The Professor Dismemberer - Russian True Crime Stories, #6

On a freezing November morning in 2019, a taxi driver spots an elderly man floundering in the icy Moika River in central Saint Petersburg. When rescuers pull him out, he's clutching a waterlogged backpack — inside are a woman's severed arms and a sawed-off rifle. The man is Oleg Sokolov, a decorated historian at Saint Petersburg State University, a Knight of the French Legion of Honor, and a celebrated Napoleonic reenactor. In his elegant apartment overlooking the Moika, investigators discover the dismembered remains of his twenty-four-year-old graduate student and lover, Anastasia Yeshchenko. Veteran investigator Colonel Volkov — "the Wolfhound" — methodically dismantles every defense: the claim of temporary insanity, the plea of self-defense, the narrative of a tortured genius. What emerges is a portrait of institutional complicity, academic worship of "genius," and a system that looked away while a professor terrorized young women for decades.