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Their calculation failed. Detectives had already built a cast-iron case against all four of them and had no need of any confessions. It was this episode with Kostina that later became the single strand enabling a connection to be made between the gang and the essentially political process against Pichugin, Menatep and Nevzlin. The man chosen to be the link, as we already know, was Aleksey.
Let us take a closer look at the hideous nature of the gang's crimes and of their leader Korovnikov - a soulless, mindless monster driven by sordid and macabre desires. Into a car - out of town - rape - throttle - rip off a cross and a cheap ring - hide under branches. As soon as they tried to pull off something more complex, such as a housebreaking, they were caught.
This is a particular type of cut-throat, many times described in Russian literature. Men of this ilk were around in old Russia 200 years ago, and 300. Remember how in the film "My Friend Ivan Lapshin" Aleksey German played a similar character, who killed a butcher in the 30s? He chopped the guy up with an axe, all for a few miserable pennies. Compare him to Korovnikov. He grabbed a debtor, demanded a large amount of money, then lost control and brutally killed him - and stole from the body a 50 rouble cross on a chain.
So this was the man former FSB man Aleksey Pichugin chose as a hitman in a modern-day corporate conflict! But in this instance Korovnikov had not actually killed, he had just discussed a killing with Pichugin five years before.
On this evidence the case for the prosecution rests. Such is the barbaric world that lies behind the confident figure of Deputy Prosecutor-General Kolesnikov as he, like so many other mouthpieces of the state, condemns Yukos and its leaders on television. I sometimes think that criminal cases are invented solely for the purposes of this propaganda, not at all for the division of the spoils in which the cases against the company culminated. But I'm probably wrong on that ...
Chapter 4
The indictment
Unlike the remarkably self-confident Kolesnikov, the investigating officers had nothing to show the public. They spent an entire month after Pichugin's arrest working out how best to approach the case. As we already know, their problem was the feeble, or rather nonexistent, evidence.
The motive for Pichugin to kill the Gorins was concocted, routinely, ahead of the arrest. But from that point little headway was being made. Murder is in a different league from the tangled financial intrigues that they were planning to pin on Khodorkovskiy and his colleague Platon Lebedev, where the Procuracy General merely interpreted the Yukos management's conduct as criminal without properly understanding its substance. Pichugin's case was more difficult.
From the way the investigation was proceeding, the logic was that Aleksey was to play the starring role in all the cases against Yukos and its staff. So he was immediately charged with three attempted murders: of the Gorins, Kostina and of a premises manager at Yukos called Kolesov. The regime, with the Procuracy General doing its bidding, desperately need to prove the criminality of Yukos's top managers and co-owners to a sceptical outside world. This would head off any political fallout or damage to Putin's international prestige. And he certainly enjoyed prestige.
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