The Taste of Blood. Ten Stories about Russian Serial Killers

The child killer Slevko, the cannibal Jumagaliev, the butcher Sukletin with his girlfriend Dina – the names of these serial killers were carefully hushed up, but the entire Soviet Union trembled at rumors of their crimes. Starting from the 1960s, the statistics of violent crimes in the USSR steadily grew, and along with it, the number of those called serial killers increased. Anatoly Slevko killed and tortured children for twenty years, claiming that 'it was all exclusively for filming a historical film about fascists.' Nikolai Jumagaliev would dismember and eat girls. This inspired him. Alexei Sukletin preferred to feed his neighbors dishes prepared from the girls he had killed. Alexander Spesivtsev tortured his victims for several days, and it was his own mother who helped him get rid of the corpses. What drove them to commit crimes? How was their personality formed, and at what moment, while killing others, did they completely lose control over their own lives?