Some ride horseback, others carry automatic weapons. In the fields ringing Moscow, police stand vigilant over workers digging buried treasure -- potatoes.


This is Operation Harvest. Over 600 police are guarding suburban potato and cabbage fields, defending farms from thieves who sneak through the woods to the edge of a plot, dig up a few sacks of vegetables and melt away as quickly as they came.


Since the operation began in late July, police have fined 693 people caught plundering produce and opened criminal cases against 33, said Gennady Melnik, the Moscow region police press spokesman. Just 1.5 million rubles' ($714) worth of kidnapped foodstuffs, mainly potatoes, carrots and cabbage, were recovered.


"It's not very much," Melnik said, calling Operation Harvest a measure designed mainly to frighten off thieves rather than catch them red-handed. Farmers say the strategy does not face up to the immensity of the problem.


Thieves take 20 to 25 percent of the strawberries, currants and other berries grown at the Lenin cooperative farm in the Leninsky region outside Moscow, said Pavel Grudinin, the commercial director of the former state farm.


Grudinin quoted the 18th-century Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin, who when asked to describe Russia in one word said, "Voruyut" -- "They steal."


"They stole, they steal, and they will always steal," he said. "What can you do? We are surviving."


Grudinin brushed off police efforts to dam the flow of stolen produce as too minuscule to make a difference. "If you have one person trying to prevent stealing and 1,000 people trying to steal, what can he do?" he said.


It is often the employees of former collective and state farms, many of whom are owed large amounts of back pay, who do the stealing. A truck driver for the Ozyora farm south of Moscow was caught with a ton of cabbages worth 200,000 rubles that he had loaded onto a company truck, Melnik said.


In another case, he said, thieves took five or six sacks of potatoes totalling 260 kilograms from a private plot, about half the owner's crop.


"You can imagine what that would mean for a private person," he said. "You watered it, you weeded it, and suddenly two people with shovels drive up and clean it all out." But most thieves take just 10 or 20 kilograms, he said.


Operation Harvest went on every year for decades before perestroika, but the program's emphasis has shifted in recent years.


Before, Melnik said, the officers' main function was to head off conflicts between locals and the city folks -- from high-school students to ministry bureaucrats -- who at the exhortation of the Communist Party came to the countryside in droves to help with the harvest.


"You know how it goes," he said. "People come from the city, and the locals, teenagers, they say, 'This is ours, we're in charge.'"


Stealing was also a problem, but it has increased dramatically in recent years because of unemployment and poverty that leave people hungry, and rising prices that make it profitable to steal a sack of potatoes and sell them on the street, Melnik said.


Of the 600 Moscow region police involved in Operation Harvest, 215 guard the fields, 203 keep order in local settlements and the rest maintain traffic and fire safety, he said. In addition, the Moscow city police department has provided mounted police, who Melnik said were particularly helpful in fields of tall corn where foot patrols cannot see far.


The fight against agri-thefts may gain importance if forecasts of a small harvest turn out to be correct.


Blaming rainy weather, the state weather service has forecast a grain harvest of 90 to 94 million tons, down from 99 million in 1993, and grain analysts predict output as low as 85 million tons and warn that Russia may have to import 5 to 6 million tons, Reuters reported.