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The changing nature of murder in Russia
Social Science & Medicine 55 (2002) 1713–1724
The changing nature of murder in Russia Valeriy V. Chervyakova, Vladimir M. Shkolnikovb, William Alex Pridemorec, Martin McKeed,* a
Transnational Family Research Institute, ul. Akademika Korolyova, 8, 1-479, Moscow 129515, Russian Federation b Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Doberaner Str. 114, Rostock, D 18057, Germany c Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma, Kaufman Hall 329, Norman, OK 73019, USA d European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT, UK
Abstract The death rate from homicide in Russia increased rapidly during the 1990s. It is now about 20 times higher than in western Europe and is among the highest recorded anywhere in the world. However, this issue has received little attention so far from public health researchers or policymakers. This paper describes the changing nature of homicide during the 1990s in Russia as a whole and, in more detail, in the Udmurt Republic. The study uses data from three sources: routine mortality data for Russia from 1970 to 1999; statistics on criminal investigations and convictions in Russia between 1990 and 1997; and an in-depth study of homicide trial records in the Udmurt Republic in 1989–1991 and 1998. Deaths from homicide increased between 1970 and 1985, falling slightly during the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign and then resuming their increase until 1994. Another fall in the late 1990s was arrested in 1998, with an increase in 1999. By 1999 the age standardised homicide death rate in Russia was 81% higher than in 1990, an increase almost twice that of all causes of death combined. Throughout the 1990s about 10% of those convicted of homicide were female. Of those homicides leading to convictions in the Udmurt Republic, 71% of those killed by males were male, as were 76% of those killed by females. Killings of women by men often involved sexual assaults. In Russia as a whole, about 80% of those convicted of homicide were reported to be under the influence of alcohol at the time. In the Udmurt Republic, where data on both offender and victim were available, victims were also commonly intoxicated. The nature of homicide in Russia has changed considerably in less than a decade, with many more now involving aggravating circumstances, such as murder to conceal another crime, in association with robbery or rape, or by a group of people. Although still a small proportion of the total convicted, the number of murders by hired killers is also on the rise. The characteristics of those convicted of homicide have also changed during the 1990s. They are now younger, less likely to have previous convictions, and to have a more diverse range of educational levels. The previous urban–rural gap, with higher levels in rural areas, has also narrowed. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Homicide; Mortality; Violence; Russia
Introduction Research undertaken during the 1990s provided important new insights into the reasons for what is *Corresponding author. Fax: +44-20-7580-8183. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. McKee).
currently a 12-yr gap in life expectancy at birth between Russians and western Europeans. Examples include studies on cardiovascular disease (Britton & McKee, 2000), injuries (ECOHOST, 1998), certain infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (Farmer, Kononets, & Vorisov, 1999), and the impact of medical care (Bojan, Hadju, & Belicza, 1991). Other causes of premature
0277-9536/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 7 7 - 9 5 3 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 2 9 9 - 4
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death have received less attention. Homicide is one such example. In 1999, approximately 28,000 men and 10,000 women died from homicide in Russia. Although homicide accounts for only about 2% of all deaths in Russia, comparison of crude death rates understates its impact. Since the average age of homicide victims is much lower than for most other causes of death, it has a disproportionate impact on the number of years of life lost (about 6% for males and about 4% for females in 1999). Further, homicide underwent one of the steepest increases among all causes of death during Russia’s mortality crisis in the 1990s. The rate more than tripled from 1988 to 1994, and the present levels of homicide place Russia among the most violent nations of the world. Although mortality from many chronic diseases in Russia is comparable to that in the countries of eastern Europe, homicide mortality in Russia is much higher than in these nations, and the homicide victimisation rate in Russia in the late 1990s was about 20 times higher than in most of the European Union nations. Further, a focus on mortality provides only a partial picture of the societal impact of homicide. Increased levels of violence have an adverse effect on a community’s social cohesion, causing uncertainty and fear and damaging the prospects for economic development. Not only does the victim lose his or her life but the victim’s family suffers psychological pain, as well as probable hardship. The consequences for the perpetrator and his or her family will also be severe. The appalling conditions in most Russian prisons are increasingly recognised as contributing to the growing rates of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, meaning a de facto death sentence for many of those incarcerated (Stern, 1999). This paper focuses primarily on the changing nature of murder and of homicide offenders in Russia during the last decade. Research on the causes of mortality more usually centres on the people who die. Such analyses are also important in relation to homicide, but a full understanding of changes in mortality from this cause of death must also take into account the characteristics of offenders. The aim of the present study is to find out whether the striking rise in homicide mortality in Russia since the end of the Soviet era is associated with changes in the characteristics of offenders and in the characteristics of the nature of the homicide event. After a brief overview of principal trends and patterns of mortality from homicide in Russia we undertake analyses at two levels. The first considers statistical data collected by the Russian Ministry of Justice on the characteristics of homicides resulting in a conviction from 1990 to 1997. The second looks in more detail at a single area by means of an in-depth study of court and
police records from one Russian region, the Udmurt Republic (Fig. 1). The analyses presented here are part of a larger study exploring a range of causes of premature mortality at working ages in Russia (Shkolnikov & Chervyakov, 2000). The Udmurt Republic was selected for in-depth study because it is a typical industrial region of Russia (The Udmurt Republic, 2001). It has a population of about 1.6 million people and its overall mortality is very close to that of Russia as a whole, with life expectancy at birth in 1998 61.7 for men and 73.4 for women vs. 61.3 and 72.9 in Russia, respectively.
