In March 1987 a group of teachers, school workers and three sixth-grade boys at School No. 16 in Kyiv fell ill a day or two after eating a late lunch in the school canteen. Their legs went numb, their joints ached, and within days some of them began to lose their hair. Doctors suspected a severe flu. Two of the boys died, as did at least one adult who had eaten the same meal. A few weeks later police arrested the canteen's dishwasher, Tamara Ivanyutina, after a forensic chemist found a heavy little bottle of thallium solution hidden in her sewing machine.
The school was not her first target. Investigators traced thallium deaths back through her family: her first husband, her second husband's parents, and two women on the school staff. Her parents, Anton and Maria Maslenko, and her sister Nina had their own victims. The four were tried together in the Kyiv City Court. Ivanyutina was convicted of poisoning 20 people, nine of them fatally, and was sentenced to death. She is usually described as the last woman executed under a court sentence in the Soviet Union.
This account relies on the 2007 reporting of the Kyiv newspaper Fakty i Kommentarii, which interviewed a surviving teacher and the police chemist who solved the case; on a memoir by Nikolai Poddubny, the Kyiv police commander who directed the inquiry, published in extract in the newspaper Bulvar Gordona in 2012; on a 2019 long read in Lenta.ru; and on a 2020 Echo of Moscow history broadcast. No court document from the case was available online, and the sources disagree on several dates, including the date of the execution.
Tamara Antonovna Maslenko was born in 1941 in Tula, south of Moscow, according to Lenta.ru and Echo of Moscow. Her parents were Anton Mitrofanovich Maslenko and Maria Fyodorovna Maslenko. Poddubny wrote that they had six children, three sons and three daughters; the historian Alexei Kuznetsov told Echo of Moscow listeners that the children were born just before or at the start of the Second World War. By the time the case came to trial the parents were old: Kuznetsov gave their ages as 79 and 77.
Lenta.ru reported that as a young woman Tamara was convicted of speculation, the Soviet offense of reselling goods for profit. Fakty, citing the case, said she served a year in a labor colony for it. That conviction would matter later, because Soviet rules barred people with such a record from working in institutions for children.
Investigators came to regard the household as a place where poison was an ordinary answer to everyday conflicts. Poddubny described the four relatives later convicted as sharing an inflated sense of their own worth, vindictiveness and irritability, traits he said the court psychiatrists also noted. Lenta.ru and Echo of Moscow both describe the parents using poison against neighbors who annoyed them, including a man who played his television too loudly.
Ivanyutina's first husband was a long-distance truck driver who had a two-room apartment, according to Lenta.ru. Lenta.ru reported that she began giving him thallium soon after the wedding. Poddubny wrote that investigators, making inquiries in Tula, found the driver's former co-driver, who recalled that on one trip the husband complained of pain in his legs, and that after he bathed in a river his towel was covered in his hair. He died later of what was recorded as a heart attack, and the apartment passed to his widow. The sources do not give his name or the year of his death. Lenta.ru reported that she sold the apartment and moved to Kyiv.
In Kyiv she married Oleg Ivanyutin, a man several years younger than she was. Lenta.ru said he was seven years younger; Fakty, nine. His parents had lived in the Krasnodar region in southern Russia. Lenta.ru reported that they moved to Kyiv after the wedding in the summer of 1983, and Echo of Moscow said they sold their house in the south and bought a house in Kyiv. The couple lived in a private house in Kyiv where Ivanyutina kept animals. Fakty put the livestock at about ten pigs and 150 chickens.
Both parents-in-law died within a few days of each other. In Poddubny's account, the father fell ill after a meal that Ivanyutina had cooked and died in hospital. At his funeral his widow felt faint, and Ivanyutina brought her a glass with heart drops. She collapsed, and she died two days later. Fakty, drawing on the case, reported the same sequence: the father-in-law died in suspicious circumstances and the mother-in-law died two days after his funeral. When the bodies were exhumed in 1987, Lenta.ru reported, thallium was found in their tissues.
