The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  6

  THE GAY POGROM

  By the autumn of 1984, the twenty-four victims in the lesopolosa series included five boys, ranging in age from eight to fourteen: Igor Gudkov, Sergei Markov, Dmitri Ptashnikov, Dmitri lUaryonov, and Sasha Chepel. They had all been killed within the preceding year. With the accumulation of male victims, and the discovery of semen on or in their bodies, the investigators began to look harder at the two theories that explained the addition of a second sex to the killer's targets. One was the idea, supported by Dr. Pelipas of the Serbsky Institute, of two unrelated murderers, one killing girls and women, the other boys. The second theory postulated a single killer, but one whose basic orientation was homosexual. Viktor Burakov began to investigate both.

  Like most Russians, he knew little about homosexuality. Most Russians, in fact, knew little about sex in general. The official mores of the country were still, by and large, the mores of Stalinism. Like Mao and Hider, Stalin saw sex solely as a means of creating new revolutionaries, new servants of the state. He saw any form of licentiousness as a threat to the discipline he demanded.

  Stalinism reinforced a conservative Russian sexual tradition. Laws against sodomy that the Bolsheviks had repealed in 1918 were reinstated in 1934. Boys and girls were separated in school classes. Their curriculum included no sex education. A strict Puritanism held sway in films and novels. People had to live in communal apartments where privacy did not exist, making their sexual relations stealthy and hurried. They lived with the fear that an extramarital affair, to say nothing of a homosexual liaison, might be discovered and reported anonymously to the secret police. The state's controls gradually loosened in the decades after Stalin's death. Public school classes, for one, became coeducational again in the mid-1950s. But Russia remained one of the most sexually intolerant countries in the developed world.

  Social attitudes and the socialist system combined to create particular difficulties for gay men and Lesbians in the Soviet Union. The general attitude toward homosexuality hovered between revulsion and derision. And socialism gave gay men and women no opportunities to create a more hospitable subculture. They could not, for example, open a small business and become economically independent. They had to work for state enterprises, and they knew that their bosses would be likely to fire them if their sexual orientation became known. They could not, for the most part, rent their own apartments, to say nothing of clustering in neighborhoods with other homosexuals. The state assigned housing, and single adults generally had to share cramped quarters with their parents until they married. They had a hard time simply finding places to meet other homosexuals. The few bars and restaurants that the state provided were uniformly dingy and closely watched.

  In 1984, one of Aleksandr Bukhanovsky's students at the Rostov Institute of Medicine, a young psychiatrist named Aleksei Andreev, began the first systematic effort to study the homosexual population of Rostov. Bukhanovsky and Andreev held progressive views, by Soviet standards, about the nature of homosexuality. They believed that a certain, small percentage of men are born with a hormonal abnormality that defines them irremediably as homosexuals. Bukhanovsky sympathized with this group and abhorred society's hostility toward it. Society, he felt, taught gay men to loathe themselves, and this self-loathing drove them into behavior that was destructive toward themselves and others.

  But Bukhanovsky's concept in some respects reinforced the legal hostility toward homosexuals. Bukhanovsky believed that, beyond the core group of congenital homosexuals, there were many other boys and men who, to one degree or another, were uncertain of their sexual orientation. They might, under certain circumstances, be heterosexual. They might, under other circumstances, be "recruited" by homosexuals. This raised the specter of pedophilia, of gay men seducing straight boys.

  Andreev's research, conducted largely through contacts he made treating patients at the city's psychiatric clinic, filled out this theoretical structure. He found a secretive, multilayered gay subculture that involved about one percent of the Rostov population of a million people. At the top of the subculture, he found two elite groups. One consisted largely of artists, many of whom worked at the city's operetta theater. Behind closed doors and within this circle, men might wear jewelry, women's clothing, and cosmetics. Some of them had long-term relations with other men.

