Gang of Vasily Kotov

The gang leader Vasily Kotov was born in 1884 in a village of Sukhodol in the Assumption Volost of the Vyazemsky district of the Smolensk province into a dysfunctional family. His father and three older brothers had several convictions. During another term, Kotov's father died, and his older brothers began to take care of his upbringing. Under their influence, he began to commit crimes, and at the age of 12 he was arrested for theft and sent to a correctional home. From that moment on, Kotov practically did not go free in the Russian Empire. In 1918, he was released as a "victim of the tsarist regime", after which he undertook to plunder landlord estates ^[1] .

Grigory Morozov, a native of the Belgorod district of Kursk province , became the closest assistant to Kotov in the gang. In 1903 he was convicted of killing a policeman. During the commission of crimes, he was the main killer, often raping his victims before the death. The 20-year-old lover of Kotova Serafim Vinokurova took part in a number of crimes ^[1] .

One of the first crimes the bandits committed in Kursk , in Kazan suburb, in November 1920 . On the night of Vinokurov, she knocked on the door to some Lukyanov. Saying that she was the victim of a robbery, she asked to let her sleep. When the Lukyanovs opened the door, the bandits broke into the house, where, in addition to the spouses, there were three more of their children. All five were killed by them. They were blindfolded before killing children ^[1] .

In January 1921, in the same Kursk, in Streletskaya settlement, gangsters attacked a Chinese house, to which several of his compatriots came to visit that day. Having broken into the house, Kotov and his accomplices discovered sixteen people there at once. Such a number of people did not stop the gangsters - everyone was tied up and killed by blows of the ax on the head. A month later, in Kursk, on Khutoryanskaya Street, a gang committed another massacre of six people ^[1] .

The Kursk Criminal Investigation Office was helpless in the search for cruel murderers, since in those years the provincial departments had practically no professionals and technical means. As a result, the gang remained elusive for a long time. In the summer and autumn of 1921, gangsters committed two more massacres in the Gzhatsky district of Smolensk Province . Two families of five people were killed in the village of Vidnoe and near the station Uvarovka in this county. Further, in the area of ​​the station Batiushkovo they killed six more people ^[1] .

Deciding to change the area of ​​activity, the bandits went to the Kaluga province . There, in the Borovsk district, they committed the massacre of 16 people of the families of the farmer Lazarev and his worker. After that, they returned to Kursk province, where they killed another 27 people in two months ^[1] .

At the end of 1921, gang members murdered five members of the Solovyov family in the Borodino volost of Mozhaisk district . In January 1922, they again committed the massacre of the family of the Meshalkins in Gzhatskiy district. At the end of January 1922, gangsters first committed a crime in Moscow - on the Poklonnaya Hill they killed the Morozov family of 6 people. Leaving, the bandits set fire to a looted house. Another gang committed a massacre a few days later at number 53 down Nizhny Krasnoselskaya Street . Three members of the Malitsa family and a man renting a room turned out to be killed. In May 1922, Kotov's gang committed the murder of 50-year-old farmer Fedotova in the Smolensk province ^[1] .

Soon the gangsters committed another crime in the area of ​​the Palikovo station in the Verey district . They killed 10 people, but for the first time in a year and a half, they accidentally left a living witness to their crimes - the 16-year-old daughter of the owner of the house managed to hide, and the gangsters did not notice her ^[1] .

For another three weeks, the gang was operating in Resurrection and Naro-Fominsk counties , killing 32 people. After these killings in the counties of the Moscow region, mass demonstrations of peasants began, which demanded that the authorities neutralize the murderers ^[1] .

Soon Kotov and Morozov's accomplice in several robberies and murders, 19-year-old Ivan Krylov was arrested in the Gzhatsky district. During interrogations, he turned out to be accomplices, who, however, he knew under fake names and surnames ^[1] .

Fearing that Morozov would eventually kill him, Kotov on September 23, 1922, lured his accomplice into a forest in the area of Aprelevka and shot him with a revolver . But after a month and a half Kotov and Vinokurov were arrested ^[1] .

The trial of the bandits took place in 1923 at the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal . Kotov, Vinokurov and Krylov were on the dock. They tried to defend themselves, claiming that all 116 people were killed mostly by the late Morozov, but the court decided to sentence all three to capital punishment - to be shot . The sentence was carried out ^[1] .

Psychiatrist P. I. Karpov characterizes ^[2] Kotov as follows:

Kotov, together with Morozov, killed about 120 people, but Kotov appeared before the court a beggar, for he did not kill the rich, but almost the same beggars as himself, taking home household belongings, a nasal dress, and other household items from them. bazaar for pennies. Kotov, after the murder committed by him, sat quietly at the table and dined, never drank before the murder, therefore, probably, he did not find us for a long time, never saw his victims in a dream, his actions never caused him to repent, he didn’t there was pity neither for adults nor for children. But he had some peculiarity noted by him: he said that, having come to "work", he sometimes, despite the convenient circumstances, for some unknown reason, let some people pass by him, and some calmly killed. Kotov did not perceive, did not evaluate the harm caused by him, he committed murder as usual, everyday work, which did not leave an imprint either on his appearance or on his internal warehouse, and therefore "being in the dock, he gave the impression of a petty steward, and not malicious killer.

• Banda Nikolai Safonov

• Razzakov F. I. The bandits of the times of socialism. - M .: Eksmo , 1996. - (Series: Chronicle of Russian Crime 1917-1991) - 528 p. - ISBN 5-85585-885-5