Alexander Maslich was a prisoner from Altai Krai, in southern Siberia, whose killings were committed almost entirely behind bars. Between about 1991 and 1996 he killed men he was held with in a colony, in pretrial detention and on death row, according to the press of the region and Russian news agency reports carried abroad. In two cases he staged acts of cannibalism, he and his accomplice said, in the hope of being sent to Moscow and declared insane. Psychiatrists at the Serbsky Center in Moscow concluded that the cannibalism had been simulated and found him sane. A court sentenced him to death in 1995, and the regional court sentenced him to death again in December 1996. When Russia stopped carrying out executions, the sentence was replaced by life imprisonment. Barnaul newspapers report that he died at the Black Dolphin colony in Orenburg Oblast in 2015, of causes that were never made public.
He appears as Alexander Maslich in most reports: the Barnaul publication Altapress in 2003 and 2021, the Barnaul news agency Amic in 2023, the Barnaul edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, and an Interfax report printed by The Moscow Times in July 1995. One Interfax report, carried by The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, in December 1996, calls him Andrei Maslich. No patronymic or exact date of birth appears in these reports. Altapress gave his age as 23 in July 1994, and Interfax gave it as 24 in December 1996.
Little is known about his life before his crimes, Altapress wrote in 2021. He came from Aleysk, a town in Altai Krai. When he was 12, his parents' drinking left him, in the paper's words, an orphan with living parents, and he had already come to the notice of the police. He was sent to a boarding school for difficult teenagers.
According to the case materials Altapress cited, he was abused there for the six years until he left: beaten, abused psychologically, and sexually abused by older boys. The staff, the paper said, were no kinder. He was tall and thin but withdrawn, and could not stand up for himself.
When he left, Altapress reported, he decided to fight what he saw as evil on his own terms, by killing rapists and men who abused children. In conversations with investigators, the paper said, he described himself as a "sanitar lesa", a cleaner of the forest. Komsomolskaya Pravda gave the same account of his outlook, writing that he had his own ideology and wanted to punish criminals.
He began, Altapress wrote, with car theft and robbery. During one robbery he killed a man. That sent him to a strict-regime colony at Kueta, a village in the Barnaul area. The paper gives no date or name for that first victim.
In 1991, at Kueta, he strangled a cellmate. The killing added 12 years to his term and gave him the status of a repeat offender, Altapress reported, and from then on his sentences only grew longer.
The next case Altapress describes took place in Barnaul's pretrial detention center No. 1. There he shared a cell with a man held for sexual offenses against children, whom the paper identifies only by an initial. The man boasted of his crimes, Altapress said, and after a series of arguments Maslich killed him. He then staged an act of cannibalism. His aim, the paper wrote, was to be sent to the Serbsky Center in Moscow for a psychiatric examination, and to be found insane. Altapress does not give a date for this killing. It places it after the Kueta killing and before his transfer to Rubtsovsk in 1994.
In 1994 he was moved to a punishment isolation unit of a correctional colony at Rubtsovsk, in Altai Krai. Altapress gave the reason as his record as an especially dangerous prisoner who broke the rules of the regime; officials feared he could stir up mass unrest. He was 23 and had four previous convictions, the paper said, one of them for murder. Altapress in 2003 and Amic in 2023 name the institution as colony UB 14/9.
He was put in a cell with two other men. Alexei Goluzov, 25, was serving a sentence for a series of serious crimes, as Maslich was. Alexei Dzyuba was 23. Altapress, in 2021, described Dzyuba as the ringleader of the cell. He wanted a transfer to Moscow, the paper said, and it was he who came up with a fallback plan: an act of cannibalism, which the men believed would get them sent to the Serbsky Center for examination. Goluzov, in the paper's account, went along with whoever led.
The three first planned to attack a newcomer placed in their cell. The attempt failed, the paper said: the man was strong, the fight ended in beatings, and he was moved to another cell the next morning.
Rather than wait for another newcomer, Altapress wrote, Maslich decided to kill Dzyuba himself. In July 1994 Maslich and Goluzov killed him in the cell. They then staged an act of cannibalism. The next morning the two men told the colony staff what they had done. Altapress reported in 2003 that they gave as their reason that they disliked the strict conditions of their detention and wanted a pretext for a trip to Moscow, at state expense, for a forensic examination. Amic, in 2023, reported that they said they had planned it for about a year.
Alexei Dzyuba was 23 years old. Where he came from and what sentence he was serving have not been reported.
In 2021 Altapress spoke to two men who had dealt with Maslich in the 1990s. Sergei Voronin, a criminologist, was an assistant prosecutor in 1994 and happened to be in Rubtsovsk on another case. He visited Maslich the day after Dzyuba was killed. He found him calm and polite, and his speech coherent and literate; the colony staff told him Maslich had shown no aggression toward them. "Strange as it may seem," Voronin said, Maslich gave the impression of a pleasant man. To Voronin the motive was plain: Maslich wanted to be declared insane, and had built a deliberate story to get there.
Eduard Bauer, who worked on the case as an investigator and later became a lawyer, described Maslich to the paper as an ordinary criminal who bore a grudge against people who tried to escape punishment through a psychiatric examination. Maslich behaved normally and did not seem frightening, Bauer said, though meetings with him were still held with a colony officer and a service dog present.
Both men admitted their guilt quickly, Altapress reported, and were sent to Moscow for the examination they had sought. Psychiatrists at the Serbsky Center concluded that Maslich and Goluzov had simulated the cannibalism, and found both men sane.