  The second elite group consisted of men with high-ranking positions in the Soviet nomenklatura. These men lived deeply closeted lives. Often, for the sake of appearance, they married and had families. Their wives remained ignorant of their sexual orientation. Sometimes, they carried on long-term, furtive relationships with other men in similar circumstances. Sometimes they had a series of one-night stands with boys or men who passed through their lives on vacations or business trips. Some of them, Andreev found, occupied posts not far below the apex of Party and government power in the oblast.

  At a much lower level in Soviet society, Andreev found men whose lives were defined by their homosexuality. These men could afford to be careless about secrecy. They lived on the fringes of society, either unemployed or working in marginal jobs, perhaps waiting on tables in restaurants. Many of them engaged in prostitution. They hung out, in Rostov, at a spot in Maksim Gorky Park, not far from the public toilets.

  Andreev believed that the "recruiters" came from within this group. In his view, many Rostov gays prized nothing more than an uninitiated young boy. Recruiters worked the stations and parks, looking for those lonely, confused teenagers who, perhaps, had run away from an abusive home, searching for some tenderness and understanding, needing something to eat and a warm place to sleep. The recruiters, he found, derived their own satisfaction and sometimes their livelihood from finding such boys and either seducing them or introducing them to friends.

  Men who dropped below this layer of the gay subculture had truly bottomed out in Rostov society. Many of them drank heavily. They lived as best they could in parks, stations, and priyemniki for the homeless. Their more fortunate gay counterparts had a word for them—"dirt."

  Andreev, like Bukhanovsky, believed that the repressive attitudes of Russian society bore some of the responsibility for the aggressive pedophilia he found in some strata of Rostov's gay subculture. Soviet society did not tolerate or provide conditions for open, stable relationships between gay adults. It taught gay men that they were soiled and loathsome. This encouraged, he believed, quick, furtive couplings and a desire for partners who were undefiled.

  Rostov's gay population had, of course, a different view. Adult gay men often acknowledged having their first homosexual experience when they were teenagers, quite often with an older man. But they tended to believe that their gay inclinations had firmly developed by the time they had their first encounter and that the adults only provided what they had left home to seek.

  In any case, the law against sodomy had a second section, providing longer sentences for men convicted of sodomy with a minor.

  Viktor Burakov had barely met Bukhanovsky and had yet to receive his profile of the killer when he began to work on the homosexual theory. Burakov had occasionally heard of cases in which a gay adult killed or injured a boy, although never a series of boys. However, he thought of homosexuality as a sexual disorder, and he believed that the lesopolosa killer suffered from a sexual disorder. He had no qualms about working on the theory that the killer, or one of the killers, might be gay.

  His problem was identifying gay suspects to check out. Prior to 1984, the militsia had not aggressively prosecuted homosexual activity. There was not much need to. The social and economic structure of society, combined with Russian homophobia, was repressive enough. The militsia generally confined their attention to a few cases they ran across each year, usually in the course of searching for a runaway boy, in which gay men were accused of sodomy with a minor. The militsia files had few leads for Burakov to start on.

  One of them was a bulging dossier on a man named Valery Ivanenko. Six times, over the course of about twenty years,
he had been convicted of violations of Soviet statutes against sodomy and perversion. The sixth time, in 1982, he had convinced the psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute that he was insane. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Kovalevka, a village north of Rostov. In 1983, the files showed. Dr. Bukhanovsky had taken custody of Ivanenko and brought him to Rostov, to a bed in the hospital at the Rostov Institute of Medicine. He wanted Ivanenko to serve as a subject in the study he and Dr. Andreev were beginning on the city's gay population. But shortly after arriving at the Rostov Institute of Medicine, Ivanenko escaped. In the summer of 1984, he was still at large.

  Ivanenko's background intrigued Burakov. Ivanenko was a cultivated man. He spoke English and German, and he had graduated from a theatrical institute in Leningrad. He had worked as a teacher prior to his first sodomy conviction. He had, according to the files, a winning manner: he was affable, amusing, and quick to make contacts with people. And his physical features fit the vague description of the man seen walking ahead of Dmitri Ptashnikov: Ivanenko was six feet tall, forty-six years old, and gray haired, had a cleft chin, and was nearsighted and bespectacled.

