In the USSR, several women were sentenced to capital punishment: however, some of them had their sentence changed to life imprisonment at the last moment. However, three criminals were still executed. Why were they shot?
Tonka the machine gunner
Antonina Makarova was born in 1921 in the Smolensk region, in the village of Malaya Volkovka, into a large peasant family of Makar Parfenov. She bore her father's surname, but Makarov's "pseudonym" was still at school: when the girl came to the first grade of the school, she could not give her name or surname because of her shyness. When the teacher asked her again, one of her classmates shouted: “Yes, she is Makarova!”, referring to the name of her father. So they wrote it down.
Classmates recalled that Tony had a revolutionary heroine in childhood: Anka the machine gunner. After graduating from school, Antonina went to study in Moscow: there she was caught by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The girl went to the front as a volunteer, but did not really have time to serve the Motherland: she ended up in the Vyazemsky operation - the infamous battle near Moscow, in which Soviet army suffered a crushing defeat. A whole part died: only Tonya and a soldier named Nikolai Fedchuk managed to survive. For several months they wandered through the forests, trying to get to Fedchuk's native village. They ate literally pasture, slept on the ground and, quite naturally, became close. Feelings flared up between the young people, but when they managed to get to the soldier’s village, the “camping wife” found out that he actually had a wife. Tonya left him with her, and she herself went on alone and went to the village of Lokot, occupied by the German invaders. She stayed there.
There she continued to be a "camping wife" - this time already German, and not Soviet soldiers. I drank a lot, often caroused along with the invaders. Often Tonya was raped - even in groups - providing housing and food for this. According to legend, once Tonya got drunk and put to the machine "Maxim", ordered to shoot at a crowd of prisoners. Tonya, who before the war took not only courses for nurses, but also for machine gunners, did not refuse. Since then, she was nicknamed the Thin Machine Gunner and for a regular salary of 30 marks she was ordered to shoot people. And all indiscriminately: men, women, children and the elderly. With children, a miss often came out: sometimes bullets flew over them, and they managed to survive. The surviving children were taken out of the village along with the corpses, and partisans rescued them at the burial sites. At the same time, the Germans allowed Makarova to take the belongings of the dead, which she did, washing them from blood and sewing up bullet holes.
So rumors about Tonka the machine gunner reached the partisans, who were outraged by the betrayal of the monster woman. They even put a reward on her head, but they failed to get to Makarova. Until 1943, Antonina continued to shoot people. Then, however, the Soviet army reached the Bryansk region, and Antonina would not have been well, but she very “successfully” contracted syphilis from someone, and the Germans sent her to the rear, to the hospital. From there, she fled, having managed to get documents proving that all this time she allegedly worked as a nurse in a hospital.
Thanks to the documents, she even found a job, entering a Soviet hospital, where in early 1945 she met a young soldier Viktor Ginzburg. The young people got married, and instead of Tonka the machine-gunner, Antonina Ginzburg “appeared”. After the liberation of the Bryansk region, Soviet investigators learned a lot about Tonka the machine gunner, but they could not attack her trail in any way. Witnesses were interrogated, clarified, checked, but they did not find out where she could be hiding.
Meanwhile, Ginzburg led the life of an ordinary woman. They lived in the city of Lepel, she and her husband had two daughters, she worked and even spoke to schoolchildren, talking about the hardships of difficult wartime. Naturally, without mentioning their "exploits" in front of the German troops. As a result, the KGB hiccuped her for almost 30 years, and found it almost by accident. A certain citizen Parfenov, going abroad, submitted questionnaires with information about relatives. There, among the solid Parfenovs, as sister for some reason, Antonina Makarova was listed, after her husband Ginzburg. Antonina was detained right on her way home from work. True, they did not immediately punish him, an investigation began. They say that even a former policeman-lover was brought for interrogation to confirm whether it was Tonka the machine-gunner or not. Only when all the data matched did Ginzburg begin to judge.
At first, the husband and daughters tried to obtain the release of the mother: the investigators did not say why exactly she was arrested. However, when the true reason for the detention became clear to them, they stopped trying to appeal the arrest and left Lepel. Antonina Makarova was sentenced to death on November 20, 1978. She immediately filed several petitions for clemency, but they were all rejected. On August 11, 1979, Tonka the machine-gunner was shot.
Berta Borodkina was born in 1927. She did not like her name, and the girl preferred to call herself Bella. She began working as a barmaid and a waitress in the Gelendzhik dining room. Soon, the girl was transferred for success in work to the position of director of the dining room: there she became an honored worker of trade and catering of the RSFSR, and also headed the trust of restaurants and canteens in Gelendzhik. They say she had many connections: among those who patronized her were members of the Presidium Supreme Council USSR, as well as the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Fyodor Kulakov.
The scheme of work was simple: visitors to cafes and restaurants were constantly cheated, dishes were prepared from expired products, due to which dizzying sums were released. Bella spent them on bribes to high-ranking officials and their service at the highest level.
During this period [from 1974 to 1982], being an official in a responsible position, - says the indictment in the Borodkina case, - repeatedly personally and through intermediaries in her apartment and at her place of work received bribes from a large group of subordinates to her work. Of the bribes she received, Borodkina herself transferred bribes to senior officials in the city of Gelendzhik for assistance and support in their work ... So, over the past two years, 15,000 rubles worth of valuables, money and food were transferred to the secretary of the city party committee Pogodin.
The last amount in the 1980s was approximately the cost of three Zhiguli cars.
It was a real restaurant mafia: every bartender, waiter and director of a cafe or canteen had to give Borodkina a certain amount every month, otherwise the employees were simply fired. At the same time, there were no checks and audits - contacts with officials helped. But in 1982, an anonymous source reported that in one of Borodkina's restaurants, pornographic films were shown to selected visitors. It is not known whether this information was confirmed, but during the audit it turned out that over the years of managing the trust, Borodkina stole more than a million rubles from the state - an incredible amount at that time. Borodkina's house was searched, finding furs, jewelry and huge sums of money hidden in radiators, in rolled up cans and even in a pile of bricks near the house. Berta herself did not admit her guilt for a long time, however, according to her sister, in prison the defendant was tortured and given psychotropic drugs, under the influence of which she began to confess. In August 1983, Berta Borodkina was shot.
Tamara Ivanyutina, before Maslenko's marriage, was born into a large family living in Kiev. It was said that from early childhood, parents inspired their children that the main thing in life is material security. No wonder Tamara went into trade - in Soviet times it was a bread place. However, very quickly Ivanyutina fell for speculation and received a criminal record. It was then very difficult for a woman with a criminal record to get a job, so she got herself a fake work book and in 1986 got a job as a dishwasher at school number 16 in the Minsk district of Kiev. Later, she told the investigation that she needed work in the canteen in order to provide chickens and pigs with food waste. However, not only for this, as it turned out.
On March 17 and 18, 1987, several students and school staff were hospitalized with signs of serious food poisoning. At first there was a version of an intestinal infection, but soon it disappeared: all the victims lost their hair. In the first hours, two children and two adults died, another 9 people were in intensive care in a serious condition. A criminal case was initiated. The investigation interviewed the victims, and it turned out that they all dined the day before in the school cafeteria and ate buckwheat porridge with liver. Later it also turned out that the nurse responsible for the quality of nutrition died two weeks ago, according to the official conclusion - from a cardiovascular disease.
