ST. PETERSBURG -- In a city where businessmen and politicians are routinely bumped off by hired hit men, finding the right man for the job has never been easier.
All it takes is a look through the classified ads, where brazen young men have taken to openly advertising their services.
In July 1996, Dmitry Kashnitsky, a 23-year-old unemployed St. Petersburg resident, placed such an ad in Reklama Shans, or Advertisement Chance, a local classified ad publication. "Seeking any kind of one-time-only, dangerous work," the ad read, including Kashnitsky's first name and home telephone number.
On July 24, he received a reply to his ad. Leonid Andronov, 39, had married a St. Petersburg woman in hopes of receiving a city residency permit, but not long after he moved in with his new wife, Irina Rukavishnikova, 58, and her mother, his motives were discovered. His mother-in-law, Raisa Rukavishnikova, filed on behalf of her daughter, a schizophrenic, to have the marriage dissolved.
Andronov promised Kashnitsky $6,000 to murder both women, according to court records.
Kashnitsky wasted no time. Early on the morning of July 26, he attacked them outside their 13th-floor apartment, beating their bodies and skulls with nunchucks and a hammer, court records show. Irina was killed instantly; her mother died the following day in a hospital.
Both men were arrested for the crime that November. They were convicted earlier this month by the St. Petersburg City Court, which ordered Kashnitsky sent to a psychiatric hospital and sentenced Andronov to a 15-year term in a penal colony.
Andrei Kivinov, 36, the homicide department chief who solved the Kashnitsky case, said he was struck by its banality.
"Life here has reached the point where people look for killers in the newspapers," said Kivinov, who has since left the force to write crime-related articles and fiction. "Newspapers run ads for laundry detergent next to ones for contract killers. It's very routine, and this is the saddest thing of all."
Police have no figures for the number of contract killers who have been found through the classifieds, but they say Kashnitsky was not the first. A longtime St. Petersburg court reporter who covered the Kashnitsky trial says it is the 13th such case the city has seen in recent years.
Nikita Filatov, who spent 12 years in the police force, including a stint in the OMON special forces' intelligence unit, laid part of the blame on high unemployment and a lack of moral guidance after the collapse of communism. Filatov, who now works as a lawyer and consults on security and crime issues for foreign and Russian business people, said many young Russians have served as mercenaries in various wars and political conflicts in the former Soviet Union and abroad, gaining the psychological and technical ability to kill on command.
"Now the wars are more or less over, but the desire to earn money fast through dangerous, risky work still remains. It is these people in particular, who already know how to shoot well and are used to getting paid for it, who have started putting in these sorts of ads," said Filatov, who is also president of the St. Petersburg Crime Novel Club.
Contract killings secured through the classifieds are almost always domestic, he said.
"This is the kind of situation when people don't have much money. They read a lot of crime novels. They might approach a low-level 'executioner,'" Filatov said. "These killings are usually discovered, and pretty soon the killer is brought before the court and put in prison."
Although the amateur hit men are often easy to track down, it is difficult to arrest people who place ads looking for a gun for hire, because of their deliberate vagueness.
"If I call one of these numbers in the ads and I am suspected of being a policeman, the guy will tell me he needs someone to paint the roof of St. Isaac's Cathedral," Filatov said. "You need to arrest this man in flagrante."
Contract killings of political or business figures are a different story.
"The people who commit these crimes are not found through the newspapers," he said, adding that few are ever caught.
In the first five months of 1998, 356 murders were registered in St. Petersburg, of which 12 were contract killings, police say. None of those 12 have been solved.
Last year, 60 of the 769 murders registered in the city were contract killings. Only six were solved.