On a morning in 1994, in a colony for especially dangerous prisoners at Rubtsovsk, in Altai Krai, a group of inmates told the guards what they had done in the night. We ate Dziuba, they announced, for real. Alexander Maslich had thrown a ribbon around the neck of a prisoner named Dziuba and choked him while the others held him down. They cut the body with a safety razor, drank the blood and boiled some of the organs. Maslich said afterward that he had tried the liver and could not swallow it.
It was a performance, and it was not the first. Every man involved wanted to be moved from the colony to a psychiatric hospital, and Dziuba himself had helped plan the scheme that killed him. They were sent to the Serbsky Center in Moscow, where the doctors concluded that Maslich and a fellow prisoner, Goluzov, were feigning and declared them both sane.
Maslich was born in Aleysk, in Altai, in 1972; the Russian record gives 1971. His parents drank and neglected him, and his truancy and vagrancy landed him in a boarding school for difficult teenagers, where he was beaten and sexually abused by staff and by other boys. He came out of it resolved, he said, to punish child molesters and rapists.
He began with petty theft and robbery, and then killed a man. The Russian account dates his first killing to 1989. It sent him to a maximum-security colony at Kueta, near Barnaul, and there in 1991 he murdered a fellow inmate, in keeping with his stated aim of punishing sex offenders, which added twelve years to his sentence.
In Barnaul's Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 he shared a cell with a man held for molesting children. One night the cellmate boasted about it and Maslich beat him. A few days later, in another argument, he strangled him with a rope and laid the body on the bed. Believing that a man thought to be a cannibal would go to a psychiatric institution rather than a prison, he cut the body open and cooked the organs. He did not eat them. In 1994, because of his violence, he was moved to Rubtsovsk.
While he was held in Moscow after the Dziuba killing, and while the investigation was still under way, he killed again: a cellmate who would not pay a gambling debt.
At his trial in December 1996 he was not alone in the dock. Goluzov was sentenced to fifteen years in a colony. Maslich was sentenced to death. At that trial he talked about his childhood, describing in detail what had been done to him at the boarding school, and some of the jurors were in tears by the end of it.
Then the timing saved him. He fell under the moratorium on executions that followed, and his death sentence became life imprisonment. He was sent to corrective colony number six at Sol-Iletsk in Orenburg Oblast, the prison known as the Black Dolphin, which is where Russia holds the men it will not release.
He had tuberculosis and kidney disease there. The regime forbids prisoners to lie on their beds between six in the morning and ten at night, leaving only a metal bench bolted to the floor, and he lived in constant pain and exhaustion from being unable to lie down. He died at the Black Dolphin in 2015, no earlier than April; the cause was not disclosed.
The count is five killings on the fullest Russian account, four of them committed inside prison walls; a Barnaul newspaper puts it at four. Only Dziuba among the dead has a name on the record. The others are known by where they were held and what they had done to be there.