All these circumstances aroused suspicion in the investigation, and it was decided to exhume the body. An examination showed that the nurse died from thallium poisoning. It is a highly toxic heavy metal nervous system And internal organs, as well as causing total alopecia (complete hair loss). All employees of the school cafeteria were searched, including Ivanyutina, in whose house they found "a small but very heavy jar." In the laboratory, it turned out that the jar contained "Clerici liquid" - a highly toxic solution based on thallium. Later, the woman confessed, saying that in this way she wanted to “punish” the sixth graders who refused to place tables in the dining room. However, later it turned out that this was not the first crime of a woman.
It turned out that it was customary for Ivanyutina to poison people in the family. Her parents and sister at that time had already been using thallium for 11 years - since 1976 - to commit poisoning. Moreover, both for selfish purposes, and in relation to people who, for some reason, simply did not like family members. They bought the highly toxic Clerici liquid from a friend: the woman worked at the Geological Institute and was sure that she was selling thallium to her friends for rat-baiting. In addition, Ivanyutina poisoned her first husband, and then his parents - because of the apartment. Then she married a second time, but also unsuccessfully. Deciding to ruin the man gradually, she began to poison him with small portions of poison. He began to get sick, and Tamara expected to receive a house after his death and land plot. Ivanyutina also poisoned school party organizer Ekaterina Shcherban (the woman died), a chemistry teacher (survived) and two children - students of the first and fifth grades. They asked the woman for the remains of cutlets for their pets, which greatly angered the criminal. The children died.
As a result, the court proved 40 episodes of poisoning committed by members of this family, 13 of them were fatal. Ivanyutina's sister Nina was sentenced to 15 years in prison, father and mother - to 10 and 13 years. Tamara Ivanyutina was shot.
Finally, Antonina Makarovna Makarova (nee Parfenova, according to other sources - Panfilova; 1922, Malaya Volkovka, Sychevsky district, Smolensk province, according to other sources, in 1923 in Moscow - August 11, 1979, Bryansk).
At birth, Makarov was named Antonina Makarovna Parfenova. However, when the girl went to the first grade of the village school, an incident occurred with her name - the teacher, writing down the names of the children in the class journal, confused Antonina's patronymic with her last name, and as a result, she was listed as Antonina Makarova in school documents. This confusion was the beginning of the fact that in all subsequent documents, including in the passport, Antonina's name was recorded as Antonina Makarovna Makarova.
In 1941, when the Great Patriotic War began, 21-year-old Makarova was at the front as a nurse. In the autumn of that year, she was among the few who miraculously survived the Vyazemskaya operation, and after the defeat of her unit, she hid in the forest for several days, but was eventually arrested by the Germans. After some time, she and soldier Nikolai Fedchuk, seizing the moment, escaped from captivity. For several months they wandered together around the district, trying to get out of the German encirclement. Much later, during interrogation, Makarova said that she was too frightened and therefore, in fact, she herself followed Fedchuk, offering herself to him as a so-called "camping wife."
In January 1942, the couple reached the village of Krasny Kolodets, where Fedchuk had a wife and children, and, despite Makarova's requests, he broke up with the latter.
Makarova wandered around the villages and villages for some time, not staying anywhere for a long time, and eventually ended up on the territory of the newly formed Lokot Republic in the village of Lokot, where she was again detained by the Germans.
The Lokot Republic is an administrative-territorial national formation on the part of the Soviet territory occupied by Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War.
Existed from November 1941 to August 1943. The administrative center was located in the working settlement of Lokot, which was proclaimed a city. The district included several districts of the pre-war Oryol and Kursk regions (now the territory of the Bryansk region mainly).
All power in the localities belonged here not to the German commandant's offices, but to local governments. Any German authorities were forbidden to interfere in the internal affairs of the Lokot Volost. German institutions on the territory of the Lokotsky district limited their activities only to help and advice to the leaders of the district and its districts.
At the end of November 1941, the head of the Lokot self-government, K.P. Voskoboinik, published the manifesto of the Viking People's Socialist Party, which provided for the destruction of the communist and collective farm system, the provision of arable land to the peasants and personal plots, the development of private initiative and the "merciless extermination of all Jews who were commissars."
The population of the district was 581 thousand people. On the territory of the district, despite the fact that it was an occupied territory, there was its own Criminal Procedure and Criminal Code.
She had her own armed forces- The Russian Liberation People's Army (RONA) - a relatively combat-ready association, created in the image of the people's militia and consisting of 14 battalions (according to various sources, from 12 to 20 thousand people).
The property confiscated during dispossession by the Soviet government was returned free of charge to the former owners, and in case of loss, appropriate compensation was provided. The size of the capitation area for each inhabitant of the municipality was about 10 hectares.
During the existence of self-government, many industrial enterprises engaged in the processing of agricultural products were restored and put into use, churches were restored, 9 hospitals and 37 outpatient medical centers operated, 345 secondary schools and 3 orphanages operated, the city art and drama theater named after K. P. Voskoboynik in the city of Lokot.
The main currency in the district was the Soviet ruble. The budget of the district consisted of taxes on the population. A monetary tax was taken from buildings, all types of agricultural products, livestock, poultry and handicrafts. On average, about 600 rubles were received from each farm annually, in addition, they took out fire insurance, but no compensation was paid to the victims of the fire.
The status of the Lokotsky district as an autonomous national entity was based on the support of the commander of the 2nd German tank army G. Guderian.
Soviet partisans associated with the NKVD attacked the civilian population of the district and led fighting with RONA, the actions of the parties in the district were in the nature of a civil war.
From May to October 1942, the partisans tried 540 times to attack the security forces of the district.
The district leadership maintained order with brutal repressions against persons suspected of having links with the partisans.
The Jewish population of the Lokot district was completely destroyed by the police. In Suzemka, 223 Jews were shot, and in the settlement of Navlya - 39.
The executioner of the Lokotsky district, Antonina Makarova, executed about 1,500 people, including partisans, their families, women and teenagers.
On September 5, 1943, Lokot was taken by the forces of the 2nd Tank Battalion of the 197th Tank Brigade of the 30th Ural Volunteer Tank Corps, together with units of the 250th Rifle Division. During the retreat of the German army, the armed formations of the Lokotsky district under the command of Bronislav Kaminsky, as well as members of the families of military personnel and everyone who did not want to stay on Soviet territory (30 thousand people), left in August 1943 together with the German army in the city of Lepel, Vitebsk region , where the "Lepel Republic" was created for some time, and the RONA participated in military operations against Soviet partisans until the summer of 1944. From here, the RONA brigade as part of the SS troops was transferred to Poland, where, in particular, participated in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
In the future, giving evidence, Makarova stated that she simply pursued the elementary goals of surviving and warming herself after long wanderings, and at the same time she was very afraid of death, which is why, when the Germans began to question her, she began to scold Soviet power. She attributed to her fears the reason why she voluntarily entered the service of the Lokot auxiliary police, where she was given a Maxim machine gun for the execution of death sentences to which Soviet partisans and members of their families were sentenced. According to Makarova herself, the Germans obviously did not want to get their hands dirty and they decided that it would be even better if it was the Soviet girl who executed the Soviet partisans. For agreeing to participate in the executions, the Germans settled Makarova in a room at the local stud farm, where she also kept the machine gun itself.
“I did not know those whom I shoot. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. Sometimes you shoot, you come closer, and someone else twitches. Then again she shot in the head so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes a few prisoners had a piece of plywood hung on their chests with the inscription "Partisan". Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardroom or in the yard. There was plenty of ammo…”
She also stated that she was never tormented by remorse, and none of the dead appeared to her in her dreams, since the executions themselves were not perceived by her as something unusual.
