Komin was born in 1953 and lived at Vyatskiye Polyany in the Kirov region. Over several years he excavated a two-room bunker under a rented garage, fitted with electricity, ventilation and a locked hatch, and from 1995 he kept people in it.
He took homeless women and men from the streets and railway stations, sometimes with the help of an accomplice, Alexander Mikheyev, and confined them underground. They were tattooed with the word slave, beaten, raped, and set to work sewing clothes on machines installed in the bunker, which were then sold at local markets. Four of them died: Vera Tolpayeva, poisoned with antifreeze; Nikolai Malykh; Tatyana Nazimova, twenty-eight, electrocuted; and Yevgeny Shishov. Russian reporting called him the Vyatka Maniac.
The bunker was found in January 1997 after one captive, sent above ground to work, escaped and went to the police.
He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He killed himself in prison on June 15, 1999. Mikheyev received twenty years.
The case was reported internationally as an illustration of how far people could disappear in Russia in that decade: the captives were homeless, nobody had reported them missing, and the garments made underground were sold openly in the town for two years.