Artem Alexandrovich Anoufriev was born in Irkutsk on October 4, 1992. Nikita Vakhtangovich Lytkin was born a year later and was a year below him at school. They met at a mutual friend's birthday. Russian accounts describe Lytkin as isolated and badly depressed, and Anoufriev as the one person he confided in. At the trial Anoufriev's mother said that he had been badly beaten by a group of men some years earlier, that a case was opened and nobody was punished, that the family received fifty thousand roubles in compensation, and that her son was unstable afterwards.
Between December 2010 and April 2011 they attacked people in Akademgorodok, the academic suburb of Irkutsk. The weapons were mostly hammers, which is why the Russian press settled on the name the hammer gang. Six people died and a series of others survived. The victims were whoever was on the street, several of them elderly or homeless. On Lytkin's own account under questioning, he usually struck first and they finished together, and Anoufriev was the first to start interfering with the bodies. They washed the weapons and their clothes at home while their parents were out.
They filmed the attacks, which is what convicted them and what eventually caught them.
The district panicked, and the rumour going round was that there was one attacker of about thirty. The investigation initially treated the attacks as unconnected hooliganism. The investigator on the case, Yevgeny Karchevsky, is credited with establishing that they were linked and ideological rather than random, which is the point at which the police began looking for a series.
The arrest, on April 5, 2011, came from Lytkin's own family. His grandmother saw a composite sketch on television and thought it was her grandson. His uncle went round to the flat, and while he was there took back a video camera he had lent the boy. On the memory card he found a recording of one of the killings. He took it to the police, and both were detained the same day.
The case file ran to forty-nine volumes. In June 2011 Anoufriev recorded a video asking forgiveness of everyone he had harmed. In October 2012, in the courtroom, he cut his neck and stomach with a razor he had carried in his sock. The trial ran from August 2012 to April 2013.
On April 2, 2013 the Irkutsk regional court convicted both men. The charges included six murders, nine attempted murders, robbery, desecration of the dead and organising an extremist group. Anoufriev was sentenced to life imprisonment. Lytkin, who had been a minor when the killings began, was sentenced to twenty-four years in a strict regime colony, later reduced to twenty.
Lytkin died in December 2021, about halfway through that sentence. Russian reporting gives it as suicide, after he was taken to hospital at Angarsk following an attempt on his own life.
This entry covers both men, as Lytkin has no separate file. Sources vary on the exact count of the surviving victims, some giving nine attempted murders and others ten episodes of grievous bodily harm.