Filed Under: Yeltsin's Culler (Sanitar Yeltsina)

Yeltsin's Culler (Sanitar Yeltsina)

This artifact excerpts the first episode of Kriminalnaia Rossiia (Criminal Russia), the first true crime show on Russian TV. It aired on the channel NTV between 1995-2002, epitomizing the genre of 1990s chernukha (gore). Loosely inspired by the American reality show COPS (1989-), Kriminalnaia Rossiia combined documentary footage with staged reconstructions, and, like its American counterpart, came under fire for sensationalism and graphic content—including actual footage of decomposing or maimed bodies and detailed simulations of violent crimes. Kriminalnaia Rossiia covered cases of serial killers—like the infamous “Monster of Rostov,” Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994)—as well as gang- and drug-related violence.

This first episode, “The Murylev Case: Death for Apartments,” reveals the ruthlessness and banalization of violence in post-Soviet Russia and points to the importance of private property in the new reality. Alexander Murylev (1971-), the son of a Russian counter-intelligence agent stationed in Germany and a former medical student, murdered several destitute homeowners (mostly unemployed alcoholics) after tricking them into transferring their apartments to his name on the promise of a later payment. The chronicle of his crimes opens with a nostalgic historical digression about early-Soviet and Khrushchev-era dreams of state-assigned homes for all. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the voiceover explains, some Soviet citizens became homeowners overnight. As they follow the police investigation of Murylev’s crimes, the show’s producers strive to balance depicting a “normalized Russia,” where crimes are routinely investigated and prosecuted, with framing the case as a particularly brutal tip of the iceberg. Accordingly, when detectives try to approach “likely victims” of the type of scam Murylev perpetrated, the camera shows several homeless people who, we are told, lost their homes as a result of privatization.

Once he is caught and confesses, Murylev demonstrates for the camera, in a matter-of-fact way, how he murdered his victims: strangling them with his bare hands or a wire, shooting them in their sleep, or simply letting them fall into a well after getting them drunk. At the end of the episode, the narrator relates a statement by Murylev that encapsulates the darkest forms of social Darwinism pervading Russian society at the time. During police questioning, Murylev famously claimed that his actions—or, as the show’s narrator mockingly calls them, his “privatization method”—were justified, because by killing “drunks and degenerates” he was in fact freeing up living space that could then be handed to “far more deserving people.” In doing so, he explained, he was behaving as “Yeltsin’s Culler” (sanitar Yeltsina; lit: Yeltsin’s hospital orderly), “helping him purge” Russian society of its “marginal elements.”