At ten o'clock on the morning of Monday, July 21, 1997, a frightened young woman walked into the police station in Vyatskiye Polyany, a small town in Russia's Kirov region. Her story came out in pieces. Under one of the garages in the Ideal cooperative, she said, there was an underground bunker where women had been held for years. Two had been killed in front of her. Two were still alive, and someone had to get them out.
Officers forced the garage door, found a hidden passage leading down, and brought up two women who had not seen daylight in nearly three years. Each had the word РАБ, slave, tattooed across her forehead. Below, the police found four metal collars on steel cables, a length of rubber hose, a chain with a ball on the end, a homemade electrical device and medical needles fitted with tubes. The man who owned the garage, Aleksandr Komin, was arrested nearby, carrying food and sewing materials down to the women. His friend Aleksandr Mikheev was detained with him.
At five past five that afternoon Komin began to talk. About three and a half years earlier, he told the investigator, he had built a brick garage, number 198, at the edge of town, and under it a room three meters by six with its own ventilation. At first it was meant for vegetables. Then, having read up on the subject, he decided to find women who lived loosely or had no fixed home and shut them in that room for the rest of their lives, sewing clothes for him to sell. The plan was his own, he said, and Mikheev had agreed to help. He said he was confessing of his own free will, and he asked to be seen by a psychiatrist. Then he refused to say more until the next day.
The biography investigators assembled, from Komin and his relatives, began in Vyatskiye Polyany in 1953. He was the second of three children. His father was withdrawn, irritable and epileptic, and once went at his mother with a knife; the boy was afraid to be left home alone with him. At school he was small, fought, wore heeled shoes to look taller, and earned middling grades but liked shop class. After school he worked as a fitter at a factory, sniffed solvents, and bought a spyglass to watch women undress through their windows. In the summer of 1971, drunk, he hit two young men over the head with a bottle and injured them badly, and he was sent to a penal colony for three years. While he was there he had surgery on his intestines and was treated for a concussion, and he came out classed as an invalid.
He went to live with his mother in the Kurgan region, trained as a tailor at a vocational boarding school for the disabled, and married. He badly wanted children. When his wife became pregnant, tests showed he was infertile. He concluded she had deceived him but resigned himself to raising another man's child; after the divorce he haunted playgrounds looking into strollers and, he later told investigators, felt a rage that made him want to tear things apart when the mothers wheeled their children away from him. He went on to qualify as a garment cutter with honors, came home, lasted a few months at the town's sewing factory, moved to a machine-building plant, and married again. His second wife told investigators he would set himself some pointless goal and pursue it with dull stubbornness. It was during that marriage that he befriended Mikheev, a man she described as spineless and easily led, which was what Komin liked about him. When they split in 1991 Komin insisted on keeping the garage.
In early 1993 another woman and her daughter moved in with him. He sewed to order at home until the beginning of winter 1994, when he took the sewing machine and the overlocker away. He told her he had rented a house from an old woman for sixty rubles and hired a few people to sew there. Each day he went to the garage with large bags of food, which he said was for the old woman, and later for the nutria he claimed to be raising, and he talked about growing cucumbers underground year-round. He bought seeds and once came home with two freshly picked cucumbers. He quit his job, saying it got in the way of his business. She began to worry when he started reading textbooks on forensic medicine and gynecology. In March 1997 he ended the relationship himself and went back to his mother's.
The first prisoner, by Komin's account, was Vera Tolpayeva (the name also appears as Talpayeva), whom Mikheev brought to the garage. The three shared a bottle of Rasputin vodka, and the two men talked her into climbing down the ladder and locked her in. For about six weeks she sat alone. She could not sew, so she gave them the address of a woman named Tatiana who could, and who was living with Nikolai Malykh, a man Komin had served time with. The two men invited the couple to the garage for drinks, got them very drunk, put Malykh out on the road and locked Tatiana in with Vera. Other accounts say Malykh was stripped and left to freeze, and he was found dead. Komin dated these events to early 1994, though by the women's later reckoning the first of them had been below since about the beginning of 1995.
