How the most talented Soviet schemers made money, whom the legendary Ostap Bender would envy

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Among the criminals in the USSR there have always been true virtuosos of their craft. Counterfeit money, bribes to enroll in a university, non-existent awards - the scammers used every opportunity to get rich. In our selection - 5 of the most egregious cases in criminal practice.

The crippled pickpocket who duped the Stalinist ministers

Venya Vaisman is a legendary swindler of the 30s - 40s, to whom a separate stand in the MUR Museum is dedicated. All his adult life, he traded in theft, for which he was repeatedly convicted. In the winter of 1944, during another escape, Benjamin froze his limbs and was left disabled without both feet and one hand. Two years later, Vaisman ended up in Moscow, in the status of twice Hero of the Soviet Union, invalid of the Great Patriotic War, with orders and medals on his chest.

The scheme of the scam, which became hostages of the ministers and the top of the Communist Party, was simple. Weissman went into the office of one leader or another, told a heartbreaking story about his past heroism and the hopeless prospects of disability. Venya's artistry was at its best, so he invariably left with money and valuable goods. In 1947, the Central Committee of the party even allocated an apartment to the hero, appointed a pension and life-long medical care. But Vaisman wasn’t enough. He went to the Minister Kazakov a second time, and he suspected something was wrong, calling the guards. The exposed Venya received 10 years in the camps, which was very modest for all his scams.

Front-line deserter and non-existent construction organization of the union scale

At the end of 1952, the military prosecutor's office received a case about the UVS-1 military unit under the command of Colonel Pavlenko. The investigation establishes that neither the unit itself, nor a colonel with that name in the Ministry of Internal Affairs has ever been listed. But there was a front-line deserter Lieutenant Pavlenko, who famously took advantage of the bureaucratic confusion of the war years.

In the fall of 1941, he surrounds himself with criminal specialists. Forgery of documents, seals and stamps falls on Rudnichenko's accomplice. He forms a set of linden papers, thanks to which a military construction site is created. The commander is the military engineer Pavlenko. The UVS team, which originally consisted of the same deserters, is expanding to 200 people. Through all sorts of machinations and bribery, the organization receives large construction contracts.

The construction unit comes under cover almost to Berlin. And the net profit from the work performed by the end of the Great Patriotic War exceeds a million rubles. Operating in Poland, Germany, Pavlenko organizes outright robberies of the local population, taking out the loot in wagons.

After the war, a construction artel was created according to a similar scheme and another 300 thousand rubles were laundered. Exposure overtakes the "front-line soldier" only in 1948, after another fake UVS, which deployed its construction sites across the Union. Control over the investigation of an unprecedented scam is transferred to the MGB of the MSSR. Only in 1952 did law enforcement officers cover the headquarters of the organization and arrest Pavlenko. It took more than 2 years to unravel the case. The damage to the state amounted to almost 40 million rubles.

Fake Hero of the Soviet Union

Vladimir Golubenko, repeatedly convicted of theft, decided to start a new life. True, I chose the same methods. Having taken possession of someone else's passport, he turned into Valentin Purgin. Under this name, he got a job as a military commander in a newspaper. During a business trip to Belarus in 1939, he stole a blank divisional form and filled it in with his own data on the award of the Order of Lenin. A little later, in the same fraudulent way, he turned into a participant in the Soviet-Finnish war and a Hero of the Soviet Union. But in the spring of 1940, the swindler was arrested. "Komsomolskaya Pravda" published the data of the escaped criminal Golubenko, and the enterprising hero was quickly exposed. The Supreme Court of the USSR stripped the swindler of all illegally obtained titles and sentenced him to death.

The ingenious counterfeiter Baranov, who printed money in a barn

In the mid-70s, counterfeit bills of 50 and 25 rubles were revealed in several cities of the Union at once. The case was taken under special control, because the printing technology was of high quality. Even the version of stuffing a batch of banknotes by CIA agents was considered to undermine the economy of the USSR. Imagine the amazement of the venerable KGB investigators when it turned out that a self-taught inventor was behind this case. Driver Viktor Baranov created his own mini-printing house and practiced printing technologies for 12 long years. By the way, he served the same amount for his work.

The compact machine was found in a barn in the courtyard of Baranov's Stavropol house. There were also notebooks with synopses of many years of research. Experts arrived from Moscow, in whose presence Baranov put watermarks and a Treasury number on the paper, rolled gravure and letterpress stamps, and cut off the bill.

The most striking thing was that Baranov did not commit the crime for profit. He strove to realize his ingenious inventions. And he planned to use the modest mass of forgeries put into the circulation of money for further innovative work. He lived exclusively on honestly earned money.

A million-dollar fortune on a share of bribes

Almost 400 thousand rubles - this is the official amount of bribes on the account of the group, which consisted of employees of eminent Moscow universities. The fraudsters took money for guarantees of receipt. The role of the main mediator was assigned to Berlin-Kvachadze, who was married to the daughter of Artyukhina, head of the women's department of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b).

According to the RSFSR prosecutor's office, during the Great Patriotic War, Berlin-Kvachadze illegally appropriated the rank of major in the medical service, stole other people's orders and, having issued an order book, passed them off as his own. In 1944, having only 3 years of medical school behind him, he fraudulently defended his thesis and received the degree of candidate of medical sciences. The fraudster presented himself as a researcher, the author of dozens of inventions and works. In addition to his main specialization - the transfer of bribes to officials of the Ministry of Health, Berlin-Kvachadze had a share in other financial frauds. It has been established that due to family ties with Artyukhina, he warmed his hands on "contributions" to determine those wishing to join the Central Committee.

His savings were discovered by investigators in his parent's Odessa apartment. For a rainy day, Berlin-Kvachadze put aside money and valuables worth more than 3 million rubles in old terms.

Many are interested in the question of whether there was such a character in history as a great combinator, and who was the prototype of Ostap Bender … We know the answer to this question.