Every adult and capable person knows that the law of the state in which he lives must be observed. But in exceptional cases, for especially serious crimes, the punishment prescribed by law may not be enough. We are talking about private and very rare situations that invariably fall into world history. For example, in 1964 in Leningrad, a minor offender Arkady Neiland was sentenced to death and shot. What did this teenager do and why did the highest officials of the state decide to violate the current legislation of the RSFSR?
Neyland Family History
In 1949, Arkady Neiland was born in Leningrad. The story of his family is typical of his time. The boy lived with his parents, brothers and sister in the most ordinary communal apartment. Mother and stepfather often drank and spent little time on children. Physical punishment, often unreasonably cruel, was considered the norm in this family. My mother worked as a nurse, and my stepfather was a mechanic, respectively, and there was no talk of material wealth. As Arkady himself admitted (after his arrest), he and his brothers and sister often were malnourished, engaged in vagrancy, and began to steal from early childhood. From the age of 7, the boy was registered with the police for hooliganism and petty robbery. At the age of 12, he was expelled from a comprehensive school, and his mother identified a bad child in a boarding school. But even in this institution Arkady “did not take root” - he often clashed with peers, tried to run away. As soon as Neiland graduated from grade 6, he was expelled. After which he was sent to work at the Lenpishchemash production association. However, in this type of activity Arkady could not prove himself positively. The guy was caught in petty thefts and absenteeism, but because of his age, he managed to avoid serious punishments and courts.
Big "business" for the sake of a "new" life
Until 1964, theft of the Soyuzpechat kiosk and hairdresser was considered the largest crimes of Neyland. But all this seemed to the ambitious teenager a trifle, in addition, most of the offenses ended with the inevitable “visits” to the police station. In January 1964, Arkady Vladimirovich Neiland, together with a like-minded accomplice, decided to really do something “large” and take possession of a large amount of money at a time. The ideal crime for teenagers seemed apartment theft. All that remained was to find a suitable object. Attackers liked the house number 3 on Sestroretskaya street. The villains began to prepare in advance for the upcoming theft. On January 24, 1964, they walked around the whole entrance of the chosen building and communicated with the tenants on an innocent pretext. Nobody opened the door in one of the apartments, and then the criminals picked up the key and unlocked it on their own. Having committed the apartment theft, Arkady calmly left the apartment with an accomplice, but immediately ran into her mistress, who made a fuss about her things. As a result, thieves were detained.
Crime that could not have happened
For the next theft of teenagers, according to tradition, they were interrogated and left to wait in the office. It was during this pause that Arkady Neiland calmly got up and left. What is striking - none of the employees of the authorities paid attention to him and did not try to detain him. The offender went to his home and stole a tourist hatchet, which is notable for its light weight and size, as well as a fairly high-quality sharpening. Arkady immediately realized that you can’t stay in the parents’ apartment. For several days he spent the night in the basements and attics, not ceasing to follow the chosen apartment. According to some versions, the idea of committing a robbery with a murder occurred to the teenager spontaneously, during the last detention. But if you evaluate all the facts in total, we can assume that Arkady Neiland and his accomplice invented and planned everything in advance. Be that as it may, on January 27, 1964, the offender went "to the cause." And just think: if he had not managed to escape from the department three days earlier, or if he had been placed in a correctional institution for earlier crimes, tragedy could have been avoided.
The brutal murder on Sestroretskaya street
The juvenile delinquent watched the chosen “rich” apartment for several days. By the time of the attack, he already knew for sure that in the afternoon only a middle-aged housewife and her little son were inside. As Arkady Vladimirovich Neiland later confesses during interrogation, he committed a crime, deciding in advance that he would kill the mistress and, most likely, the child too. The moral side of this issue did not bother him, and as for the probable punishment, the attacker has repeatedly experienced by his own example that the judicial system of the RSFSR is loyal to adolescents. Arkady rang the doorbell of the chosen apartment, and he was immediately opened. The landlady - Larisa Kupreeva - recognized the sullen young man who came in a few days ago, and was wary. The criminal himself, too, hesitated and uttered some completely unconvincing pretext for the visit, in response to which the door was closed before his nose. Then Arkady waited a while, called again, called himself a postman, changing his voice, and when the door opened, he immediately attacked the landlady with an ax. A struggle ensued, the woman realized that she was responsible for the life of her own son, and desperately resisted. At one point, she almost managed to grab the ax from the hands of the criminal. But then Arkady threw Larisa into a chair and struck a series of blows on the head. After the landlady died down, the criminal calmly dealt with her son. Then he went around the rooms and collected valuable things, after which he did not disdain and have a bite to eat in the kitchen. Before leaving the apartment, Arkady made an arson, hoping that the fire would destroy all traces of his atrocities. However, this expectation did not come true. The fire brigade arrived quickly enough: the neighbors suspected something was wrong, smelling the smell of burning in the entrance. Quickly enough, the fire was extinguished. But when firefighters entered the apartment, they were shocked. Dead bodies, traces of blood and a general mess in the rooms were clearly evident. In addition, they even managed to detect the fingerprints of the unknown, which subsequently became important evidence against the main suspect.
To the sea, for a new life!
15-year-old Arkady Neiland is not a maniac, but just an unhappy child who grew up in terrible conditions and with a complete lack of concepts of morality and conscience. In his official statements, he himself and his failed accomplice said that they wanted to commit a big theft in order to go to the sea with the money they received (in Sukhumi or Tbilisi, according to various sources) and relax there, and then start a new one, law-abiding life. Of course, these plans were not destined to come true. Immediately after the commission of the crime, Arkady handed over the stolen things to the locker at the station. And he, having walked a bit, began to search for tickets. In Leningrad that day, it was not possible to catch a long-distance train heading south, so the criminal bought a ticket to Moscow, hoping to make a transfer there. And he succeeded, but when leaving the train on the platform of the southern city of Sukhumi, Neiland Arkady was detained and taken back to Leningrad.
