A book about the most high-profile criminal cases of the Soviet era. Many materials were previously unpublished and were first issued from archives directly to the author. Thanks to access to these documents and communication with eyewitnesses, Eva Merkacheva was able to reconstruct the scenes of the trials of the last person executed in the USSR — the maniac Fisher, of the only child executed in Soviet times, Arkady Neyland, of the executioner Antonina Makarova nicknamed Tonka-the-machine-gunner, of Berta Borodkina, who set the tables for Leonid Brezhnev himself — the only one sentenced to the highest penalty under an economic article.
Bridging the past is not only interesting and enlightening, but also useful for understanding the processes that are taking place in judicial practice today. Each chapter includes archival illustrations from criminal cases and court materials — they give the reader the opportunity to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the described events and see with their own eyes the original protocols of interrogations, handwritten verdicts, reports on the execution of the death penalty, and how 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 Golden Hand, which sparked the author's interest in the topic of judicial investigations.
