The child leader murdered for more than 20 years, his “games” were increasingly frightening

At that time, they led a 51-year-old black-haired man with strangely prickly eyes from the death row in the Novocherkassk prison in the Soviet Union. They put a pistol to the back of his neck. A shot was fired. The execution of Anatoly Plum, a serial murderer of children, who earned the grim nickname “Deserved Torturer” in the Soviet Union, has just taken place.

Romantic leader of the Romantik section

Anatoly Yemelianovich Slivko was born on December 18, 1938 in the Dagestan city of Izberbash. From puberty, he knew he was gay, yet he married and became the father of two children. After his arrest in the mid-1980s, he confided in investigators that he had not slept with his wife more than ten times during a seventeen-year marriage. From these rare sexual contacts came both children, after the birth of the second Slivko never resumed sexual intercourse with his wife.

In 1961, he witnessed a car accident in which a drunken motorcyclist ran into a group of pedestrians and fatally injured a young boy wearing the then Soviet pioneer uniform. “For reasons I can’t explain, I was sexually aroused by this scene. The boy writhed in a fatal spasm as the smell of gasoline and smoke wafted through the air,” Slivko later told investigators.

About two years later, a sympathetic-looking black-haired young man began to visit schools in the town of Nevinnomyssk in the Stavropol region, where Slivko lived at the time, explaining to the children that they could join the new Romantik tourist section. They will reach interesting places in the Soviet Union and become famous. The children heard of such a plan, and the Romantik section was born.

Plum appeared to be a devoted and passionate organizer. He took children not only to nature and on hiking marches, but also took care of each of them personally and gave them individual tasks. He also dealt with the history, especially the one that every Soviet child lived – the history of the “Great Patriotic War” and the guerrilla struggle of Soviet citizens against the German hordes. But in Slivek’s performance, the memory of that time looked a little different than an innocent child’s play on guerrillas…

It’s not a game like a game

“The guerrilla game was the most popular among the boys in those years. Nobody wanted to be a fascist, so it was mostly done by budgeting,” says a documentary by Russian television NTV called Deserved Torturer.

In Plum’s scenarios, this game became “interesting” but something other than “shootouts” in the forest. In his submission, the partisans set out to catch the ‘tongue’, in other words they wanted to capture the fascist to speak, but it turned out mostly the other way around and one partisan fell into captivity. And the other fascists were to torture him to betray his comrades-in-arms.

“A lot of boys played similar games. They fired wooden rifles, tied themselves to trees and played torturers, but of course apparently so as not to hurt. But Slivko went on,” the document states.

As the leader, Slivko not only liked to stage these scenes with the children, but also shot them on a hand-held film camera. It was almost always a situation where the savage Gestapo or soldiers captured the pioneer – and began to torture him. “He often let the children burn the legs of the prisoners,” Vladimir Lobanov, who was a member of the Romantik tourist section in the 1960s, recalled in the documentary. At the same time, it was not possible to overlook how the leader is attracted to these scenes.

According to a later investigation, the first murder took place probably on June 2, 1964. Slivko used a scenario, which he later repeated regularly and which apparently subconsciously tried his individual work with children: he established a close friendship with a boy, usually aged 12 to 15. , who was small for his age and therefore unconfident.

Plum then told him that there was a method of controlled hanging by the neck, in which the spine was stretched. He then asked him if he could wear a pioneer costume and told him that he would shoot the scene as a “pioneer execution” for his tourist club. At the same time, he assured the boy that he would immediately take him away and revive him. To prevent possible vomiting of the victim, he also warned him not to eat a few hours in advance.

Fifteen-year-old Nikolai Dobryshev, who ran away from home, became the first boy on whom Slivko tried his screenplay for the first time. Everything went as the “leader” described in advance, except for the recovery. When the boy in the noose fell unconscious, Slivko did not start to resurrect him, but instead took it off his pants, stroked and caressed him, and while the camera was still running, he filmed his body in various lewd and suggestive positions and masturbated repeatedly. When he finally decided to resume, it was late, Dobryshev was dead.

