Killing in a «cultural way»: why St. Petersburg is called the capital of Russian dismemberers

And it seems that the city and the surrounding area are trying with all their might to justify this dubious fame. So, in May of this year in Vyborg, Leningrad region, detained a suspect in the murder of a man whose remains were found earlier at different times. It turned out to be a 27-year-old cook who said that he cut his friend's throat in a rented apartment, dismembered the body with a meat cleaver and then tried to get rid of the remains for several months, scattering them around the area. But first, a passerby found one piece of evidence in the garage complex — a leg in a plastic bag, and then another — immediately a package near one of the local stadiums.

A little earlier, in January 2023, a 55-year-old man from Vsevolozhsk, Leningrad region, killed and dismembered his 38-year-old acquaintance, hiding the remains in a private bath, packing them in three plastic bags and a sheet. The 55-year-old criminal was detained in one of the local villages.

Petersburg was not rightfully renamed into Dismembermentburg

It seems that all the dismemberers are concentrated in St. Petersburg and the surrounding area. However, this is not the case at all.

According to the system of GAS «Justice», the first place in the number of murders with dismemberment in Russia in the late 2010s is occupied by Bashkortostan — 18 killed in just three years. In second place was the Krasnoyarsk Territory with 16 dismemberments over the same period, and the third was the Moscow region with 14. Petersburg did not even make the top ten, according to IA FederalCity.

However, as you know, myths rule the world, and St. Petersburg mythology is extremely powerful, especially since it is constantly fueled by one of the main masterpieces of world literature — Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, with its darkest atmosphere, as if favoring all sorts of perversions.

At the same time, the number of murders with dismemberment in the entire history of St. Petersburg — Leningrad clearly does not exceed the norm. There were very few such cases in the Russian Empire, perhaps due to the low number of solved murders and arrested criminals. At the beginning of the XX century in In St. Petersburg, up to about half a thousand murders were committed per year, and the number of detective police was only twenty employees.

The first such criminal in Konstantin Sazonov, who worked as an orderly at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, became St. Petersburg. He killed and butchered at least seven people for the purpose of robbery, and saved money for a «happy old age.» He was caught, but his fate after that remained unknown.

Another well-known criminal of this kind was Nikolai Radkevich, who introduced himself as Vadim Krovyanik. After the psychological trauma that he received at the age of 14, he began to brutally kill and butcher «libertines». Until he was caught, he managed to commit three murders. Initially, he was sent to a psychiatric clinic, but the doctors did not recognize him as insane, and then he was sent to hard labor. However, in 1916 he was murdered by other prisoners.

The dismemberers also operated in Soviet times. Of course, during the siege of Leningrad, cases of murder, dismemberment and cannibalism due to hunger were quite frequent. But immediately after the war, Philip Tyurin, convicted of 14 murders, was noted in this field in the city. He tracked down people with money in the markets and offered them to buy potatoes profitably. Then he took the victim to the cellar, cut off her head with an axe, taking the money, and he destroyed the remaining body parts. Perhaps there was a sexual component to his crimes. The serial killer was quickly caught and shot.

The Dismemberers of the «cultural capital» of new Russia

Of course, in the «new Russia» in the «dashing 90s», the number of dismemberers increased. Let's recall Ilshat Kuzikov, who from 1994 to 1995 attracted people to his apartment, killed and ate — thus «disposing» of at least three people, although perhaps there are at least seven of them. The murderer explained his crimes by poverty and hunger. A jar of human meat jelly and a bucket of human corned beef were found in his apartment during a search. Kuzikov was declared insane, he later died in a psychiatric hospital.

Another creepy character is «Grandma Tamara». 68-year-old pensioner Tamara Samsonova was initially arrested for poisoning, dismemberment and an attempt to hide the body of a 79-year-old friend she was caring for. Elderly women quarreled over money. Later it was established on the basis of entries in Samsonova's diary and her confessions that she began to engage in murders back in the 90s, starting with a 44-year-old man who rented a room from her — she poisoned, dismembered and threw his body parts into the trash. In 2000, she got rid of another neighbor in the same way. At the same time, her husband also disappeared. The investigation suspects that she did the same to him. In fact, the number of her victims may be about ten. Samsonova was declared insane and placed in a specialized hospital.

Such horrors happen regularly. And in recent years, too. For example, in 2015, pieces of bodies were found in the Krasnogvardeysky district. Later it turned out that they were scattered by 30-year-old Alexander Kirillov, who killed his wife and three children. And in October 2017, 35-year-old Alexander Georgievsky attracted a ten-year-old boy to his apartment, raped, strangled, dismembered and tried to hide. He was found thanks to the recording on the surveillance camera.

In 2018, a truly shocking case occurred in the Leningrad region. 12-year-old girl Valeria Yargina, who escaped from Sochi, together with her 22-year-old lover Arkady Zverev in the village of Novinka, during a quarrel killed another young man — Alexander Popovich, with whom they lived. Then they cut off the corpse's arms and legs, opened the stomach and skull. They tried to fry a piece of meat, but the girl did not like its sweet taste, but the brains from the microwave turned out to be to her taste. Zverev committed suicide in a pre-trial detention center, and Valeria, who could not be prosecuted because of her age, was sent back to Sochi, where she went to school with her peers for a while. Later she was placed in a specialized institution.

