Issue #11/92, June 8 - 22, 2000 
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ONE NIGHT’S COMPENSATION
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Veronika’s mistake, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets, was that she had told a friend of hers named Yuliya Kalinova before going into the disco that she couldn’t lend her 50 rubles. Actually, it wasn’t even as bad as all that. Yuliya and Veronika had met some six months before at a party, where the straight-laced, diligent girl from the good family, Veronika, had attracted the attention of a boy named Volodya. Yuliya, runaway daughter of violent drunks and a heroin addict herself since the age of 13, had liked Volodya herself. Nothing doing. Volodya picked Veronika. Not for long, true, but that didn’t matter. His rejection of Yuliya was certainly permanent enough.
Over the course of the year, Yuliya started to get into trouble. Neighbors sent in complaints to the police about her-about how she spit in the face of one old woman, for instance, or tossed broken glass on the stairwell in front of another. At one point during the winter she made a phone call to Belarus from a friend’s house, racking up a 275-ruble bill. The friend’s father demanded the money and Yuliya didn’t have it. So she went around town looking for money to borrow. Eventually, after exhausting a host of other possibilities, she came to Veronika one afternoon for the money.
Veronika told her she didn’t have the money, that all she could lend her was 50 rubles. Yuliya was offended: you know what you can do with your 50 rubles, she said, and stormed off. “Nyet kak nyet,” thought Veronika, and went home.
That night, Yuliya came across Veronika outside the disco. Apparently having changed her mind, she asked if Veronika still had that 50 rubles. Annoyed, Veronika said she didn’t have it. Bad move. Yuliya later found out through friends that Veronika spent no less than 200 rubles later that night. It was proof of a deception that Yuliya would not forgive.
Yuliya confided in another friend, a fellow high school flunkie and heroin banger named Zhenya Zaborina. Zaborina was known as a nice girl around the neighborhood, if a little slow, who’d just begun that year to lose her way. Along with Yuliya, she’d turned into a hardcore addict the previous summer. Now she spent most of her time at home. When Yuliya came home that day complaining about that stuck-up little Veronika, Zhenya, as was her habit, quickly took her fellow junkie’s side. The two of them agreed that Veronika needed to be punished.
The next day they confronted her in a park, after Veronika got out of school, and demanded an explanation for the 200-ruble incident. Veronika, infuriated, shouted them both down right away. “What, did you want me to bring the money home to you?” she yelled. “Ridiculous! And the real reason I didn’t give you the money was because I knew I’d never see it again!”
Veronika stormed off. The friends stood there in shock.
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“Wow, that was great! Can we try it again with the bigger one?” |
A week later, Veronika was dead. The two girls had conspired to visit her at home, rob her, and strangle her. And that was exactly what they did. One day they visited Veronika in the afternoon, overpowered her, and strangled her with a scarf. They left the body in the stairwell of the building, and left the apartment with a few bagfuls of Veronika’s things-some clothes, an amber bracelet, some nail polish, a pack of Parliament cigarettes, 100 dollars and 500 rubles.
The girls went immediately to the marketplace, where they changed the dollars and bought themselves some new clothes. They took the rest of the stuff to a pawnbroker and converted it into cash. That night, they went to the disco. The same disco. And had, by all reports, a good time.
The next day they were both picked up. Now they’re in jail, awaiting sentence. The maximum they can receive: 10 years. Not a bad trade, for one good night.
VIEWER LOYALTY
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They are the crackhouses of Russia, and they’re all around us. They’re run-down apartment-crash-pads full of drunks who drink round the clock. Just about every apartment building in town as one or two of them-places where drunks in off the street come to hang out. Maybe one of them owns the place. Maybe some of them can’t remember whose apartment it is. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that drinking alone sucks.
All the same, peace and quiet is nice sometimes. Particularly when you’re 41 and you’ve spent the whole night boozing with four people, two of whom happen to be your 24 year-old drunk girlfriend and a young man in his twenties you’re pretty sure she’s flirting with. That’s an act that can get kind of boring. Fortunately, there’s always a solution to that problem in Russia, and it’s seldom more than an unopened drawer away. All you have to do is find the kitchen knife-even the poorest apartments usually have them-and you can dispatch any obstacle to your happiness quickly and vigorously.
That’s what one 41 year-old on Isakovskogo street in Moscow did this past Tuesday. He took the old kitchen knife and hacked up his girlfriend and another man. Typical story, but then he did an atypical thing: instead of fleeing the scene, he simply returned to his chair and sat watching television while just a few feet away, the bodies of two people sat bathing in rapidly-expanding puddles of blood.
The killer had spared two other people in the room, who quickly fled the scene, without telling police, leaving the culprit to enjoy his TV-viewing alone. This mirthful scene was interrupted the next morning, when another alcoholic friend came by to visit. He left quickly (no doubt waving in the doorway and saying “Um, I’ll come back later”), and called the police. When the Law arrived soon after, the killer was still sitting watching television. He was handcuffed right there in his chair.
THEY STUCK A SPOON IN HIS ASS
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“I think I’ll just lie down here for a while and take a premature
death from exposure.” |
