The phrase is still in the language. "Otkroyte, Mosgaz," open up, it's the gas board: in Russian it has come to mean a stranger at the door with a reason to be let in. It dates from the winter of 1963, when a young man in a fur hat tied at the back of his head went up the stairwells of new apartment blocks in Moscow saying he had come to check the gas, and killed the children and the old woman he found at home alone.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Ionesyan was born in Tbilisi on August 27, 1937, to an Armenian family. He sang well as a child, and his parents pushed him. He finished music school and was admitted to the Tbilisi State Conservatory, then left in his second year to work in the theater. His early record is told three ways. In one version his father was jailed for seven years for trading fraud while Vladimir was still at school, and in 1954 he was convicted of theft and given a five-year suspended sentence; in 1959 he was drafted, claimed a nervous illness, and got two and a half years for evading service after, he said, someone at the draft office destroyed his medical papers. In another, the draft evasion came first and his father was arrested while he served it. Interrogation records printed by Komsomolskaya Pravda mention the 1959 evasion term and no 1954 conviction at all.
He served the term in a light-regime camp in Gori, where he behaved well enough to be made the camp's cultural organizer and was sometimes let into town. On one of those passes he went home instead of back, and the rest of his sentence was changed to a year of corrective labor. Called up again, he was again declared unfit on nervous grounds. He married a conservatory graduate named Medea and they had a son. Short of money, he joined a group theft, was caught, and was given five years suspended in view of his age and family. His wife wanted him away from his friends, and the family moved to Orenburg, where he sang tenor at the Musical Comedy Theater; one account says he was an accompanist.
In November 1963 a ballerina of twenty-one from Kazan, Alevtina Nikolaevna Dmitrieva, came to the theater and took rooms near the Ionesyans, and she and Vladimir began an affair. The management soon told her she was not good enough and still had to learn to dance. He left his wife and child and walked out of his job on December 13 to go with her, telling her he worked for the KGB and could get her made a principal at the Bolshoi. They tried Ivanovo, where he had a friend from the Orenburg operetta, and when that came to nothing he took her to Moscow, saying an uncle who had died in Germany had left him an inheritance there. They rented a room from a pensioner on Second Meshchanskaya Street near the Rizhsky station. No Moscow theater would take her, and the money ran out. He told her he had been promoted and would often be away on assignments, and that he dressed plainly because he was undercover.
He bought a tourist's hatchet at GUM, the department store on Red Square, and went from door to door. He said he was an inspector from Mosgaz, the city gas service, or from housing office No. 13; he read meters and looked at the burners, and what decided him was not what a flat contained but how many people were in it. He planned nothing in advance. The detail investigators seized on later was his hat: he tied the flaps of his ushanka at the back of his head, where almost no Muscovite tied them, and it marked him as someone from out of town.
On December 20, 1963, he went through a new five-story block on Baltiyskaya Street in the Sokol district. In apartment 95 on the fourth floor he found Konstantin Sobolev, called Kostya, twelve years old, home alone from school, and struck him again and again; one account says he used a knife that one time. He took the boy's sweater, sixty rubles, a bottle of Shipr cologne and a pair of sunglasses. Some later accounts give the boy's first name as Mikhail.
The first door he had knocked on in that building was apartment 86, on the second floor. A boy of nine, Vladimir Teplov, answered, and when the man asked who else was home he said everyone was, though there was only his grandmother of seventy and a baby. The man hesitated, looked at the gas stove in the kitchen and left clear fingerprints on its handle, and went on upstairs. The boy described a man who stooped slightly, not obviously from the Caucasus, with his hat tied behind his head. From his account the police criminalist Sofia Feinstein built a composite, with help from the artist Naum Karpovsky and the anthropologist and sculptor Mikhail Gerasimov; a detective who happened to look into her office resembled the man closely enough to sharpen the likeness. The boy later picked Ionesyan out and gave evidence at the closed trial under a false name, Artem Frolov.
On December 25 Ionesyan and Dmitrieva were in Ivanovo, a textile city about 150 miles northeast of Moscow. In an apartment on Kalinin Street he killed Mikhail Kuleshov, called Misha, twelve, and took a worn jacket, a pullover, two cheap pens and some bonds. On Oktyabrskaya Street he killed a woman of seventy-four whose name is not given in the published accounts, and took a pocket flashlight and seventy kopeks. Then he went back to Kalinin Street. There he raped Galina Petropavlovskaya, fifteen, and struck her nine times on the head with the hatchet, and took a sweater, a jacket, a fluffy shawl and ninety rubles. She lived and was able to describe him.