Slivko decided to solve this matter by cutting his body and burying it in various places. He burned the film and photographs he had taken during the entire “ceremony”.

Serial killer

The second murder took place in May 1965, this time with Alexei Kovalenko. Even before him, however, the man tried his method on another boy, a member of his Romantik section, Yevgeny “Woman” Vlas.

“Slivko told us that she was writing a book about guerrillas and her hero would be a young pioneer. The Germans caught him, interrogated him, he didn’t say anything, so they hung him,” Vlasov described it in a Russian documentary. According to him, Slivko confided in him that he needed to shoot and see such a scene so that he could describe it truthfully and without falsehood. “I couldn’t know what was going on in his head,” Vlasov said.

However, he proudly accepted the offer to play the “pioneer hero” and, according to the leader’s instructions, arrived by bike to the forest, where a noose was waiting for him hanging over a tree branch. “I got on the seat of the bike, he took me by the legs with both hands and pulled me down. Then, of course, I don’t remember anything,” Vlasov described the staged execution in the document.

He didn’t wake up until a few hours later, about which he never knew exactly what was going on. It was only in adulthood that he discovered what he was actually a part of.

Unfortunately, Kovalenko was unlucky in Vlasov’s case and, like Dobryshev, did not wake up from his unconsciousness after the staged hanging. The killer claimed the second victim.

In 1966, Slivko founded a new children’s club in the Nevvinnomyssk region, this time under the name “Čergid”, which was an abbreviation of the words “Čerez reky, gory i doliny”, ie “Across rivers, mountains and valleys”. And the perverted game of “executing a brave pioneer” continued. Over the course of 22 years, Slivko forced a total of 43 boys to join her, 36 of whom he managed to revive after hanging. However, there were five more to be added to the two cases where it “did not work out”.

The third murdered was a fifteen-year-old boy Alexander Nesmejanov, who disappeared in Nevinnomyssk on November 14, 1973. Two years later, on May 11, 1975, eleven-year-old Andrei Pogasjan also disappeared. The police were able to stop Slivka for the first time because Pogasjan, like Nesmejanov, was a member of Chergid and his mother knew that her son was supposed to film something with his leader in a nearby forest. However, the investigators did not connect this information with the boy’s disappearance, they considered the shooting to be innocent – coincidentally, they knew Slivka and even knew that he even received an award for his other amateur film work.

Meanwhile, the plum began to get rid of the bodies in an established way. He usually kept the victim’s shoes in memory, cut the body, poured gasoline on its fragments and set it on fire, supposedly to remember the smell of gasoline in a car accident that caused his ecstasy. Then he nodded at home over the footage, until he needed a fresher stimulus and went on another “hunt”.

In 1980, a thirteen-year-old boy named Sergei Fatiyev disappeared, as did a previous victim of a member of Chergid. Another victim was fifteen-year-old Vyacheslav Chovistik, who was killed in 1982. Finally, on July 23, 1985, Slivko killed his last victim, a thirteen-year-old boy named Sergei Pavlov.

Cergid finally under surveillance

When investigators of Pavlov’s murder began to ask around who, when and under what circumstances he last saw the boy, his neighbor remembered that Sergei had told him that he was planning something with the head of Cergid. The eye of the police has finally focused on the children’s club…

Investigator Tamara Langujeva became interested in this tourist section, but at first she saw nothing illegal in his activities. During November 1985, however, she heard from a number of its members, and many admitted to her that Slivko had conducted various “experiments” with them and that they had suffered temporary memory loss. It became clear to an experienced policewoman.

In December 1985, Anatoly Yemelianovich Slivko was finally arrested. At the beginning of 1986, he led the investigators to the places where the bodies of six of his victims rested, and he was no longer able to find the body of his first victim, Nikolai Dobryshev. He was charged with seven murders, seven cases of sexual abuse and seven cases of necrophilia. In June 1986 he was sentenced to death.

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