11/12/19
ST. PETERSBURG – For years Oleg Sokolov was a well-known eccentric among the academic elite of Russia’s cultural capital St. Petersburg. As one of the founders of the city’s historical reenactment society, at weekends he liked to dress up as Napoleon Bonaparte, ride a white stallion and bark orders at pretend soldiers. His obsession with the French emperor echoed another of the city’s famous characters — the anti-hero Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” who became convinced he was a genius like Napoleon. On Saturday, eccentricity turned to horror after police fished Sokolov, 63, out of the icy waters of St. Petersburg’s Moika canal with a backpack containing the severed arms of his 24-year-old girlfriend and former student, Anastasia Yeshchenko. They later found the young woman’s decapitated head in Sokolov’s nearby apartment, and on Monday a court charged him with murder. The case has sparked calls for an investigation into St. Petersburg’s prestigious state university — where Sokolov held tenure — after reports that the professor had abusive relationships with young female students and exhibited violent and erratic behavior in the past were ignored. It also shines a light on an entrenched culture of impunity in Russia that lets perpetrators of domestic violence escape prosecution until it is too late for their victims.
In a more serious incident dating back to 2008, Sokolov was reported to have beaten and tortured a female student who had attempted to end her romantic relationship with him. “Every time I begged him to stop and come to his senses, he beat me harder and threatened to kill me and bury my body in a nearby garbage dump,” the unnamed victim wrote in a police statement published by the Moskovsky Komsomolets news outlet.According to Alexandra Oleynik, a psychologist who helps victims of violence, “complaints about domestic violence in Russia are largely ignored and it’s an exception when the perpetrator is brought to justice.” “If our laws for regulating such problems had been better, then this professor would have been punished a long time ago and this murder may not have happened,” she told The Moscow Times. Sokolov’s defense team is reportedly planning to argue that the murder was not premeditated and happened in a fit of passion — a crime that carries a maximum sentence of three years in Russia. They are not planning to argue that he is mentally unstable. For Yeshchenko’s brother Sergei, however, Sokolov is no tragic anti-hero — just an abuser and a murderer. “The reason was his jealousy. I spoke to her before it happened. She said she had been planning to go to a friend’s birthday party. He beat her and she left, but then she went back,” he told the RBC news website.