Data and methods Our consideration of long-term trends and age patterns of mortality from homicide in Russia is based on time-series mortality data by cause-of-death constructed by French and Russian researchers on the basis of routine vital statistics from the the State Committee of Statistics of the Russian Federation (Goskomstat). It includes deaths by sex, age, cause-ofdeath and 5-yr age group since 1965 (Mesl!e, Shkolnikov, Hertrich, & Vallin, 1996). Mortality data are commonly considered by criminologists to be a better measure of homicide than crime data (LaFree, 1999; Rokaw, Mercy, & Smith, 1990), especially when making international comparisons (Lynch, 1995) and in particular when undertaking research on homicide in Russia (Pridemore, 2000). In Russia, even though crime data include attempted homicides, they show a significantly lower number of homicides than mortality data. In the second half of the 1990s, the difference in annual counts was about 24–27%. A part of this difference can be attributed to a difference in registration procedures. Medical registration of homicide as a cause of death is based on reports by forensic experts. If a forensic expert states that someone’s death was caused by purposeful violence of other people or by a purposeful legal action, then this diagnosis is to be reflected in medical death certificate and in vital statistics. However, the judicial system counts homicides on the basis of investigations by police departments and prosecutor’s offices. Theoretically, the initial diagnosis of homicide in the medical death certificate can be replaced by another cause of death if a further investigation shows that homicide has not taken place, but this rarely occurs in practice. On the other hand, over the course of the 1990s the Russian police were becoming increasingly overloaded by an explosive growth of serious crimes demanding criminal investigation. The overworked and underpaid police force may simply be unable to investigate each case of violent death.
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Fig. 1. Map of Russia showing the Udmurt Republic.
Thus, while there are some reasons for a difference between the two, such a large disparity between the number of homicides reported by the police and mortality data is difficult to explain and deserves further attention. Indeed the true difference may be even greater. A disproportionate increase during the 1990s in mortality from unspecified violence (i.e. it is unknown whether the injury was purposely caused or an accident) could suggest that mortality from homicide may be increasingly under-recorded in vital statistics. The second principal source of data is a report prepared by Professor A.S. Mikhlin in 1999 (Mikhlin, 1999). This drew on statistical publications of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), such as Prestupnost i Pravonarusheniya (‘‘Crime and offences’’) and Sostoyaniye Prestupnosti v Rossii (‘‘The state of crime in Russia’’), as well as unpublished statistical tables from the Russian Ministry of Justice that contain information on persons convicted of homicide in Russia from 1990 to 1997. For an in-depth comparison of homicides in the Udmurt Republic in the late 1980s and in the second
half of the 1990s, we use information drawn from verdicts of the Udmurt courts handed down in 1989– 1991 (101 verdicts, 112 offenders, 142 victims) and 1998 (124 verdicts, 182 offenders, 174 victims). These records were obtained from the archives of the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic, and we employ two types of information drawn from them. The first set of data is taken from the standard Ministry of Justice’s ‘‘Statistical card of the accused.’’ Since 1990 this has been supplemented in the Udmurt Republic by several additional types of information, including the characteristics of the offender, the relationship between the offender and the victim, and the circumstances of the homicide event. Second, a brief 1–2 page narrative was extracted for each case from the descriptive part of verdict, describing the events leading up to the homicide as determined by offenders, witnesses, and police reports. To ensure reliability and comparability, all the court data were collected by a single person, who is a secretary of the Court, and then checked for judicial accuracy and consistency with the source files by an experienced judge of the Court.
