In the 1990s, Russia experienced a state that historians would later call a legal vacuum. The state existed, but state institutions worked intermittently, like electricity in a communal apartment. That is, then no. The police were demoralized, underfunded and overworked. Organized crime occupied the streets openly, with little concealment.
People disappeared and were never found, cases were opened and not investigated. In this environment, a man named Viktor Nikolaevich Plovtsov killed for 9 years. Not because he was elusive in a professional sense, not because he left few traces. He left enough traces. He killed for so long because the system was in no hurry to find the victims he chose, because in Russia in the 1990s, a woman called a lesbian was beyond the reach of public sympathy, in a space where her disappearance was perceived as something that required no
explanation. Plovtsov knew this. It was part of his method. This is the story of a man 2 m tall and weighing 120 kg, who lived in the village of Siversky in the Gatchina district, came to St. Petersburg every few weeks, found women and returned home. About investigator Andrei Veniaminovich Korzunov from the St.
Petersburg criminal investigation department, who spent seven years piecing together the case, about what was found on the property behind the house on Sadovaya Street in the village of Siversky in October 1999 . And about the question that the psychiatrists asked in court. Was Plovtsov crazy or did he simply know that nothing would happen to him? The village of Siversky is located in the Gatsky district.
Leningrad region on the Oredish River, 23 km south of Gatchina and approximately 6 km from St. Petersburg along the Warsaw railway. The first documentary mention of Siverskaya is contained in the Novgorod Pestsovaya Book. 1499 is an old Russian place with a history that goes back deep into the late 10th and early 20th centuries.
Siverskaya was a summer residence for the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. People came here in the summer, breathed the pine air, and swam in the Oredezh. By the 1990s, all that remained of that dacha idyll were the architecture: wooden houses behind sagging fences, the smell of dampness and resin, a few shops, a post office, a sawmill, and a population of several thousand people, most of whom worked in Gatchina or traveled to St.
Petersburg by commuter train. an urban-type settlement, formally urban, but essentially rural, with a rural way of life and a rural attitude to other people’s affairs. We know everything, but speak little. It’s none of our business. It was here, on Sadovaya Street, in a wooden house with a plot of 30 acres, that Viktor Nikolaevich Plovtsov lived since 1985. He inherited the house from his mother.
She died in 1984. Victor’s father left the family when he was 8 years old and never showed up again. Plovtsov lived alone. Neighbors interviewed in 1999 described him in the same way: big, quiet, unsociable. “He’d say hello if he saw you at the gate. That’s all, ” said the neighbor on the right.
Sixty-four-year-old Zenaida Fedorovna Ageeva. I didn’t keep a vegetable garden , I drank, but not in a way that wouldn’t cause a scandal. None of the neighbors ever came into his house. Nobody knew what he was doing. Nobody was interested. Viktor Nikolaevich Plovtsov was born on February 18, 1950 in Gatchina.
The mother is a dairy worker, a quiet woman and, by all accounts, downtrodden. My father was a mechanic who drank regularly and methodically. Until the age of 8, Victor watched his father beat his mother. 8 years ago my father left. The mother did not grieve out loud. Victor did not grieve at all.
At school he was known for one quality: his physical strength. At 10 years old, he was bigger than most of his classmates. 14 is larger than most teachers. He reached 2 m in height by the age of 17. By this time, I had long since abandoned my studies, completed eight grades, received a certificate of completion and that was it.
He worked at a sawmill in Siversky, then as a loader in a warehouse in Gatchina. Army Stroybad, Pskov region, 1976-78. The loader returned again. Then the sawmill again. By the nineties, he had no official job and was making ends meet with odd jobs. The neighbors didn’t see anything scary about him. A big, quiet man.
There were quite a few of them in the village. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg in September 1991, but the city had been changing since 1989-9. The first private cafes opened rapidly, nightclubs appeared, and Soviet prohibitions were destroyed along with Soviet prices and Soviet stability. In this new city, something appeared that did not exist, or that existed but was carefully hidden in Soviet Leningrad: an open LGBT community.
The first informal gathering places were the courtyards near the Kazan Cathedral, the embankment near the Bronze Horseman, and several cafes in the center where one could appear without fear. In 1993, homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia; Article 121 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, which punished sodomy, was abolished.
