A small-town Russian massacre

How a middle-aged electrician shot and killed nine of his neighbors

On the night of June 4, a middle-aged electrician murdered nine of his neighbors in the Russian town of Redkino. Armed with a Saiga carbine rifle, Sergey Egorov methodically shot and killed everyone in a neighboring cottage, except for a 21-year-old woman who hid herself under a blanket. Egorov then moved onto the next home, where he murdered another two people. It was only then that the police apprehended him. The evening before the killing spree, Egorov got into two heated arguments with neighbors in the community. In a special report for Meduza, Evgeny Berg went to Redkino to learn more about this gruesome crime.

“What the f*** are you doing!” a man wearing track pants and a wife beater yells at patrol cars from the Investigative Committee and local police department. The cars are trying to turn around at the edge of his property. The roads in this cottage community on the outskirts of the town of Redkino have been all but washed away by pouring rains. Gloomy men in heavy raincoats have been going door to door for three days now, dealing with the aftermath of a massacre that occurred here on the night of June 4.

The man in the track pants lives next to Sergey Egorov, the 45-year-old electrician who shot and killed nine people on June 4, but he says he doesn’t know Egorov. “I saw him once. He was taking meter readings. He was sober,” the neighbor said.

Redkino is a small town about 25 miles outside Tver. In the 1990s, it was the local mafia capital, with the “Redkinskaya organized crime group” even making a name for itself outside the Tver region. But even here there’s never been a crime quite like this, and residents are calling the mass murder of nine people a “horrendous event.”

“There used to be times when we’d bury three bodies at once, but that was all the mafia chewing itself up. With this, it’s totally innocent people. Everyone is just in shock,” a local man says at the train station.

There’s a railway connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg that runs through Redkino. Not far from the town, there’s also a highway between the two cities. You can reach the town from Moscow in about 90 minutes, which is why Redkino is a popular summer vacation spot for Muscovites. The dacha cooperative where the multiple homicide took place, located on the outskirts of Redkino, is known particularly as a place for vacationers from Moscow. Locals say life here was calm before, and now that “the thugs have killed each other off” it’s become even more so.

There’s a poorly paved two-mile road that leads from the train station to the “Muscovites’ cottages.” The cooperative itself consists of a few parallel dirt roads overgrown with grass, and along them are small, mostly wooden houses. Some of them are unusually and crudely built, and others are abandoned. The cooperative’s management board is housed inside a detached cabin with barred windows. On these modest little plots of land, there are greenhouses and beer cans impaled on sticks, doing the work of a scarecrow. Only a few people live here year-round; most come only for the summers or on the weekends.

Three days after the murders, the only people on the streets were police officers who cordoned off sections of the cooperative, shooing away reporters.

Behind the barricade, there was a police van, from which a stocky man in a sweater periodically emerged. This man was Sergey Egorov, the murderer, and investigators were walking him through the crime scene.

Egorov lives with his 63-year-old mother in a two-story house at the very end of the community’s second-to-last street. Tatyana Arkhipova, the former head of the cooperative, who got into a heated argument with Egorov on the night of the murder, lives three streets — about 220 yards — from his house.

Arkhipova told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets that she was hosting her neighbors, Vera and Pavel Smirnov and Alexander Redin, on Friday, June 3, to celebrate her granddaughter's birthday. “Then this electrician [Egorov] shows up,” Arkhipova said, “and he tells everyone, ‘[Marina] Lobanova [the current cooperative director] demands that I shut off your electricity.’ I got angry, asking him, ‘On what grounds?’” Arkhipova says Egorov was already drunk at this point, and bragging that he owned a gun.

After the group booted Egorov from Arkhipova’s home, the party winded down, and the guests headed home. Along the way, the Smirnovs and Alexander Redin decided to stop by a friend’s house on a parallel street, at the home of 34-year-old Vladislav Saveliev and his girlfriend Marina Konygina, who had seven house guests at the time: Saveliev’s 92-year-old grandmother, a married couple named Ivan and Lyudmila Zagornyan, their neighbor friends, Oleg and Svetlana Sorokin, and Svetlana’s brother, Alexey, and his wife, Natalia.

Twenty-one-year-old Marina Konygina later told the television show “Pust’ Govoryat” that Egorov showed up at her house around midnight. He spoke mainly with her boyfriend, Vladislav Saveliev. “They just started talking, and then [Egorov] says, ‘Yeah, I served in the paratroopers, broke bottles over my head, and learned to shoot.’ And my Slava asks, ‘What unit did you serve in?’ But [Egorov] couldn’t answer. Then he started raising his voice at Slava.”

After the fight, Konygina says Egorov got back in his car and drove off, returning two and a half hours later, around three in the morning, now carrying a “Saiga” carbine rifle. Konygina was already falling asleep in her bedroom on the first floor, when the yelling started again.

“I heard someone swearing, and I looked out the window. Slava is the first one killed. I see his blood and brains go flying. Then [Egorov] walks up to Alexander [Redin] and clubs him twice with his rifle butt, screaming at him, ‘Go dig a grave for your friend.’ Eventually, he grabs him by the hair, throws him to the ground, and shoots him at point blank.”

That’s when Konygina says she called the police and hid under her blanket. She says she then heard Egorov go room to room, shooting everyone in the house, despite people’s pleas to be spared. Wounded, Oleg Sorokin ran to the neighbors, in order to warn his wife, Svetlana, who would die moments later, and her brother and his wife, who would survive.

Egorov then found Sorokin and shot him again, this time fatally. He also wounded Svetlana, and Konygina says he finished her off by crushing her head with an iron chair.

Egorov then returned to Saveliev’s home and fired “security shots” into the heads of all his victims, dragging some of the bodies into the house, and separating them into different piles. The whole time, Konygina remained hidden under her blanket. Egorov apparently never noticed her, though he was within earshot the entire time. Police finally arrived at the scene and took Egorov into custody. He confessed to the killings immediately, and is now under arrest.

Locals say they knew Sergey Egorov to be an unsocial, withdrawn person. One neighbor, a man named Alexey from Zelenograd (about 30 miles from Moscow), says he used to talk to Egorov and his mother, when his family first got their cottage in Redkino. “Then they fenced off everything, and that was the end of that. My son stayed in touched for a bit, but then he stopped, too. He said there’s something not right about them,” Alexey told Meduza.

Sergey Egorov has a Moscow residence permit, and by his own account (according to reports on television) he lived there together with his daughter, who studies at a local institute. He came to Redkino mainly on weekends, when he’d work on his cottage, which is still under construction. Neighbors say he worked as an air-conditioner installer in Moscow.

Beginning in May 2017, Egorov started living permanently in Redkino, though he never explained the change to anyone in the community. He did, however, tell his neighbors that he was their new electrician, supposedly hired by the cooperative. Marina Lobanova, the current head of the cooperative, confirms that Egorov approached her for a job.

Tatyana Arkhipova, Lobanova’s predecessor, is sure that Egorov was originally coming for her, saying he apparently “worked himself up” when he wanted to shut off her electricity, the evening before the killings. Locals who spoke to Meduza claimed not to know anything about a conflict between the old and new management of their cooperative, saying that the most plausible explanation for the massacre is still that it was an ordinary domestic dispute.

Russian report from Redkino by Evgeny Berg, translation by Kevin Rothrock