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Results Trends and patterns of the Russian mortality from homicide Fig. 2 shows trends in the standardised death rate (SDR) for homicide since 1970 for Russia and since 1990 for the Udmurt Republic. During the period of gradual increase between 1970 and 1985, mortality from homicide increased by 47% for men and by 41% for women. By the end of the Brezhnev era, Russia had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. In 1985–1987 there was an unexpected short-term drop, coinciding with Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. In 1988, however, the rise in homicide resumed and by 1990 its level was higher than before the anti-alcohol campaign. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the beginning of the painful economic reforms of 1992, homicide mortality increased steeply to a peak of more than 32 per 100,000 in 1994 (54 per 100,000 for men and 15 per 100,000 for women). The homicide rate in Russia is now among the world’s highest, placing it below only South Africa and Colombia (Butchart & Peden, 1997, Chap 25; World Health Organization, 1995, 2001). In the Udmurt Republic, the rise in SDRs for homicide in the early 1990s was even greater than in Russia as a whole, peaking at 63 per 100,000 for men and 20 per 100,000 for women. The homicide rate then decreased and levelled off until the final years of the decade, when it again began to rise slightly. The direction of change in homicides throughout this period was the same as for mortality in general, trends that were driven largely by causes associated with alcohol consumption (Shkolnikov, McKee, & Leon, 2001).
In the Udmurt Republic this decrease was steeper than in Russia as a whole. In 1999, the SDR for homicide in Russia and the Udmurt Republic was 42 and 43 per 100,000 for men and 11 and 13 per 100,000 for women, respectively. The crude death rate by homicide in the Udmurt Republic for the total population was 26.1 per 100,000 in 1999. Overall, the increase in homicide over the 1990s was one of the largest of any cause of death. The all-Russia SDR for homicide in 1999 was 81% higher than in 1990, while the rise in SDRs for all external causes was 46%, and only 16% for all causes combined. A comparison of the age curves of mortality from homicide in Russia and the USA, another country with a very high rate of homicide, (not shown here) indicates a considerable difference in the population affected in the two countries. In the USA, homicide victimisation peaks in the early 20s. In Russia, the homicide victimisation rate peaks in the early to mid-30s and remains at almost the same level up to age 50. Trends in convictions for homicide Table 1 shows that, from 1990 to 1997, the number of people convicted of a purposeful killing of some type increased in Russia by 118%. This figure, based on Ministry of Justice data, is higher than the proportional increase in the age-standardised homicide mortality rate from vital statistics (68%). Thus, the ratio of convictions in judicial statistics to homicides in vital statistics has increased from 47% to 64%. These figures must be interpreted with care, however, as obviously more than one person may be convicted of a single homicide, one person may commit more than a single murder, and the years in which the death and conviction took place may not be the same. The increase in convictions for homicide in Russia was considerably greater than that for all crimes, which was 88% in the same period. Characteristics of those convicted of homicide
Fig. 2. Trends in mortality from homicide in Russia (1980– 1999) and the Udmurt Republic (1990–1999).
Gender In Russia, the proportion of those convicted of homicide who are female has remained relatively stable during the last decade, rising only slightly from 9.6% in 1990 to 10.7% in 1997. National statistics do not link the sex of the murderer and the victim. In the Udmurt Republic in 1998, however, 71% of those killed by males convicted of homicide were males, and 29% were females. Among females convicted of homicide, 76% of victims were male and 25% females. Murders committed by women against men commonly took place in domestic circumstances and often involved alcohol. Murders committed by men against
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V.V. Chervyakov et al. / Social Science & Medicine 55 (2002) 1713–1724 Table 1 Numbers of convictions for homicide in Russia in 1990 and 1997 Type of crime
Years 1990
Homicide Murder under aggravating circumstances Manslaughter while in a state of impaired responsibility Other attempts on someone’s life Total All crimes a
1997
Article of the criminal code of the RSFSRa
Number of convicted
Article of the criminal code of the Russian Federation
Number of convicted
103 102 104
7457 2099 734
105, part 1 105, part 2 107
13,241 4529
a
106–110
4704 22,474 1,013,431
105–107
10,290 537,643
a
Numbers were not given in the original statistical forms. Deaths due to legal action are not included. Source: Assembled by Mikhlin (1999) from the original statistical forms.
women often involved sexual violence in addition to the presence of alcohol. Brief narrative descriptions of two characteristic cases are given below (exact dates, names of people, and locations have been removed).
After inserting an object in her vagina, S and D weighed down BB’s clothes with sand and threw her body in the water. S and D ran away from the place of the crime.
Case 1
Case 2
In August 1997, S and D were with their friends V, B, and P (all male), drinking hard spirits and consuming drugs. At between 8 and 9 p.m. they went to the discotheque in the city park. About 10 p.m. S met a young woman, BB, at the disco. She was drunk. S then decided to seek assistance to rob and rape BB. With this in mind, S left with BB and proposed to D, B, V, and P that they rape BB and steal her belongings. Taking advantage of BB’s intoxicated state and her inability to resist actively, S and D took her to a concealed place near a lake. B and V followed them. When they arrived there, S and D demanded that BB have sexual intercourse with them. BB refused. In order to suppress BB’s will to resist, S and D began to beat and kick her with their hands and feet. This caused BB to fall to the ground. S and D, acting in concert, continued to beat BB while she was lying on the ground. They demanded that she have sex with them. When BB was completely unable to protect herself, S and D undressed and raped her. BB expressed her intention to inform the police about the crime and that her brother is a policeman. Afraid of being caught and in order to hide their crime, S and D decided to murder BB. S took a belt, approached BB from behind (she was sitting on the ground) and strangled her until she stopped moving.