Formally, a different era has arrived. Formally. In practice, public attitudes towards gays and lesbians in Russia in the 1990s were hostile, especially outside a few central areas of St. Petersburg and Moscow. In the village of Siversky, the word ” lesbian” was rarely spoken in the nineties, exclusively as a swear word.
This was not just a social fact, it was a fact that Plovtsov understood and used. According to the data recovered by the investigation, Plovtsov first came to St. Petersburg for a specific purpose in April 1990 . This was established based on indirect evidence from several witnesses and records found during a search of his home.
He traveled 60 km by electric train for about an hour, got off at Vitebsk station and walked to the city center. What exactly led him to this topic, to this specific choice of victims of the investigation? I tried to establish this through a psychiatric examination. The answer turned out to be both simple and unsatisfactory. Plovtsov himself explained this during interrogation, without any visible embarrassment, in a businesslike manner, as if explaining a production process.
They were disgusting to me, you see, physically disgusting. Like something is unclean. I couldn’t pass it by. Investigator Korzunov, who conducted the interrogation, later wrote in his report. The defendant spoke about this calmly. It was the most terrible calm, 1990. St.
Petersburg is experiencing the collapse of the Soviet system, along with sugar coupons and the first commercial kiosks. The city police are busy with racketeering, the division of retail outlets, the first gang showdowns and murders, which at first seemed isolated, but then became background noise. In this context, the disappearance of twenty-two-year-old Marina Stepanova from the Kirovsky district of St.
Petersburg in May 1990 was perceived as ordinary. A young woman living alone rented a room in a communal apartment and worked as a salesperson in a store. Her communal apartment neighbors reported her missing two weeks later, when she didn’t show up or pay her rent. The application was accepted. The inspection was carried out formally.
The investigation was unaware that Marina Stepanova was part of a small circle of acquaintances of St. Petersburg women who gathered at apartment parties and in certain places. This came to light later, much later. Four months later, in September 1990, she disappeared. Twenty-five-year-old Svetlana Kudryavtseva. An engineer, she lived with her mother in the Nevsky district.
The mother filed an application immediately. They opened a case, but found nothing. Then another one and another one. Each time there is a pause of several months. Each time a young woman from St. Petersburg. Each time there were no traces of what united the victims. It only became clear to the investigation in 1996, when the cases finally ended up on the same desk of investigator Andrei Veniaminovich Korzunov.
Before that, they existed separately in different district offices, not connected to anyone. Investigator of the St. Petersburg criminal investigation department Andrei Veniaminovich Korzunov was 42 years old in 1996. I have 20 years in the system, the last eight of which have been in the serious crimes unit. A man described by colleagues as stubborn to the point of obstinacy and possessing a specific professional trait.
He did not close cases that were not solved, even when it was organizationally more convenient. In March 1996, Korzunov was given three new ones. unsolved cases of missing women. While working with the materials, he noticed one coincidence, insignificant, previously unnoticed by anyone. In all three cases, the same names – several people from the same informal circle – appeared among the known victims.
He requested missing persons cases for the previous six years in all areas of the city. all unsolved cases involving young women. He was sent 27 cases. Eight of them contained the same intersection. Korzunov realized that he was looking at a series. His next step was unconventional. Instead of working through official channels, submitting requests, waiting for responses, and moving up the hierarchy, he personally contacted several people from the circle to which the victims belonged.
This required caution. People were afraid. It wasn’t just Plovtsov; they didn’t know his name back then. They were afraid, basically. Any attention from the authorities to their existence was perceived as a threat. The first conversation took 3 hours. The woman Korzunov did not mention her name in her testimony, only the initials T. V.
She spoke slowly with long pauses. She told something that this entire small circle knew, but which no one told the police. Over the past few years, several of their acquaintances have encountered a stranger at their gathering places. A very large man who was watching, who did nothing obvious, just stood nearby and watched.
After these meetings, some women disappeared. “We called him a pillar,” the woman said, because he stood like a pillar and was silent. The investigation was able to reconstruct Plovtsov’s method from two sources. His own testimony. He gave it in detail, without coercion, as if he were recounting something ordinary from the testimonies of several women who managed to avoid meeting him, who saw him at different times.
Plovtsov arrived in St. Petersburg by commuter train early on Friday or Saturday evenings to Vitebsk Station, then on foot or by tram to the center. He knew several places – not nightclubs, which by the mid- nineties had already appeared in St. Petersburg, but more modest spots, certain cafes, courtyards, sections of the embankment.
