Vladimir Vinnichevsky

Vinnichevsky's criminal case is No. 434. According to the State Archives of the Sverdlovsk Region, the archive contains four volumes of the criminal case against Vladimir Georgievich Vinnichevsky, considered by the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in 1940. They are in the fund of the State Archives of the Sverdlovsk Region R-148 "Sverdlovsk Regional Court" (Inventory 2). In one media in the summer of 2017, information appeared that the materials of the criminal case of Vinnichevsky had been kept secret for more than 70 years. However, according to the answer of the State Archives of the Sverdlovsk Region on 16 March 2018, the Vinnichevsky case was archived in 1991, and since then has been freely available.

In January 2018, A. Rakitin published a two-volume book dedicated to Vinnichevsky, titled: "The Urals Monster: Chronicle of the exposure of the most mysterious serial killer of the Soviet Union". In this book, the author put forward a version that Vinnichevsky had an accomplice.

In the USSR, bodies of those executed were not given to relatives for burial, but were buried in special secret places. Vinnichevsky was probably buried at 12 km of the Moscow tract. This is the only known burial place in the Sverdlovsk region, where the bodies of the executed were buried in the 1930s. These bodies were not divided for what they were shot for; therefore, all were buried in one mass grave, both those executed for political reasons and on criminal charges, such as Vinnichevsky. In the 1990s, the burial place was turned into a memorial complex of victims of reprisals of the 1920s–1950s. On 20 November 2017, at this complex a monument titled "Masks of Sorrow: Europe-Asia" was opened, the work of a friend of Vinnichevsky, Ernst Neizvestny.

On 16 January 1940, Vinnichevsky was sentenced to death and executed several months later.

On 16 January 1940, Vinnichevsky was sentenced to death by the Soviet court. The convict filed a request for a pardon, in which he claimed that he was ready to win forgiveness in battle, and expressed desire to become a tanker, since at the time of the USSR was at war with Finland. His clemency was denied, and he was executed.

Vinnichevsky was on friendly terms with Ernst Neizvestny, who later became a famous sculptor. Neizvestny and Vinnichevsky were in the same year of schooling (Vinnichevsky was two years older than Neizvestny, but went to school at a one-year older age and repeated a grade). The adolescents lived near each other. Together they attended school, cinema and Sverdlovsk's Theater of Musical Comedy. Vinnichevsky often visited Neizvestny's apartment. During an interrogation on 17 November 1939, Ernst Neizvestny described Vinnichevsky with the following words:

In Sverdlovsk, Vinnichevsky began to practice the kidnapping of children and killing them in the forest massifs to the outskirts, where the bodies were covered with branches. This is how 4-year-old Lida Surina and 3-year-old Valya Kamaeva died in the spring of 1939. Later, 3-year-old Alya Gubina was kidnapped, whom Vinnichevsky raped, after which he stabbed her several times with a knife, leaving a wound 25 centimeters long. After that, he threw the girl away, but she survived, and quickly fled. At the same time, Vinnichevsky did not take the child further than 1 km away from the place where he picked her up. He killed not only in the outskirts, but also near his home on Mamin-Sibiryak Street, where he kidnapped two children.

The Sverdlovsk criminal investigation department found it difficult to investigate cases of abductions of children. The kidnappings were very different - from the different locations, to the different disposal of the bodies. In addition, the surviving children could not give a clear description of the kidnapper. Finally, the parents of some of the victims did not file a complaint to the police. At the same time, the investigators made several erroneous assumptions about the murderer's identity. Everyone was sure that the killer had been convicted earlier, and, it was supposed, for crimes against the sexual inviolability of the person. It was assumed that the murderer was between 20 and 25, and looked like a teenager. According to one theory, the killer was either mentally-ill or simply a degenerate. Only in the summer of 1939 were all known cases connected into one; however, the attacks in Nizhny Tagil and Kushva were not connected with the Sverdlovsk murders. In 1939, Sverdlovsk was flooded with hidden police patrols, with more than 300 people arrested.