T lived with her husband V and their two children. V frequently drank heavily, leading to family quarrels and a hostile marital relationship. One evening in March of 1997, V, while intoxicated, insulted his wife for no apparent reason in the presence of P, her sister, who was visiting. A quarrel ensued and P, who disliked V because of his harsh treatment of her sister murdered V in concert with T. T held her husband’s legs as he lay on the bed, and P attempted to strangle him with a belt. The belt tore. The two women then strangled the victim with a pair of tights by drawing them around his neck. They continued until V ceased to show signs of life. Age Table 2 shows that those convicted of homicide in Russia are most often between 30 and 39 yr old, though the mean age of convicted homicide offenders fell by more than 10% between 1990 and 1997, from 38.7 to 34.6 yr old. In spite of the decline, the average age of Russian homicide offenders is significantly higher than in the USA (Pridemore, 2000). In the USA in 1997, more than 55% of homicide offenders were under age 25 (Federal Bureau of Investigations 1998), whereas in Russia the equivalent proportion was only half of this (27%). In addition, those convicted of homicide in Russia were older, on average, than those convicted for all crimes together.
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Table 2 Percentage distribution by age of those convicted of homicide in Russia in 1990 and 1997a Type of crime
Russia Homicide All crimes a
Year
1990 1997 1990 1997
Age groups (yr) 14–17
18–24
25–29
30–39
40 +
3.6 5.8 14.7 11.9
14.5 21.6 22.9 27.5
10.3 14.3 20.3 15.2
48.1 46.6 36.4 40.4
23.5 11.7 5.7 5.0
Total
Mean age
100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
38.7 34.6 30.6 30.9
Source: Assembled by Mikhlin (1998) from original statistical forms.
Education Detailed information on educational attainment of those convicted was obtained from Ministry of Justice records in the Udmurt Republic. Fig. 3 shows that in the early 1990s, most of those convicted of homicide had completed a secondary education only. By the late 1990s, however, this group had diminished substantially and had been joined by an increasing number of people with either incomplete secondary education or who had undergone specialised education (typically vocational training not leading to a university degree). There are no data for Russia as a whole for the years around 1990, but in 1997 the educational attainment of the homicide offenders was very similar to that in the Udmurt Republic: 34.5% had less than a secondary education, 48% had a secondary education, 14.5% had a specialised secondary education, and 3% had at least some college education. It is unlikely that the change in educational structure of homicide offenders can be attributed to changing
educational composition of the general population, since the latter did not undergo substantial changes between the census of 1989 and the micro-census of 1994 (Goskomstat, 1995). Location It is now apparent that the increase in mortality in the early 1990s in Russia was greatest in cities, where all causes of violent death, including homicide, increased rapidly (Walberg, McKee, Shkolnikov, Chenet, & Leon, 1998). Fig. 4 employs annual mortality data from the Udmurt Republic to reveal the evolving pattern during the 1990s. In the Udmurt Republic, death rates from homicide at age 15–54 were lower in urban than in rural areas in the mid-1980s, but by the mid-1990s, when homicide rates peaked, this pattern had reversed. Information from court files on the place of permanent residence of offenders shows that the proportion of murders leading to convictions of people living outside the Udmurt Republic increased from 0.9% in 1989–1991 to 6% in 1998. In addition, 1.1% of convicted offenders were homeless. For all of Russia in 1997, these figures are somewhat higher: 10% and 4.5%, respectively. This difference is probably due to the fact that the Udmurt Republic is a region where migratory exchange with other regions is relatively low. Characteristics of the homicide event
Fig. 3. Educational attainment of those convicted of homicide in the Udmurt Republic.
Means of assault Soviet and Russian mortality statistics have always been based on broad diagnostic categories, where all homicides have been combined in one item. In 1999, however, detailed ICD-10 codes were included in individual death records in many regions of the Russian Federation. We had such records for the first half of the year 1999 for the Udmurt Republic, giving us an opportunity to look at the distribution of victims by means of assault. Among the 215 homicide deaths officially registered during this time, the greatest number was committed by the use of a sharp object 45.1%, 25.1%were committed by unspecified means, 13.5%
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Fig. 4. Mortality rates from homicide at ages 15–54 per 100,000 by location, the Udmurt Republic. Source: Trudosposobnoye Naseleniye Udmurtkoi Respubliki. Chislennost’ i sostojanije zdorov’ja. (The size and health condition of the working population of the Udmurt Republic)FIzhevsk: Ekspertiza, 1998, s. 48–49.