Oleg Ivanyutin himself became ill. Fakty reported that he suffered from joint pain, and that his wife told neighbors he would soon die of the same "hereditary" illness that had killed his parents. Poddubny wrote that by the spring of 1987 he was on sick leave with hair loss and numbness. He survived. Echo of Moscow said he gave detailed evidence against his wife, and NEWS.ru reported in 2025 that he lived because investigators identified her before the poison killed him. Lenta.ru and Poddubny both give her ambition as a GAZ-24 Volga car, and Poddubny wrote that she meant to raise and sell pork.
The poison was Clerici solution, a heavy liquid made from thallium salts that geologists use to separate minerals by density. The Kyiv police chemist who later identified it, Valentina Kalachikova, told Fakty that the bottle held thallium formate. Thallium is a cumulative poison. A 1987 report by the US Centers for Disease Control described its compounds as odorless and tasteless, causing stomach pain and vomiting at first, then pain in the feet and lower legs within several days to a week, followed by hair loss after one to two weeks. That pattern, with numb legs and falling hair, runs through every account of the Kyiv victims.
The family obtained the solution from an acquaintance, a laboratory assistant at a geological exploration expedition in Kyiv. She told investigators, according to Poddubny, that the Maslenkos asked her for it nine times over 15 years, saying they needed it to kill rats, and that she marked the bottles as poison. Lenta.ru put the total at about half a liter. None of the sources say whether she faced charges.
The poisonings by the older Maslenkos predate the school case. Poddubny wrote that in 1980, when Maria Maslenko was in hospital, a relative by marriage remarked that she might not recover. Anton Maslenko poured thallium into home-brewed vodka and gave it to the woman, who died the next morning. Lenta.ru describes the same episode. Both sources describe a neighbor who was killed with poisoned pies after complaining about noise, and an elderly neighbor who died after being offered poison.
Tamara's sister Nina, whose married name the sources give as Matsibora, married a much older man. Poddubny said he was 25 years older than she was; Lenta.ru gave his age as 69. Through the marriage she gained the right to live in Kyiv and a claim on his apartment. He died soon afterward, and doctors attributed the death to old age, Lenta.ru reported. Poddubny wrote that Nina had asked the laboratory assistant for the solution herself on one occasion, before that marriage. Fakty called Nina the younger sister and Echo of Moscow the older; the sources do not agree.
In September 1986 Ivanyutina took a job as a dishwasher at School No. 16, which Fakty and Poddubny place in Kyiv's Podil district; her home on Krasytskoho Street was two blocks away. Lenta.ru reported that the pay was so low that hardly anyone wanted the job. To get it she hid her conviction, presenting what Fakty and Echo of Moscow describe as a forged employment record. "We did not know about her past," the chemistry teacher Viktor Stadnik told Fakty in 2007.
The attraction, the sources agree, was the food waste. Before taking the job, Fakty reported, she had paid a nearby school 15 rubles a month for its leftovers. Now she carried them home for her pigs. Staff found her rude and aggressive; the director complained to the trust that ran school canteens but was told there was no one to replace her. Poddubny wrote that she drove off children who asked for leftover food and switched off the refrigerators at night so that food would spoil and be written off.
The people who stood in her way were the ones who checked the kitchen. Fakty reported that she resented Stadnik, the chair of the school's union committee and the dietitian Natalia Semyonovna Kukarenko, who watched the portions every day. The school's party organizer had also crossed her.
The party organizer was a woman of 55 whom Fakty called by her first name and patronymic, Ekaterina Arsentyevna, and Lenta.ru by her full name, Ekaterina Shcherban. She had often reprimanded the dishwasher. She died in the autumn of 1986, in September according to Fakty and in October according to Poddubny, and her death was put down to heart failure. In 2007 Fakty reported that she is now believed to have been the first person poisoned at the school.
On November 20, 1986, two pupils, a first-grader and a fifth-grader, were taken to hospital with nausea, pain in their legs and hair loss, Fakty reported. A teacher who had stood up for children asking for leftovers fell ill, as did Stadnik, who lost his hair. Doctors diagnosed flu, and no one connected the cases. Stadnik believed a sanatorium stay, arranged for him by a colleague, saved his life. Lenta.ru reported that the poisoned pupils had wanted to take scraps from the canteen, and that the dose they received was small.
