In the latter part of the 20th century, Anatoly Slivko, a Soviet serial killer, was found guilty of murdering seven young boys over a 22-year period. Later, it was discovered that he had molested at least 43 boys, who he had coerced into participating in his “experiments” by using his authority as the director of a kids’ group. He is renowned for performing distinctive actions such as dressing up his victims in Young Pioneers garb and polished shoes, inducing unconsciousness in them through controlled hanging, stripping them while they were asleep, and fondling them. He also records his crimes. He retained the uniforms and shoes of up to 36 of his victims as a memento and took pictures and videos of them as well. He was allegedly an emaciated child with sexual problems who, as a result of bullying at school, formed an early association between sexuality and violence. Following a car mishap involving a child who is said to have sexually excited him, he allegedly tried to relive the experience by molesting and ultimately killing some of his victims.
Early Youth & Life
On December 28, 1938, Anatoly Yemelianovich Slivko was born in Izerbash, Dagestan ASSR, Soviet Union. Slivko was an emaciated boy who was born in rural Ukraine, which was still recovering from a devastating famine at the time. He also struggled with insomnia.
When the boy was still a young child, his father was drafted into the German invasion force and imprisoned. After being released, he was mocked when he returned home. Slivko experienced bullying as an adolescent because of his father’s alleged “cowardice.”
According to reports, he was also born with hydrocephalus (water on the brain), which led to a number of genital-urinary tract problems, including bedwetting as a kid and erectile dysfunction as a young man. He was ashamed of himself and spent the majority of his early years away from his peers because of all the external and bodily problems.
After failing the Moscow State University entrance test, he served in the military for a while. He relocated to Stavropol in the Rostov Oblast as an adult in 1960 after getting work as a telephone engineer.
He appeared to be a well-liked local who had become well-known for producing amateur films about Nazi atrocities during World War II. It is unknown when he first started managing a kids’ club, but in 1966, he took over another boys’ club by the name of Chergid after his first one was burned in a fire.
A criminal history
An early teen boy donning a Young Pioneers uniform was fatally injured in a traffic accident in 1961 that 23-year-old Anatoly Slivko observed involving a drunk motorcyclist. Later, he maintained that for some unexplainable reason, watching the boy go through “convulsions in his death throes as the scent of gasoline and fire permeated the air” made him feel sexy.
By 1963, he had started taking advantage of his position at a kids’ club to persuade young boys to participate in his ill-conceived experiment, which appeared to stretch the subject’s vertebrae through controlled hanging until they fell asleep. He would outfit the boy in a Young Pioneers uniform to make him look like the boy in the accident, polish his shoes, and tell him not to eat so he wouldn’t throw up before each “experiment.”
Slivko would strip his victims naked, and molest them to fulfill his sexual fantasies, and in most instances, he would even record the entire incident after successfully knocking his victims out. He sexually abused 43 boys over the course of 22 years, and the majority of them went on with their normal lives after regaining consciousness, unaware of what had occurred.
In 36 instances, Slivko filmed the experiments, presumably to keep himself busy until he could lay hands on the next victim. Slivko kept the clothes and shoes of his victims as a memento. However, in seven instances, simple molestation was insufficient to awaken him; he went on to kill his victims, mutilate their bodies and set their limbs on fire after dousing them in gasoline.
On June 2, 1964, he murdered his first victim, a homeless 15-year-old boy who was subsequently identified as Nikolai Dobryshev. He claimed that because he was unable to bring him back from the dead, he had to dismember his corpse, bury him, and destroy the film and pictures as well.
He murdered his second victim, Aleksei Kovalenko, in May 1965, leaving a significant amount of time before his third victim, Aleksander Nesmeyanov, a 15-year-old boy, went missing in Nevinnomyssk on November 14, 1973. On May 11, 1975, after taking part in Slivko’s video recordings in a nearby forest, 11-year-old Andrei Pogasyan vanished. However, due to Slivko’s notoriety for documentaries, the authorities failed to find him.
Both Nesmeyanov and Pogasyan belonged to Chergid, the club that Slivko ran; this affiliation grew stronger after another 13-year-old club member, Sergei Fatsiev, vanished. Unlike his subsequent victim, Vyacheslav Khovistik, who was murdered in 1982, little is known about Sergei Pavlov, who vanished on July 23, 1985, after meeting Chergid leader Slivko.
Capture and execution
Tamara Languyeva, a prosecutor looking into Sergei Pavlov’s disappearance, became interested in the club Chergid’s operations but was unable to uncover any illegal activity. However, when young boys were questioned at the club, many of them mentioned having “temporary amnesia,” particularly when Anatoly Slivko was conducting his tests.
After extensive research, Languyeva was able to link Slivko to the different disappearances, and in December 1985, he was detained at his Stavropol residence. In January and February of 1986, he eventually guided the investigators to the corpses of six of his victims but was unable to find the first one.
In June 1986, he received a death sentence after being found guilty of seven murders, seven counts of sexual abuse, and seven counts of necrophilia. He then spent the following three years in the Novocherkassk prison on execution row. In a murder on September 16, 1989, he was put to death.
Personal Influence & Life
After realizing his inability to attract female attention, Anatoly Slivko’s younger sister, who had moved in with him in Stavropol, set up a meeting for him with a local girl called Lyudmila. He married her in 1963 despite being aware of his sexual orientation since he was a teenager.
Slivko claims that during the course of their lengthy marriage, which spanned 17 years, they had fewer than 12 sexual encounters. Nevertheless, he had two boys with her despite his sexual issues and disinterest in women.
Slivko, who appeared to lead an ordinary existence, changed his profession in 1971 to become a teacher. He eventually settled at a mining school in Shakhty, close to Rostov, after being compelled to move from school to school as a result of numerous complaints of indecent assaults on young children.
Estimated Net Worth
Unknown.
Trivia
When Anatoly Slivko was apprehended, he admitted to the detectives that none of his victims were older than 17 years old. He did this for a number of reasons, including the desire to relive the car accident he had in his early teens, but he also dreaded being overpowered by his victim’s physical prowess.