were committed by a blunt object, 7.4%were committed by strangulation, and 4.7% were committed by firearms. Unfortunately, detailed classification of deaths according to the ICD-10 is not available for Russia as a whole, and thus we cannot see to what extent the Udmurt pattern can be considered as typical. Table 3 presents means of assault from another angle by classifying the use of different methods by offenders convicted in Udmurt Republic in 1989–1991 and 1998. Homicide with the use of a sharp object was the modal category of weapon chosen in both 1989–1991 and 1998. However, between 1989 and 1991 and 1998 the proportion of all homicides in which a sharp object was employed decreased from about 60% to about 40%, while the use of a blunt object and strangulation by offenders substantially increased. The percentage of convicted offenders using firearms appears to be stable, constituting about one tenth of all offenders convicted both in 1989–1991 and in 1998. It is not clear to what extent the latter observation reflects the general Russian situation. For example, one might think that firearms might be used relatively more frequently in metropolitan areas like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Samara or in regions situated close to the Chechen war. Acting alone or in concert? The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation identifies crimes committed with the help of accomplices as especially serious. In Russia as a whole in 1990, only 11.9% of convicted homicide offenders acted with the help of accomplices, and there were no cases involving organised gangs. By 1997, 20.5% of all murders leading to convictions were committed with the help of accomplices, with 4.9% of murders leading to convictions shown to be committed by organised gangs. Fig. 5 shows that homicides involving more than one offender have increased faster in the Udmurt Republic than in Russia as a whole, and they now account for more than half of all homicides leading to convictions.
Table 3 Percentage distribution of homicide offenders by primary means of assault: Udmurt Republic, convictions of 1989–1991 and 1998a
All means Hanging, strangulation, suffocation Firearms Sharp object Blunt object Bodily force Other a
1989–1991
1998
100.0 9.8
100.0 20.3
(5.0–16.8) 9.8 (5.0–16.8) 57.1 (47.4–66.5) 11.6 (6.3–19.0) 4.5 (1.5–10.1) 7.1 (3.1–13.6)
(14.7–26.9) 10.4 (6.4–15.8) 37.9 (30.8–45.4) 21.4 (15.7–28.1) 6.6 (3.5–11.2) 3.3 (1.2–7.0)
Ninety-five percent confidence limits are given in brackets.
Fig. 5. Number of offenders involved in homicides leading to convictions in the Udmurt Republic.
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Aggravating circumstances Murders with aggravating circumstances are considered as representing a special danger for Russian society. In the Russian Criminal Code of 1990 these were defined by Article 102 (Article 103 for murders without aggravating circumstances). In the new Criminal Code of 1997 they are defined by Article 105, Part 1 (Article 105, Part 2 for non-aggravated murders). According to official statistics, the absolute number of offenders convicted for murders with aggravating circumstances in Russia more than doubled between 1990 and 1997, while their proportion among all convictions for murder increased from 20% to 25% (Table 1) during this same period. These figures might, however, be influenced by substantial changes in legal and judicial practices during this period. Changes in the number of people convicted for each crime and the degree of individual culpability in the murder are also relevant. Therefore, in respect of analyses of aggravating circumstances, it is more appropriate to relate figures to murder cases rather than murderers. The detailed information about cases available from court files in the Udmurt Republic makes it possible to ascertain the extent to which circumstances aggravating homicides changed in the 1990s, by applying the same criteria to murders committed in 1989–1991 and 1998. Table 4 shows that the overall proportion of homicides
with aggravating circumstances increased markedly during the 1990s, with several types of circumstances showing steep increases. For example, the proportion of murders of person(s) in a helpless state increased almost 13 times, those committed in complicity with others increased more than 4 times, those committed for mercenary motives increased 2.3 times, and those committed either in order to conceal other crimes or attended by a rape doubled. In addition to information on aggravating circumstances, Udmurt files show a new phenomenon in the Russian criminal world. These are murders by hired killers, which accounted for 3.3% of all those convicted of first-degree homicide by the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic in 1998. It should be noted that the absolute number of these types of murders is likely to be undercounted, since murders for hire are usually committed by more professional and skilful offenders and thus are less likely to result in a conviction. The role of alcohol Alcohol intoxication at the time of the offence is considered an additional aggravating circumstance in Russia. In the country as a whole, the percentage of those convicted of homicide who were reported (according to data from police investigations) to have been
