In the summer of 2020, the village of Vilgort of the Cherdyn District of the Perm Territory got into federal news feeds: the district court sentenced a 15-year-old teenager to three years in prison and compulsory treatment for the preparation of mass murder.
The schoolboy was going to crack down on his classmates and teachers.
Since it was a minor, details were not disclosed in the official press release.
Nobody appealed the verdict, and the story was gradually forgotten.
Meanwhile, in about a year (taking into account the term spent in the pre-trial detention center), 17-year-old Konstantin D. (all the names of the minor defendants in the note have been changed) will be released.
RT special correspondent Ekaterina Vinokurova went there to understand the details of the unfortunate tragedy.
Knife and social media posts
Beyond Cherdyn, the regional center of the district of the same name, my mobile communication is lost.
Villages with old wooden houses, deep taiga, gray roadway and domes of old churches.
The only way to get here is to ride for four and a half hours by car or just over five hours by bus from Perm.
There is no railway here, and people are fed by logging enterprises and shift work in the north or in neighboring Solikamsk (the “neighboring” is about 90 km).
In the village of Bigichi, where Konstantin D. lived, there are only three streets: Lower, Sredny, Upper.
Unpainted wooden houses are similar to each other: gable roofs, carvings.
People are already digging gardens, talking among themselves - there are not many deaf fences here, and they are mostly facing the street.
Everyone here knows exactly what happened and easily tells me how to find Kostya's family and his neighbors.
One of my first interlocutors in Bigichi - a tall, thin guy in camouflage pants, Daniel K., turns out to be Konstantin's cousin.
“He sometimes calls me from the colony, he says, everything is exactly with him, he goes to school there.
We talked, of course, he is my brother, he was always calm.
He loved the computer, yes.
He said that he was beaten at school, ”says Daniel with a harsh reprimand typical of the inhabitants of the Urals.
Looking ahead, I will say: at the school in the village of Wilgort, where Konstantin D. studied, they categorically deny the beatings, but his relatives say the opposite.
Daniel talks about the family of Constantine: his mother Galina was once imprisoned for the murder of her husband.
In the countryside, they are calm about this: I have served my term in the zone, which means that I have redeemed my guilt.
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Konstantin D. himself, according to Daniil, after his release wants to leave Bigichi for Krasnoturinsk, to his older brother.
By the way, he is also sitting now: he was sentenced to seven months in prison for a drunken brawl.
The other brother is doing well, his child is growing.
Konstantin also has a sister, she is disabled and receives a pension.
The mother also receives a pension, and her current husband does a part-time job.
Even before the initiation of a criminal case and posts in social networks about the planned shooting at school, Konstantin himself was registered at a neuropsychiatric dispensary.
A psychiatric diagnosis was made to him in early childhood (the court found Konstantin sane).
Galina, according to the man, handed over her son to the police, fearing his aggressive behavior.
“She took him to a narcologist and to a psychiatrist.
I wanted to straighten my jacket - and there was a knife in my pocket on my back.
But even at school, the children knew and spoke to the teachers.
He told them openly that he would kill everyone.
And my mother saw that he was writing strange, and was worried, but when she found a knife, she went to the police, ”Daniel tells me his version of events.
However, now, after the tragedy in Kazan, none of her fellow countrymen condemns her - rather, they support her.
“We don't have much contact with his family, they come to the store, buy what they need, then leave.
Few people communicate with.
Today she, his mother, went to pick up a parcel for him in Cherdyn, a neighbor took her, and they will be back for dinner, ”says Natalya, an employee of a local grocery store.
Other customers at first listen cautiously, but then join the conversation: they do not know what to do when Konstantin comes out.
They are afraid for their children.
The village has no doubts that he really was preparing to shoot the school.
"He was quiet"
The school in which Konstantin wanted to perpetrate reprisals against his classmates is located in the neighboring village of Wilgort.
It is larger than Bigichi - about 600 inhabitants.
In the middle of the village there is an old church, and next to it is the same school.
It is divided into two buildings, the first is a kindergarten and an elementary school.
There is no fence, no frames of metal detectors and no guards.
In the vicinity of the school, children help the teacher take care of the garden.
