#3 | March 20 - April 2, 1997  

The State Withers Away-By Suicide

Russian prisoners looking to escape may not have to wait much longer for a choice opportunity. The press service of the GenProkuratura announced this week that more than 100 prison guards last year killed themselves, at a rate roughly analogous to that of the prisoners themselves.

"Ok, honey-I promise I'll never go to the Hungry Duck again!"

"Work stress in prisons," the Prokuratura spokesman told eXile, "is reaching somewhat of a high." The high self-inflicted mortality rate, along with a general turnover problem (more than 50,000 people have left prison guard service in the past two years) was discussed at a recent meeting of MVD officials, chief among them Deputy Minister Pyotr Mishenkov. The board concluded that conditions would have to be improved in prisons, or the country would soon be faced with mass escapes. Already in February, guards of a convoy in Norilsk-a city stricken by economic problems stemming from Norilsk Nickel's failure to pay wages-announced a strike before authorities quickly found money to pay their salaries. It's worth noting that Moscow penitentiary officials were recently discovered to have been moonlighting as security guards for Koptevsky mafia chief Vasily Naumov. Soon they may be guarding them against the rest of us.

Laser Tag for Tough Guys

Hey, d'you like the grainy, low-visibility basement firefights at Quasar, Moscow's new laser-tag club? Then you may want to head down to the Volgograd oblast and try the real thing. Last week, military school cadet Sergei Lepnev went beserk with a machine gun in a basement security room at his academy in the town of Kalmuishin. He shot several people before hitting a boiler pipe, causing the room to cloud up with steam. Suddenly Kalmuishin was transformed into the set for a bad Dolph Lundgren movie: fleeing victims, hot muscle-defining steam, and a mad gunman firing blindly in all directions. Six were killed and two were injured in the fracas. Lepnev was later arrested when his mother talked him into turning himself in. He got three paragraphs in the Moscow Times for his trouble, taking second-billing to a killer of four in Detroit, who got a half-page

She Was Always Nagging!

Mothers love their sons unconditionally, even when their sons shoot them in the head and stomach and wait two hours to call an ambulance.

"Boy, that hole in the ozone is no joke!"

According the the Moscow City Police department, 39 year-old Tatyana Alekseyeva died trying to protect her 19 year-old son Pavel, who had just shot her in the hopes of inheriting her apartment. After having laid on her couch for two hours following the shooting, Tatyana was only just barely alive when the ambulance arrived. Before she died, though, she told the ambulance driver that she had been attacked by a stranger on the street. Police were touched by her story but arrested her worthless son anyway this past Saturday, after recovering the TT pistol he'd used to kill her.