Natalia Kukarenko fell ill after eating soup in the canteen and was admitted to hospital on March 9, 1987. Relatives who visited her told Fakty that she found it strange that her legs were going numb and cold, since her heart condition should not cause that. She died on March 12. Before she died, Fakty reported, she whispered that Ivanyutina had poisoned her. No one went to the police. Her death too was recorded as heart failure. Lenta.ru connected her poisoning to a staff celebration of International Women's Day on March 8.
After Kukarenko's death the canteen manager, G. Noga (Grigory Noga, in the Echo of Moscow broadcast), began locking the room where the kitchen staff kept their things. Fakty and Poddubny both report that Ivanyutina said "Noga will follow Kukarenko." Fakty reported that she injected oranges with the solution and gave them to him, and that he did not eat them. Echo of Moscow and the Ukrainian outlet WAS both say the poison of March 1987 was meant for him.
On March 16, 1987, according to Fakty, she put the solution into fried liver and a buckwheat soup made with chicken giblets left over from Kukarenko's funeral. The food was served to staff who came late to lunch and to three sixth-grade boys. Lenta.ru wrote that the people who fell ill had all come late to lunch and eaten soup with buckwheat and chicken liver. Stadnik was about to go into the canteen when the director stopped him at the door to remind him of a union meeting. He told Fakty he believed she had saved his life.
On March 17 and 18, everyone who had eaten the food was taken to hospital in serious condition, Fakty reported. Echo of Moscow gave the same dates. Accounts put the number of patients at 13 to 15, adults and children together. Fakty listed among the long-term patients the canteen manager, four teachers, a speech therapist, a nurse, a librarian, a driver and the third sixth-grader, who survived.
Fakty, in 2007, reported three deaths from that meal: a child on March 20, an engineer from the canteen trust on March 28, and another child on May 5. The two children who died were sixth-grade boys. Fakty, writing with care for the families, identified the two boys who died only as Sergei P. and Andrei K., and the classmate who survived only by an initial. Little else about the boys appears in the published record, beyond the fact that they were in the sixth grade and that one of their classmates lived.
Most later accounts give four deaths from the canteen poisoning, two children and two adults. Lenta.ru described the adults as a teacher and a man who repaired refrigeration equipment; Poddubny, as a teacher and a refrigeration technician called in from another city to repair the canteen's equipment; Echo of Moscow, as a teacher of manual work and a building maintenance worker. Poddubny also wrote that a schoolgirl died, a detail no other source repeats.
The survivors carried the effects for years. Fakty reported that the librarian was left permanently disabled, and that a young teacher who had been poisoned later lost a pregnancy. Stadnik, still teaching at the school in 2007, told the paper that his doctors blamed the poisoning for his never having children.
At first nobody thought of poison. Lenta.ru reported that the prosecutor's office checked the school for radiation and found nothing, and that at a consultation of doctors one specialist argued that flu was unlikely at the end of March and that the symptoms pointed to poisoning, but was not heeded. Poddubny wrote that the doctors suspected "a severe form of flu from a previously unseen strain." Fakty listed spoiled food, an intestinal infection and an atypical flu among the early theories.
The case was placed under the oversight of the Communist Party's Central Committee, Poddubny wrote, and his team checked more than ten hypotheses, including spoiled food and poison laid for rats. The sanitary service and the school director both said no rodent poison had been used. The team interviewed doctors, nurses, staff, pupils and neighbors, and established that the patients had all eaten the late lunch. One of the boys, whom Poddubny calls Anton, told officers that a canteen worker had fed them.
The sanitary inspectorate asked the police for a criminal investigation, Kalachikova told Fakty. She was then head of a special research unit in the forensic service of the Kyiv police. A search of the kitchen found nothing; by then, she said, any traces had gone. The turning point was Natalia Kukarenko. Investigators obtained permission to exhume her body, and the tests found thallium.
With the poison identified, officers looked again at the dishwasher. They found the forged employment record, according to Echo of Moscow, and learned of her quarrels with the dead and the sick. Background checks turned up the deaths of her parents-in-law and the illness of her husband, Fakty reported. Neighbors told officers what she had said about his "hereditary" disease.
