When the women in the bunker under Aleksandr Komin's garage tried to escape, locking him in a room and jamming the door with a frying pan, he broke out and caught them. Then he gave them a choice: he would cut their mouths open to the ears, or he would tattoo the word РАБ, slave, on their faces. They chose the tattoo. After that, when Komin came to the garage in Vyatskiye Polyany, in Russia's Kirov region, he signaled with a light bulb, and the prisoners nine meters below had to put on their collars and shackles and leave the keys on the table. They worked sixteen hours a day, with a quota of thirty-two dressing gowns each, and he sold what they made in the town's markets.
Komin was born in Vyatskiye Polyany on July 15, 1953. After eight years of school he was sentenced at eighteen to three years for hooliganism, and in the penal colony he worked in the garment shop and liked it so much that after his release he trained as a tailor. In the small town he worked as a watchman, an electrician and a handyman. In the colony, he said later, he had met a man convicted of keeping homeless people in his basement and making them work for him, and he wanted to know that kind of power himself.
He recruited a colleague from the night shift, Aleksandr Mikheev. Their first plan was an electrically heated greenhouse underground, worked by forced laborers, with the vegetables sold to a cafe; then Komin settled on a sewing workshop. Over nearly four years the two dug beneath his garage, which no longer had a car in it, a bunker of several rooms with electric wiring, ventilation and a winch that served as an elevator. It was ready by early 1995. Komin could electrify the ladder, cutting the current only when he himself was below.
On January 13, 1995, he met a woman named Vera Talpayeva near a school on Gagarin Street, invited her to celebrate the Old New Year, and drugged her vodka with clonidine. She could not sew, but she pointed him to a tailor, Tatiana Melnikova, who became his next prisoner. Looking for Melnikova, he met her partner, Nikolai Malykh, a former convict, and drugged him too. Deciding that a man who knew the ways of the criminal world would never work for him, Komin and Mikheev stripped him and left him outside in seven degrees below zero; his body was found a week later. On March 21, 1995, they picked up Yevgeny Shishov, thirty-seven, an alcoholic, with the offer of a free drink. When Komin realized Shishov was an electrician who might work out the bunker's wiring, he built an electric chair, wrapped the man's hands and legs in bare wire and made Talpayeva and Melnikova throw two switches at once. Shishov's body was hoisted up and buried in the forest.
Talpayeva, whom Komin trusted as an accomplice to that killing, brought him Tatiana Kozikova on July 16, 1995, and Melnikova taught her to sew. It was after this that the two tried to escape and were tattooed. Talpayeva then vanished. Komin found another prisoner himself at the station: Tatyana Nazimova, twenty-seven, who had been homeless for years, riding the Gorky Railway. She was seriously ill in mind and body, and he and Mikheev used her only for sex. A year later, tired of her, he starved her for several days and killed her with brake fluid, then dragged her body on a sled toward the morgue and dumped it two hundred meters from the garage when a passerby startled him. Meanwhile Komin lived an ordinary life in an apartment on Shkolnaya Street with his partner, who suspected nothing, drew unemployment benefits, and had the prisoners sew vestments for local priests and weave icons and a huge Russian coat of arms, which he tried to sell to the town administration and the police.
In January 1997 he ran into Talpayeva again and offered her a new arrangement: she would find markets and new prisoners in return for a share. Within days she brought him Irina Ganyushkina, twenty-two, whom he later tried to impregnate with a syringe to breed more slaves. He killed Talpayeva in the garage with brake fluid, torturing her for hours first. He fell for Ganyushkina and wanted to marry her, and Melnikova and Kozikova persuaded her to agree. Left alone in his apartment for a few minutes, she ran to the police on July 21, 1997. They did not believe her until she named the people in the bunker. Komin was arrested near his garage; she had warned the officers about the ladder. Melnikova and Kozikova were brought up with bandages over their eyes against a sun they had not seen in two years.
Mikheev testified and confessed to four murders, the illegal confinement of three more people, the use of slave labor and illegal business. In 1999 the Kirov Regional Court sentenced Komin to life imprisonment and Mikheev to twenty years. After the sentence Komin killed himself in his cell by cutting open his femoral artery, on June 15, 1999.