He learned about them by chance, according to him, one day he saw several women whose behavior seemed unusual to him, and followed them. Then he simply waited. He returned once every few weeks, studied, chose those who were alone without company, without a constant companion, then established contact that was non- aggressive, not frightening.
Plovtsov knew how to be Inconspicuous, despite his size. He spoke quietly, made no threats, and introduced himself in various ways. Sometimes he’d say he was looking for his sister, sometimes he’d ask for help finding an address. When the woman was close enough and far enough away from other people, he’d act quickly.
Given Plovtsov’s size, resistance was impossible. He didn’t leave the bodies in the city. This was a matter of principle, and it was also the reason the series went undiscovered for so long . He’d bring them to Siversky, to a house on Sadovaya Street, in a plot behind the house. It was there, in a plot overgrown with weeds and enclosed by a high wooden fence, that the remains were found in October 1999.
The investigation knew what happened to the bodies on the plot from two sources. The first was Plovtsov’s testimony. The second was what the forensic team saw during excavations in October 1999. Among the experienced forensic experts of the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office who worked in the 1990s, there was a professional saying: “We’ve seen it all.
” By the fall of 1999, they had indeed seen it all. It was a decade saturated with violence beyond all reason. Shootouts, dismemberments, hiding in the woods, bodies in trunks. The team that left for Siversky on October 21, 1999, consisted of seven people, each with many years of experience working crime scenes. The first thing they saw when they came out behind the house was a stake.
Plovtsov had been installing them around the perimeter of the property, sharpened wooden stakes about one and a half meters high, dug into the ground about two meters apart, on skulls. They had been cleaned, not professionally, but carefully, and positioned facing outward toward the fence. Investigator Korzonov, who was present during the inspection, later wrote in his work notes not in the official report, but in the personal notes he kept throughout the investigation.
When I walked around the corner of the house and saw this, I stopped not because I was scared because it didn’t fit into any pattern I’d known in 20 years of work. This wasn’t an attempt to hide evidence, it was something else. It was a setup. The forensic team counted nine skulls on stakes. Other remains— skeletal fragments, mostly incomplete—were found underground on the property.
Identification took several months. A search of the house uncovered a large knife with a wooden handle, clearly homemade, from a repurposed industrial blade. Several items of clothing belonging to different people were found. They found notes—a notebook with a squared pattern, filled with large, uneven handwriting.
The notebook contained dates and descriptions. Korzunov read it all in one sitting, standing at the table in the living room. When he finished, he went out onto the porch and stood silently for a long time. The notebook contained 10 entries. The contents of the notebook were not published in the open case materials.
The fragments that became known to journalists were obtained second-hand from people familiar with the materials. investigation. What is known for certain is that Plovtsov kept notes on each incident. Date. Meeting place in St. Petersburg. A brief description, a few words. Completion date. And at the end of each entry, the same phrase, reproduced by several sources.
The evil spirits have been removed. This was his own classification. Neither victims nor people are evil spirits. The evil he removed. Korzunov later spoke about this with a psychiatrist involved in the case. He didn’t consider himself a murderer. He considered himself a man doing a job that others didn’t.
Psychiatrist Dr. Igor Semyonovich Balashov from St. Petersburg Psychiatric Clinical Hospital No. 6 spent 40 hours of interviews with Plovtsov over the course of three months. His conclusion was comprehensive and cautious. Diagnosis: Paranoid personality disorder with elements of religious delusions and pronounced homophobic fixation.
Sanity preserved. Personality disorder does not preclude the ability to recognize the illegality of actions, he wrote. Balashov is in custody. The defendant understood he was killing people. He didn’t consider it wrong. These are fundamentally different things. The defense attorney argued for insanity at trial. Balashov repeated his conclusion.
The court accepted it. Plovtsov’s arrest wasn’t the result of Korzunov’s years of investigative work, although that work was necessary. The arrest was the result of an accident, which was later discussed at length in the St. Petersburg criminal investigation department as an instructive example. In late September 1999, Plovtsov’s neighbor, the same Zenaida Fyodorovna Ageyeva, went to the Siversky police station with a complaint not about the murders, about which she knew nothing, but about a smell. “Sometimes there’s a smell coming from behind the fence,”
she told the duty officer, ” as if something is rotting. Maybe he’s keeping livestock illegally.” The duty officer wrote down the complaint and passed it on to the district police officer. Young district police officer Dmitry Alekseevich Lomov, 23 years old, eight months in office. He came to Plovtsov’s.
