Gennady Mikhasevich killed women in the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus for 14 years, from 1971 to 1985. In May 1987 a Soviet court found him guilty of the murders of 36 women, with other charges, and sentenced him to death, according to the Belarusian human rights center Viasna. He confessed to 43 killings. He was a mechanic on a state farm, a married father of two, a member of the Communist Party who served as a party secretary, and a volunteer in the druzhina, the civilian auxiliary that helped the Soviet police. In that role, Lenta.ru reported, he took part in checks connected with the search for the man responsible for the killings.
The case is remembered in Belarus less for the number of deaths than for what happened while he was free. Before his arrest, investigators convicted 14 other people of killings in the series, and one of them was shot. Zerkalo, the Belarusian news site, has written that the confessions of those people were beaten out of them. When Mikhasevich confessed, the convictions fell apart. The former regional police chief Mechislav Grib, who led the investigation in 1985 and later became Belarus's head of state, has said that the case convinced him the death penalty is wrong. "The man was shot for nothing," he said of the executed man.
Mikhasevich was born on April 7, 1947, in the village of Ist, in the Vitebsk region of Belarus, according to Lenta.ru. His father drank heavily and was violent toward the boy's mother during his binges, and other children in the village teased the boy as a drunkard's son. Lenta.ru describes him as withdrawn and shy with girls, and says that their mockery left him resentful.
As a young man he had a relationship with a young woman from his village. He was called up for army service but, by Lenta.ru's account, was discharged after about a year because of hepatitis. When he came home, she had married someone else. Years later he named his daughter after her.
In 1970 he left Ist to study at the agricultural technical school in Gorodok, about 55 kilometers from Vitebsk. He graduated in June 1973 and went back to his village to work at the Disnensky state farm. Zerkalo describes his job there as technician and mechanic for agricultural machinery. In the spring of 1976, according to Lenta.ru, he moved to the Dvina state farm as a fitter, married, and settled in the village of Solonyki. He and his wife had a son and a daughter.
He made his way in local public life. Lenta.ru reports that he was a party secretary, a delegate to a regional party conference and a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and that as a druzhina volunteer his photograph was displayed on an honor board. By some accounts cited by Lenta.ru, he received a red Zaporozhets car in 1978 after joining the party.
Lyudmila Andaralova was 19. In May 1971 she was coming home from a trip to the Krasnodar region in southern Russia, Lenta.ru reported. On May 14, 1971, Mikhasevich, then 23 by Zerkalo's account, missed the last bus home to Ist and set off on foot. By Lenta.ru's account he was thinking about killing himself. Instead he met Lyudmila Andaralova near the village of Yakiman and strangled her. He took her bags and later threw them into a river. Zerkalo gives May 16, 1971, as the date her body was found.
A man was soon convicted of her murder. By Zerkalo's account he received 15 years on a confession obtained by force; Viasna gives his sentence as 10 years and says he confessed under threats. He was one of the first of the people punished for killings that Mikhasevich later admitted.
Lenta.ru's year-by-year account says that he killed again in the autumn of 1971, a woman who had been traveling by bus, and that an attempt that October near Vitebsk failed when schoolchildren came to the woman's help. In 1972 there were two attacks, in April and July. In 1973 a woman was killed a couple of months before he finished at the technical school. In 1975 he killed a young woman near the village of Zui in May and a passerby near the village of Nacha in September. In 1976, the year he married, he killed four young women.
The killings were not treated as the work of one man. In the official criminology of the time, KP (Komsomolskaya Pravda) wrote in 2021, serial killers were something that existed only in the West. Each death was investigated separately, and investigators who were rewarded for solving crimes, as Grib later put it, solved them "at any cost."
From September 1981, Lenta.ru reported, he began offering women lifts in his car, and on September 12, 1981, he killed a woman who had accepted one. By the middle of 1981, by the same account, he had killed 15 women. In 1984 alone he killed 12, according to Lenta.ru.
Zerkalo has written about one of the deaths in this period in detail. Lyusya Ovlasenko was killed in Polotsk on July 7, 1982, on a day when her partner was late to meet her. Her partner was then convicted of killing her and sentenced to 10 years; he was released after three, Zerkalo reported, when the real killer was found.
Lenta.ru's total for the whole series is 36 women, and it notes that other sources give 38. The figure of 36 is also the number of murders in the verdict, as reported by Viasna, and the number given by Zerkalo and KP.
The wrongful convictions in the Vitebsk case are the best-documented part of it. Zerkalo, Viasna and Lenta.ru all describe them, and their figures differ in places.
