How a Father Avenged His Daughter’s Rapists: A Story from Volgograd, 1990s
On Sunday, October 2, 1994, Stepan Arcadevic Tarasov, 65, opened the door of his apartment on the third floor of a building from the time of Yusov, on Marshal Jeremenko Street in Volgograd, and saw his 20-year-old daughter Maria, with her dress torn, blood on her face and a swollen eye, standing in the doorway and looking at him in such a way that it took his breath away.
Despite being a man accustomed to hard work and not given to showing his emotions. He immediately approached her. She fell into his arms and, in a low voice, almost voiceless, said something that 9 days later changed the lives of several people and became a topic of conversation in Volgograd for several more years. Days after that conversation, two shots from a home rifle echoed through the city.
One of those who had done that to his daughter was found with a bullet in his head on the stairs of his own house, and the second one survived. But his life would now be different from before, because the shotgun blast from a 12-gauge gun from a distance of 2 meters left no doubt about what the shooter had in mind when he chose his target.
And it was not an accident or a mistake, but a precise, deliberate and premeditated decision by a man who had spent several days observing before pulling the trigger. The shooter was found three days later, although he had made no special effort to hide. Stepan Arcadievic Tarasov, a retired single father and veteran of the Krasni Octiabr factory , was sitting in his apartment watching television when the investigators arrived.
He opened the door himself, asked them to let him finish his tea, and then calmly told them they could leave. Throughout the subsequent investigation, the trial, and the serving of his sentence, the tone remained unchanged. Calm, without defensive explanations or ostentatious remorse. This is a story about what happened between those two moments, about what it meant to be a father in Volgograd in 1994, about how the State betrayed a young woman twice.
First by not protecting her and then by trying to sentence her father to 20 years in prison and about why the whole neighborhood, the whole neighborhood and judging by the polls of the local newspapers, the whole city took her side and continued to do so even after the court handed down a guilty verdict. In 1994, Volgograd was experiencing a collapse that was not physical, in the sense that houses were not collapsing and factories were not burning in the literal sense of the word, but the structure that held the city’s family life together was
crumbling. the habit of order, the confidence that the law works at least approximately, the fear of the state that in Soviet times replaced the belief of many people in justice. The Barricadi factory, one of the oldest defense factories in the USSR, had by then laid off a third of its employees and was operating in a state of constant uncertainty about its future.
The tractor factory operated with three shifts out of the eight that used to be the norm. The central market sold everything from roasted corn to unregistered weapons. And vodka was being sold by the glass at the train station from early morning, which didn’t particularly surprise anyone, nor was it the cause of any official action.
During this period, power in the city was in the hands of two entities: the official authorities, the municipal administration, the city council, the internal affairs agencies, and the unofficial ones represented by a few specific names well known in all districts, which were pronounced differently depending on who said them and in what context, with respect, with fear, or in a low voice.
looking over his shoulder. One of those surnames was Gribov, Kenadi Petrovic Gribov, deputy of the Volgograd Soviet District Council, a man of robust build, with rings on several fingers and a Volga the color of wet asphalt at the entrance, who in Soviet times worked as a workshop manager in Crasny Octiabr, and in 1994 had acquired a small wholesale base with connections in the city’s executive committee and a position on the district council that he did not need for his political career, but only as administrative cover
for his business interests. His 24-year-old son, Badim Griboff, was not officially employed anywhere and was listed as a sales representative for his father’s store, which in practice meant that he drove a new red nine that was parked at the entrance to the family home on Rokosovski Street and was known in the neighborhood as someone who, due to family circumstances, could afford things that others could not and who had long since learned this as a basic principle of existence in a city where his father held a certain position. The second
defendant, in the case Kiril Nechaev, 22 , was the son of Arcadi Nechaev, head of the Soviet district police department . He lived apart from his parents, renting a room from a woman named Antonina Sergevna on Kirov Street, which gave him greater freedom of movement, and he had been friends with Badim Gribof since adolescence, as they had a common basis for their friendship.