Plovtsov opened the door, and Lomov entered the house. There was nothing obviously criminal in the house, but Lomov asked permission to go out to the property. Plovtsov said, “No, legally, Lomov had no grounds to insist without permission, but he later said he couldn’t explain what exactly—something simply wasn’t right—made him not leave right away .
He returned to the department and called Gatchina. Gatchina called St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, this landed on the desk of Korzunov, who by that time already had a list of eight probable victims and a description of the pole from several witnesses. The description matched immediately. On the morning of October 21, 1999, an investigative team from St.
Petersburg, with the prosecutor’s approval, arrived at Sadovaya Street in the village of Siversky. Plovtsov opened the door himself without resistance. When they showed him the sanction, he moved aside and said: “Go ahead.” As if he was waiting. Viktor Nikolaevich Plovtsov did not remain silent during interrogations. This became one of the most psychologically difficult parts of the investigation: not silence, but the willingness to speak.
He answered the questions in detail, methodically, without any sign of remorse or any sign of wanting to impress. Just information about how he drove, how he waited, how he chose, how he acted, how he returned home. The investigators who worked with him changed. Korzunov could not conduct all the interrogations himself.
Several young investigators later said that they asked to be replaced not because Plovtsov was threatening or aggressive, but because he was completely calm. A two-metre-tall man sat on the other side of the table, talking about his victims in a calm, low voice, the way one might talk about housework. One of the young investigators, Pavel Igorevich Strelkov, wrote in his notes after one of the interrogations.
He is not crazy in the sense that we are accustomed to understanding it. He is very smart. He understood everything he did. He just thought it was the right thing to do. And this is the most terrible thing. During one of the interrogations, Korzunov asked a question directly: “Did you understand that you would be found?” Plovtsov paused, then said: “I thought not. They’re not really being looked for.
” Who are they? Well, these. They are not really being looked for. Korzunov did not answer. It was the only moment in the investigation when, in his own words, he did not know what to say, because Plovtsov was right. Up to a certain point he was right. Plovtsov was arrested in October 1999 and placed in a pre-trial detention facility in St.
Petersburg. Here the story took on an additional dimension, one that is brought out in the subtitle of this case. and which is mentioned in it not for the sake of sensation, but for the sake of accuracy. The prison environment of Russia in the nineties was an environment with a clearly established hierarchy, cruel and stable.
In this environment there were people who were justifiably feared, experienced criminals with long sentences, people with a reputation, people who had committed crimes, at the mere mention of whom the other prisoners fell silent. Plovtsov arrived on Wednesday as a complete stranger, with no criminal record prior to his arrest and no prison experience.
The first weeks could have been very difficult for him according to the laws of this hierarchy. This did not happen. According to several prisoners who testified in related cases and mentioned this situation, information about what was found on Uplavtsov’s property spread quickly within the pretrial detention facility, not through official channels, but through those that exist in closed spaces and are more reliable than official ones.
Nine skulls on stakes. It was the detail that made an impact. Not because it is customary in the criminal community to respect serial killers. This is a myth of popular culture that does not correspond to reality, and because the scale and nature of what Plovtsov did placed him in a category that this environment identified as not our field, unpredictable, illogical by their standards.
A person you don’t understand, and therefore do n’t know what to expect from. Plovtsov was not touched. He sat in the cell, ate, slept. On walks he walked separately, no one approached him. A senior warden at the pretrial detention facility, who worked there for 14 years, described this in a conversation with a journalist back in the 2000s.
I’ve seen a lot in 14 years, but I’ve never seen anyone fear a person just because they’re there. Even experienced prisoners avoided him in the country. He did nothing, just sat. And that was enough. Viktor Nikolaevich Plovtsov was transferred to a special regime penal colony. There is no information about his death in open sources.
The house on Sadovaya Street in the village of Siversk was demolished in 2001. The site stood empty for several years. Nobody wanted to buy it. Subscribe if you think these stories need to be told. In the next issue, a case from Yekaterinburg in the nineties. The maniac, who had been missing for 12 years, lived three houses away from the district police station.
