It's that there's less to lose. Instead of a social contract that guarantees[2] employment, a shitty apartment, and food on your table, if you just go through the motions, it's a dog-eat-dog-every-man-for-himself world. Unsurprisingly, many people find it easier to drop out of that, and make a living through crime.

[1] Without even mentioning the truly mind-blowing amount of low-level, and high-level corruption that the USSR experienced.

[2] Employment wasn't guaranteed - people had to go apply for jobs, have their employment and social records get checked, there was competition for getting into good jobs, etc - but 100% employment was an official goal of the state. This is not the case in either the West, or the East, anymore.

Thanks I think that explains the carrot portion. The various stick options likely helped too—the various efforts to “eradicate counterrevolutionaries” and decrying leniency and favoring resoluteness and setting goals for executions likely has an impact.

After destalinization, nobody doing law enforcement in the USSR had execution quotas, or was inventing counterrevolutionaries to eradicate.

I would recommend looking up the crime stats for USSR. There's a very big difference between the perception and the reality there.

I would imagine there's also a very big difference between the reported stats and what the reality is

I would imagine there is also a very big differeence between the USSR reported numbers and western estimates. Not sure what the reality you speak of is.

This one https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/03/19/the-prettiest-crime-...

Of course they did. Parents grew up in a former communist country and smuggling in goods, stealing, were all pretty common. The reason you don't hear about it is because if people did those things that would mean that communism is bad and doesn't work. I wouldn't trust the data coming out of a communist country.

During the chernobyl disaster the USSR kept providing false numbers to the world in order to downplay the significance of the event - to the point of sabotaging the cleanup effort and themselves.

Yes they had to fib and lie about production and all their 5-year Plans... but on the other hand most police in those states were unarmed (of course the sentences for being an armed criminal were “prohibitive”)...