Police searched the house on Krasytskoho Street for several hours. Ivanyutina, Kalachikova told Fakty, behaved like "an enraged harpy." Poddubny wrote that when the chemist asked her to open the sewing machine, she snapped back that the chemist could open it herself. In a niche of the drawer of a Singer foot-operated sewing machine was a small bottle that Ivanyutina said held machine oil. Kalachikova put it in her pocket, and noticed it was too heavy for oil. She worked on it through the night. "By morning the result was ready," she told Fakty. "It was thallium formate." Ivanyutina was arrested the same day, Fakty reported; no source gives the exact date.
Poddubny wrote that her husband at first refused to believe it and was shown the results of the exhumations. More than ten bodies were exhumed in the investigation, Echo of Moscow reported, and thallium traces were found.
Ivanyutina confessed. Fakty reported that she told investigators she had obtained the solution from a friend at a geology institute and tested it on a neighbor's piglet and chickens, which died. Poddubny wrote that she described testing doses on chickens and cats and adjusting the amount depending on whether she meant to make someone ill or to kill. Her stated reason for the March poisoning, Fakty reported, was revenge on sixth-graders who had refused to set out the tables and chairs in the canteen.
Lenta.ru and Echo of Moscow both report that she offered investigators gold if they would let her go. When that failed, Lenta.ru reported, she withdrew her confession and said it had been beaten out of her. The court did not accept the retraction.
A search of her parents' home found no poison. Then, Poddubny wrote, Maria Maslenko baked pancakes for a neighbor. The neighbor fed one to a cat, and the cat died. Lenta.ru reported that the neighbor, a woman with an enhanced disability pension, survived; NEWS.ru reported that she did not eat the pancakes and handed them to the police. Anton and Maria Maslenko were arrested, and Nina soon after.
Poddubny described a test that Kalachikova and a prosecutor carried out at the Lukyanivska pretrial detention center. A peeled boiled egg turned black where it had touched the thallium bottle. Anton Maslenko, who was present, swallowed the egg, shell and all. Lenta.ru gives a shorter version of the same story.
All four relatives were found legally sane by forensic psychiatrists, according to Poddubny, Echo of Moscow and WAS. They were tried together in the Kyiv City Court. Echo of Moscow said the hearings lasted several months, drawn out by expert testimony, witness evidence and the reading of the exhumation records. Poddubny said about a year. Kuznetsov told listeners that crowds gathered outside the courthouse.
Investigators had linked the family to about 40 poisonings over 11 years, 13 of them fatal, according to Lenta.ru, Echo of Moscow, WAS and TechInsider; Poddubny and Life.ru give 15 deaths. Tamara Ivanyutina's own share, as reported by Lenta.ru, WAS and Zerkalo, was 20 poisonings, nine of them fatal.
The verdict, quoted by Fakty, said she resented the staff who made pupils finish their food, because uneaten food served her interests, and that she wanted revenge, to throw suspicion on the canteen workers, and to make people distrust the canteen food so that more of it would go to waste.
She was sentenced to death by shooting. When the judge asked whether she wished to apologize to the victims' families, Echo of Moscow reported, she refused; Poddubny wrote that she said she had not been raised that way. Lenta.ru reported that Anton Maslenko received 13 years, Maria Maslenko 10 years and Nina 15 years. WAS gave the same terms. Both parents died in custody, Lenta.ru and Life.ru reported. Lenta.ru wrote that Nina disappeared after her release. None of the sources give the exact articles of the criminal code on which the relatives were convicted, or which poisonings each was held responsible for.
Ivanyutina was shot at the Lukyanivska pretrial detention center in Kyiv. WAS, in 2017, and NEWS.ru, in 2025, give the date as December 6, 1990. The Czech broadcaster CNN Prima News gave December 9, 1990. Lenta.ru said she was executed in 1987, and Echo of Moscow's host said 1988. The 1990 accounts are the most specific and are followed here, but no official record of the date was found.
She is described in WAS, Echo of Moscow and Lenta.ru as the third and last woman executed under a court sentence in the Soviet Union after the Stalin era. WAS and Echo of Moscow name the two before her as Antonina Makarova and Berta (in Echo's transcript, Bella) Borodkina.
Little was published about the case when it happened. Kuznetsov told Echo of Moscow in 2020 that he had found no press coverage from the time and did not know whether the Kyiv papers wrote about it, though the trial took place in the years of perestroika and drew crowds.
