Ilya Gerasimenko was chatting with friends outside a supermarket when a bullet blasted through his skull. Gerasimenko, an 18-year-old student, was conscious long enough to see the gunman, a man named Denis Yevsyukov.
Yevsyukov killed two people that night in April and wounded seven in an unprovoked rampage that shocked Russia, where mass shootings are rare. The public seemed far less surprised, though, to learn of Yevsyukov’s occupation: He was a major in the police force and the chief of a Moscow precinct.
For many Russians, including top officials, Yevsyukov’s shootings have come to symbolize a systemic crisis in Russian law enforcement, making the issue of police criminality — already an ever-present, if largely unaddressed, fact of life in this country — almost impossible to ignore.
“Everyone thinks the police should protect civilians, but here this is not the case,” said Gerasimenko, who survived the attack, even though one bullet shattered his jaw and exited through the bridge of his nose, while another lodged close to his heart. “I can’t bear to even see them.”
After the shootings, Russian officials declared that they would move quickly to address the troubled Moscow police force, and President Dmitri Medvedev took the unusual step of firing Moscow’s police chief, Vladimir Pronin.
Several other high-ranking Moscow police officials were also fired. Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, whose ministry oversees the police, vowed to impose tougher psychological-health requirements on officers, among other measures.
But critics of the government say that the rot in law enforcement runs deep, and that the new measures hardly scratch the surface.
“The police have turned into an organization that has its own criminal interests, has its own criminal influence,” said Igor Trunov, a prominent human rights lawyer representing some of Yevsyukov’s victims, including Gerasimenko. “It differs from criminal groups in that police carry weapons legally.”
In most Western countries, Yevsyukov, 32, would be considered a rogue officer, but in Russia he is widely viewed as the unfortunate product of the broken police force to which he belonged.
Yevsyukov had a history of disciplinary problems, former colleagues told the Russian media, and last year he sprayed tear gas in a restaurant after becoming intoxicated and had to be forcibly removed from the premises. A month before the shootings, the police labor union accused him of abusing officers and appealed unsuccessfully to Pronin to fire him.
Nevertheless, Yevsyukov rose rapidly through the ranks, and some Russian news reports described him as a protege of Pronin, who shortly after the attacks praised the officer as “a good professional.”
“The more details from the biography of Yevsyukov that emerge, the more clearly you understand that this person is a quintessential example of the corruption and lawlessness of the police,” the commentator Yuri Bogomolov wrote in a column published on the Ria Novosti news agency’s Web site. “He is not a deviation from the norm, but the norm itself.”
Yevsyukov spent the evening before the shootings celebrating his birthday at a Moscow cafe, according to investigators. For reasons that are still unclear, Yevsyukov left the cafe intoxicated, went home and put his uniform jacket on over his civilian clothing. He also grabbed a Makarov 9mm pistol.
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