Both of them knew from childhood that they had behind them people capable of resolving the most unpleasant situations. And this knowledge shaped a certain type of character that was not inclined towards self-restraint. Stepan Arkadievich Tarasov had been living in Volgograd for 40 years when all this happened.
He was born in 1949 in the village of Dubovka, upstream on the Volga. His father died in the Battle of Kursk. His mother raised three children alone. And in 1964, Stepan arrived in Volgograd to look for work in a factory. He ended up in Crasni Octiab at the steelworks, and worked there for 30 years, receiving in 1978 a two-room apartment on Marshal Yeremenco Street, where he laid the wallpaper with his own hands, leveled the floors and built between floors, which is important for the rest of the story, because in those mezzanines lay a home rifle
wrapped in an oiled rag. In 1973 he married Valentina, a nurse at mountain hospital number 7. For a long time they were unable to have children due to the harmful effects of metallurgical production. In 1974 they adopted a child who had been abandoned at the maternity ward and who died of pneumonia after a year.
They didn’t try again until Valentina, against all odds, became pregnant at 41 years old against medical advice. As a result, in 1974, Stepan, who was 45 years old, had a daughter, Maria, and the neighbors in the building always said more or less the same thing, that Stepan Arkadievich lived for his daughter and nothing else, that he took her to school when he could, cooked her Borcht, fixed her shoes and watched television with her in the afternoons.
or owls, the news, sometimes movies. Valentina died of cancer in 1988, rapidly progressing in 8 months from the first symptom to the end. Maria was 14 and Stepan was 59, after which he took early retirement and worked part-time as a parking attendant and sometimes unloading at the market, because the pension in post-Soviet Volgograd only provided the bare minimum to survive.
In 1991, Maria graduated from high school and enrolled at Volgograd State Technical University to study mechanical engineering, which made Stepan extremely proud, given his opinion of himself. He told his neighbors about it at every opportunity, even though he was normally a man of few words.
In the fall of 1994, Maria entered her third year and worked part-time three times a week at a stationery store. In the afternoons, she sometimes went to the cinema or to social gatherings with her classmates, and Stepan did not object to this, as he understood that his daughter was an adult.
He only asked one thing of her: to let him know if he was going to be late. And she did, except for that Saturday night, October 1, when she went with her classmate Olga to the birthday party of their mutual friend, Svetlana Curnikova, who lived on the second extended highway in a panel building where about 10 people had gathered with cake, Bulgarian wine and a cassette player playing music.
And around 11 p.m., two men appeared, Badim Gribov and Kiril Nechaev, who had arrived through mutual acquaintances with a bottle of Armenian cognac and with the intonation of people accustomed to being welcomed everywhere, regardless of their behavior. Maria barely spoke to them during the evening, as she found them unpleasant for no apparent reason.
and around midnight he began to prepare to go home. Her classmate, Olga, changed her mind at the last minute and decided to stay overnight at Svetlana’s house, so Maria left alone and on the stairs she met Nechaev, who told her that he was also leaving and that he would accompany her to the bus stop, to which she did not object, since the night streets of Volgograd in 1994 were a place where a woman alone felt vulnerable and a man by her side seemed to her at that moment the lesser of two evils. Although his intuition, which he would
later recall for a long time without any result, told him otherwise. Gribof, who had been waiting outside, immediately joined them in the street and the three walked together. At some point, Maria realized that they were not heading towards the bus stop, but in the other direction, along the garage cooperative, where there were no streetlights, as they had been broken in the summer and no one had replaced them.
She tried to let go of the hand that Nechaev had already grabbed, but he wouldn’t let go. And what happened next behind the garages, in the darkness between the concrete walls, he described to the investigator in a single sentence, briefly in a low voice looking at the table, and he never went into details again in conversations with strangers.
When he finished, Nechaev stood up, adjusted his jacket, and told her that if she told anyone, her father would bury her. Gribo silently kicked him , carelessly, as if he were trash, and they left. The red nine roared its engine and drove away, and Maria lay on the ground for a few minutes.
