Soviet Bandit Tales: The Steam of the Still and the Lure of Easy Profit (original) (raw)

2001, Canadian-American Slavic studies =

In the early morning hours of November 6, 1927 the body of sel'kor V. T. Shchelokov was discovered in a Moscow apartment. Shchelokov had helped himself to a considerable quantity of strychnine and added a tragic crescendo to the "case of the Riazhsk bandits," as the case had become known both in the local Riazan press and in the national press. His suicide note read, "I am dying for communism." (Umirt�iu za kommunizm.) Shchelokov had been waging an all out war with the bandit gang of Popov and Gavrilov for years. Eventually his tortured imagination "painted enemies all around him," until, in a Moscow apartment belonging to relatives and safe from the threats to his life in his native village in Riazan, he took his life.l I Rather a melodramatic story yet, beyond the melodrama, the case of the Riazhsk bandits provides a gaze into the workings of one Riazan village in the 1920s. The village of Borets was located in Riazhsk uezd, in the southern section of Riazan province. Before the revolution bores was "specially handled" (osobenno orudovan) by a village constable (uriadnik) by the name of Malinin. Malinin had three sons, Aleksei, Ivan and Mikhail, and two daughters, Anna and Antonia. It seems that the Malinin clan remained very powerful in the village of Borets after the October Revolution. Aleksei Malinin worked for the Criminal Investigation Department (ugolovnyi rozysk) and his brother Ivan was chairman of the local village soviet. As his daughters came of age in revolutionary Russia, Malinin senior strengthened his position in a traditional village way, through marriage ties. His daughter Antonia married a certain M. S. Gavrilov, who was a party member and a member of the Riazhsk uezd level executive committee (uezdispolkom). Anna married T. E. Popov, the criminal mastermind of a well-organized local bandit operation. Already sentenced to death in 1917 for his criminal activities, Popov was saved by an amnesty only to be re-arrested in 1922 and released once more. In 1923, , , Popov murdered at least two witnesses to his bandit activities. He murdered Stepan Sitnikov because Sitnikov witnessed Popov stealing a horse from another villager. In another case, Popov asked the wife of one of his victims to