Anatoly Grigoryevich Maistruk (; 1950s – 1981/1982) was a Soviet serial killer who murdered at least eight men of Central Asian descent in Irkutsk and Voronezh Oblasts in 1981, most of whom he beheaded. His motive was supposedly hatred, since he had caught his girlfriend cheating on him with an Uzbekistani immigrant.
Although he initially confessed to 28 murders in total and was investigated for similar killings across the USSR, Maistruk was found guilty of his eight confirmed killings and sentenced to death - by the time the verdict was announced, however, he had hanged himself in the detention center.
Early life
Anatoly Grigoryevich Maistruk was born sometime circa the 1950s in the village of , Khmelnytskyi Oblast, UkSSR, the older of two sons born to Grigory and Anna Maistruk. Sometime during his youth, his father was imprisoned for collaborating with the Germans during World War II, due to which Maistruk and his younger brother Leonid were ostracized and bullied by their peers, who called them fascists. Due to this, Anatoly often had to defend his brother and engaged in fistfights, from which they developed a strong bond with one another.
In 1963, his mother was arrested for stealing food from her workplace and given an eight-year prison sentence - fearing that both of them would be sent to an orphanage, Anatoly took his brother and fled the village, wandering around various parts of the USSR and surviving on odd jobs. When he became of age, Maistruk enlisted in the Soviet Armed Forces, where he received special training in knife throwing and Sambo. After leaving the service, he resumed traveling between various parts of the USSR with Leonid.
Automobile accident
In 1974, Maistruk was working as a truck driver, driving a Kamaz-brand delivery truck. One day, while passing through a village in Krasnodar Krai, he accidentally struck and killed a young boy who was playing on a road just outside of the settlement. Mortified by the accident, he picked up the boy's body and carried it back to the village. Villagers soon gathered to see what was going on, and after hearing from one of the boy's playmates that the stranger had killed him, some of the residents almost lynched Maistruk, but were prevented members of the militsiya who had arrived at the scene.
Investigators soon established that the boy was struck while playing a game of courage with his friends, and that his death was a tragic accident. Maistruk was charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter, for which he was ordered to serve a four-year sentence at a local detention center. He was released two years early for good behavior, and thereafter moved to Ust-Ilimsk, in the Irkutsk Oblast, where he found work at a construction site for a new hydroelectric power plant.
Speculation and cheating incident
In order to make more money, Maistruk became a speculator - he would often sell cars such as Zhiguli and Moskvitch at a higher price, often bypassing Soviet regulation for purchasing automobiles. One report conducted after his arrest estimated that before the murders, he would buy a car for 7,000 rubles and later resell it for 14,000. Most of his clients were druzhinniks from the Central Asian part of the USSR, most often from states such as the Uzbek and Tajik SSR.
One day in early 1981, Maistruk and his girlfriend Anya had invited over a potential Uzbek client into their home over a cup of tea and some food. At one point, Maistruk left to buy some groceries, but when he returned, he found the Uzbek having sex with his girlfriend. Believing that she was being raped, he beat up the man and threw him out of his home - unbeknownst to him, Anya frequently had short-term relationships with his clients, and likely pretended to be the victim of rape to avoid trouble. This incident caused Maistruk to develop a fierce hatred of Central Asians, as he believed that they were all manipulators and liars.
Murders
Using his position in the car dealing business, he would often lure clients (usually in pairs of two or three) to isolated areas where he would then separate them and kill them one by one. This often involved either stabbing them with a knife or bludgeoning them with a hammer, with at least one victim being killed with the help of a throwing knife. Some of his known victims were decapitated while still alive, and all of them were left naked from the waist down.