Prisoners were sent to her for execution in groups of about 27 people. There were days when she carried out death sentences three times a day. According to official figures, she shot about 1,500 people, but only 168 people managed to recover their passport data. For each execution, Makarova received 30 Reichsmarks. After the executions, Makarova took off the clothes she liked from the corpses, motivating it like this: “Why should good disappear?” Often she complained that large blood stains and bullet holes remained on the clothes of the dead. Eyewitnesses recalled that often at night Makarova came to the local stud farm, where the Germans set up a prison for the condemned, and intently examined the prisoners, as if she were looking after their things in advance.
Makarova often relieved tension at a local music club, where she drank heavily and, along with several other local girls, worked as a prostitute for German soldiers. Such a wild life led to the fact that in the summer of 1943 Makarova was seconded to a German rear hospital for treatment for venereal diseases, and thus avoided capture by the partisans and the Red Army when they captured Lokot on September 5 of that year. In the rear, Makarova started an affair with a German cook-corporal, who secretly took her in his convoy to Ukraine, and from there to Poland. There, the corporal was killed, and the Germans sent Makarov to a concentration camp in Königsberg. When the Red Army captured the city in 1945, Makarova posed as a Soviet nurse thanks to a stolen military ID, in which she indicated that from 1941 to 1944 she worked in the 422nd sanitary battalion, and got a job as a nurse in a Soviet mobile hospital.
Here, in the local hospital, she met the Belarusian soldier Viktor Ginzburg, who was wounded during the assault on the city. A week later they signed, Makarova took her husband's surname.
Antonina and her husband settled in Lepel (Belarusian SSR) (it was Victor's hometown) and they had two daughters. Antonina worked as an inspector in a sewing workshop at a local garment factory, where she carried out product quality control. She was considered a responsible and conscientious worker, her photograph was often on the local honors board. However, after working there for many years, Antonina did not make any friends. Faina Tarasik, the inspector of the personnel department of the factory at the time, recalled that Antonina was very reserved, not talkative, and during collective holidays she tried to drink alcohol as little as possible (probably she was afraid to let it slip). The Ginzburgs were considered respected front-line soldiers and received all the benefits due to veterans. Neither her husband, nor neighbors, nor familiar families knew about Antonina's real identity.
The KGB began looking for Makarova immediately after Lokot was liberated from the Germans. However, the surviving residents of the village could only provide investigators with scant information, since they all knew Makarova only as Tonka the machine gunner. The search for Makarova dragged on for 30 years, and only in 1976 did things get off the ground, when in Bryansk on the city square one man attacked a certain Nikolai Ivanin with his fists, in whom he recognized the head of the Lokot prison during the German occupation. Ivanin, who, like Makarova, had been hiding all this time, did not open up and spoke in detail about his then activities, at the same time mentioning Makarova (with whom he had a short-term affair). And although her full name he mistakenly named the investigators as Antonina Anatolyevna Makarova (and at the same time erroneously reported that she was a Muscovite), this was a major clue, and the KGB began to develop a list of Soviet citizens with the name of Antonina Makarova. However, the Makarova they needed was not in it, because the list contained only those women who were registered under this name at birth.
Her real name became known when one of her brothers, who lived in Tyumen, being an employee of the Ministry of Defense, filled out a questionnaire in 1976 to travel abroad. In Lepel, surveillance was established for Makarova, but a week later it had to be stopped, because Makarova began to suspect something. After that, investigators left her alone for a whole year and all this time they were collecting materials and evidence on her. At one of the concerts dedicated to Victory Day, the mishandled Chekist started a conversation with Makarova: Makarova could not answer his questions about the locations of the military units where she served, and about the names of her commanders - she referred to a bad memory and the prescription of events.
In July 1978, the investigators decided to conduct an experiment: they brought one of the witnesses to the factory, while Makarova, under a fictitious pretext, was taken outside in front of the building. The witness, watching her from the window, identified her, but this identification alone was not enough, and therefore the investigators arranged another experiment. They brought two more witnesses to Lepel, one of whom played a local social security worker, where Makarova was allegedly summoned to recalculate her pension. She recognized Tonka the machine-gunner. The second witness was sitting outside the building with a KGB investigator and also recognized Antonina. In September of the same year, Makarova was arrested on her way from her place of work to the head of the personnel department. Investigator Leonid Savoskin, who was present at her arrest, later recalled that Makarova behaved very calmly and immediately understood everything.
Makarova was taken to Bryansk. At first, the investigators feared that she would take it into her head to commit suicide, so they put a woman “whisperer” in her cell. She recalled that Makarova was still very cold-blooded and confident that she would be given a maximum of three years, both because of her age and because of the prescription of those events (she even made plans for her future life after her release). She did not mention her family.
She volunteered for interrogation herself, where she demonstrated the same composure, answering questions directly. Antonina was sincerely sure that there was nothing to punish her for, and she attributed everything to the war. She behaved no less calmly during the investigative experiments, when she was brought to Lokot. During the investigation, she never mentioned her family. Viktor Ginzburg, not knowing the reasons for the arrest of his wife, all the time tried to achieve her release, after which the investigators had to tell him the truth, because of which Ginzburg and his children left Lepel in an unknown direction (their further fate remained unknown).
On November 20, 1978, she was sentenced to capital punishment - the death penalty. Makarova took this, as always, calmly, but from the same day she began to apply for pardon to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other authorities, which were all rejected. Most of all, she stressed that she needed eye surgery and that 1979 was the year of the woman.
On August 11, 1979, the sentence was carried out.
In general, Tonka's story alone would be enough for the series - it is amazing in itself, and then there are a lot of murders, and stupid ones at that. A story about this unfortunate Raisa. Very often, the ends do not meet, although the image of a woman who takes into account only the interests of her family in life and hates everyone else has succeeded.
In 1987, an unprecedented trial took place in Kiev in the case of a family of serial killers who chose a highly toxic aqueous solution based on thallium compounds as the weapon of crime. Maria and Anton Maslenko and their daughters, Tamara Ivanyutina and Nina Matsibora, were in the dock. Most of the victims were on account of 45-year-old Ivanyutina. She became the last woman in the USSR sentenced by the court to an exceptional measure of punishment.
Who was Tamara Ivanyutina?
The biography of a woman before the start of the process is not distinguished by any outstanding events. Her maiden name is Maslenko. She was born in 1942 into a family with six children. Parents always inspired their offspring that material security, prosperity are the main conditions for a normal life. This is exactly what the serial poisoner Tamara Ivanyutina was striving for.
In the process of investigating the poisoning case, it turned out that Ivanyutina had previously been convicted of speculation, and got a job at the school with a fake work book.
Since September 1986, she worked in the canteen of one of the schools in Kiev. She was hired as a dishwasher. This work brought her considerable benefits. Tamara Ivanyutina kept a fairly large household. Working in the canteen, she was able to provide her animals with free food, which was left over from schoolchildren with poor appetites. To make it even worse, Tamara Ivanyutina periodically added poison to food. She also used poisonous substances against those who, in her opinion, "behaved badly." Ivanyutina's victims were those who interfered with stealing food from the school cafeteria, allowed themselves to make comments to her, and in general all those who she did not like for one reason or another.
Poisoning.
The story of Tamara Ivanyutina became known when several workers and students of the 16th school in the Podolsky district of Kiev were admitted to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed signs of food poisoning. It happened on March 16 and 17, 1987. At the same time, four (two adults and the same number of children) died almost immediately. There were nine victims in intensive care. Initially, doctors diagnosed an intestinal infection and flu. However, after some time, the patients began to lose their hair. For these diseases, this phenomenon is uncharacteristic.