On 24 October 1939, during the commission of the crimes, Vinnichevsky was detained by three police high school cadets named Popov, Angelov and Krylov. While patrolling at the tram stop in Verkhnyaya Pyshma, the cadets noticed a tall man who was carrying a little boy into the forest. Vinnichevsky had kidnapped the 3-year-old Vycheslav Volkov, whom his mother left for a few minutes at the entrance of the family home. The killer snatched the boy quickly, and got into the tram to get away from his pursuers. The cadets followed the teenager, and found him at a time when Vinnichevsky was choking the boy. Vyacheslav was rescued, and Vinnichevsky was detained.

He was convicted of eighteen attacks on children aged between two and four years in 1938–1939 in Sverdlovsk, Nizhny Tagil and Kushva. Eight of these attacks resulted in murder.

The first murder (or more precisely, the third, as there is no information on the previous murders) was that of 4-year-old Gerta Grebanova, committed in the summer or early autumn of 1938 in Sverdlovsk. Vinnichevsky entered the courtyard of the private house where the Gribanovs lived, took the girl to the kitchen garden, where he strangled her, and then struck her head 8 times with a kitchen knife, breaking it, and leaving a splinter in the victim's skull. He later disposed of the broken knife and used a screwdriver and a folding knife in later murders.

Тhus, the USSR prosecutor's office and the Supreme Court of the USSR virtually abolished article 22 of the Criminal Code, which explicitly abolished the execution against persons under the age of 18. On 2 January 1936, the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR indicated that if persons who have attained the age of 12 commit crimes not listed in Article 12, but connected with violence, bodily harm, mutilation or murder, they are liable under the relevant article of the Criminal Code.

The doctor of jurisprudence AS Skryalin emphasizes that the trial of Vinnichevsky was held when Soviet legislation provided for the death penalty for minors who had reached the age of 12 years. The People's Commissar for Defense, Kliment Voroshilov, on 19 March 1935, sent Stalin, Molotov and Kalinin a letter with a proposal to introduce the death penalty for children, pointing to the statistics of child crime in Moscow and, in particular, on wounding a son of the deputy prosecutor of the Soviet capital by a 9-year-old boy. Voroshilov was well acquainted with Stalin for battle of Tsaritsyn. The letter quickly gave the result in the form of a normative legal act. On 8 April 1935, a joint resolution of the CEC and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "on measures to combat juvenile delinquency" was promulgated, providing for the imposition of the death penalty from the age of 12. This was known abroad. The famous writer Romain Rolland, in a conversation with Stalin on 28 June 1935, questioned the humanity of such a measure. Stalin replied to him:

On 20 April 1935, the top secret circular of the USSR Prosecutor's Office and the USSR Supreme Court No. 1/001537-30/002517, which was signed by the USSR Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky and the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR Vinokurov, is dated. The Circular explained to Prosecutor's Offices and Courts the Resolution "On measures to combat crime among minors":

Vladimir Georgievich Vinnichevsky (Russian: Влади́мир Гео́ргиевич Винниче́вский; 8 June 1923 – 11 November 1940), known as The Urals Monster (Russian: Уральское чудовище), was the youngest known Soviet serial killer.

Vladimir Vinnichevsky was born in July 1923. His father, Georgy Ivanovich, worked as a crew chief in municipal public utilities of Sverdlovsk, and his mother, Elizaveta Petrovna, was an accountant. The family lived in a stand-alone private house in the center of Sverdlovsk. The Vinnichevsky family was considered wealthy by Soviet standards at the time: Vladimir had a suit, a tank helmet, a Swiss knife, and leather shoes. He had been also given pocket money - at the time of his arrest he was found to have more than 20 rubles, which constituted a two-day salary of an average Soviet worker at the time. Vinnichevsky studied at the Sverdlovsk School № 16, in the 7 "B" grade. Due to his low performance in school, he once had to repeat a grade. At the same time, however, he was good at singing and knew many songs by heart.