Then he got up and went home, since there was nothing more he could do. Stepan Arkadievic opened the door at the beginning of the second night after having stayed awake waiting for his daughter, and when he saw her and realized the state she was in, at first he said nothing. He sat her down in the kitchen, put the kettle on the stove, took out the first aid kit, and she spoke in a low voice with long pauses, and he listened to her without interrupting with an expression.
The neighbor Rosa Ivanovna from the fourth floor woke up to the voices she heard through the wall and later told about it, which she described as stony, without tears and without screams. only that of a person who listens and remembers. Towards morning, he asked her if she would go to the police. She looked at him and asked who SNAV’s son was, and he nodded slowly.
They did n’t talk about the police again in that conversation, although Maria went there alone the next day, perhaps because she wanted to believe in the system or perhaps because she wanted to give it a chance before her father did what she seemed to understand he was going to do. The officer on duty at the district police station , a young lieutenant who smelled of stale alcohol at 9 a.m.
, wrote down her statement on a piece of paper and when she mentioned the name Nechaev, he looked at her and asked if he was the son of Arcadi Nechaev. When she confirmed it, he finished writing, folded the sheet, put it in a folder, and told her they would investigate it. And she knew nothing more. no calls, no summons, no telephones, no signs that any action had been taken based on his statement.
And when she told her father on the third day, he listened, got up from the table, went into the room, and closed the door. And she heard him pacing behind the wall for a long time, about two hours. After which, judging by subsequent events, he made a decision that he had probably made before, but which was now final.
The IH18 12-gauge home rifle had been disassembled in the attic since the 1970s, when he had used it a couple of times for hunting and then abandoned it. The license had expired in 1989. The cartridges, a packet of Glaf Patrona shot and some loose ones were stored in a tea tin next to the rifle.
And that same night he took everything out of the attic. He assembled the rifle, checked the mechanism, cleaned it, loaded it, and put it away again . After which he spent the following days observing the two of them methodically and without fuss. I knew Badim Gribof by sight. He knew his red nine. He passed by the house on Rokosovsky Street several times at different times of the day.
He memorized the routine and the address where Nechaev rented a room, which he found out thanks to a former factory colleague who lived in that neighborhood, whom he visited apparently by chance and with whom he struck up a conversation. The investigator would later point out in his conclusion that the accused’s actions were premeditated and cold-blooded, which, according to Russian criminal law, is an aggravating circumstance and, in the eyes of those who knew about this case, turned out to be the only proof that Stepan Arkadevic Tarasov was exactly
who he was, a serious man who had made a serious decision. On October 11th he got up at 5 a.m., washed, shaved carefully, put on a clean shirt, dark trousers and a jacket. He checked his rifle and ammunition, and wrote a few lines in block letters on a sheet of notebook paper. He always wrote in print because it was easier to understand, he explained.
He placed the sheet on the table under the salt shaker and left the house around 6 a.m. with his rifle in a long sports bag he had previously used for skiing, without saying anything to his daughter, as she was still asleep. Kiril Nechaev returned home late at night and went to bed. Stepan was waiting for him on the stairs, and an old woman from the third floor, who was going out to feed her cat, saw him by the radiator and thought he was waiting for someone, which was a completely accurate observation.
And at about 7:30 in the morning, when Nechaev left the apartment unshaven and in sweatpants, apparently to buy cigarettes, there was no one else on the stairs and Stepan raised his gun and fired, choosing his target deliberately and consciously. Then he picked up the shell casing and left the ladder.
It was about a 20-minute walk to the Gribof’s house. The red nine was parked at the entrance. Stepan rang the doorbell and Gribof himself opened the door sleepily, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. When Gribof asked him who he was, Stepan replied, “Father.” After which he fired from a distance of 1.5 meters and Badim Gribov died at the door of his own apartment.
