#11 | July 5 - 16, 1997  

Service Guaranteed

"What are you starin' at? Never seen a corpse before?"

You've got to give Russian assassins credit-they are thorough. Though Moscow only had 12 murders last week, one of them was a real whopper. Stanislav Alimov, president of "RosInterbank" was riding in his jeep back to Moscow from his dacha with his wife, his bodyguard, his driver and his maid when suddenly an object flew threw his driver side window and passed out the passenger side window. What was it? Naturally, a hand grenade, shot from a grenade launcher by assassins along the side of the road. When the grenade passed harmlessly out of the car and exploded on the road embankment, the assassins opened fire with Kalshnikovs, hitting the Jeep more than 50 times and killing everybody inside but the driver, who managed to escape on foot back to the dacha. In what has become one of the most oft-repeated cliches in Russia, police later announced that the killing "was connected with Alimov's professional activites."

A Booming Business

Police in the ZAO, the Western Administrative Okrug, announced last week that they had uncovered Moscow's all-time lamest academic corruption ring. The "ring" turned out to be one Ivan Yevdokimov, an English teacher at junior high no. 224 in the Western part of the city. According to the UVD ZAO, Yevdokimov was ratted out to police by parents of his 12-13 year-old students, who were buying high marks in his language courses for $100 bucks apiece. Police did not specify whether or not Yevdokimov had learned his English at Harvard.

"Next time, whisper."

Road Games

In a story entitled Russian Roads are the Best Roads in the World, the increasingly mercurial Kriminalnaya Khronika told a rare story of deliverance in the Russian provinces. The newspaper reported that three armed men held up a truck on the highway outside Kazan last week and ordered the driver to drive on. As they roared away from the city, the three gangsters argued over how best to kill the driver and dispose of his body, providing, to say the least, a terrible distraction from the road. Fortunately for the driver, though, the truck hit a monster pothole some 30 kilometers out of the city, forcing the vehicle to a halt. The newspaper comments further: "The pothole was a nice one, very deep. There was a lot of water in it. And there was more than enough dirt and mud around it. The truck was stuck so badly, the police stopped to help out. That's the way it goes..."