Law enforcement agencies quickly established that Ivanyutina Tamara Antonovna was involved in the poisoning. The investigation began immediately, as it became known about the death of students and school staff. Criminal proceedings were initiated. The investigation team conducted interrogations of the survivors of the victims. It was found that all of them became ill after they had lunch in the school cafeteria on March 16. At the same time, they all ate liver with buckwheat porridge. Investigators decided to find out who was responsible for the quality of food at the school. It turned out that Natalya Kukharenko, a nutritionist nurse, had died 2 weeks before proceedings were initiated. According to official figures, the woman died of a cardiovascular disease. However, investigators questioned the accuracy of this information. As a result, an exhumation was carried out. After the study, traces of thallium were found in the tissues of the corpse. Then searches began at everyone who had anything to do with the school cafeteria. They did not ignore the house in which the dishwasher of the food unit Ivanyutina Tamara Antonovna lived.
Arrest.
During the search, a "small but rather heavy container" was found at the dishwasher in the house. Naturally, its contents interested the investigation team. The container was confiscated and handed over to experts for examination. As it turned out, it contained Clerici's liquid. It is a highly toxic solution based on thallium (used in a number of branches of geology). Tamara Ivanyutina was taken into custody. First, she submitted a confession, confessed to all the episodes that took place in the school cafeteria. Such a crime, as Tamara Ivanyutina explained, she committed due to the fact that sixth-graders who were having lunch refused to arrange chairs and tables. She decided to punish them and poisoned them. However, she later stated that the confession was made under pressure from the investigators. She refused to testify.
The case of Tamara Ivanyutina became resonant. In the course of further operational activities, new facts came to light. So, the investigation found that not only Ivanyutina herself, but also members of her family (parents and sister) for 11 years used a highly toxic solution to deal with people they did not like. At the same time, they committed poisoning both for selfish motives and to eliminate people who were unsympathetic to them for some reason. The family received Clerici liquid from a friend who was an employee of the Geological Institute. The poisoners explained that they needed thallium to fight rats. The acquaintance herself later admitted that over the course of 15 years she had passed the toxic solution to Ivanyutina herself, as well as her parents and sister, at least 9 times over the course of 15 years.
Tamara's criminal activity began with her first husband. She poisoned a man and got his apartment. After the death of her first husband, Ivanyutina remarried. In a new marriage, her husband's parents became her victims. Father-in-law and mother-in-law died two days apart. The second husband himself also received small portions of thallium. So she kept his sexual activity low. In addition, Ivanyutina expected to get a house and a land plot that belonged to her husband's parents. In September 1986, she became a dishwasher at a local school. In addition to the episodes described above, the victims were a school party organizer (died) and a chemistry teacher (survived). They prevented Ivanyutina from stealing food from the catering department. Pupils of the 1st and 5th grades were also poisoned, who asked her for the remains of cutlets for pets. These children survived.
The investigation revealed that Nina Matsibora, the older sister of the main defendant in the case, was also active in criminal activities. In particular, using the same Clerici liquid, she poisoned her husband and got his apartment in Kiev. Spouses Maslenko - Ivanyutina's parents - also committed numerous poisonings. So, a neighbor in a communal apartment and a relative who made a remark to them were killed with a highly toxic liquid. In addition, animals belonging to "objectionable" people also became victims of poisoners. The geography of the family's criminal activity was not limited to Ukraine alone. So, it was proved that a number of poisonings were committed by criminals in the RSFSR. For example, while in Tula, Maslenko Sr. killed his relative. He mixed Clerici's liquid into the moonshine.
Court.
It examined the case of 45-year-old Ivanyutina, her older sister Nina Antonovna and their parents, Maria Feodorovna and Anton Mitrofanovich Maslenko. They were charged with numerous poisonings, including fatal ones. The court found that for 11 years the criminal family, for mercenary motives, as well as out of personal hostility, committed murders and attempts to deliberately deprive different people of life with the help of the so-called Clerici liquid - a highly toxic solution based on a potent poisonous substance - thallium. According to the Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, who worked during the proceedings as a senior investigator for especially important crimes in the Kiev prosecutor's office, the identified episodes are among the first criminal cases in which such a compound was used, recorded in the USSR. The total number of proven facts is 40. Of that number, 13 were fatal. Most of the murders (nine) and attempts (20) were personally committed by Tamara Ivanyutina. The process took about a year.
During the investigation, Ivanyutina tried several times to bribe the investigator. She promised the law enforcement officer "a lot of gold." The unusualness of this case in criminal practice lies in the fact that the main accused was a woman sentenced to death, and the punishment was carried out.
In her last speech, Ivanyutina did not admit her guilt in episodes. While still in jail, she said: in order to achieve what you want, you do not need to write any complaints. It is necessary to be friends with everyone and treat them. And especially for malicious people to mix poison. Ivanyutina did not ask for forgiveness from the relatives of the victims, saying that her upbringing did not allow her to do this. She regretted only one thing. Her old dream was to buy a Volga car, but she never came true. Ivanyutin was declared sane and sentenced to death. Accomplices were assigned different dates prisons. So, sister Nina was sentenced to 15 years. Her subsequent fate is unknown. The mother received 13 and the father 10 years in prison. Parents died in prison. The year in which Tamara Ivanyutina was shot was 1987.
Officially, in all the post-war years, three women were executed in the USSR. The death sentences for the representatives of the weaker sex were handed down, but not carried out. And then the case came to a head.
Who were these women, and for what crimes they were still shot.
The history of the crimes of Antonina Makarova
Incident with a surname
Antonina Makarova was born in 1921 in the Smolensk region, in the village of Malaya Volkovka, into a large peasant family of Makar Parfenov. She studied at a rural school, and it was there that an episode occurred that influenced her future life. When Tonya came to the first grade, because of her shyness, she could not give her last name - Parfenova. Classmates began to shout “Yes, she is Makarova!”, Meaning that Tony's father's name is Makar.
So, with the light hand of a teacher, at that time almost the only literate person in the village, Tonya Makarova appeared in the Parfyonov family.
The girl studied diligently, with diligence. She also had her own revolutionary heroine -
Anka the gunner. This film image had a real prototype - the nurse of the Chapaev division, Maria Popova, who once in battle really had to replace a killed machine gunner.
After graduating from school, Antonina went to study in Moscow, where she was caught by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The girl went to the front as a volunteer.
Camping wife of the encircled
The 19-year-old Komsomol member Makarova suffered all the horrors of the infamous "Vyazemsky cauldron". After the most difficult battles, only soldier Nikolai Fedchuk was surrounded by the young nurse Tonya. With him, she wandered through the local forests, just trying to survive. They did not look for partisans, they did not try to get through to their own - they fed on whatever they had to, sometimes they stole. The soldier did not stand on ceremony with Tonya, making her his "camping wife". Antonina did not resist - she just wanted to live.
In January 1942, they went to the village of Red Well, and then Fedchuk admitted that he was married and his family lived nearby. He left Tony alone. Tonya was not driven out of the Red Well, but the locals were already full of worries. And the strange girl did not seek to go to the partisans, did not strive to break through to ours, but strove to make love with one of the men who remained in the village. Having set the locals against herself, Tonya was forced to leave.
Killer with pay
Tonya Makarova's wanderings ended near the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region. The infamous "Lokot Republic" - the administrative-territorial formation of Russian collaborators - operated here. In essence, they were the same German lackeys as in other places, only more clearly formalized.
