Issue #06/87, March 30 - April 13, 2000 
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DING DONG DITCH
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You might believe that a Russian raised and educated under the old, dated Soviet regime has nothing to teach the new, ideology-free Techno generation, but this tale will tell you differently. Seems that a
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"Damn these shoes are uncomfortable. I think I'm developing a blister!" |
Their first victim was a Korean flea market trader who worked at Luzhniki, and her eleven-year-old son. On February 2nd of last year, mentor and mentees arrived at the Korean's apartment on Orekhom Bulvar. While Kachanov, the baby of the group, the apprentice if you will, waited down in the podyezd, Alekhin and Reshetov went up to the apartment, rang the buzzer, and asked the Korean mommie if they could use her telephone. She recognized Alekhin as a friend [sic] of her eldest daughter's, and let him in. Alekhin walked straight to the kitchen, grabbed a carving knife, and proceeded to slice the mother-son up like dog meat, or better yet, like bul-go-ki. Reshetov, ever the motivated apprentice, took a construction hammer and used it to crush the slashed-up Koreans' heads.
For their hard work, they were able to clear the apartment of 2000 rubles and 700 dollars.
Flush with success, the sage and his minion set off to make another, even more clever heist a month later, this time choosing a young girlfriend of Reshetov's, Yelena Solodova. Their plan was to take her out to their dacha in the Dmitrovsky region outside of Moscow, get her drunk (not a difficult task), swipe her keys, and have one of them clean the flat while the other, you know, had sex with her or whatever. But Solodova, ever the clever SPS girl, didn't take the bait, and instead decided to bail on the dacha and its promise of vomit and semen. She grabbed her stuff and prepared to leave. What now? How to adapt to changing market conditions? Alekhin and Reshetov (the 16-year-old couldn't take the heat, so he bailed out) switched to Plan B: they shot her in the head and killed her. Then took her keys, hopped in the Lada, and headed to her apartment on Ulitsa Yekaterina Budanovaya. They arrived, went about their business of cleaning Solodova's apartment of all of its goods, when yet another one of those "Murphy's Law" things happened: her youngest sister, only a fifth-grader, came home from school. What to do? Why, strangle her, drown her corpse in a full bathtub, then cut her throat, of course!
Two weeks later, the mentor-student duo got busted by the police, and last week, they were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. As for the 16-year-old, he never made it to the police station. That's because between murders, he'd gotten into a fight with another teenaged flathead over his girlfriend... and was killed.
GIMME MY WATERMELON!
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We really should have a new death porn icon for watermelon-related murders, what with the summer season approaching and all. You may laugh, but folks, we kid you not: the arbus is the cause of more
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"Whoah! Huh-huh! Check it out, you can see her thingies!" |
The most recent arbus-related murder trial, as reported in the February 15th edition of Moskovsky Komsomolets, ended with a sentence of 12-1/2 years in jail for 34-year-old Viktor Pavlyuk.
Last August 23rd, Pavlyuk went to the corner of Amurskaya and Montazhna streets to buy an arbus, but was, for some reason, refused by the Azerbaidjani traders. One can only guess why: a drunken, hungover, crazed Russian and a frustrated, abused, violent Azeri are a dangerous mix: place a watermelon between the two, and sparks will fly, folks.
Pavlyuk didn't take the watermelon-snub lying down. He went back to his apartment and grabbed a homemade 5.65mm pipe-gun (a contraption that he learned to build by watching one of the TV real-life crime shows), returned to the watermelon stand, aimed the pipe, and, using a hammer, pounded the bullets from the back. One nailed the Azeri watermelon trader in the stomach, wounding him but not killing him. A cop who happened to be nearby and who happened to be a "friend" of the Azeri (hey, we'd be friends to any fruit traders who we could beat and shake down for a few bucks every week, too!) chased after Pavlyuk. The criminal fled, firing his contraption at the pursuing cops, even nailing one in the chest - but the militiaman was saved by his trusty bullet-proof vest. Hey, it's one thing to kill an Azeri for not selling you an arbus - that's understandable. But to shoot a cop who merely wanted to protect his racket - heck, you may as well just return to the law of the jungle! For that, Pavlyuk received a harsh sentence, and added his name to the illustrious list of watermelon-psychos.
SHE ASKED FOR IT
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Observers often wonder how it is that Russians can survive the economic collapse, the chronic payment shortages, and the decay of the social fabric. In fact, they often can't.
The latest issue of Kriminalnaya Khronika reported the tragic story of Irina Nikolaevna, a 45-year-old pensioner from a village in the Saratov region. She had fallen into inconsolable depression after her pension had been delayed for months, and her employer for a side job meant to supplement her meager pension, ever the budget-slashing SPS-er, also decided not to pay her for her work. The final straw was when she had a falling out with her twenty-two year old daughter.
Nikolaevna took a hard look at her circumstances, and realized that life wasn't going to get any better (well duh!). So last April, she wrote a suicide note to her daughter, grabbed some rope, and headed out on her bicycle to a field to find a place to hang herself. Here's where God's Plan for humanity kicks in.
Just as she was hanging, a group of four, tottering drunken men
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"You know Igor, it's days like this, when you get a chance to help the average Russian stand on his own two feet, that makes working in the militsia worth the trouble." |
One of the men took her bike and left, and the other three led her to a nearby canal. One, a twenty-four-year-old red-haired officer's academy graduate named Vladimir Klykov, suggested that now might be a good time to have sex. Nikolaevna asked to be let go, but Klykov started to tear her clothes off for her. She broke free, ran onto the canal, but it being April and all, the icy surface cracked and she fell into the canal, nearly drowning. Somehow she managed to swim to the shore, but she probably regretted it.
Klykov's friend, the twenty-two-year-old Andrei Tyufikov, grabbed Nikolaevna, wrestled the freezing woman down, and raped her. She managed to bite and wound Tyufikov in the cheek and neck, but by the time Klykov got to her, she'd given up resisting. The third man didn't rape her; rather, he helped dress her and even offered to get her drunk in order to warm her up again. She refused.
The two rapists were thereafter apprehended, but they pleaded for leniency since, after all, they'd done the greatest mitzvah of all: they'd saved a human life.
Tyufikov is quoted as defending himself thus: "When I saw this chick on the ground with rope around her neck, I figured she was drunk.... I was also a bit 'under the weather', so I lost control of myself. I offered her vodka. She took her jacket off herself and willingly lay down, but for some reason she bit me..." Standing by her man, Tyufikov's wife is quoted as saying, "Yeah, my husband loves to take walks. On that day he came home drunk. His face and neck were covered in bites."
The end result was that the judge was touched by their philanthropy. He sentenced Tyufikov to four and half years in "the zone," and Klykov to four. Each was also ordered to pay 3,500 rubles, or about $120 dollars, to the victim.
Nikolaevna was offended by the paltry sum, while Tufikov demanded even greater leniency for having saved the ungrateful bitch's life. He took his case to the Saratov appeals court. In a rare instance where everyone came out a winner, Nikolaevna's compensation was increased to ten thousand rubles from each rapist, while the do-gooders' sentences were reduced to three years.
The life-affirming ending to this ugly story is that Nikolaevna now has decided she wants to live. The rapists indeed saved her life, and earned her enough money to keep going. Folks, this is about as close to a happy Hollywood ending that you'll find in Russia today, so get out your hankies, and praise the lord that life goes on.
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