The case reached a wide audience only after the Soviet Union ended. Fakty i Kommentarii revisited it in two articles in May and June 2007, interviewing Stadnik and Kalachikova. NTV devoted an episode of its series "Sledstvie veli..." to it in June 2012 under the title "The Poisoned School." The episode summary places the outbreak in May 1987. Poddubny, who later served as a deputy interior minister of Ukraine and headed the country's first unit against organized crime, told his version in the memoir "Unichtozhit' oborotnya" ("Destroy the Werewolf"), excerpted in Bulvar Gordona in January 2012 for his 70th birthday. Lenta.ru published its long read in 2019, Echo of Moscow devoted an episode of its history program "Ne tak" to the trial in March 2020, and the case has appeared since in Life.ru, TechInsider, NEWS.ru and, in April 2026, on CNN Prima News in the Czech Republic.
Proven by the verdict, as later reported: Tamara Ivanyutina's 20 poisonings, nine of them fatal, and the convictions of her sister and parents. No court record was available, so the exact list of counts is not known.
Date of the canteen poisoning: Fakty gives March 16, 1987, for the meal and March 17 and 18 for the hospital admissions; Echo of Moscow gives March 17 as the date of the meal; Lenta.ru gives March 27; NTV's episode summary says May 1987.
Number of deaths from the meal: three (two boys and a canteen trust engineer) in Fakty, four (two children and two adults) in most later accounts. The identity of the adults differs between sources, and Poddubny's mention of a schoolgirl among the dead is not repeated elsewhere.
Family total: 13 deaths in most accounts, 15 in Poddubny's memoir and Life.ru.
Execution date: December 6, 1990 (WAS, NEWS.ru), December 9, 1990 (CNN Prima News), 1988 (Echo of Moscow) or 1987 (Lenta.ru, TechInsider).
Location of the school: the Podil district (Fakty, Poddubny) or the then Minskyi district (Lenta.ru).
Details from Poddubny's memoir, including the dialogue, the egg test and the Tula inquiries, are the recollections of the senior officer on the case, written decades later, and are reported here as his account. Ivanyutina's claim that her confession was forced was raised at trial and rejected; no later campaign to reopen the case was found.
1941: Tamara Antonovna Maslenko is born in Tula.
Undated: she is convicted of speculation and serves a year in a labor colony.
About 1976: the family's poisonings begin, by the investigators' reckoning of an 11-year span.
1980: by Poddubny's account, Anton Maslenko kills a relative by marriage with thallium in home-brewed vodka.
Undated: her first husband, a truck driver, dies after a long illness; she sells his apartment and moves to Kyiv.
Summer 1983: she marries Oleg Ivanyutin; his parents move to Kyiv.
Undated, before 1987: her parents-in-law die within days of each other.
September 1986: she starts work as a dishwasher at School No. 16, Kyiv.
September or October 1986: the school's party organizer, Ekaterina Shcherban, dies.
November 20, 1986: a first-grader and a fifth-grader are taken to hospital; a teacher and Viktor Stadnik fall ill.
March 9, 1987: dietitian Natalia Kukarenko is admitted to hospital; she dies March 12.
March 16, 1987: the late lunch of buckwheat soup and liver is poisoned.
March 17 and 18, 1987: about 13 to 15 pupils and staff are hospitalized.
March 20, 1987: the first of the two sixth-grade boys dies.
March 28, 1987: an engineer from the canteen trust dies.
Spring 1987: Kukarenko is exhumed and thallium is found; Kalachikova identifies the bottle from the sewing machine; Ivanyutina is arrested.
May 5, 1987: the second boy dies.
1987, after her arrest: her parents and sister are arrested.
Late 1980s: the four are tried in the Kyiv City Court; Ivanyutina is sentenced to death, her sister to 15 years, her parents to 13 and 10 years.
December 6, 1990: Ivanyutina is shot at the Lukyanivska pretrial detention center in Kyiv (most specific date; disputed).
May and June 2007: Fakty i Kommentarii revisits the case.
January 2012: Bulvar Gordona publishes an extract from Poddubny's memoir.
June 2012: NTV broadcasts "The Poisoned School."
October 2019: Lenta.ru publishes its long read.
March 8, 2020: Echo of Moscow broadcasts its program on the trial.