Another prisoner was a man, Yevgeny Shishov, who was held for about half a year. In Mikheev's testimony, Komin wrapped Shishov's arms and legs in bare wire, plugged it into the socket, and made Vera and Tatiana throw two switches at the same moment. The body was winched up and dumped naked in the forest. Irina, the woman who would eventually reach the police, heard a different version from Vera in the bunker: that Komin had promised to let Vera go if she killed Shishov, that the wires went around his neck, and that the body was thrown into a gully by the Vyatka River.
There was a second Tatiana, thirty-eight, who was facing a criminal trial and needed money for a lawyer. Vera told her she knew someone with goods to sell and work to offer, and took her to the garage. The first Tatiana, about thirty-seven, had three children and had once worked at the town's consumer services center, where she sewed. Between them they made what Komin sold, most of it white gowns, in the town's markets and to order. He once brought a priest's vestment and an icon to the Orthodox cathedral and said he had made them himself. The rector, who later gave evidence, had no idea they had been embroidered by women in a cellar.
The bunker had two rooms. In the larger one, about three meters by five, an old sewing machine and an overlocker were built into a big table. There was a black-and-white television that only produced sound and eventually stopped working altogether, a welding machine, a kitchen table, shelves of boxes and buckets of garbage, and a round electric hot plate on which the women cooked the grain, potatoes and rosehip tea he brought them, and sometimes a little sugar. The smaller room had a sink, a washbasin and two-tier plank bunks. Komin moved around the bunker with an awl in his hand. He told them the ladder was electrified and that if they ever attacked him he would kill them all, and he punished disobedience by beating them and collaring them to the wall by the neck, like dogs. Before he took finished garments up to sell, he held each one up to the light to make sure no one had sewn a note inside.
Once the women did try to get out, by digging. When Komin found the tunnel he gave them a choice: he would slit their mouths to the ears, or he would tattoo their foreheads. They chose the tattoos. Besides the word on the forehead, each was marked with a cross on the bridge of the nose.
Vera, by the time Irina met her, had been held in the bunker twice. Komin had let her out to find more women of the kind nobody would go looking for, and had promised her a million rubles for it. In January 1997 Irina Ganyushkina, twenty-two, was living with her mother and her small daughter, selling cigarettes at the market, divorced, and afraid of losing the child: the authorities had begun proceedings to take away her parental rights. On January 20 she ran into Vera, a neighbor from the same building, and the next day Vera offered to have a friend with a car drive her to her fiancé, who might speak up for her. That evening the two walked out past the district hospital, through a ravine, to the garage cooperative, where Komin was waiting. The garage had no car in it; Komin said it was in another garage. He and Vera went down the ladder and called her to come and eat some apples. The last thing she remembered was climbing down and seeing Komin reach for her.
She woke on a plank bunk under electric light, beside three women, all named Tatiana, and Vera. One of the Tatianas was a homeless woman from Perm who had turned up at the town station, who seemed mentally ill and was skeletally thin, covered in sores, and said to have leukemia. The next evening Mikheev raped Irina, threatening to kill her if she resisted. Then Komin came down and told her she was their slave now, that she would never leave, and that if she resisted they would kill her and throw her body in the Vyatka.
Around February 25, by Irina's account, Komin decided to be rid of the woman from Perm, who could no longer walk and was of no use to him, and poured undiluted spirit into her mouth until she died. Komin said she had died of exhaustion, and that he carried her out alone at night and left her among the trees near the garage. Later accounts name her as Tatyana Nazimova. In March it was Vera. Komin had already once tied her to the metal table, collared her by the neck to the wall and ordered one of the Tatianas to push needles into her toes. This time he brought a bottle of poison and a syringe and ordered Irina to fill it. One of the Tatianas took the syringe and tried to inject Vera, and could not find a vein. All of them were crying. Vera said she would drink it herself. She drank it, lay on the floor wheezing through the night, and died the next morning.
Irina survived by telling Komin she loved him. He began to treat her better, and on April 13, 1997, warning her that he had accomplices, he took her out of the bunker to live with him, locking her in whenever he went to the garage. About a week later, with his permission, she telephoned her brother at work and said two men had held her by force but had let her go, and she introduced Komin as a friend. On June 13 she and Komin celebrated his birthday in the woods with her mother, stepfather, brother, cousin, aunt and uncle, her little sister and her daughter, and she acted as if nothing had happened. Afterward they quarreled and she answered him back. Mikheev arrived, the two men forced vodka and a solution of sleeping pills into her mouth with a spoon, and she woke up in the bunker again with the two Tatianas. He let her out on July 18 on the same terms. When Komin mentioned that Mikheev was in the hospital after an operation on a stomach ulcer, she decided to go to the police.
