Exposed radium on compass needle

I opened up my old soviet compass which I posted here before to look at the needle in detail and found that it's much hotter than I thought. I Initially measured through the glass of the compass and got an average of 3 uSv/h. With the needle out of the compass and measured at direct contact It's about 3 times as high with peaks of up to 17 uSv/h and about 450 CPS. I was quite surprised about how much of a difference these 4mm made.