Issue #27/82, February 1 - 10, 2000  

low-yield murder	"control shot"	podyezd	really stupid criminal	children	cries for help ignored	murder-suicide
"investigation continuing"	carved up like a turkey	related to victim's job	cannibalism	riddled with bullets	old people	Hunger-related murder

THEY SLICED HIS WEINER DOWN THE MIDDLE

Kids these days! They’ve got nothing to do but mutilate the unemployed! In St. Petersburg last week, however, they had their reasons. Well, they seemed like reasons, anyway. See, the problem, from the point of view of young Russians these days, is that too many of their would-be adult role models are boozing their lives away instead of providing the guidance that we all know youngsters need. Deprived of this helping hand, kids sometimes lash out. That’s what happened in front of house no. 32 on Kostushenko street in St.

Above: A typical post-Soviet Russian party. Below: Later, at a typical post-Soviet Russian party.

Pete last week, where 42 year-old Igor Nikonov was found lying dead with his throat slit, his pants pulled down, and his genitals, er... Well, more on that later. What happened, according to police, was that this Nikonov, who had recently been released from prison after doing several years for petty theft, had run out of money to keep him and his alcoholic wife properly medicated. The wife, left sitting motionless among the empty shelves of the kitchen of their nearby apartment, had sent her husband out to forage for vodka with a their entire savings-five rubles, according to police. Nikonov had gone from kiosk to kiosk with those five rubles, from store to store, and after being turned down at every corner he had finally approached a gang of teenagers he found standing and smoking on Kostushenko street. When he asked the kids for money, they didn’t react all that well, to put it mildly. Apparently in response to a rude comment Nikonov made, the kids (five of them, according to cops, including two girls) first beat the drunk over the head with sticks, then choked him with a belt, and finally cut his throat and stood around while he bled to death. Then, after he was dead, they yanked his pants down and sliced his penis in half with a knife-cut it in two long halves, like a hot dog grooved for mustard application-- from the tip to the very base. For good measure, one of the boys stole Nikonov’s shoes, making sure as he did to observe proper evidentiary etiquette by leaving his own shoes for cops to find in the bushes two meters away. The whole gang was arrested the next morning. No word yet on whether or not Mrs. Nikonova got her five rubles back.

THE ROOF WORKS BETTER

Bend your knees and follow through-that’s the lesson kids should be learning from Russian newspapers these days. At least, that’s what we think, after reading about the sentencing of a sixteen year-old girl last week in the city of Severodvinsk. That city last June was the site of one of those rare domestic crimes that actually makes the news in Russia-a botched suicide pact between two sixteen year-old girls who’d decided to end it all after considering their future options in their grim provincial hometown. One girl strangled the other, then slit her own throat with a knife. Unfortunately for her, she survived. The incident, which was shown on television throughout the country, apparently set off a series of similar incidents, including one in Mytishi, where three fourteen year-old girls threw themselves off the roof of their apartment building. They all died, but the girl in Severodvinsk wasn’t so lucky. The court didn’t buy her suicide-pact defense and sentenced her to five years in prison for first-degree murder. She’ll be lucky if she sees a roof in that time.

BLOODY AND BLOODIER

Viktor Kluyev, also of St. Petersburg, got a little more than he bargained for on the evening of January 10 when he invited two old friends over to his apartment on Vashavskaya Ulitsa for a holiday drink. If you’ve lived in this country long enough, you know how this story ends: Kluyev and his buddies had horked down over 5 liters of vodka before someone revisited an old argument over something or other and soon the whole crew was racing for the knife-drawer in the kitchen. Kluyev lost out in the struggle and the two other friends were left standing over the body, vision blurred from drink, wondering what to do. Finally it occurred to one of them to dismember the body so that it could be carried out in bags and thrown into a nearby dumpster. A sound enough plan, to be sure, but easier said than done: according to Moskovsky Komsomolets, the two men were too drunk to manage the job and accomplished nothing but the bloodying of their clothes. Giving up finally on the dismembering idea, the two men decided to simply flee the apartment, but hesitated on account of their

"I object to the misogynist tone of this otherwise intelligent publication. Objectifying women undermines its [sub]-versive con/text."

bloody clothes. Realizing they couldn’t go out on the street covered in blood, they both stripped down to their underwear and decided to split the apartment and take their chances. Genius # 1 was foiled by alcohol; he passed out on the first floor of the building and rounded up shortly afterward by police who had been summoned by irritated neighbors to get him off the property. Brainiac # 2 made it a little farther, but was apprehended by police on the street after the rapid interrogation of Genius # 1 moved them to look around for a naked drunk fleeing the area. Both are now clothed by in jail, probably headed for Kresti.

NEXT THEY’LL PROBABLY RAPE ME IN PRISON!

That’s probably what an as-yet-unnamed suspect in a murder of a young girl in the northern city of Kolpinsk must be saying to himself after being thrown behind bars, probably for life, just for... well, just for trying to be himself. The 21 year-old suspect’s first mistake, according to Moskovsky Komsomelets, was to desert from his army unit on the coast of the Baltic sea. In an attempt to escape capture by military police, the suspect hid in a basement in an apartment building on Lenin St. in the small city of Kolpinsk. There, he met a 20 year-old girl named Olga Osipova, who was a runaway and also hiding out in the basement of a nearby apartment building. The two homeless youngsters decided to try to make a go of it together. But things fell apart when the deserter tried to squeeze some satisfaction out of life in the cold basement by making a pass at Osipova. First the army, now this; in a nation of stone-cold sluts, deserter-boy found a homeless Russian girl in Osipova who was stubbornly insistent upon her virtue. Apparently figuring she was just bluffing, the deserter raped her. Thousands of Russian women every day have rape complaints to the police fall on deaf ears, and most have such a faint expectation of justice that they wouldn’t even bother reporting a rape, but Osipova had a wild card to play that would guarantee police would listen to her-- the cops were already looking for the deserter. When she announced her plans to turn him in, the deserter made his next bad move and strangled the girl. Then he left her in the courtyard lightly covered with snow, her body showing clear signs of aggravated rape. Witnesses who had seen the two together helped police find the suspect, who will soon be brought to a great fork in the road, separating the two wildly unpleasant prospects of military and criminal justice. Best of luck, pal. Send us your address, we’ll send you a lifesaver.