The interview Komin had promised for the next day never happened, because that night he tried to kill himself. He left a six-page letter to Irina in which he said he loved her as he had never loved anyone, did not blame her for going to the police, and asked her forgiveness, and his mother's, and God's. In the weeks that followed he confessed to two more killings, a homeless man he called Grey and a baby he said Irina had borne in the bunker, then withdrew both and blamed hallucinations of a woman named Glafira, dressed all in leather, who beat him with a whip and gave him orders. He later admitted he had invented the homeless man to get himself transferred to Vyatskiye Polyany, where his mother could visit. In October 1997 guards found an explosive substance hidden in his sugar mug and a sharpened implement in a piece of bread, and he spent fifteen days in a punishment cell. When he was brought to court he could not answer a single question and was sent to a psychiatric hospital, and from there to the Serbsky Center in Moscow. On February 22, 1999, its experts found that he had no chronic mental illness, though he showed signs of a personality disorder, that the Glafira story was most likely a simulation, and that he was fit to stand trial.
The trial in the Kirov Regional Court was open to the public. The two Tatianas and Irina testified about hunger, forced labor, beatings, electric shocks and rape, and about the tunnel and the choice he had given them. Their faces, they told the court, were disfigured for good. Irina's tattoo, a blue and red flower, was on her shoulder. On June 11, 1999, the court convicted both men of abducting five people as an organized group, torture, rape, grievous bodily harm and murder. Komin was sentenced to life imprisonment and Mikheev to twenty years, the first five in prison. Each of the Tatianas was awarded fifty thousand rubles. Among the exhibits the court ordered returned to their owners were two children's sleds and a notebook diary the women had kept below ground; the wire with its two switches, the collars, the awl and the forensic medicine textbook were to be destroyed, and the Chaika sewing machine was to go toward the damages.
Komin was held after the verdict in cell No. 3 of the town police's temporary detention unit. At about noon on June 15, 1999, his cellmates heard him wheeze and saw him arch his back. He was lying under a blanket in a large pool of blood from an artery he had opened in his groin, and he fought off the medics who tried to help him. He died in intensive care. Investigators declined to open a criminal case; a cellmate told them Komin had said that his forensic medicine books had taught him how to die. Irina Ganyushkina told reporters she was certain someone had helped him. Mikheev served his full term, was released in 2017, and died in the spring of 2022, at fifty-five. In 2024 someone drove a stake into Komin's grave.
1953: born in Vyatskiye Polyany, the second of three children.
Summer 1971: injures two young men with a bottle and is sent to a penal colony for three years.
1991: splits from his second wife and insists on keeping the garage.
Early 1994: by Komin's account, Vera Tolpayeva becomes the first woman locked in the bunker under his garage (by the women's later reckoning, the first had been there since about the beginning of 1995).
January 1997: Irina Ganyushkina, twenty-two, is lured to the garage and imprisoned in the bunker.
Around February 25, 1997: by Irina's account, Komin kills the homeless woman from Perm, later named as Tatyana Nazimova, by pouring undiluted spirit into her mouth.
March 1997: Vera dies after drinking the poison Komin brings to the bunker.
April 13, 1997: he takes Irina out of the bunker to live with him.
June 13, 1997: after his birthday picnic she answers him back, and she is drugged and returned to the bunker.
July 18, 1997: he lets Irina out again.
July 21, 1997: Irina goes to the police; two women are brought up from the bunker, Komin is arrested and Aleksandr Mikheev detained.
February 22, 1999: experts at the Serbsky Center find him fit to stand trial.
June 11, 1999: the Kirov Regional Court convicts him and Mikheev; Komin is sentenced to life imprisonment and Mikheev to twenty years.
June 15, 1999: Komin dies after opening an artery in his groin in a police detention cell.
2017: Mikheev is released after serving his full term; he dies in the spring of 2022.