O. G. was convicted of Lyudmila Andaralova's murder in 1971. Zerkalo gives his sentence as 15 years; Viasna gives 10.
Three young men, V. P., V. K. and N. Ya., were convicted over the strangling of a woman in 1972, according to Viasna. Lenta.ru describes a group of three friends who had been walking a dog and who were forced into confessions and sentenced to terms of 2 to 15 years. V. P. received 12 years, served the full term by Zerkalo's account, and was freed about two weeks after Mikhasevich's arrest, by Viasna's. V. K. received 15 years and served 12. While in prison he harmed himself several times in protest, Zerkalo reported. N. Ya. received two and a half years by Zerkalo's account, or three by Viasna's, and served them. His father believed he was guilty until he was rehabilitated in 1986.
V. G. was sentenced to 15 years for a woman's murder, Viasna reported, although the biological evidence did not link him to the crime. He went blind in prison and was released after six years. By then he had lost his family. He was rehabilitated in 1986.
O. A. was acquitted at his first trial, but the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal and he was sentenced to 15 years, Viasna reported. Zerkalo says his false confession followed a forged forensic report and threats. He served less than two years and tried to take his own life in his cell. "Frankly speaking, I would have never returned to normal life had I served 15 years," he said in 2011, as quoted by Viasna.
N. T. was sentenced to death in 1979 and shot in 1980, according to Viasna. The sentence was passed by the Vitebsk Regional Court, Grib said in remarks published by Viasna. A woman who knew him, L. K., had testified against him and was sentenced to 10 years as his accomplice; Lenta.ru says she was pressured into giving evidence. She was rehabilitated in 1986. N. T. was rehabilitated after the real killer was caught, Zerkalo reported, but his mother was never told where he had been buried.
Viasna lists six more people who were sentenced and later rehabilitated on the strength of Mikhasevich's confessions. Zerkalo gives some of their sentences. V. M. received 10 years and served them all. N. O. received 15 years and served 7 years and 8 months. Ye. B. confessed under the threat of beatings and was released after the real killer was caught. Ye. M. was pressed into a false confession with the promise of a one-year suspended sentence. The partner of Lyusya Ovlasenko served three years of a 10-year sentence. Lenta.ru also describes a driver who confessed after two weeks and ten interrogations, once investigators had planted a victim's photograph in his home; he tried to kill himself and needed sedatives for the rest of his life.
The numbers vary with the source. Zerkalo and Lenta.ru say 14 people were convicted. Grib, in remarks published by Viasna, said 13 people were unlawfully sentenced to long prison terms and one was executed. Viasna's own account says Mikhasevich confessed to 13 murders for which 14 innocent people had been convicted.
All of the living people wrongly convicted were released and rehabilitated, Zerkalo reported. Lenta.ru adds that they were given money in compensation and apartments in one district of Vitebsk, and that not all of them were able to return to normal life.
The turn came from the prosecutor's office in Minsk. Nikolai Ignatovich was an investigator for especially important cases at the prosecutor's office of the Byelorussian SSR. When the pattern became plain, KP wrote, he was sent to Vitebsk, and he insisted on joining all the separate cases into one. Lenta.ru describes him as a young investigator who took over the case in 1985 after earlier being removed from it for being too zealous. Zerkalo adds that the killer was caught in 1985 after the investigation was brought together and officers from other Soviet republics joined it.
In January 1985 Mechislav Grib, head of the internal affairs department of the Vitebsk regional executive committee, took charge of the investigative group working on the killings of women, Zerkalo reported. He had spent 36 years in the police, according to Viasna.
Ignatovich drew up a description of the man they were looking for. By Lenta.ru's account, it said he would be an attractive man with fair, curly hair from the Vitebsk region, probably connected with cars and possibly a volunteer police helper. Parts of it were wrong: Ignatovich expected an unmarried man outside the party. The police appealed to the public on radio and television, and police stations were flooded with calls about anything that looked suspicious.
A witness told investigators that one of the women had got into a red Zaporozhets, a small Soviet car, Zerkalo reported, and police set out to check every car of that kind in the region. Mikhasevich owned one. According to Lenta.ru, he worked on these checks as a druzhina volunteer and himself checked about 7,000 owners of similar cars. He stopped using his own red Zaporozhets for his crimes. A juvenile affairs inspector questioned him, and the inspector's report was sent to Grib's headquarters, Zerkalo reported. Grib recalled that after that interview Mikhasevich understood everything and was badly frightened.