Table 4 Aggravating circumstances associated with murders in the Udmurt Republic in 1989–1991 and 1998 (in percent)a (95% Confidence intervals) Aggravating circumstances of a murder
Murder of two or more persons Murder of a person (or his/her relatives) in connection with performance by this person of his/her professional or public duty Murder of a person whose helpless state was obvious to the murderer. as well as a murder accompanying kidnapping or taking hostage(s) Murder of a woman whose pregnancy was obvious to the murderer Murder committed with special cruelty Murder committed by a method that places at risk people other than the intended victim Murder committed by a group, conspiracy by a group, or committed by an organised group Murder committed for mercenary motives or for a payment, as well as a murder accompanying armed robbery, extortion or banditry Murder for hooliganb motives Murder committed in order to conceal another crime or facilitate it as well as a murder accompanying a rape or other sexual violence Repeated murder a
Year 1989–1991
1998
19.6 (12.7–28.2) 7.1 (3.1–13.6)
19.8 (14.3–26.3) 1.6 (0.3–4.7)
1.8 (0.2–6.3)
23.1 (17.7–29.9)
0.9 (0.0–4.9) 28.6 (20.4–37.8) 0.9 (0.0–4.9)
0.5 (0.0–3.0) 23.6 (17.7–30.5) 4.4 (1.9–8.5)
12.5 (7.0–20.0)
51.6 (44.1–59.1)
13.4 (7.7–21.1)
30.8 (24.2–38.0)
15.2 (9.1–23.2) 18.8 (12.0–27.2)
9.9 (6.0–15.2) 38.5 (31.5–45.9)
19.6 (12.7–28.2)
12.1 (7.7–17.7)
Categories in the table are not mutually exclusive. The total of each of the columns exceeds 100% since each murder might have more than one aggravating circumstance. b Hooliganism is defined as purposeful actions, violating civil order and expressing disrespect to the commune/society and to moral rules. In the Russian Criminal Code hooliganism implies violent actions characterised by marked cynicism and audacity towards other people or representatives of authority.
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intoxicated at the time of the offence has declined between 1990 and 1998–1999 from about 80% to about 70% (Nemtsov, 2001, p. 35). In 1990, the percentage of chronic alcoholics ordered to undergo compulsory treatment of alcoholism among those convicted for murder in Russia was 20.4% in 1990 and 8.4% in 1997 (Mikhlin, 1998). The latter, however, can be attributed (at least partly) to reduced financing of the system for compulsory treatment of alcoholism. Data from the Udmurt case transcripts provides additional information on the extent of intoxication of those convicted of homicide. In 1989–91, 84% of homicide offenders were intoxicated with alcohol at the time of their offence, while in 1998 this figure was 67%. Although the proportion of intoxicated offenders has declined in the Udmurt Republic, its level remains high and the absolute annual number of intoxicated offenders has grown. The narrative description of cases in the Udmurt Republic shows that, in the majority of cases, both the offender and the victim were under the influence of alcohol at the moment of crime. Recidivism Table 5 shows that in 1989–1991, 62% of those convicted of homicide in the Udmurt Republic had previous felony convictions. In most cases, homicide offenders had more than one conviction on record, and 35% had 3 or more prior convictions. By 1998 the situation had changed markedly, with only 32% of convicted homicide offenders in the Udmurt Republic having no previous convictions. In Russia as a whole in 1997, the proportion is even lower (27%). The difference might be due to the fact that there are prisons and penal camps within the territory of the Udmurt Republic from which convicted offenders, who may have come originally from other regions, are released back into the local population. In any case, the majority of homicides in the late 1990s were committed by people with no previous criminal history. In the Udmurt Republic, of those convicted in the early 1990s who had previous convictions, the overwhelming majority (90%) had completed their previous sentences when they committed the homicide. Among the remaining convicted offenders slightly under half committed murder while released on parole, and the remainder offended while still in prison. By 1998, many of those who had previously been convicted were still on parole (19%) or serving a suspended sentence (16%) when they committed their murder.