Stepan Arkadevic put the pistol in his bag, left the building, walked to the nearest tram stop, got on the tram, arrived home, put the kettle on the fire and sat down at the table by the window when Maria entered the kitchen. When she asked him where he had been, he replied that he had gone for a walk and they had tea, after which he told her that they would be coming soon and that she shouldn’t be afraid, because everything would be all right.
And she didn’t understand it right away . But then, when he understood, he said nothing to indicate later that he disagreed. The note under the salt shaker said the following. My daughter Maria Tarasoba, a third-year student at VGTU, was raped on October 1, 1994 by Kiril Arkadevic Nechaev and Badim Genadvich Gribov. She went to the police where her statement was ignored.
No one punished the guilty parties. I punished them myself. S to Tarasov. This note was later read in court, photographed, and distributed throughout the city. Someone posted a typed copy on the bulletin board of the USTU building where Maria studied, and the university administration removed it the next day, but by then everyone who needed to see it had already seen it.
The police arrived three days later, not because they had been searching for a long time, but because the case had become politically complicated from the start. Arcadi Nechaev, head of the district department, was immediately removed from the investigation for formal reasons of personal interest, but for the first 48 hours it was his men who controlled the crime scene and the first interviews.
And what exactly was done or not done during those hours is a question that has never received an official answer. Meanwhile, Genadi Gribof called everyone he could, demanding immediate arrest and the maximum penalty. He hired a lawyer for the victim’s family , that is, for the family of his murdered son.
And a small note appeared on the third page of the Volgograta newspaper, Pravda, stating that two young men had been victims of a criminal. But other rumors were already circulating around the city, first in the stairwells and kitchens, then growing stronger and stronger. The people at the market approached Stepan’s neighbor, Mikil Semenovic Pronin, and asked him if it was true that the father and Jeremenko were after his daughter.
And Pronin answered yes, and the people left in silence. And in that silence there was something definitive that required no more words. When they came to pick up Stepan on Wednesday morning, two in plainclothes and one in uniform, the whole yard was in the street, not on purpose, but because that’s how it had happened.
Rosa Ivanovna from the fourth floor, the Criftsovs with their children, the bank retirees, the men from the parking lot across the street. And one of the neighbors approached the people and told him that he understood who he was taking. And the agent did not respond. Mary walked beside her father to the car and he stopped.
He turned to her and placed his hand on her head, as one does with children, even though she was 20 years old. And he told her not to cry because he had done the right thing and she had to be restrained when she tried to get into the car with him. Soviet District Prosecutor’s Office investigator Igor Vladimirovic Menchov took charge of the case the next day and many years later said in an interview with one of the regional publications that it was the most unusual case in his 20-year career, not in terms of complexity, but in
terms of the atmosphere that surrounded it from the beginning, because normally a person who has committed a murder tries to explain, justify or blame others. But Tarasov sat down opposite him and answered the questions calmly and precisely, as if it were a business meeting. And when Menchov asked him if he was aware that he had committed murder and caused serious injuries, he replied that he was.
And when he asked him if he regretted it, he thought for 3 seconds and said that he did not regret killing one person, nor did he regret mutilating the other. Natalia Fedorova, a journalist from the local newspaper Gorotskie Evesti, conducted a survey in several courtyards. 46 people were asked if they believed Tarasov had done the right thing, and 38 people answered affirmatively.
Five said they didn’t know. Three refused to answer, and none of the 46 responded negatively. What became the main thesis of her front-page article under the headline “Defended her daughter.” He now faces 20 years, which caused such a serious scandal that the newsroom was summoned by the city’s Executive Committee and warned about the inadmissibility of materials that justified vigilante justice .
Following this, Fedoroba wrote a second article about the fact that she had been warned and this warning did not have the expected effect. The trial began in February 1995 in the Soviet district court, which was overflowing from the first hearing. People crowded into the hallway and the street entrance, including retirees, workers, VGTU students, and Maria’s classmates.
