Anatoly Slivko was considered a model citizen in the Soviet Union for many years. He was a good worker at the Nevinomysk nitrogen fertilizer factory, a teacher loved and respected by all and locally recognized as the leader of the film club. However, on the other side of the coin is a child rapist and serial killer operating in the Soviet Union, Nevinnomyske, Russia.
Anatoly Yemelianovich Slivko (nickname – Tolik) was born in 1938 December 28 in Izerbash, at an oil extraction station. His homeland was oppressed by Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, and in the early years of his life, he experienced the terrible effects of war and poverty. Slivko’s father was an alcoholic who often fought with his wife, he was an only child, did poorly in school (although, according to his contemporaries, he was very intelligent), had many health problems. In his youth, Anatoly saw many horrors of war – corpses of animals and people, hiding in cemeteries from bombings.
In 1961, a fateful event left one of the biggest traumas and changed the lives of not only Tolik but countless others. At the age of 22, Slivko witnessed a car accident. A drunk motorcycle driver, speeding, ran into a pedestrian crossing and hit a young boy, who later died. It is also important to mention what he was wearing because it is also significant in the later life of Slivkos. The boy was wearing a young pioneer uniform. This incident led to Slivko’s later actions of incorporating the boy’s clothing and shoe fetish into his fantasies and crimes.
During police interrogations, Anatoly Slivko also revealed his personal connection with this accident – “During the agony of death, the boy had convulsions, the smell of gasoline and fire infiltrated the air… That boy looked so helpless, especially in his uniform. It reminded me of how I felt about myself after a childhood of pain and suffering. Every time he cried out in agony, I got more and more excited. (Until the boy’s death) I remained oblivious to everyone else except that boy.”
Hiding his true feelings, three years after the mentioned accident, Slivko starts his activities as a teacher and establishes the first tourism club. This first club was destroyed in a fire, and Slivko in 1966 founded the second and final club called Chergid. In the years that followed, Slivko gained local celebrity status for his club activities and amateur documentaries about German atrocities during World War II.
Anatoly Slivko with the children of the “Chergid” Club
Looking at everything through the prism of an outsider, what could go wrong? A respected teacher who introduces children to the world and gives them the opportunity to act in films. The criminal’s alibi is clean and tidy, he could not be suspected by anyone. However, the Chergid Club was a place where there was never a shortage of victims. He chose his victims according to the physical strength and age, Slivko never chose anyone over 17 years old, fearing that they would be too strong and he would not be able to control them.
A frame from the “films” created by Anatoly Slivkos
Since 1963 Slivko began periodically convincing the boys in his club to let him hang them as part of an “experiment” that would “stretch their spines” Slivko claimed would make them grow.
The boys knew they would lose consciousness after the procedure, but Slivko assured them he would revive them. After the boys were unconscious, Slivko took the opportunity to molest the boys and masturbate in front of their lifeless bodies. Most of the victims regained consciousness and went on with their lives without knowing what Slivko had done to them, but in seven cases the “experiment” failed, with attempts to revive the boys failing to recover. In such cases, he destroyed the bodies by cutting the children into pieces and burning the remains, masturbating a second time, and just then burying the remains. All the “experiments” were extensively photographed and videotaped to be used as a memento/trophy of the crime (when his victim Alexei Dobryshev died in 1964, Slivko destroyed the recordings, but kept all the ones he made later). With the memories he had, he satisfied his sexual needs until he decided he needed to act again. He also filmed himself cutting up his victims’ shoes and keeping them as trophies.
After the death of the victim and the beginning of the investigation, Anatoly Slivko was extremely helpful to the police, he always volunteered to help and provided photos of the boys. However, it is strange that the police did not realize earlier that all the dead boys were from the Chergid club and automatically had a connection with Slivko.
Only in 1985, after the disappearance of the last victim, the prosecutor Tamara Langujeva decided to look into Slivko and his club after she learned that one of the victims, before he disappeared, told his neighbor that he was going to meet with the leader of Chergid.
At first, Languyeva found nothing illegal about the club’s management, but suspicions arose when several guys at the club claimed to have experienced “temporary amnesia” after Slivko performed “experiments” on them. The following month, Slivko was arrested at his home in Stavropol and formally charged with seven counts of murder, sexual assault and necrophilia.
In 1986 between January and February, he gave investigators the location of six bodies, but he was unable to find Dobryshev (his first victim). In June, he was sentenced to death and imprisoned in Novocherkassk, where he spent three years before his sentence of death.
