The Murder of Egor Sviridov

Egor Sviridov, the man whose death launched a thousand angry Russians

Since early December, reporters and commentators have eagerly taken up the issue of nationalism in Russia, following a series of marches and demonstrations by groups of grieving sports fans (which quickly attracted far-right political extremists). Several unsanctioned, increasingly violent rallies sparked a massive public debate about racism, internal immigration, migrant workers, and the Kremlin’s approach to intimidating and manipulating Russia’s civil society. For the media, this was an opportunity to circulate photographs of Russian muzhiki fighting with riot police and pouncing on innocent darker-skinned passersby. Vladimir Putin and Vladislav Surkov sweetened the deal by lashing out at liberal democrats, ludicrously suggesting that they’d popularized unsanctioned protests. This allowed journalists to recycle the standard tropes about Putin’s authoritarian rule, leading to all the requisite theories about who enabled the riots, how they play into the 2012 tandem-tension, and so on. This is a necessary, important conversation to have (and indeed I’ll examine some tie-ins below), but — as our focus drifts onward into the future — the small matter of what started all this madness grows more and more forgotten. That boring detail is the story of Egor Sviridov and his killer Aslan Cherkesov.

Sviridov died a little past midnight on December 6, 2010, just a couple of weeks after his 28th birthday. He had plans to travel to Slovakia that very same day, to watch Spartak, his favorite soccer team, play on the road. According to his wife, Yana Fallaleeva, Sviridov and four other friends (including one female) went to a cafe, presumably to see him off before the trip. Fallaleeva insists that no one in the group got drunk, and that only two of the five people (including Egor) were Spartak fans. DPNI reports that the police found five injured men (not four men and one woman) when they arrived at the scene, minutes after the fight ended.

Aslan Cherkesov

Aslan Cherkesov is a 26-year-old native of Kabardino-Balkaria, a Muslim Republic of the North Caucasus. His pregnant, common-law wife is an ethnic Russian. He claims to have arrived in Moscow just ten days before the events that led to his murdering Sviridov, which he argues was self-defense. On December 3rd, Cherkesov says he first met Ramazan Utarbiev, a twenty-year-old native of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. (See here for archived screenshots of Utarbiev’s Vkontakte page, access to which has since been restricted. If the images are legitimate, he appears to have described himself as a “fanatical Muslim” and joked that his work experience includes serving as a mujahideen in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 12-years-old.) According to Cherkesov, he met Utarbiev and some of Utarbiev’s friends at a cafe on the night of the murder. Cherkesov claims not to have witnessed the beginning of the fight outside. (He allegedly stepped away from his entourage to use the toilet.) When he returned, a bunch of drunken Russians were beating up Utarbiev and company. When Sviridov and a friend ran in Cherkesov’s direction, he pulled out an air pistol (a Turkish-made ‘Streamer’ rubber-bullet handgun) and fired several warning shots into the air. After wrestling a bit, Cherkesov turned the gun on his assailants, killing Sviridov and seriously wounding his friend, Dmitri Filatov.

Sviridov's widow prepares to bury her husband

Sviridov’s friends tell a different story. They claim that the Caucasians started the fight when they mistakingly interpreted a moment of laughter to be at their expense. (Denis Petrochenko, one of Sviridov’s friends, allegedly provoked them by accident by uttering the phrase “scream like in the hills.”) Yana Fallaleeva says that her husband was shot twelve times and that Filatov took six bullets. (Police, however, only recovered evidence of 12 shots in total.) Cherkesov’s side also had the numerical superiority. Sviridov’s widow initially told Moskovskii Komsomolets that Cherkesov’s group was made up of ten people. She lowered this figure to seven people when she spoke to MK five days later. (The authorities ultimately charged six individuals with crimes committed that night.) Based on witnesses’ statements and photographs from Vkontakte, commentators have highlighted the fact that Cherkesov and his entourage were all very physically fit and capable fighters. Though no charges on such grounds have yet been filed (indeed, law enforcement has avoided the subject altogether), Sviridov’s group claims that they were also robbed. Initially, Police Commissioner Viktor Biriukov reported that Sviridov received a fatal wound to the stomach. It later emerged that he actually died from a rubber bullet to the back of the skull, which apparently removed a large piece of his head.