That evening he told Dmitrieva that his government task had put them both in danger of being killed and that they had to leave Ivanovo at once. They walked about six miles toward Moscow before they took a bus. After Ivanovo the case was given special status and placed under the personal supervision of Vadim Tikunov, the minister for the protection of public order, and of Alexei Kosygin, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Nikita Khrushchev took an interest in it too.
On December 28, on Leningradsky Prospekt in Moscow, he followed a boy home from playing outside. Alexander Lisovets, called Sasha, was eleven. When the first blow landed the boy ran into the toilet and tried to lock himself in, and Ionesyan caught him before he could and killed him there. He took nothing: the room with the cabinet was locked and he could not find the key or force the door.
He and Dmitrieva saw in the New Year together and he did not kill again for a week and a half. Moscow was frightened in a way it was not used to being. Soviet newspapers did not report violent crime, so nothing official appeared and the city ran on rumor, which made it worse.
On January 8, 1964, he worked his way along a building on Sheremetyevskaya Street in the Maryina Roshcha district, and this time said he was from the housing office. Maria Yermakova, forty-six, was alone and opened her door. He struck her about twenty times with the hatchet and then went through the apartment. He took five skeins of yarn, three pairs of socks, a purse with thirty rubles in it, a table clock called Mir, and a Start-3 television set.
The television caught him. Residents told the police they had seen a young man of southern appearance carry a television wrapped in a sheet out of the street that day and leave in a truck. The district officer, Malyshev, had seen it too and remembered that the plate began with 96; detectives soon had the whole number, MOG 96-26. The driver said he had dropped the man between Trifonovskaya and Meshchanskaya streets. Door-to-door questioning found a woman on Shchepkin Street who said a neighbor's niece had a husband who looked Caucasian and had just bought a television and sold it straight on to someone in the next building. It was Yermakova's set.
The police waited at the apartment and caught Dmitrieva. She told them Ionesyan was a KGB officer on a secret mission. A check ordered by the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, found no such officer. Put in solitary confinement, she said he had gone ahead to Kazan and would meet her train at the station. A woman officer of the Moscow criminal investigation department went in her place as bait. The arrest was supervised by the Tatar republic's minister for the protection of public order, Salikh Yapeyev, and on January 12, 1964, Ionesyan was taken on a platform of the Kazan station without a struggle. He introduced himself to the officers as a KGB major.
His fate was settled before the trial. A later NTV documentary claimed that the Prosecutor General, Roman Rudenko, took him to Khrushchev's office, and that Khrushchev looked at him and ordered that he be gone within two weeks. The ministry for public order proposed that he be hanged in public, and Filipp Bobkov, first deputy chairman of the KGB, recalled in 2001 that letters came in from citizens and work collectives demanding he be hanged or quartered at the Lobnoye Mesto on Red Square. The Central Committee decided against a show. Its officials wrote that a sensational trial was not justified, noting among other things his nationality, and recommended a closed hearing before the Supreme Court of the RSFSR with no press, radio or television coverage beyond a short report of the verdict.
He admitted everything. Investigation and trial took two weeks. On January 30 the court convicted him of murder under article 102, robbery under article 146 and rape under article 117, and sentenced him to death, a verdict declared final with no appeal. His petition for clemency was refused at once, and at eleven the following night, January 31, 1964, he was shot in the back of the head at Butyrka prison; some English-language accounts give the date as February 1. It was eighteen days from arrest to verdict, nineteen to execution. Accounts of his last hours say he sang arias.
The motive was never worked out, because there was no time to work it out. The charge was robbery, and he told his interrogators he had been looking for money and that he killed the first time because he was desperate for it; he could not explain the later killings. In half the apartments he ignored valuables in plain sight and took small things he thought Dmitrieva would like, and gave them to her. One later account has him admitting that by Ivanovo it was no longer about money. Gerasimov concluded he was a hysteroid personality killing for self-assertion, a man who had sung second parts in Orenburg and believed he deserved the first. Others have argued he was a robber who killed to leave no witnesses.
Dmitrieva was convicted as an accomplice, although he shielded her throughout, insisting she knew nothing, and forensic specialists said later that her guilt had not been proved. She was given fifteen years and released early, in 1972 by most accounts, in 1974 by others.
He is often called the first Soviet serial killer, and he was not. Vasily Komarov killed in Moscow in the 1920s, and Vladimir Vinnichevsky killed children in the Urals in the 1930s. What was new was that the public knew. His was the first case of its kind to reach ordinary Soviet people, by rumor more than by print, and that is why the phrase outlived him. In 2012 Channel One broadcast a ten-part drama, Mosgaz, directed by Andrei Malyukov, with Maksim Matveyev as a killer renamed Vladislav Vikhrov.