A police patrol detained Tonya, but they did not suspect a partisan or underground worker of her. She liked the policemen, who took her to their place, gave her a drink, fed and raped her. However, the latter is very relative - the girl, who only wanted to survive, agreed to everything.
Tonya didn’t play the role of a prostitute for the police for long - one day, drunk, they took her out into the yard and put her behind the Maxim machine gun. People stood in front of the machine gun - men, women, old people, children. She was ordered to shoot. For Tony, who had completed not only nursing courses, but also machine gunners, this was not a big deal. True, the dead drunk woman did not really understand what she was doing. But, nevertheless, she coped with the task.
The next day, Makarova learned that she was now an official - an executioner with a salary of 30 German marks and with her bunk. The Lokot Republic ruthlessly fought the enemies of the new order - partisans, underground workers, communists, other unreliable elements, as well as members of their families. The arrested were herded into a barn that served as a prison, and in the morning they were taken out to be shot.
The cell held 27 people, and all of them had to be eliminated in order to make room for new ones. Neither the Germans, nor even the local policemen, wanted to take on this job. And here, Tonya, who appeared out of nowhere with her shooting abilities, came in very handy.
The girl did not go crazy, but on the contrary, she considered that her dream had come true. And let Anka shoot enemies, and she shoots women and children - the war will write everything off! But her life is finally getting better.
1500 lost lives.
The daily routine of Antonina Makarova was as follows: in the morning, the execution of 27 people with a machine gun, finishing off the survivors with a pistol, cleaning weapons, schnapps and dancing in a German club in the evening, and at night, love with some pretty German or, at worst, with a policeman. As a reward, she was allowed to take the belongings of the dead. So Tonya got a bunch of outfits, which, however, had to be repaired - traces of blood and bullet holes immediately interfered with wearing.
However, sometimes Tonya allowed a “marriage” - several children managed to survive, because because of their small stature, the bullets passed over their heads. The children were taken out together with the corpses by the locals, who buried the dead, and handed over to the partisans. Rumors about a female executioner, "Tonka the machine gunner", "Tonka the Muscovite" crawled around the district. Local partisans even announced a hunt for the executioner, but they could not get to her.
In total, about 1,500 people became victims of Antonina Makarova.
By the summer of 1943, Tony's life again took a sharp turn - the Red Army moved to the West, starting to liberate the Bryansk region. This did not bode well for the girl, but then she very conveniently fell ill with syphilis, and the Germans sent her to the rear so that she would not re-infect the valiant sons of Great Germany.
Honored veteran instead of a war criminal
In the German hospital, however, it also soon became uncomfortable - Soviet troops approached so quickly that only the Germans managed to evacuate, and there was no longer any case for accomplices.
Realizing this, Tonya fled the hospital, again finding herself surrounded, but now Soviet. But survival skills were honed - she managed to get documents proving that all this time Makarova was a nurse in a Soviet hospital.
Antonina successfully managed to enter the service in a Soviet hospital, where at the beginning of 1945 a young soldier, a real war hero, fell in love with her. The guy made Tonya an offer, she agreed, and, having got married, the young people after the end of the war left for the Belarusian city of Lepel, to her husband's homeland.
So the female executioner Antonina Makarova disappeared, and the honored veteran Antonina Ginzburg took her place.
She's been looking for thirty years
Soviet investigators learned about the monstrous deeds of "Tonka the machine gunner" immediately after the liberation of the Bryansk region. IN mass graves found the remains of about one and a half thousand people, but only two hundred were identified. Witnesses were interrogated, checked, clarified - but they could not attack the trace of the female punisher.
Meanwhile, Antonina Ginzburg led ordinary life Soviet man - she lived, worked, raised two daughters, even met with schoolchildren, talking about her heroic military past. Of course, without mentioning the deeds of "Tonka the machine gunner".
The KGB spent more than three decades searching for it, but found it almost by accident. A certain citizen Parfenov, going abroad, submitted questionnaires with information about relatives. There, among the solid Parfyonovs, for some reason, Antonina Makarova, by her husband Ginzburg, was listed as a sister.
Yes, how that mistake of the teacher helped Tonya, how many years thanks to it she remained out of reach of justice!
The KGB operatives worked like jewelry - it was impossible to accuse an innocent person of such atrocities. Antonina Ginzburg was checked from all sides, witnesses were secretly brought to Lepel, even a former policeman-lover. And only after they all confirmed that Antonina Ginzburg was “Tonka the machine gunner”, she was arrested.
She did not deny, she talked about everything calmly, said that she had no nightmares. She did not want to communicate with her daughters or her husband. And the husband, a front-line soldier, ran around the authorities, threatened Brezhnev with a complaint, even at the UN - he demanded the release of his wife. Exactly until the investigators decided to tell him what his beloved Tonya was accused of.
After that, the dashing, brave veteran turned gray and aged overnight. The family disowned Antonina Ginzburg and left Lepel. What these people had to endure, you would not wish on the enemy.
Retribution
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was tried in Bryansk in the autumn of 1978. This was the last major trial of traitors in the USSR and the only trial of a female punisher.
Antonina herself was convinced that, due to the prescription of years, the punishment could not be too severe, she even believed that she would receive a suspended sentence. She only regretted that, because of the shame, she again had to move and change jobs. Even the investigators, knowing about the post-war exemplary biography of Antonina Ginzburg, believed that the court would show leniency. Moreover, 1979 was declared the Year of the Woman in the USSR.
However, on November 20, 1978, the court sentenced Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg to capital punishment - execution.
At the trial, her guilt was documented in the murder of 168 people from those whose identities could be established. More than 1,300 remained unknown victims of Tonka the Machine Gunner. There are crimes that cannot be forgiven.
At six in the morning on August 11, 1979, after all requests for clemency were rejected, the sentence against Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was carried out.
Berta Borodkina
Berta Borodkina, known in certain circles as "Iron Bella", was one of 3 women executed in the late USSR. By a fatal coincidence, Berta Naumovna Borodkina, a well-deserved worker of trade, who did not kill anyone, was included in this mournful list along with the murderers. She was sentenced to death for embezzlement of socialist property on an especially large scale.
Among those who patronized the catering director of the resort town were members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, as well as the secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Fyodor Kulakov. Relations at the very top for a long time made Berta Borodkin invulnerable to any auditors, but in the end they played a tragic role in her fate.
In April 1984, the Krasnodar Regional Court considered criminal case No. 2-4/84 against the director of the trust of restaurants and canteens in the city of Gelendzhik, Berta Borodkina, Honored Worker of Trade and Public Catering of the RSFSR. The main point of accusation of the defendant is part 2 of Art. 173 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (taking a bribe) - provided for punishment in the form of imprisonment for a term of five to fifteen years with confiscation of property. However, reality surpassed the worst fears of 57-year-old Borodkina - she was sentenced to death.
The decision of the court came as a surprise to lawyers who followed the high-profile trial with interest: an exceptional measure of punishment “up to its complete abolition”, according to the then current Criminal Code of the RSFSR, was allowed for treason (Article 64), espionage (Article 65), terrorist act (art. 66 and 67), sabotage (art. 68), banditry (art. 77), premeditated murder under aggravating circumstances specified in art. 102 and paragraph "c" Art. 240, and in wartime or in a combat situation - also for other especially grave crimes in cases specially provided for by the legislation of the USSR.
Pay or lose...
The successful career of Borodkina (her maiden name is Korol), who did not even have a complete secondary education, began in the Gelendzhik catering in 1951 as a waitress, then she successively occupied the positions of a barmaid and head of the dining room, and in 1974 her dizzying rise to the nomenclature took place. post of the head of the trust of restaurants and canteens.
