Could a serial killer keep taunting and evading authorities in Stalin's USSR?

Fenestella

Banned
Could a prolific serial killer* active during Stalin's reign be so mysterious and elusive that even the NKVD failed to identify and catch him?

*no conspiracy theory that he's actually Stalin himself or Stalin's henchman
 

Md139115

Banned
Could a prolific serial killer* active during Stalin's reign be so mysterious and elusive that even the NKVD failed to identify and catch him?

*no conspiracy theory that he's actually Stalin himself or Stalin's henchman

Well, there was Beria’s extracurricular activities, but that violates the prompt.

Then there’s this guy, who operated in the 1980s, but that’s not Stalin’s time...


I don’t know, I want to say yes, but something tells me that we would never be able to prove it.
 

SsgtC

Banned
Yes. And kinda-sorta easily. The USSR officially never had a serial killer. Because they refused to acknowledge that multiple murders fit a pattern and were tied together. It's not that they couldn't see it understand the evidence. But for political reasons, they couldn't. Crime like that was a symptom of the burgoise (sp) West and was impossible for it to exist in the Soviet Union. Basically, politics would keep the guy from getting caught.
 
If the serial killer, like the one in Child 44, was clever and careful it would take a serious slip-up to get him caught, or killing the wrong (highly connected) person. In communism the "pathologies" that allow serial killers don't exist (just like no pollution, etc).
 

SsgtC

Banned
If the serial killer, like the one in Child 44, was clever and careful it would take a serious slip-up to get him caught, or killing the wrong (highly connected) person. In communism the "pathologies" that allow serial killers don't exist (just like no pollution, etc).
Thank you. This is what I was trying to convey in my post
 
Sure. A Colombian serial killer named Pedro López is free right now thanks to various legal bullshit. A good card-carrying communist can easily get away with the same amount of rape and murder in the Soviet Union by staying in the good graces of authorities and finding a way to get the murders blamed on "reactionaries", "counter-revolutionaries", "Trotskyists", whatever. It isn't much different than the case of Paul Ogorzow in Nazi Germany, who was a member of the Nazi Party for many years and also an SA member and was able to get the authorities to blame Poles and Jews for his crimes. Oskar Dirlewanger is another fantastic example of a Nazi serial killer who represents how powerful a serial killer can get thanks to being ideologically acceptable to powerful members of society. Though by Nazi ideology Dirlewanger was a degenerate alcoholic child molester and thus a very poor example of an Aryan, he managed to find some powerful protectors and thus was allowed to redirect his violent impulses onto Eastern Europe.

A case like Paul Ogorzow is a lot easier to have, thanks to the fact that as noted in this thread, Soviet serial killers were pretty similar in how they got people falsely accused and executed. A Dirlewanger-like case takes a lot of luck and knowing the right people. Of course, if you're a serial killer, and you have a protector high up in the Communist Party, and said protector ends up purged or demoted, you will end up caught before long, expelled from the Communist Party, and shot. And what happens post-Stalin is anyone's guess, but will also likely end up with you being shot.
 

GarethC

Donor
I kind of expect that anyone with the connections to escape scrutiny for their murders will end up being purged for having those connections, regardless of their success in covering up their actual crimes.
 
Wait, you mean that thousands of NKVD/GPU/KGB etc. agents that killed thousands of people and got away scot free weren't serial killers?

As in old meme:

but_in_soviet_russia-s750x600-71382.jpg


http://files.sharenator.com/but_in_soviet_russia-s750x600-71382.jpg

What I wanted to say is that in Soviet Union, if you had the urges to kill people, you just join the NKVD/KGB/etc. and do it perfectly legally and for money. No need to hide, you even get the medal. No wonder that they considered that they have no serial killers... At least not outside the NKVD/KGB club.
 
Last edited:
Could a prolific serial killer* active during Stalin's reign be so mysterious and elusive that even the NKVD failed to identify and catch him?

*no conspiracy theory that he's actually Stalin himself or Stalin's henchman

It's far more likely that he would have been IN the NKVD and, ahem, working for them, like Maggo or Blokhin...
 
I think people are somewhat exaggerating things here with Soviet police practices but it's certainly true they had some very dated ideas. One thing I will say is that the gulags, for all they were used to imprison prisoners of a political variety, were also used to imprison murderers and other criminals so it's not as if the Soviets ignored murder completely.
 
What I wanted to say is that in Soviet Union, if you had the urges to kill people, you just join the NKVD/KGB/etc. and do it perfectly legally and for money. No need to hide, you even get the medal. No wonder that they considered that they have no serial killers... At least not outside the NKVD/KGB club.

Well, Paul Ogorzow in theory might have been able to join the SS and get to express his sick desires as much as he wanted to in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe, but he wasn't (unlike Dirlewanger). Likewise, not all Soviet psychopaths/serial killer types were able to have access to easy prey like being an NKVD member/whatever might give them simply because for some reason or another they weren't able to get a job in those organisations which would give them access to situations where they could torture/rape/kill people.
 
Top