  Ivanenko's mother still lived in Rostov, in an apartment on Maksim Gorky Street in Nakhalovka, the neighborhood where Burakov had lived in his first years in Rostov. Burakov went to see her. The building resembled a lot of other slum housing in Rostov. It was four stories high, made of crumbling brick. It framed a courtyard in which people had, over the years, built shacks and lean-tos to add to their living space. Burakov found Ivanenko's mother in No. 46, a two-room hut on the courtyard level.

  The old woman was paralyzed, as a result of a stroke. Who fed her, Burakov asked. Who changed her linens? She had, he could see, no money to pay someone to look after her. Did her son Valery come to help out?

  No, the old woman insisted. She had not seen him since the court had sent him to the psychiatric hospital in Kovalevka.

  She was, Burakov felt certain, lying to him. So he began to stake out the Ivanenko hut at night, taking up a position on the second floor, on a fire escape that offered a clear view of the courtyard. A few nights later, at two o'clock on a Saturday morning, a tall, gray-haired man entered the courtyard and slipped into No. 46. Burakov descended silently and arrested the man. He offered no resistance.

  The details of Ivanenko's activities soon emerged from the interrogation, which Burakov conducted himself Since escaping from Bukhanovsky's custody, Ivanenko had been living illegally in Donetsk, a Ukrainian city just over the border from Rostov oblast, making his living as a photographer. Twice a week, he risked taking the train into Rostov, late at night, to bring food to his mother.

  A blood test and a further background check quickly eliminated Ivanenko from suspicion in the lesopolosa killings. His blood was type A. And he had been at the Serbsky Institute on the day Lyubov Biryuk was killed. The blood test disappointed Burakov keenly. He asked Ivanenko to produce a semen sample for testing, just to double-check. Ivanenko agreed. The semen sample, too, came back type A.

  But that did not mean Burakov had to let Ivanenko go. Ivanenko feared terribly being sent back to the psychiatric hospital. Burakov made him an offer. He could arrange for Ivanenko to live freely in Rostov and have the opportunity to help his mother openly—if Ivanenko helped him identify and investigate the gay population of Rostov.

  Ivanenko agreed. He had, as Burakov had calculated, no other choice.

  But Burakov had not calculated on the extent of the help he would get from his new informant. Ivanenko had a habit of keeping records, and one of the first things he turned over to Burakov was an index-card file containing the names, addresses, and sexual proclivities of more than two hundred fifty Rostov gays, ninety percent of whom were trying to keep their sexual orientation secret. Burakov stashed the card file in his office safe, and next to it he placed a secret informant's file, with a flap of white paper pasted like a curtain over Ivanenko's photograph. He revealed his new informant's identity only to Fetisov.

  Ivanenko soon began to fill this file with more information. After eliminating Ivanenko as a suspect in the killings, Burakov took him slightly into his confidence. He told him that someone in Rostov oblast had been killing girls, women, and young boys. He told him a few particulars of the killer's signature. Ivanenko said he wanted to help Burakov find the man. Normally, Burakov was as cynical as the next syshchik in evaluating human motivation, and a normal syshchik would assume that a man like Ivanenko cooperated with the militsia solely from self-interest. But Burakov, in this case, chose not to believe that Ivanenko was betraying his friends and acquaintances to protect his own freedom. He believed he sensed an altruism in the man, an interest in finally being of service to society.

  Whatever his motives, Ivanenko turned out to be a gifted undercover investigator. He was particularly useful in cases where a potential suspect displayed no criminal behavior and thus gave the militsia no leverage to use in interrogating him. Burakov, for instance, wanted to check a man named Ivan Fyodorov, living alone, quietly, in a cottage in the country. He had been convicted ten years earlier of molesting a neighbor's daughter. Burakov feared that a syshchik, particularly a heavy-handed one, might prompt Fyodorov only to clam up. So he sent Ivanenko.

