High-profile Cases: Crimes and Punishments in the USSR

A book about the most high-profile criminal cases of the Soviet era. Many materials have not been published before and were first released from the archives to the author personally. Thanks to access to these documents and communication with eyewitnesses, Eva Merkachyova managed to reconstruct the pictures of the trials of the last person executed in the USSR - the maniac Fisher, the only child shot in Soviet times, Arkady Neyland, the executioner Antonina Makarova, nicknamed Tonka-the-machine-gunner, and Berta Borodkina, who laid the tables for Leonid Brezhnev himself - the only one sentenced to the highest measure under an economic article.

To bridge the past is not only interesting and educational but also useful for understanding the processes that are happening in judicial practice today. Each chapter is accompanied by archival illustrations from criminal cases and court materials - they allow the reader to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the described events and see with their own eyes the authentic interrogation protocols, handwritten sentences, execution reports, and what the volumes of cases, victims, criminals, and crime scenes looked like.

The book concludes with the only pre-Soviet case of the "queen of the criminal world" Sonka Zolotaya Ruchka, which sparked the author's interest in the topic of criminal investigations.