Ramazan Utarbiev, at large and on the run

People living near the scene of the murder called the police once the fight started, and the cops showed up minutes later to hospitalize the injured Russians and apprehend the fleeing Caucasians (who were found not far off en route to their homes). The suspects were then brought to the local police precinct in Moscow’s Golovinskii District for booking. In what has been the center of the Sviridov Case controversy, five of the six prisoners were then released at 5pm after promising not to leave Moscow. (One of these individuals, Nariman Ismailov, was actually immediately let go, once it was established that he was a minor.) The only man to remain behind bars was Aslan Cherkesov, who alone was charged with Sviridov’s murder. (Since December 6th, three of the five released suspects have been found. Akai Akaev and Ramazan Utarbiev remain at large.)

The person most widely blamed for letting the bad guys go is Mikhail Sokolov, Deputy Chief of Moscow’s Golovinsky District Investigation Department. According to his critics, Sokolov’s crucial mistake was dividing the December 6th crimes into two categories of severity: first-degree murder (criminal code 105) and battery (criminal code 116). Battery, it turns out, carries a maximum prison sentence of just two years, which is insufficient to legally allow pretrial detention.

Current Duma deputy and former journalist Aleksandr Khinstein has openly accused Sokolov of accepting a bribe, which he told Komsomol’skaia Pravda explains both the failure to bring robbery charges and investigators’ alleged conduct toward the victims’ families, which apparently included pressuring them to leave the police station (presumably, so some kind of corrupt deal between investigators and the Dagestanis could be worked out). The Moscow Prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into possible negligence charges (criminal code 293) against Golovinsky District detectives. For three weeks, the press was unable to reach Sokolov, who reportedly left for a vacation to Egypt immediately after the Sviridov Case scandal.

Mikhail Sokolov, captured on hidden camera by a rebuffed interviewer

Branches of Russian law enforcement have turned on each other, trying to escape blame for releasing five of the six participants in Sviridov’s murder. Two days after the shooting, Chief of Police GUVD Colonel Viktor Biriukov told the media that Golovinsky’s MVD officers had handed over the case to investigators, who were then supposed to have determined charges and secured the detention of the suspects. Investigative Committee Chief Vladimir Markin fired back that investigators only had the responsibility of working the murder charge, which fell solely on Aslan Cherkesov. The battery charges should have been taken up by the local police — not the investigators, he argued: “Our jurisdiction is murder,” he said. “The police deal with brawls. We have no connection to brawls.” This is essentially what Mikhail Sokolov said when he finally granted Moskovskii Komsomolets an interview, published on December 28th. In that conversation, Sokolov waffles between blaming local police for letting the men go and defending his own assessment that there were no legal grounds to detain them. “The following is a fact,” he told MK, “the Dagestan natives were brought to the [MVD] police and the decision was taken there.” He then added: “but it was unclear how they could have been legally [detained].”

The President sits down with TV heads to talk tough

On December 16th, President Medvedev seemed to target Sokolov, demanding that authorities “expose and bring to justice those guilty of killing Egor Sviridov and also the investigators who released those suspected of the murder.” Five days later, on December 21st, Vladimir Putin sat down with representatives of the major soccer fans’ clubs to discuss the Sviridov Case. Putin called the murder a “tragedy” and seemed to support Sokolov’s position, emphasizing that the man “primarily responsible for the murder” (Aslan Cherkesov) was now behind bars. Without addressing the five suspects who were released, Putin then launched into a long and vague discussion about Russian multi-culturalism and internal migration policy. Was Putin communicating to the government that he didn’t want a witch-hunt against the Investigative Committee? Did attacks on investigators and allegations of corruption (like those made by Aleksandr Khinstein) rub the Prime Minister the wrong way? Whatever Putin’s reasons, Medvedev responded on December 24th with the following statement, delivered to the chief executives of Russian television:

Currently, under my direct orders, the Investigative Committee has opened a criminal investigation into why it was decided to release persons against whom there was ample evidence [showing] that they committed a murder. If such facts are established, these investigators should be punished. That’s absolutely clear.