Discussion The various forms of homicide data discussed here are unique. Due to restrictions by the Soviet government,
Table 5 Percentage of those convicted of murder in the Udmurt Republic with prior felony convictions, 1989–1991 and 1998 Number of previous convictions
None One Two Three Four and more
Percentage 1989–1991
1998
38.4 (29.4–48.1) 14.3 (8.4–21.1) 13.3 (7.7–21.1) 10.8 (5.7–18.0) 23.0 (16.5–33.1)
59.8 (52.3–67.1) 25.2 (19.1–32.2) 9.9 (6.0–15.2) 2.7 (0.9–6.3) 2.4 (0.6–5.5)
crime data of any sort were rarely made public in Russia until the 1990s (Butler, 1992; Connor, 1973). Falsification of data related to crime and justice was common during the Soviet era, and public reports about crime were invariably vague and often misleading. Thanks to the increasing transparency, new research has begun to appear on violence in Russia (Chenet, Leon, McKee, & Vassin, 1998; Gondolf & Shestakov, 1997; Goskomstat, 1995; Pridemore, 2001). Of great importance for this study, the recognition of the seriousness of the situation on the behalf of Udmurt authorities, and thus their subsequent co-operation, has allowed the authors the opportunity to obtain detailed information about homicide in the region. Although death rates from homicide in Russia have declined from their peak in 1994, as have overall death rates, the level remains much higher than before the break up of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the proportionate increase relative to the 1980s is among the highest for any cause of death. In spite of this and its severe personal and social consequences, homicide in Russia has received little scholarly attention from those who commonly study social structure and violence, such as public health researchers and sociologists. This paper begins to redress this imbalance. It is of course necessary to consider the validity of these data when carrying out this type of research. Other empirical work has shown that Russian mortality data are of generally high quality (Leon et al., 1997), and with few exceptions, such as the precision of cancer diagnosis among the elderly in rural areas (Shkolnikov, et al., 1999), have remained so since 1990. One possible criticism is that the increase in homicide mortality may appear greater than it reallyis because of underrecording during the Soviet period. This has been the subject of a previous study, which concluded that, at least in the Slavic republics of the Soviet Union, the data
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were valid, with no pressure to distort them (Wasserman & Varnik, 1998). The present study employs additional sources of original data from court and police records that have specific limitations, as well. For example, the MVD and Ministry of Justice obviously only know and can report information about offenders that have been arrested. Offenders arrested (and subsequently convicted) for homicide are likely to be different in several ways from those not arrested, and are thus not representative of all offenders. Further, the court records examined here are homicide cases stored in the archives of the Udmurt Supreme Court. Theoretically, this set of cases should be complete or nearly complete. But it is possible that some cases have been dealt with elsewhere and those on which information is available are not representative of all homicides. We were unable to compare them with a complete set of data on cases processed by lower courts in the Udmurt Republic in the relevant years. Even with these limitations, however, it would be unwise to disregard these unique data. They provide us with a valuable first glimpse at the serious problem of lethal violence in Russia and the Udmurt Republic and allow us the opportunity to examine its evolving nature. This study demonstrates how homicide in Russia has changed in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, the homicide rate in the late 1990s was nearly double what it was at the beginning of the decade. Given the increased levels of poverty and social disorganisation in Russia during the transition, this is not surprising. Studies of violence elsewhere have consistently shown a positive relationship between homicide rates and the proportion of the population living in poverty (Sampsen and Lauritsen, 1994) and a negative relationship between homicide and social cohesion (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). Initial research in Russia yields similar results (Pridemore, 2000). There is also evidence from elsewhere that homicides are more common in areas with greater income inequality (Kawachi, Kennedy, & Wilkinson, 1999; Szwarcwald, Bastos, Viacava, & de Andrade, 1999), and the level of income inequality in Russia increased greatly during the 1990s. Other parts of the world that have undergone a major political transition, such as South Africa, have seen similar increases (Wigton, 1999). The characteristics of the homicide event and of those committing murder have changed. On average, homicide offenders are younger and less criminally experienced than their counterparts a decade ago. Further, the urban–rural gap in mortality from homicide diminished during the period under study. The educational level of offenders has also undergone a curious change, with both those with less than a secondary education and those with a specialised secondary education now representing a larger proportion of homicide offenders
than before. In general, these observations suggest that homicide offenders have become a more socially diverse group. The newly unemployed or newly poor have probably joined a formerly selected group of criminally experienced offenders. Alcohol continues to play a very important role, with over four in every five Russians convicted of homicide reported as being in a state of intoxication when the offence was committed. In a majority of cases, victims of homicide are also often intoxicated at the time of the murder. The importance of alcohol in the genesis of homicide and non-lethal violent injury has been welldocumented (Hougen, Rogde, & Poulsen, 1999; Macdonald, Wells, Giesbrecht, & Cherpitel, 1999). Some of the decrease in the percentage of offenders who were intoxicated between the early 1990s and 1998 might be due to a rise in premeditated murderers committed by groups of people. Finally, the proportion of homicides carried out by more than one offender and the proportion of homicides committed under aggravating circumstances have risen since the early 1990s. Similarly, murder for hire has become an increasing problem, as has premeditated murder carried out by organised gangs, though these murders still represent a small proportion of the overall total. Homicide is an important preventable cause of mortality in Russia and thus is a legitimate subject for attention of the public health community. In some parts of the health policy community in Russia there is a view that little can be done to address the high levels of premature mortality in the face of continuing economic problems and, by implication, that health will improve when economic recovery takes place (Tkatchenko, McKee, & Tsouros, 2000). Economic development will not automatically lead to a fall in rates of homicide. In the period from the 1960s to the 1980s there was no obvious association between economic circumstances and homicide rates. Furthermore, despite its much greater affluence, the level of homicide in the United States is comparable to that in Russia and has been for over 30 yr (Pridemore, 2001). Instead, there is a need to address the climate of hopelessness that faces so many Russians and to change a culture in which extreme violence is so often seen as a way of resolving relatively minor problems. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this study is that behaviour that once was confined to those on the margins of society is now spreading more widely, with long term consequences for attempts to establish the rule of law in Russia. There are no easy answers and the first step must be to obtain a much better understanding of the nature of the problem. This demands an interdisciplinary approach and a recognition that effective policies will require interventions that span many different sectors of society.