Such an appointment could not have taken place without the participation of Nikolai Pogodin, the first secretary of the city committee of the CPSU, his preference for a candidate without special education was not openly questioned by anyone in the city committee, and the hidden motives for choosing the party leader became known eight years later. “During the indicated period [from 1974 to 1982], being an official in a responsible position,” says the indictment in the Borodkina case, “repeatedly personally and through intermediaries in her apartment and at her place of work received bribes from a large group of subordinates to her for work. Of the bribes she received, Borodkina herself transferred bribes to senior officials in the city of Gelendzhik for their assistance and support in their work ... So, over the past two years, 15,000 rubles worth of valuables, money and products were transferred to the secretary of the city party committee, Pogodin. The last amount in the 1980s was approximately the cost of three Zhiguli cars.
In the materials of the investigation, a graphic diagram of the corruption relationships of the director of the trust, compiled by employees of the USSR Chief Prosecutor's Office, was filed. It resembles a dense web with Borodkina in the center, to which numerous threads stretch from the restaurants Gelendzhik, Kavkaz, Yuzhny, Platan, Yacht, canteens and cafes, pancake, barbecue and food tents, and from it disperse to the city committee of the CPSU and the city executive committee, the BHSS department of the city police department (combating theft of socialist property), to the regional trust and further to the Glavkurortorg of the Ministry of Trade of the RSFSR.
Employees of the Gelendzhik catering - directors and managers, bartenders and bartenders, cashiers and waiters, cooks and forwarders, cloakroom attendants and doormen - were completely taxed, everyone knew how much money he had to transfer along the chain, as well as what awaited him in case of refusal - the loss of the "bread" position.
stolen degrees
Borodkina, during her work in various areas of public catering, perfectly mastered the methods of deceiving consumers in order to obtain “left” incomes practiced in Soviet trade, and put them on stream in her department. It was common to dilute sour cream with water, and tint liquid tea or coffee with burnt sugar. But one of the most profitable frauds was the abundant addition of bread or cereals to minced meat, reducing the established norms of meat for cooking first and second courses. The head of the trust, “saved” in this way, transferred the product to barbecue houses for sale. In two years, according to Kalinichenko, Borodkina earned 80,000 rubles from this alone.
Another source of illegal income was the manipulation of alcohol. Here, too, she did not discover anything new: in restaurants, cafes, bars and buffets, the traditional “underfilling” was widely used, as well as “stealing a degree”. For example, visitors to a drinking establishment simply did not notice a decrease in the strength of vodka due to dilution by two degrees, but this brought big profits to trade workers. But it was considered especially beneficial to mix cheaper “starka” (rye vodka infused with apple or pear leaves) into expensive Armenian cognac. According to the investigator, even the examination could not establish that the cognac was diluted.
A primitive calculation was also common - both for individual visitors to restaurants, bars, buffets and cafes, and for large companies. Musician Georgy Mimikonov, who played in the restaurants of Gelendzhik in those years, told Moscow TV journalists that during the holiday season whole groups of shift workers from Siberia and the Arctic came here for the weekend to go out in the "zone of beautiful life", as the musician put it. The calculation of such clients went to tens and hundreds of rubles.
Bertha, aka "Iron Bella"
In those days, the Black Sea health resorts received more than 10 million vacationers per year, which served as a gold mine for the resort mafia. Borodkina had her own classification of people who came to rest in Gelendzhik. Those who rented corners in the private sector, stood in line in cafes and canteens, and then left complaints about the quality of food in public catering establishments in the book of complaints and suggestions, wrote about cheating and “underfilling”, she, according to her former colleagues, called rats . The Gorkom's "roof" in the person of the first secretary, as well as OBKhSS inspectors, made her invulnerable to the dissatisfaction of the mass consumer, whom Borodkina considered exclusively as a source of "left" income.
Borodkina demonstrated a completely different attitude towards party and government officials. high rank, who came to Gelendzhik during the holiday season from Moscow and the Union republics, but even here she pursued her own interests first of all - the acquisition of future influential patrons. Borodkina did everything to make their stay on the Black Sea coast pleasant and memorable. Borodkina, as it turned out, not only provided the nomenclature guests with scarce products for picnics in the mountains and boat trips, set tables bursting with delicacies, but could, if they wished, invite young women to the male company. Her "hospitality" for the guests themselves and the party fund of the region was worth nothing - Borodkina knew how to write off expenses. These qualities in her were appreciated by the first secretary of the Krasnodar Regional Committee of the CPSU Sergey Medunov.
Among those who gave Borodkina their patronage were even members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, as well as the secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Fyodor Kulakov. When Kulakov died, the family invited only two people from the Krasnodar Territory to his funeral - Medunov and Borodkina. Connections at the very top for a long time provided Borodkina with immunity against any revisions, so behind her back she was called “Iron Bella” in Gelendzhik (Borodkina did not like her own name, she preferred to be called Bella).
The case of the sale of n *** graphic products
When Borodkina was arrested, at first she considered it an unfortunate misunderstanding and warned the operatives: no matter how much they had to apologize today. There was an element of chance that she was placed in the bullpen, however, those who are well acquainted with the details of this long history note.
The prosecutor's office received a statement from a local resident that in one of the cafes, selected guests were secretly shown f*** graphic films. The organizers of underground viewings - the director of the cafe, the production manager and the bartender - were caught red-handed, they were charged under Art. 228 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (manufacture or sale of p***graphic products, punishable by imprisonment for up to three years with confiscation of p***graphic items and means of their production). During interrogations, catering workers testified that the director of the trust had tacitly allowed the demonstrations, and part of the proceeds was transferred to her. Thus, Borodkina herself was charged with complicity in this offense and taking a bribe.
A search was carried out in Iron Bella's house, the results of which unexpectedly went far beyond the scope of the "underground cinema" case. Borodkina's housing was reminiscent of museum storerooms, which contained numerous precious jewelry, furs, crystal products, sets of bed linen, which were then in short supply. In addition, Borodkina kept large sums of money at home, which the investigators found in the most unexpected places - in water heaters and under carpets in rooms, rolled up jars in the basement, in bricks stored in the yard. The total amount seized during the search amounted to more than 500,000 rubles.
The mysterious disappearance of the first secretary of the city committee of the CPSU
Borodkina at the very first interrogation refused to testify and continued to threaten the investigation with punishment for sweeping accusations against her and the arrest of "a leader respected in the region." “She was sure that she was about to be released, but there was still no help.” “Iron Bella” didn’t wait for her, and here’s why.
In the early 1980s, investigations began in the Krasnodar Territory of numerous criminal cases related to large-scale manifestations of bribery and theft, which received the generalized name of the Sochi-Krasnodar case. The owner of the Kuban Medunov, a close friend of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev and Secretary of the Central Committee Konstantin Chernenko, in every possible way interfered with the work of the Investigative Department of the Prosecutor General's Office. However, in Moscow he had a powerful opponent - the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. And with his election in November 1982 as General Secretary, the prosecutor's office had a free hand. As a result of one of the most high-profile anti-corruption campaigns in the USSR, more than 5,000 party and Soviet leaders were dismissed from their posts and expelled from the ranks of the CPSU, about 1,500 people were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, and Deputy Minister of Fisheries of the USSR Vladimir Rytov was convicted and shot . Medunov was dismissed from the post of First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the CPSU and removed from the Central Committee of the CPSU with the wording: "For the mistakes made in the work."