Several women brought her flowers, not to the courthouse. The charges were brought under section 105, part 2, of the penal code, intentional murder with aggravating circumstances, and section 111, part 1, intentional grievous bodily harm, with a combined maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Stepan’s lawyer, Viktor Anatolievich Sasukin, an elderly man with a worn briefcase who worked at a legal clinic for a small fee, based his defense on the fact that Maria’s rape was a mitigating circumstance and that the
police’s refusal to respond to her complaint deprived her father of other legal means to protect his daughter. It was a legally controversial argument, but it worked, not in the courtroom, but in the trial room, which was also important. Mary testified in a closed session. She entered the room wearing a pale blue dress.
He spoke in a calm voice, and when the prosecutor asked him to clarify some details, he looked at him and said that he would tell him all the details he needed. But only if he wrote why. When she had told all this to her colleagues in October, no one wanted to listen to her. There was silent applause in the courtroom and the judge called for order.
Arcadi Nechaev was called to testify as a witness and when asked if Maria Tarasoba’s statement had been verified, he replied that the verification materials had not been preserved, which became one of the most scandalous moments of the trial. And the court announced a recess until the noise in the courtroom calmed down.
Kiril Nechaev was not present at the trial due to medical treatment and his testimony was read in writing in which he stated that he only knew Tarasoba superficially and did not remember what had happened on October 1, which provoked laughter in the courtroom, which the judge had difficulty stopping. Kenadi Gribov appeared as a victim, speaking of the threat that vigilante justice poses to society.
and demanded the maximum penalty. When it was over, someone in the gallery said quietly that he should focus on raising his own child, and the judge made a comment, causing Gribov to blush and sit down. The sentence was handed down on March 23, 1995 by Judge Liudmila Ivanovna Somova, 53 years old and with 20 years of experience, who read it for 20 minutes in complete silence in a packed courtroom and a corridor full of people.
Tepantarasov was found guilty of both charges, but the court, taking into account the victims’ illegal behavior before the crime, the refusal of law enforcement to take action on the rape victim’s statement, the defendant’s age , the absence of a criminal record and references to his place of residence and work, sentenced him to 7 years in prison in a general regime penal colony and the courtroom erupted in loud and prolonged applause that the judge did not stop this time.
Gribov, sir, immediately filed an appeal which was rejected and then a complaint to the regional court which upheld the sentence unchanged and after that, according to neighbors, he would sometimes stand at the entrance of his house and mutter something to himself and nobody would approach him.
Stepan Tarasov was released in 1998 under an amnesty, after serving a little over 3 years and according to people who saw him in the colony, he kept to himself, did not get involved in conflicts, worked in a carpentry workshop, and smoked cigarettes. He spent his afternoons by the barracks, and his cellmates left him in peace.
There was a silent respect for a man who knew he had done what he had to do. Maria would visit him every month, the first time in the winter of 1995, and she would bring him homemade chops wrapped in newspaper. They would sit in the visiting room and Stepan would tell her about the carpentry workshop, how good the wood smelled there, and how he had made a bookshelf for the camp director.
She listened to him and smiled, and that’s how her whole life was, focused on a single conversation. Kiril Nechaev left Volgograd in 1996 and it is not known for certain where he went exactly. Arkadi Nechaev was dismissed from the authorities in 1995, partly due to the pressure of the scandal surrounding the trial, and a few years later he also left the city.
According to available information, psychologist Svetlana Borisovna Riaboba, who worked with Maria at the Rehabilitation Center, wrote in a scientific article in 2000 that in this case the primary psychological trauma was significantly complicated by secondary victimization, the refusal of law enforcement to respond to the victim’s statement.
And what is this, other than the crime itself, that in most cases determines the long-term psychological damage? The father’s reaction, despite its legal ambiguity, fulfilled a psychological function for the victim that the system refused to perform. The function was to confirm that what had happened was not normal, that she had the right to protection, and that someone was on her side.
This was not a justification of vigilante justice, but a diagnosis of the system that had created the conditions in which vigilante justice was the only possible response. Yeah.