Mikhasevich then tried to send the investigation in a different direction. He wrote an anonymous letter to the regional newspaper Vitebsky Rabochy in the name of the "Patriots of Vitebsk", Zerkalo reported. By Lenta.ru's account the letter claimed the killings for the group, presented them as revenge against women, and set them against the Soviet government. It referred to a killing on August 30, when the bodies of two young women had been found near Vitebsk.
The letter went to the KGB. Zerkalo reported that a Major Shvachko asked his superiors for help and then went to Grib. What caught Grib's attention, he said, was not the letter itself but the fact that it named the exact place where a crime had been committed.
After a later killing near the village of Pavlovichi, a note was found at the scene. Lenta.ru gives its words: "Death for betrayal. A struggle against the cops and the communists." Experts concluded that the note and the letter had been written by the same person. Saliva on the envelope showed blood group I.
The investigators decided to compare the handwriting of the men of the region with the letter. Lenta.ru says the check covered almost all the men of Vitebsk and about 560,000 handwriting samples; Grib, as reported by Zerkalo, put the figure at 600,000. Along the way, Lenta.ru reported, the checks solved 220 other crimes, 27 of them murders.
When the samples had been checked, Grib asked for more, from the office of the state farm and from the technical school in Gorodok where Mikhasevich had studied, according to Zerkalo. Lenta.ru gives two versions of how his own handwriting reached the experts in December 1985: either he wrote an explanation during the check of his red Zaporozhets, or a traffic inspector in Polotsk, looking for a similar car involved in an accident, stopped him and asked him to write one. The experts found that this explanation and the Patriots of Vitebsk letters were in the same hand.
Three operational teams went to his home, Lenta.ru reported, but he was not there. He had taken leave from work. They found him at relatives' home in the village of Goryani, sitting on a bed in his underwear, with a train ticket to Odessa. Ignatovich asked him whether he was the "patriot of Vitebsk." Mikhasevich claimed that two strangers had forced him to write the letter at knifepoint. As he was handcuffed, he told his wife that he would be back soon.
Grib's account, as reported by Zerkalo, places the arrest on a Sunday in November 1985, just after the graphologists confirmed the match. He said that Mikhasevich offered no resistance, and that he then confessed.
According to Lenta.ru, Mikhasevich decided after several days of questioning to pretend he was mentally ill, and began to confess. Psychiatrists found him sane. KGB officers guarded him through the investigation and the trial. In one recorded session he remarked that the recording would be shown across the whole Soviet Union.
Viasna reports that he confessed to 43 murders, 22 of which had not been known to the authorities. His confessions also covered 13 murders for which 14 innocent people had been convicted. Viasna calls the evidence conclusive and lists the handwriting, his blood group, his accurate knowledge of the places involved, and belongings of the victims found in his home. Lenta.ru also reports that police found many items that had belonged to the women, and that he had given some to his wife: a gold crown for a tooth made from a wedding ring he had taken, and a pair of pliers and wire cutters that he said came from work.
The trial began in the spring of 1987, Lenta.ru reported. He was calm in court and showed no remorse. He cried only once, when he spoke about his first love.
On May 19, 1987, the judicial board for criminal cases of the USSR Supreme Court, under Judge Fedor Savkin, found him guilty of the murders of 36 women in the Vitebsk region between 1971 and 1985, with other charges, according to Viasna. A writer for Literaturnaya Gazeta, I. N. Gamayunov, attended the trial as an independent observer. Mikhasevich was sentenced to death and did not appeal.
He was shot. Accounts differ on when. Lenta.ru says he was executed in the autumn of 1987, and Zerkalo, in 2021, gives the year as 1987. Viasna gives the date as January 19, 1988.
After the trial, Lenta.ru wrote, heads rolled at the Interior Ministry. Responsibility for the wrongful convictions was shared by about 200 people, Viasna reported, but most of them received only reprimands or were expelled from the Communist Party. Zerkalo puts the number of officials prosecuted or disciplined between 1983 and 1986 at about 200.
Mikhail Zhavnerovich, the senior investigator for especially important cases who had led several of the earlier cases, was expelled from the party and dismissed from the prosecutor's office, and a criminal case was opened against him, Zerkalo reported. He was amnestied because he was a Second World War veteran with a disability, and he died in 1987. Viasna says he was never prosecuted because of his war service.
Valery Soroko, a transport prosecutor who had investigated O. A.'s case, was the only one to receive a real prison term, four years. Zerkalo calls it the only real sentence among all the officials punished. Three others, named by Viasna as Zhurba, Kirpichenka and Bunkou, received suspended terms of two to two and a half years. The judge described their conduct as the result of a "misunderstanding of the interests of the investigation." The prosecutor Leonid Proshkin commented, as quoted by Viasna: "That's how a judicial mistake is 'corrected' by yet another lawlessness."