When the defendant was made to understand that she no longer had anyone to rely on, she could alleviate her fate only by a sincere confession of guilt, Iron Bella broke down and began to testify. Her criminal case took 20 volumes, said former investigator Alexander Chernov, based on the testimony of the former director of the trust, another three dozen criminal cases were initiated, in which 70 people were convicted. And the head of the party organization of Gelendzhik Pogodin disappeared without a trace after the arrest of Borodkina. Once he left the house in the evening, telling his wife that he needed to go to the city committee for a while, and did not return. The police of the Krasnodar Territory were thrown in search of him, divers explored the waters of the Gelendzhik Bay, but all in vain - he was never seen dead or alive again. There is a version that Pogodin left the country on one of the foreign ships that were in the Gelendzhik Bay, but no actual confirmation of this has yet been found.
She knew too much
During the investigation, Borodkina tried to feign schizophrenia. It was "very talented", but the forensic medical examination recognized the game and the case was transferred to the regional court, which found Borodkina guilty of repeatedly taking bribes totaling 561,834 rubles. 89 kop. (part 2 of article 173 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR).
According to Art. 93-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (theft of state property on an especially large scale) and art. 156 part 2 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (consumer fraud), she was acquitted "due to insufficient evidence of the defendant's participation in the commission of the crime." She was sentenced to an exceptional measure of punishment - execution. The Supreme Court of the USSR upheld the verdict. The defendant did not apply for pardon.
Borodkin was let down by just what she was very proud of - acquaintances with high-ranking people, whose names she constantly trumped up. Former patrons in the current situation were interested in the fact that the "Iron Bella" was silent forever - she knew too much. She was not only disproportionately punished for her crimes, she was dealt with.
Tonka the machine-gunner, as she was called then, worked on the Soviet territory occupied by German troops from the 41st to the 43rd years, carrying out the mass death sentences of the Nazis to partisan families.
Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those whom she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her. “What nonsense that remorse is then tormented. That those whom you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven’t dreamed of a single one,” she told her interrogators during interrogations, when she was nevertheless identified and detained - through 35 years after her last execution.
The criminal case of the Bryansk punisher Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the bowels of the FSB special guards. Access to it is strictly prohibited, and this is understandable, because there is nothing to be proud of here: in no other country in the world has a woman been born who personally killed one and a half thousand people.
Thirty-three years after the Victory, this woman was called Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. She was a front-line soldier, a labor veteran, respected and revered in her town. Her family had all the benefits required by status: an apartment, insignia for round dates and a scarce sausage in a grocery ration. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. Two adult daughters were proud of their mother.
They looked up to her, they took an example from her: still, such a heroic fate: to walk the whole war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Koenigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak on the line, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for a feat. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to look death in the face. And who, if not Antonina Makarovna, knew about this best of all ...
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a shopping bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby, inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: "You urgently need to drive with us!" surrounded her, preventing her from escaping.
"Do you have any idea why you were brought here?" - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB, when she was brought in for the first interrogation. "Some kind of mistake," the woman chuckled in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the machine gunner. You are a punisher, worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. Your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk, are still being talked about legends. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it's time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations."
"So, not in vain Last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear, ”the woman said. - How long ago was that. Like not with me at all. Almost all life has already passed. Well, write down...
Birth of a legend
From the protocol of interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - so many partisans could fit in a cell. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near a pit. pit. One of the men rolled out my machine gun to the place of execution. At the command of the authorities, I knelt down and fired at people until everyone fell dead ... "
"Drop into the nettles" - in Tony's jargon, this meant to be taken to be shot. She herself died three times. For the first time in the fall of 1941, in a terrible "Vyazma cauldron", as a young medical instructor girl. Hitler's troops then advanced on Moscow as part of Operation Typhoon. Soviet commanders threw their armies to their deaths, and this was not considered a crime - war has a different morality. More than a million Soviet boys and girls died in that Vyazma meat grinder in just six days, five hundred thousand were taken prisoner. The death of ordinary soldiers at that moment did not solve anything and did not bring victory closer, it was simply meaningless. Just like helping a nurse to the dead...
19-year-old nurse Tonya Makarova woke up after a fight in the forest. The air smelled of burning flesh. Nearby lay an unfamiliar soldier. "Hey, are you still intact? My name is Nikolai Fedchuk." “And I’m Tonya,” she didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear, didn’t understand, as if her soul had been shell-shocked, and only a human shell remained, and inside - emptiness. She reached out to him, trembling: "Ma-a-amochka, how cold it is!" “Well, beautiful, don’t cry. We’ll get out together,” Nikolai answered and unbuttoned the top button of her tunic.
For three months, before the first snow, they wandered together through the thickets, getting out of the encirclement, not knowing either the direction of movement, or their ultimate goal, or where their own, or where the enemies were. They starved, breaking for two, stolen slices of bread. During the day they shied away from military convoys, and at night they warmed each other. Tonya washed footcloths for both of them in icy water, and prepared a simple dinner. Did she love Nicholas? Rather, she drove out, burned out with a red-hot iron, fear and cold from the inside.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. “There are a lot of children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I, the eldest, like Gorky’s, went out early. in the first grade, and forgot her last name. The teacher asks: "What's your name, girl?" And I know that Parfyonova, I'm just afraid to say. The children from the back desk shout: "Yes, she is Makarova, her father is Makar." So I one in all the documents and wrote down. After school I left for Moscow, then the war began. I was called up as a nurse. And I had a different dream - I wanted to scribble on a machine gun like Anka the machine gunner from Chapaev. True, I look like her When we get out to ours, let's ask for a machine gun ... "
In January 1942, dirty and ragged, Tonya and Nikolai finally reached the village of Red Well. And then they had to leave forever. “You know, my native village is nearby. I’m there now, I have a wife and children,” Nikolai said to her in parting. “I couldn’t confess to you earlier, forgive me. Thank you for the company. "Don't leave me, Kolya," Tonya pleaded, hanging on to him. However, Nikolai shook it off him like ashes from a cigarette and left.
For several days, Tonya wandered around the huts, christened, and asked to stay. Compassionate housewives at first let her in, but after a few days they invariably refused shelter, explaining that they themselves had nothing to eat. "It hurts her look is not good," the women said.
It is possible that Tonya at that moment was really moved by her mind. Perhaps Nikolai's betrayal finished her off, or her strength simply ran out - one way or another, she only had physical needs left: she wanted to eat, drink, wash with soap in a hot bath and sleep with someone, so as not to be left alone in the cold darkness. She didn't want to be a hero, she just wanted to survive. At any price. And she succeeded.
In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. Almost all of its inhabitants went to the partisans. In the neighboring village, on the contrary, only punishers were registered. The front line here was in the middle of the outskirts. Somehow she wandered along the outskirts, half-mad, lost, not knowing where, how and with whom she would spend that night. She was stopped by people in uniform and asked in Russian: "Who is this?" "I'm Antonina, Makarova. From Moscow," the girl replied.
She was brought to the administration of the village of Lokot. The policemen complimented her, then took turns "loving" her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink, after which they put a machine gun in her hands. As she dreamed - to disperse the emptiness inside with a continuous machine-gun line. For living people.