You cannot release someone from custody if there is sufficient evidence that he committed an act of violence: murder or some kind of serious physical harm. What does this say? Why did this happen? What is this? Plain corruption? Fear of the guys who pulled up in cool cars? Why was this done? We must deal with it.

As with any good Russian scandal, there are a few further discrepancies and curiosities in the Sviridov Case.

When he met with the soccer fans, Putin claimed that Cherkesov was a repeat-offending criminal — convicted first of “violent hooliganism” and later of possession of narcotics. According to his mother, however, Aslan has never spent time in jail. Indeed, the Caucasian Knot confirms that Cherkesov’s local Drug Treatment Facility has no record of an Aslan Cherkesov born in 1984. Oddly, they do have a record of treating an Aslan Cherkesov born in 1986. “Maybe they presented the Prime Minister with information about this other Cherkesov,” his mother told reporters, before confessing that her son was involved in two different crimes in 2008 and 2009: torching an automobile and brawling with an old high school rival. (He paid off the 15,000-rubles-fine for the car within a year, and the brawling charges were dismissed when he and his opponent reconciled.)

Regarding the quick release of the murder suspects, there have been reports that several cars linked to the Dagestani diaspora appeared outside the Golovinsky police station hours after the apprehension of Cherkesov’s group. This, it is widely assumed, was when investigators were either bribed or intimidated into splitting the charges between murder and battery, enabling the release of the five Dagestani suspects. Evgeny Selemenev, Chairman of the Board of the United Spartak Fans’ Club “Fratriia,” wrote in Moskovskii Komsomolets that expensive cars ferrying “representatives of the diaspora” flocked to intercept the Golovinsky investigators, who then turned their attention to these new visitors and ignored the witnesses and victims’ families already gathered in the waiting area. Sviridov’s widow claims that the cars later returned to the station to intimidate witnesses brought in to judge police line-ups. In one instance, state attorneys refused to let witnesses exit the building until they were sure they wouldn’t be attacked when they stepped outside.

Perhaps the most intriguing twist lies in Moscow GUVD Union Representative Mikhail Pashkin’s comments to Komsomol’skaia Pravda. Apparently, the Golovinsky police summoned OMON special forces on December 6th, when a crowd of Dagestanis was assembling outside the station. “If they called the OMON, that means — at a minimum — that the head of the UVD District knew about the situation,” Pashkin explains. “What do you think? Would an investigator or the Golovinsky head of police make a decision without informing the UVD Chief? [...] The decision to release the suspects was probably made by the [higher-up] leadership. But, I think, they will [only] punish the peripheral figures: an investigator or a common officer.”

Mikhail Sokolov’s name hasn’t been in the news for about a week now. Will he turn out to be the scapegoat Pashkin predicts? Is the Medvedev-initiated Investigative Committee inquiry into negligence a genuine effort to uncover the truth, or is it just a means to pinning the fiasco on Sokolov? If higher-ups are implicated in wrongdoing, does this indicate a power-play by Medvedev’s team into territory that Putin seems to prefer remain out of bounds?

The man knows how to work a crowd

It is ironic that Vladimir Putin has emerged as the figure seen as most sympathetic to the soccer fans (and nationalists), given that his statements (and perhaps his institutional allegiances?) inspire little faith that he supports a serious investigation into police misconduct in the Sviridov Case. Putin seems to have proved again (thanks to a widely publicized meeting with fan-clubs’ representatives and a well photographed visit to Sviridov’s gravesite) that good PR conquers all. President Medvedev has indicated to a far greater extent that he is heeding the calls of Russians outraged by the release of the Dagestani suspects. That is why I’ll be keeping my eyes on the headlines for Mr. Sokolov’s name. And wouldn’t it be something if the name of one of his superiors popped up beside it?

Update (January 12, 2011): The fifth suspect, Akai Akaev, has been recaptured just outside Moscow. Now, the only un-apprehended individual of the original six is Ramazan Utarbiev.