#10 | June 19 - July 2, 1997  

What Next?

"Nothing gets between me and my Calv-!"

Petrovka-38, the official newspaper of the Moscow Police, reported this past week that two invalids-one 34, one 53, with the latter in a wheelchair-were arrested in the first week of June for beating up a Russian soldier in the Moscow Metro. GUVD spokeswoman Lyudmilla Lankina confirmed the story, but declined to provide any additional details. The newspaper, however, filled in the necessary commentary. "Good thing the Metro police were closeby," it wrote, "or the Russian army would have completely shamed itself."

New Kids On the Block

Russia may not produce many consumer goods anymore, but it continues to lead the world in police subdepartments with weird acronyms. Between MUR, SOBOR, GUVD, UVD, RUVD, RUOP, OMON, RUUR, UNON, and GAI, there are enough letters on the shoulders of Moscow's finest to make any eXpat's head spin. Now it's apparently time to get acquainted with a new hit police group-the NDBD, or otryad spetsiyalnovo naznacheniya Narodikh Druzhin Bezopasnosti Dviszheniya, which in more merciful language translates simply as traffic safety squad. The NDBD seldom does much to get into the news, but it managed last week when a man they arrested for hooliganism (after he had allegedly accosted his mother for money) smashed with his head no less than three plate glass windows, including the pane covering a fire extinguisher in the stairway outside his house, before he was finally thrown into his cell in the 125th precinct. The arrest was a rare example of an NDBD squad straying from the street to answer a distress call; normally they limit their activities to preventing vandalism and car theft. Look for them soon in a theater of operations near you!

"Look Ma, no cavities!"

Dumb and Dumber

Not long ago the eXile reported an incident in Novokuznetsk of a pair of burglars holding up a trolleybus for 15,000 rubles. In this issue our asinine crime award goes to a 19 year-old military fireman in Moscow who last week was convicted of killing two of his septugenarian aunts for 98,000 rubles and a steak knife. According to the city prosecutor's office, the soldier had borrowed a large sum of money from a friend and had settled on a plan to pay the money back by robbing his two aunts, whom he regularly visited for dinner. On February 4 of this year he went for his usual meal, ate heartily (blini, according to the prosecutor), then got up and stabbed one aunt 12 times and another 8 times. The prosecutor plans on asking for the death sentence; it was unclear whether the condemned will be offered blini for a last meal.

Tables Turned

A lesson to contract killers: if something works, stick with it! According to the June 15 Moskovsky Komsomolets, a hit man in Zelenograd nearly paid with his life when he strayed from the standard head-shot-in-the-podyezd formula. The paper reported that a hitman came to the apartment of the head of a company called "Uniland," rang the doorbell, and fired his gun when the door opened. One bullet landed in the belly of his intended victim, but he didn't finish the job. The victim jumped forward, ripped the gun away from the "killer," and shot him in the foot. The would-be messenger of death tumbled down the stairs and rolled out onto the street into his Zhiguli, somehow managinga humiliating retreat.