Zerkalo reports that the Belarusian interior minister Gennady Zhabitsky, his deputies Pavel Zhuk and Ivan Timoshenko, and the prosecutor Adam Mogilnitsky were removed from their posts in 1983.
The investigators who caught Mikhasevich were not rewarded either. Grib recalled, in remarks reported by Zerkalo, that despite promises they were never put forward for awards. He had expected to be made a general, but a minister told him that the Council of Ministers and the party's Central Committee were irritated by the "Vitebsk case."
Ignatovich drew a broader lesson. "It is not enough to condemn the phenomenon; the law enforcement system has to be rebuilt," he said, as quoted by Lenta.ru. He also said that the tumor had not been removed and had spread.
Mechislav Grib (in Belarusian, Mechyslau Hryb) went on to a political career. In 2023 Zerkalo described him as the only living former leader of Belarus and as an opponent of Alexander Lukashenko. In public discussions organized by Viasna he returned again and again to the Vitebsk case. At a discussion in Minsk in October 2013, Viasna reported, he said that 13 people had been unlawfully convicted in the case and one of them executed.
In a video interview published by Viasna he said that, having seen these errors, he had concluded that the death penalty is wrong. "No man shall deprive any person of life," he said. He also condemned Belarus's practice of refusing to return the bodies of executed prisoners to their families as "terrible savagery." In 2009, Viasna reported, he was the first to sign a petition against the death penalty in Belarus.
In 2021 the Russian channel NTV broadcast Dusheguby, a 10-episode drama series based on the case, directed by David Tkebuchava. In its review, KP wrote that the hero, a detective from Minsk played by Sergei Marin, was based on Nikolai Ignatovich, and that the main antagonist was a composite of the Vitebsk investigators of the period. The reviewer's summary of the real case was blunt: the killer went uncaught for so long because nobody was really looking for him.
The number of killings. The verdict covered 36 murders (Viasna, Zerkalo, KP). Mikhasevich confessed to 43 (Viasna). Lenta.ru gives 36 and notes that other sources say 38. Viasna also says that the courts proved 33, which does not match its own count of 36 in the verdict.
The wrongly convicted. Zerkalo and Lenta.ru say 14 people were convicted; Grib, as reported by Viasna, said 13 were imprisoned and one executed. Individual sentences differ between Zerkalo and Viasna (O. G.: 15 or 10 years; N. Ya.: two and a half or three years).
The arrest date. Grib's account in Zerkalo places it in November 1985; Lenta.ru places the handwriting match and the arrest in December 1985.
The handwriting check. About 560,000 samples (Lenta.ru) or 600,000 (Grib, in Zerkalo).
The court. Viasna names the judicial board for criminal cases of the USSR Supreme Court.
The execution date. Autumn 1987 (Lenta.ru) or January 19, 1988 (Viasna).
April 7, 1947: born in the village of Ist, Vitebsk region.
1970: begins studying at the agricultural technical school in Gorodok.
May 14, 1971: kills Lyudmila Andaralova, 19, near Yakiman. A man is later convicted of her murder.
1972: a woman is strangled; three young men are later convicted of her death (Viasna).
June 1973: graduates and returns to work at the Disnensky state farm.
Spring 1976: moves to the Dvina state farm, marries and settles in Solonyki.
1979: N. T. is sentenced to death for a killing in the series; he is shot in 1980 (Viasna).
September 12, 1981: kills a woman who accepted a lift in his car (Lenta.ru).
July 7, 1982: Lyusya Ovlasenko is killed in Polotsk; her partner is later convicted (Zerkalo).
1983: Belarus's interior minister, two deputies and a prosecutor are removed from their posts (Zerkalo).
1984: twelve women killed in a single year (Lenta.ru).
January 1985: Mechislav Grib takes charge of the investigative group.
1985: Nikolai Ignatovich joins the cases into one; police check red Zaporozhets owners; the Patriots of Vitebsk letter reaches the KGB.
November or December 1985: handwriting match; arrest in Goryani.
1986: the wrongly convicted are rehabilitated (Viasna, Zerkalo).
Spring 1987: trial begins.
May 19, 1987: found guilty of 36 murders, with other charges, and sentenced to death (Viasna).
Autumn 1987 or January 19, 1988: executed by shooting.
2009: Grib is the first signer of a petition against the death penalty in Belarus (Viasna).
2021: NTV broadcasts the drama series Dusheguby, based on the case.