“Makarova-Ginzburg told during interrogations that the first time she was taken to the execution of partisans completely drunk, she did not understand what she was doing,” recalls the investigator in her case, Leonid Savoskin. “But they paid well - 30 marks, and offered cooperation on an ongoing basis. After all, none of the Russian policemen wanted to get dirty, they preferred that the execution of partisans and members of their families was carried out by a woman. Homeless and lonely Antonina was given a bed in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. In the morning she voluntarily went to work. "
“I didn’t know those whom I shoot. They didn’t know me. Therefore, I wasn’t ashamed in front of them. Sometimes you shoot, you come closer, and someone else twitches. prisoners on the chest was hung a piece of plywood with the inscription "partisans". Some of them sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardroom or in the yard. There were plenty of cartridges ... "
The former landlady of Tony from the Red Well, one of those who once also kicked her out of her house, came to the village of Lokot for salt. She was detained by the police and taken to a local prison, attributing her connection with the partisans. "I'm not a partisan. Ask at least your machine-gunner Tonka," the woman was frightened. Tonya looked at her attentively and chuckled: "Let's go, I'll give you salt."
In the tiny room where Antonina lived, order reigned. There was a machine gun, shining with engine oil. Clothes were folded in a neat pile on a chair nearby: elegant dresses, skirts, white blouses with holes ricocheting in the back. And a laundry trough on the floor.
“If I like the things of the condemned, then I take off the dead, why waste it,” explained Tonya. I don't wash it off - I had to leave it in the grave. It's a pity... So how much salt do you need?"
"I don't need anything from you," the woman backed away to the door. “Well, since you are brave, why did you ask me for help when you were taken to prison?” Antonina shouted after her. “That would have died like a hero! .
In the evenings, Antonina dressed up and went to a German club to dance. Other girls who worked as prostitutes for the Germans were not friends with her. Tonya turned up her nose, boasting that she was a Muscovite. With her roommate, the typist of the village headman, she also did not frankly, and she was afraid of her for some kind of spoiled look and for the crease on her forehead that had cut through early, as if Tonya was thinking too much.
At the dances, Tonya got drunk, and changed partners like gloves, laughed, clinked glasses, fired cigarettes at the officers. And she did not think about those next 27, whom she had to execute in the morning. It's scary to kill only the first, second, then, when the number goes to hundreds, it becomes just hard work.
Before dawn, when the groans of the partisans sentenced to death died down after torture, Tonya quietly got out of her bed and wandered for hours around the former stable, hastily converted into a prison, peering into the faces of those whom she was to kill.
From the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:
“It seemed to me that the war would write everything off. I just did my job, for which I was paid. I had to shoot not only partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before by execution, the guy sentenced to death shouted to me: "We won't see you again, goodbye, sister! .."
She was amazingly lucky. In the summer of 1943, when the battles for the liberation of the Bryansk region began, Tony and several local prostitutes were diagnosed with a venereal disease. The Germans ordered them to be treated, sending them to a hospital in their distant rear. When Soviet troops entered the village of Lokot, sending traitors to the Motherland and former policemen to the gallows, only terrible legends remained from the atrocities of Tonka the machine gunner.
Of the material things - hastily sprinkled bones in mass graves on an unnamed field, where, according to the most conservative estimates, the remains of one and a half thousand people rested. It was possible to restore the passport data of only about two hundred people shot by Tonya. The death of these people formed the basis of the prosecution in absentia of Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1921, presumably a resident of Moscow. Nothing else was known about her...
Retribution
“Our employees conducted the search case for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” said KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was engaged in the search for Antonina Makarova in the 70s. and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Couldn't Tonka have disappeared without a trace?! Now you can blame the authorities for incompetence and illiteracy. But the work went on jewelry. During the post-war years, the KGB secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union, who bore this name, patronymic and surname and were suitable in age - there were about 250 such Tonka Makarovs in the USSR. But - it's useless. The real Tonka the machine-gunner has sunk into the water ... "“You don’t scold Tonka too much,” said Golovachev. “You know, I even feel sorry for her. It’s all the damned war, it’s her fault, she broke her ... She had no choice - she could remain a person and then she herself would be among executed. But she preferred to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in 1941."
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “It just didn’t fit in my head how many lives she had taken. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in their dreams. Young, with a machine gun, looks intently - and does not take her eyes off. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and asked to be sure to find her in order to stop these nightmares. We understood that she I could get married a long time ago and change my passport, so they thoroughly studied life path all her possible relatives by the name of Makarov ... "
However, none of the investigators guessed that it was necessary to start looking for Antonin not from the Makarovs, but from the Parfenovs. Yes, it was the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who wrote down her middle name as a surname, and allowed the "machine gunner" to elude retribution for so many years. Her real relatives, of course, never fell into the circle of interests of the investigation in this case.
But in 1976, one of the Moscow officials named Parfyonov was going abroad. Filling out the questionnaire for a passport, he honestly listed the names and surnames of his siblings, the family was large, as many as five children. All of them were Parfenovs, and only one, for some reason, Antonina Makarovna Makarova, from the 45th year by her husband Ginzburg, now lives in Belarus. The man was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations. The fateful meeting was attended, of course, by people from the KGB in civilian clothes.
“We were terribly afraid of jeopardizing the reputation of a woman respected by all, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. “Therefore, our employees traveled secretly to the Belarusian Lepel, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, the former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when every single one said the same thing - it was she, Tonka the machine-gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead, - the doubts disappeared.
Antonina's husband, Viktor Ginzburg, a veteran of war and labor, after her unexpected arrest, promised to complain to the UN. “We didn’t confess to him, which is what the one with whom he lived happily all his life is accused of. We were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” the investigators said.
Viktor Ginzburg bombarded various organizations with complaints, assuring that he loved his wife very much, and even if she committed some kind of crime - for example, embezzlement of money - he would forgive her everything. And he also talked about how, as a wounded boy, in April 1945, he was in a hospital near Koenigsberg, and suddenly she, a new nurse, Tonechka, entered the ward. Innocent, pure, as if not at war, - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they signed.
Antonina took the name of her husband, and after demobilization went with him to the Belarusian Lepel, forgotten by God and people, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And no more complaints.
“The arrested woman from the pre-trial detention center didn’t pass a single line. By the way, she didn’t write anything to the two daughters she gave birth to after the war and didn’t ask to meet with him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. “When we managed to find contact with our accused, she began to tell everyone. About how she escaped, having escaped from a German hospital and ended up in our environment, she straightened out other people's veteran documents, according to which she began to live. She did not hide anything, but this was the most terrible thing. There was a feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: Why was she imprisoned, what did she do SUCH a terrible thing? It was as if there was a block in her head from the war, so that she probably wouldn’t go crazy. She remembered everything, every execution, but she didn’t regret anything. "She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I do not know what she was like in her youth. And what made her commit these crimes. The desire to survive? A momentary blackout? The horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She killed not only strangers her, but also his own family. She just destroyed them with her exposure. A psychic examination has shown that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane."
The investigators were very afraid of some excesses on the part of the accused: before there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from bouts of remorse. “It is impossible to be constantly afraid,” she said. “For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person has been tormented all his life.”
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot, to the very field where she conducted executions. The villagers spat after her like a revived ghost, and Antonina only looked at them in bewilderment, scrupulously explaining how, where, whom and with what she killed ... For her, it was a distant past, a different life.
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in her cell, to her jailers. “Now, after the verdict, I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will poke a finger at me. I think that they will give me three years probation. more then? Then you have to somehow arrange life anew. And how much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I should get a job with you - the work is familiar ... "
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was passed. The decision of the court was an absolute surprise even for the people who were investigating, not to mention the defendant herself. All petitions of 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg for clemency in Moscow were rejected.
In the Soviet Union, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a female punisher appeared.
After Tonka, two more women were executed: Berta Borodkina in 1983 for speculating on an especially large scale and Tamara Ivanyutina in 1987 for poisoning 9 people.
Probably, Antonina herself was also interested at least once in her life to look at the execution through the eyes of the victim, and not the executioner ...
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