  Ivanenko approached his task by finding a way to befriend the suspect. In Fyodorov's case, the key was his hobby. Fyodorov raised rabbits, whose pelts were used for the ubiquitous Russian winter hat, the shyopka. Ivanenko went to the library and studied the art and problems of raising rabbits until he could pass as a fellow hobbyist. Then he went out to the country and dropped in on Fyodorov to ask him questions about rabbit husbandry.

  Ivanenko hit it off with the suspect immediately, and spent a week as his guest, studying rabbits and chatting. Then he returned to Rostov and sent a detailed, handwritten report for the secret file in Burakov's safe.

  Fyodorov, Ivanenko reported, had once had a compulsive attraction to young girls. But his conviction for molestation had destroyed his marriage and cost him his family, leaving him a sad and lonely old man. That was why, Ivanenko said, he lavished so much attention on his rabbits. He no longer had much of a sex drive and showed no signs of attraction to girls, women, or boys. He was physically fragile. He could not be, Ivanenko concluded, the lesopolosa killer.

  Burakov did not immediately trust Ivanenko's judgment. But, over time, he realized that Ivanenko was an accurate reporter and an astute judge of character. His reports checked out. A peculiar relationship gradually developed between the two men. It remained that of policeman and informant, but overtones of friendship and respect tinged the edges of their conversations.

  Meanwhile, Burakov was using Ivanenko's card file to tear down the closet walls of hundreds of gay men in Rostov. These men did not require a furtive undercover evaluation like the one Ivanenko prepared on Fyodorov. It was enough to find them in the card file, watch them surreptitiously, catch them in the act of violating the sodomy law, and bring them in. Then, faced with jail time, they would talk about their friends, their contacts, and any particularly perverse, violent types they might know.

  That was how, for instance, Burakov came to prosecute Boris Panfilov. He was a name on one of Ivanenko's cards, a bachelor in his early twenties who worked as a sound and lighting technician at the operetta theater. He lived in a single room in a building designated for demolition by the city's urban renewal program. Panfilov, according to Ivanenko, particularly liked teenaged boys, but boasted of having a female lover as well. He had a collection of pornography. Once in a while, he traveled to Moscow or Leningrad for a sexual spree with gay friends in those cities. There was no evidence that he had violent tendencies.

  Panifilov had, in fact, a personal history not unlike those of Natalia Shalopinina, Yuri Kalenik, and so many others involved in the lesopolosa case. He had an alcoholic father and a mother who handed him over to an internal, Children's Home No. 7, in the city of Taganrog, when he was a toddler. This internal was primarily an orphanage for children of
normal intelligence. But the conditions were not much better than those at the retarded-children's internal in Gukovo. Panfilov remembered as rare pleasures the times the internal staff passed out candy and the time they took him to see his first film, a Russian fairy tale called Zoushka. He started to think of himself as a future actor.

  When he was eleven, his mother took him out of the internal because of a new policy requiring her to pay for his room and board. But his mother lived in a single room, and she had a lover. Panfilov spent his time on the streets, and he often slept in a space behind the screen at a Rostov movie theater. One night, he fell off his perch back there and broke his leg, which left him with a slight limp. He returned to the internal.

  At fifteen, he left both the internal and his mother for good. He enrolled in a vocational school for the film industry, supporting himself on a student stipend of thirty rubles a month. Panfilov had become a handsome man, though small and slightly built; he had a delicate bone structure, fair hair, and blue eyes that suggested he might photograph well. He tried out for acting courses. But his limp and a slight lisp eliminated him. He studied lighting and film projection.

  Since puberty at the internal, he had known that boys and men attracted him more than girls. He had his first sexual experience at sixteen with a girl. But it was at her initiative, and he found the encounter emotionally sterile. At seventeen, he started hanging out in Maksim Gorky Park, and that year he had his first gay experience, with a man of twenty-two.

  Thereafter, Panfilov sought work close to one of Rostov's furtive gay milieux. At first he worked as a projectionist in the Rossiya Theater, adjacent to the gay gathering spot in Maksim Gorky Park. After eighteen months, he got a job at the operetta theater. For the first time in his life, he had the company of colleagues with whom he could be open about his sexual preferences.