Altapress noted in 2021 that Russian criminal law has no separate offense of cannibalism. Such cases are charged as murder, under the provision covering murder for the purpose of using the victim's organs, and as desecration of a body.
In July 1995 a court sentenced the two men for the murder of their cellmate Alexei Dzyuba and for cannibalism, Interfax reported, in a story printed by The Moscow Times on July 25, 1995. Maslich was sentenced to death. Goluzov was sentenced to 15 years. The judge told Interfax it was the first case of cannibalism among convicts he had dealt with. Altapress, in 2003 and 2021, and Amic, in 2023, give the same two sentences; Altapress in 2021 dates them to 1996.
Altapress, in both 2003 and 2021, and Amic, in 2023, report that while the Dzyuba case was still being investigated Maslich killed another cellmate, a man who had refused to pay a gambling debt from a card game. None of the three gives the date, the place or the victim's name.
On December 26, 1996, Interfax reported that a death-row prisoner in Siberia had received a second death sentence. The report, printed the next day in The Spokesman-Review, said that in May 1996, while on death row in Barnaul, Maslich had argued with a cellmate and killed him, and had then again staged an act of cannibalism. At the Altai regional court, Interfax said, he explained that he had done it in the hope of being found insane, which he believed would spare him execution for the earlier killing. The agency described him as now a four-time convicted murderer, and noted that he had been sentenced to death the year before for the killing at Rubtsovsk. The report did not name the victim.
The reports do not settle whether the May 1996 killing in Barnaul and the gambling-debt killing described by the Barnaul press are the same event or two different ones.
Altapress, in 2021, wrote that jurors wept when they learned what had been done to Maslich as a child at the boarding school. The paper does not say at which trial this happened.
Maslich was not executed. Komsomolskaya Pravda and Altapress both report that he fell under the moratorium of 1997, so that his death sentence was replaced by life imprisonment. Altapress reported the commutation as early as 2003 under the headline that the Rubtsovsk cannibal had been left alive.
He served his life term at the colony known as the Black Dolphin, at Sol-Iletsk in Orenburg Oblast. Komsomolskaya Pravda describes it as the country's largest prison for men serving life sentences, holding 619 prisoners at the time of its report, all of them lifers. Prisoners there work in most cases under a strict daily schedule, the paper said, in cells of one to four men, with walks and showers limited.
A 2023 article in Novaya Gazeta Europe, based largely on the account of a former Black Dolphin prisoner, wrote that lists of the crimes of the men inside were posted at their cell doors. It listed Maslich among them, credited with four killings, one of them committed while he was already in a colony.
Altapress reported in 2021 that Maslich died in 2015. Komsomolskaya Pravda gives the same year and says the cause of death is unknown. Neither gives a date or month.
Accounts differ on how many people he killed. Altapress, in 2021, counted five: the man killed in the robbery, the cellmate at Kueta, the cellmate in the Barnaul pretrial detention center, Alexei Dzyuba at Rubtsovsk, and the cellmate who would not pay his gambling debt. Komsomolskaya Pravda and Novaya Gazeta Europe both give four. Interfax, in December 1996, called him a four-time convicted murderer. Of the men he killed, only Dzyuba has ever been named.
First name. Interfax in December 1996 called him Andrei; all other reports call him Alexander.
Year of the first death sentence. Interfax reported a death sentence in July 1995 for the Rubtsovsk killing; Altapress (2021) dates the sentences of Maslich and Goluzov to 1996. In December 1996 Interfax reported a second death sentence.
Number of killings: five (Altapress, 2021) or four (Komsomolskaya Pravda; Novaya Gazeta Europe; Interfax's count of convictions in 1996).
The May 1996 killing on death row in Barnaul (Interfax) and the gambling-debt killing during the Dzyuba investigation (Altapress, Amic) may or may not be the same event.
Cannibalism. The Serbsky Center psychiatrists concluded that the cannibalism at Rubtsovsk was simulated. The court that sentenced the two men in 1995 did so for murder and cannibalism, according to Interfax.
The spelling of the accomplice's name: Goluzov (Interfax via The Moscow Times; Altapress, 2003; Amic) or Golouzov (Altapress, 2021).
Aleysk, Altai Krai: Maslich grows up; at 12 he is sent to a boarding school for difficult teenagers, where he spends six years.
Before 1991: car theft and robbery; he kills a man during a robbery and is sent to a strict-regime colony at Kueta, near Barnaul.
1991: at Kueta, he strangles a cellmate; 12 years are added to his term.
Before 1994: at Barnaul pretrial detention center No. 1 he kills a cellmate held for offenses against children and stages an act of cannibalism (Altapress; undated).
1994: moved to a punishment unit at Rubtsovsk, colony UB 14/9.
July 1994: Maslich and Alexei Goluzov kill their cellmate Alexei Dzyuba, 23, and admit it the next morning.
July 1995: a court sentences Maslich to death and Goluzov to 15 years (Interfax via The Moscow Times, July 25, 1995).
During the investigation: Maslich kills a cellmate over a gambling debt (Altapress; Amic).
May 1996: on death row in Barnaul, he kills a cellmate (Interfax).
December 1996: the Altai regional court sentences him to death a second time (Interfax, December 26, 1996).
1997: moratorium on executions; his death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment.
Life term at the Black Dolphin colony, Sol-Iletsk, Orenburg Oblast.
2015: dies at the Black Dolphin; cause unknown.