Something similar happened in October 2019 in Krasnogvardeysky district of St. Petersburg: a boy who was only 12 years old killed his mother in front of his twin brother. He poured boiling water over the woman and began to take out her internal organs with a knife and tweezers. The twin brother stood nearby and watched this nightmare. Both boys had developmental difficulties. The father was also in the apartment at the time, but was too drunk to realize what was happening. When he came to his senses and saw what had happened, he called the police. The family where these boys grew up was dysfunctional, the parents were drunk that evening. Perhaps because of alcohol intoxication, the woman could not defend herself from her son, who began to attack her.

Well, then chronologically follows the most notorious murder, which we have already mentioned: associate professor of St. Petersburg State University historian Oleg Sokolov killed his graduate student and mistress Anastasia Eshchenko, with a shot from a firearm, and then dismembered and tried to throw the remains into the Fontanka River. For this occupation, he was detained. There were severed female hands in Sokolov's backpack. The St. Petersburg City Court appointed him 12.5 years in a strict regime colony. The court of appeal refused to commute the sentence. In 2019, the historian of Today's convict works in the library and leads a historical circle for convicts of correctional colony No. 6, located in the St. Petersburg industrial zone Obukhovo.

On Sokolov, however, the tradition was not interrupted. Already in the summer of 2020 in There was another shocking murder in St. Petersburg. Rapper Andy Cartwright was found dead in his apartment. His wife claimed that drugs were the cause, and admitted that she dismembered the body to hide this circumstance.

In July 2020, a 28-year-old from St. Petersburg brutally dealt with his 23-year-old wife, with whom he had already intended to divorce. A female body without a head and limbs was found by his neighbors under the windows of a high-rise building. It turned out that during another quarrel, he hit his wife three times on the head with an axe, then cut off her head, arms, legs and put them in a suitcase, and threw the torso out of the window.

In the autumn of the same year, a bag with a corpse was found in the St. Petersburg yacht club. There was no head and legs in it.

These are the simplest people living among us

We have already mentioned at the very beginning how the dismemberers of St. Petersburg and the region continue this long-standing tradition today. But no one can say how long it will last.

For example, psychologist Maxim Miloslavsky, answering a question from Nevsky News, expressed confidence that a sane person who committed a murder would not seek to dismember the body and drown it in the river, especially to throw himself into cold water: «These are rather the actions of a desperate and detached from reality person living somewhere in King's novels or Hitchcock's films.»

But according to forensic psychiatric expert Mikhail Klyushin, statistics state that most of the dismemberers have never been registered by a psychiatrist before, and are conditionally included in the group of mentally healthy people. Moreover, in 80% of cases, this is their first crime: «The people who commit these crimes are completely different: by psychotype, by social status, they have different motives. There are impulsive cases when everything happens suddenly and dismemberment is one of the types of concealment of the crime.»

St. Petersburg psychiatrist Georgy Borisov is also not prone to generalizations: «It is important whether a person is aware of the moment when he performed these actions. This is just one of the cornerstones facing forensic psychiatry. A person before and after a crime can be more adequate than at the moment itself. If we are talking about violent acts, then statistics say that men are more prone to this. But the crimes committed by men are more rude, and if a woman begins to commit such actions, they are much more sophisticated and painful.»

Well, the most common reason why murderers dismember their victims is banal: it's just the easiest and most effective way to get rid of a corpse. You can even say — the most cultured. And it is completely unclear why this causes especially great publicity in society, because it is much more terrible when the victim is tortured for a long time and painfully before the murder.

According to the system of GAS «Justice», the first place in the number of murders with dismemberment in Russia in the late 2010s is occupied by Bashkortostan — 18 killed in just three years. In second place was the Krasnoyarsk Territory with 16 dismemberments over the same period, and the third was the Moscow region with 14. St. Petersburg did not even make the top ten, according to IA FederalCity.

The dismemberers also operated in Soviet times. Of course, during the siege of Leningrad, cases of murder, dismemberment and cannibalism due to hunger were quite frequent. But immediately after the war, Philip Tyurin, convicted of 14 murders, was noted in this field in the city. He tracked down people with money in the markets and offered them to buy potatoes profitably. Then he took the victim to the cellar, chopped off her head with an axe, taking the money, and he destroyed the remaining body parts. Perhaps there was a sexual component to his crimes. The serial killer was quickly caught and shot.

In 2018, a truly shocking case occurred in the Leningrad region. 12-year-old girl Valeria Yargina, who escaped from Sochi, together with her 22-year-old lover Arkady Zverev in the village of Novinka, during a quarrel killed another young man — Alexander Popovich, with whom they lived. Then they cut off the corpse's arms and legs, opened the stomach and skull. They tried to fry a piece of meat, but the girl did not like its sweet taste, but the brains from the microwave turned out to be to her taste. Zverev committed suicide in a pre-trial detention center, and Valeria, who due to her age could not be prosecuted, was sent back to Sochi, where she went to school with her peers for a while. Later she was placed in a specialized institution.

Murders with dismemberment began to excite the minds of the Russian layman especially strongly after in 2019 in In St. Petersburg, the famous Russian historian Oleg Sokolov was convicted of such a crime, who killed, dismembered his young mistress and tried to throw her remains into the Fontanka River. Now he is serving a sentence of 12.5 years in a strict regime colony. It was then that rumor renamed St. Petersburg into Dismemberment, and the jokers there began to «equip» the infrastructure. So, on the Fontanka River embankment, a «body disposal zone» was designated.