Confessions of a young fanatic
The offender was surprised only that he was calculated and found after 4 days. Under Arcadia, there were several important evidence, in particular, the Zorkiy camera with several noticeable scratches, stolen from a robbed apartment, Kupreev’s passport and his adopted daughter, and there were dried blood stains on the killer’s clothes and some things. Neyland himself was in shock and did not even try to unlock. Quickly enough, he began to collaborate with the investigation. Arkady Neiland, whose biography includes a huge number of minor offenses and drives to the police, thought he knew what could be expected. The thing is that the legislation in force in the country did not provide for capital punishment for minors. Accordingly, deciding to steal a murder, Arkady thought that the maximum that he was facing was a prison term in a juvenile colony. During interrogations, Neiland described in detail how he planned his crime and killed a woman and a child.
Wealthy apartment turned out to be ordinary
This crime struck the public of the whole country with its atrocity and meaninglessness. In his confessions, the killer repeated several times that he had planned the robbery of a “rich” apartment, followed by the murder of witnesses. However, the affected Kupreevs were the most ordinary family. It is difficult to say by what principle Arkady Neiland himself chose the object for attack. 1964 - the year in which in Leningrad, in principle, there were not so many truly wealthy families. And to look for a similar one in a very ordinary house was a mistake initially. However, what to expect from a young man who grew up in communal apartments on the social day? According to some versions, the guy lost his head when he saw a dermatine-covered front door, a color TV, and a housewife leading an “idle” lifestyle.
Inhuman cruelty and cynicism
During interrogations, the suspect himself will tell that he delivered the first blows to his victim's arms and shoulders, and during the struggle he had time to change his mind and leave the woman alive. The fight between the victim and the attacker was really long and noisy, many neighbors heard suspicious sounds. Neiland himself realized that the sounds of the struggle are quite loud, so at the first opportunity he turned on the master tape recorder in order to muffle them. The child, who “got under his feet” while the criminal killed his mother, Arkady hacked into several blows. However, the killer even repented of this act, saying that he regrets that "I had to do this." The case of Arkady Neiland received such a wide public outcry precisely because of the cynicism of the criminal. After a double murder, an attacker searched the entire apartment in search of valuables, and then took a series of indecent pictures of the body of the murdered woman on a stolen camera, planning to sell them in the future as pornography. After this, Arkady calmly washed in the master's bath, went to the kitchen and prepared his lunch, using the supplies of his victims. The neighborhood with two cooling bodies did not spoil his appetite. And only having strengthened himself, the killer set fire to the apartment, opened the gas and hastened to leave. In his defense, the criminal will also say that Larisa herself is to blame for what happened. Like, if she hadn’t defended herself, she probably would not have had to be killed ...
Capital measure for a minor
When the public became aware of all the circumstances of the crime, the reactions were mixed. Many argued that Arkady Neiland - a maniac, a fanatic and not worthy of life as such. The criminal himself aggravated his situation by saying during interrogations that he knew that he had nothing to fear. However, Arkady Neiland was shot in Leningrad in 1964 by a court verdict. Many residents of our country asked for such a punishment for the killer, they sent their letters and official petitions to the prosecutor's office and even personally to L. I. Brezhnev and N. S. Khrushchev. All these appeals of citizens were attached to the criminal case. After receiving such a verdict, Arkady Neiland, whose execution was contrary to all applicable laws of the country, went down in world history. The intelligentsia and lawyers were somewhat dissatisfied with the fact that the sentence did not quite fit into legal norms. But one cannot fail to notice that this execution was not only indicative, but also rational. According to the law, Neiland was to receive a prison term and had a real opportunity (with good behavior in the colony) to be released after 5-6 years. Accordingly, the society would receive an adult and adult repeat offender at the age of 20, on whose account not only robbery, hooliganism and theft, but also the murder of a woman and a child.
The name of Arkady Neiland in world history
The story of this juvenile delinquent ends on August 11, 1964. It was on this day that the sentence was carried out, and the killer was shot. There are legends that it was very difficult to find executors for the execution. None of the government officials wanted to shoot the teenager. It is worth noting that Arkady Neiland (you can see the photo of the criminal in our article) had a very normal appearance. He sometimes looked sloppy and poorly dressed, but the general impression was neutral: the average teenager of his time. When the verdict was read out in the courtroom, Neiland was not only surprised, but really scared. After that, he began to ask for clemency, wrote a cassation appeal, but his request was not granted. At the global level, these events have received a two-digit reaction. Civilized countries were struck by the arrogance and cruelty of the criminal, but among the jurists there were those who were outraged. The Western public perceived this case and the verdict as an oppression of freedom and individual rights by the socialist system. And yet, in order to enforce the sentence, it was necessary to somehow legitimize such a decision. A unique action was carried out for this: a written survey was conducted among the judges of Leningrad, in which they had to answer, is it possible to recognize the Resolution of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council as retroactive? Agreeing with this thesis meant the admissibility of the death penalty of a minor. Of course, the judges participating in the survey immediately understood what the authorities expected from them and voted in the affirmative almost unanimously. It is worth noting that this case is unique to the history of Russia and the whole world. That is why Arkady Neiland (1964 - the year of the crime and the execution of the killer) became so "famous". Unfortunately, he managed to become famous in a bloody way.