Seeing me, they greet me.
“It is easy to distinguish a rural child from an urban one.
Rural immediately greets.
Although, of course, this generation is not ours.
We respected the elders, but today's youngsters can swear at you.
And everything else is on their phones, on the Internet, ”complains a local resident Albina.
Wilgort
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However, there are also children who are interested in patriotic upbringing: on Victory Day, they stand on guard of honor at the local memorial in memory of the Great Patriotic War.
This year there were two demonstrations in the village: one for adults and one for children.
Children's room - separately, due to covid restrictions on the number of participants in the mass event.
Residents of Wilgort are proud: their village celebrated Victory Day more elegantly than other villages.
There are also enough problems here, and the most popular name for them is "drunken fights", and even among youngsters, residents tell me and again complain about the generation lost on the Internet.
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There is still a guard in the high school building.
More precisely, not security, but two elderly women watchmen.
They log my data and lead me to the director.
“No conversations with journalists, I don't want to discuss this topic,” the director tells me sternly.
However, one of the teachers agrees to speak briefly anonymously.
According to him, when the police came to the school with a check on Konstantin D., the teachers called the children for a confidential conversation, and learned from them: Konstantin told them that there would be an execution soon, and even agitated two schoolchildren to keep him company.
Hearing this from the children, the school sounded the alarm and helped the police get the information they needed.
“We didn't beat him,” say the guys playing in the schoolyard, the same age as Konstantin.
- He did not study in our class, he studied in a correctional.
We did not communicate with him, and no one communicated.
He was quiet. "
Several children eventually admit: Konstantin really had reposts on social networks from groups of followers of shootings in schools and frightening quotes.
But they themselves were not the first to address adults.
The day after Konstantin's arrest, messages appeared in school chats with quotes from his correspondence with people from these groups.
"Where did these quotes come from?"
- I ask schoolgirls.
“A friend sent us where he got it from - we don't know,” the schoolgirls hesitate, and then they say that they have a lesson.
We are responsible, imprison, treat forcibly
The prosecutor of the Cherdynsky district, Lyudmila Romanova, a stately dark-haired woman, briefly tells everything that can be officially told about this case.
“In November 2019, the mother of an eighth grade student in a rural school turned to the internal affairs bodies with a complaint about her son's aggressive behavior. The audit found that since the fall of 2019, the teenager was carried away by the ideas of the Columbine movement and, imitating them, began preparations for the massacre of children and teachers of the school in which he studied from the first grade. In order to implement the plan, he made a knife, began negotiations with friends for the purchase of a hunting rifle, and looked for people from whom he was going to buy cartridges. He studied the behavior of adolescents who committed similar attacks, and designed his actions on the school grounds, determining the day and time of the murders, considering it appropriate to hold the school morning lineup, ”Romanova recounts the summary of the indictment.
She explains that Konstantin D. was convicted of “preparing” for the murder of two or more persons, but not for “attempted murder”, since he really began to prepare: he was looking for weapons, drew up a clear plan of attack, but did not have time to start implementing it. And since he was only preparing to commit a crime, but did not commit, and also because he is a minor, he was sentenced to only three years in prison in an educational colony. Also, by the verdict of the court, he was assigned the use of compulsory medical measures - Konstantin was found sane, but his diagnosis requires constant treatment. Romanova adds that when Konstantin is released, if he is released as a minor, he will be registered in a neuropsychiatric dispensary and with a juvenile affairs inspector, and upon reaching 18 he may be assigned administrative supervision.
For all the time, I find only one person who sympathizes with Konstantin, who believes that not only external circumstances, including the Internet, but also adults who could sound the alarm even before Konstantin began to prepare for the execution of students and teachers, should be blamed.
We met in the city of Cherdyn, and my interlocutor asked for anonymity.
He clarifies: the school workers engaged in conversations with Konstantin D.'s classmates after the police arrived, although they were ordered to do so after the “Kerch execution”.
“School psychologists then took special courses for cyber consultants, but if nothing was revealed in a year, this rate was reduced.
Now in the Cherdynsky district, only one school employee in the entire district is engaged in such work on monitoring social networks, he simply cannot track a thousand profiles at the same time, "justifies my interlocutor and the school.
School in Wilgort
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According to him, many adults and children could see cruel quotes and aggressive statements on Konstantin D.'s page, but they chose to remain silent until his own mother contacted the police regarding the episode with the knife.
Finally, questions arise for the psychiatrists who have been observing Konstantin D. for years.
For example, how could they have missed the patient's obvious outbursts of aggression?
“You know, if a child, a teenager went to jail, it is always an oversight of adults,” my interlocutor says.
Most people in Wilgort, Bigichi, Cherdyn blame the Internet for what happened: there are many dangerous people on social networks who have a shaking effect on the psyche of adolescents.
By the way, last year a teenager from the same school received an administrative fine for tattooing AUE * on his arm, a recognized extremist organization that promotes criminal values.
The problem is that the number of offline activities that can be offered here to teenagers is rather limited.
There are many young people in Cherdyn, Vilgort, Bigichi.
If schools are closed in many villages, then in Wilgort, the school consists of several buildings, and the high school in Cherdyn, where children from all over the district go to study, who have decided not to go to vocational schools, but to finish 11 classes, is a large building, even by the standards of Moscow. ...
Most of the young people I see on the streets are walking, sitting on the steps of old churches and arguing about something.
Someone walks arm in arm in parks.
Patriotic - Youth Army.
There are simply no workouts or urban activities.
Those who don't fit in with the company stay at home.
Mother
A grayish log house with a dog barking behind the fence.
Galina, the mother of Konstantin D., at first refuses to talk to me for a long time, but finally falls on the bench and lights a cigarette without looking at me.
She knows: I know that she herself wrote a statement against her son.
Whether this statement saved other children, we will never find out.
This application sent her son to a juvenile colony.
Galina has an emaciated face, shoulder-length dark brown hair and, like all locals, a characteristic Ural accent - harsh, her phrases are a little torn.
Galina's house
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“I've collected a parcel for him.
He wrote, asked for powder for washing, bought more shampoo, soap.
He is not offended there (Konstantin D. is serving time in a juvenile colony in Gamovo, near Perm. -
E.V.
), he studies at school and at the same time studies to be a welder.
How do they treat me in the countryside?
Do not condemn, say that you gave up your son?
I don't know, no one says anything to me either in support or in condemnation, - Galina takes a drag on her cigarette and speaks almost without intonation.
- I wanted to appeal against the verdict, Kostya said: "No need."
I decided so myself. "
Galina says that she herself did not read any of her son's correspondence on social networks - on the contrary, he blocked it some time before all the events.
“He listened to strange music, I didn't like it.
I wrote a statement when I took him to the doctor, and then I discovered that he had a knife in his jacket on his back, in his inner pocket.
I didn't think what it was.
Employees also opened his social networks.
We saw the notes on the wall.
And then they somehow got hold of the correspondence, although he erased everything the day before, ”Galina continues to say in ragged phrases, without changing her tone.
- He corresponded with someone there in a personal.
I don't know, teenagers or adults.
They discussed how to attack the school. "
“Were these people with whom he corresponded, found?
In theory, they were supposed to be witnesses? "
I ask.
“Nobody called them.
Or not.
This is the Internet, how can you find them? "
She replies.
Galina cannot understand: if her son is mentally ill, then why he is being treated and punished at the same time.
She tries not to think about which events have been avoided and which have not.
She collects a parcel for her son.
The main victim in this story is Galina.
In recent days, many have been arguing: which of the system fuses did not work in Kazan, which did not work in Kerch before that?
Cherdyn, Bigichi and Wilgort raise other questions.
And where is the line beyond which we can say that the fuse has tripped?
And could it have worked even earlier - at the moment of the first aggressive status on VKontakte, on the first music tracks about shootings in schools, the first remarks to classmates who were afraid to tell their parents?
Is it possible to stop school shootings even before the stage at which the preparation of the crime begins?
It worked out buying a knife.
In about a year (the term in the pre-trial detention center will be counted) Konstantin will return to his mother.
They have to live with it.
* "Prisoners 'criminal unity" (AUE, "Prisoners' way is united", AUE) - the movement was recognized as extremist by the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 08/17/2020.