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Acknowledgements A core part of this study was completed within the framework of the UNDP/Moscow project on ‘‘Policies for the Control of the Transition’s Mortality Crisis’’ (project RUS/98/G51). MM’s work in Russia is funded by the UK Department for International Development. However DfID can take no responsibility for the views expressed. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Yu.V.Sukhanov, Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic, our consultants Professor A.S. Mikhlin, Academy of the MVD in Moscow, and E.E. Stekh, former judge of the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic, for their valuable help. We are also grateful to Mrs. I. Cheredinova, secretary of court in Izhevsk, who has extracted all narrative descriptions of homicides from very long court files.
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The changing nature of murder in Russia Valeriy V. Chervyakova, Vladimir M. Shkolnikovb, William Alex Pridemorec, Martin McKeed,* a
Transnational Family Research Institute, ul. Akademika Korolyova, 8, 1-479, Moscow 129515, Russian Federation b Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Doberaner Str. 114, Rostock, D 18057, Germany c Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma, Kaufman Hall 329, Norman, OK 73019, USA d European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT, UK
Abstract The death rate from homicide in Russia increased rapidly during the 1990s. It is now about 20 times higher than in western Europe and is among the highest recorded anywhere in the world. However, this issue has received little attention so far from public health researchers or policymakers. This paper describes the changing nature of homicide during the 1990s in Russia as a whole and, in more detail, in the Udmurt Republic. The study uses data from three sources: routine mortality data for Russia from 1970 to 1999; statistics on criminal investigations and convictions in Russia between 1990 and 1997; and an in-depth study of homicide trial records in the Udmurt Republic in 1989–1991 and 1998. Deaths from homicide increased between 1970 and 1985, falling slightly during the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign and then resuming their increase until 1994. Another fall in the late 1990s was arrested in 1998, with an increase in 1999. By 1999 the age standardised homicide death rate in Russia was 81% higher than in 1990, an increase almost twice that of all causes of death combined. Throughout the 1990s about 10% of those convicted of homicide were female. Of those homicides leading to convictions in the Udmurt Republic, 71% of those killed by males were male, as were 76% of those killed by females. Killings of women by men often involved sexual assaults. In Russia as a whole, about 80% of those convicted of homicide were reported to be under the influence of alcohol at the time. In the Udmurt Republic, where data on both offender and victim were available, victims were also commonly intoxicated. The nature of homicide in Russia has changed considerably in less than a decade, with many more now involving aggravating circumstances, such as murder to conceal another crime, in association with robbery or rape, or by a group of people. Although still a small proportion of the total convicted, the number of murders by hired killers is also on the rise. The characteristics of those convicted of homicide have also changed during the 1990s. They are now younger, less likely to have previous convictions, and to have a more diverse range of educational levels. The previous urban–rural gap, with higher levels in rural areas, has also narrowed. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Homicide; Mortality; Violence; Russia
Introduction Research undertaken during the 1990s provided important new insights into the reasons for what is *Corresponding author. Fax: +44-20-7580-8183. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. McKee).
currently a 12-yr gap in life expectancy at birth between Russians and western Europeans. Examples include studies on cardiovascular disease (Britton & McKee, 2000), injuries (ECOHOST, 1998), certain infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (Farmer, Kononets, & Vorisov, 1999), and the impact of medical care (Bojan, Hadju, & Belicza, 1991). Other causes of premature
0277-9536/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 7 7 - 9 5 3 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 2 9 9 - 4
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death have received less attention. Homicide is one such example. In 1999, approximately 28,000 men and 10,000 women died from homicide in Russia. Although homicide accounts for only about 2% of all deaths in Russia, comparison of crude death rates understates its impact. Since the average age of homicide victims is much lower than for most other causes of death, it has a disproportionate impact on the number of years of life lost (about 6% for males and about 4% for females in 1999). Further, homicide underwent one of the steepest increases among all causes of death during Russia’s mortality crisis in the 1990s. The rate more than tripled from 1988 to 1994, and the present levels of homicide place Russia among the most violent nations of the world. Although mortality from many chronic diseases in Russia is comparable to that in the countries of eastern Europe, homicide mortality in Russia is much higher than in these nations, and the homicide victimisation rate in Russia in the late 1990s was about 20 times higher than in most of the European Union nations. Further, a focus on mortality provides only a partial picture of the societal impact of homicide. Increased levels of violence have an adverse effect on a community’s social cohesion, causing uncertainty and fear and damaging the prospects for economic development. Not only does the victim lose his or her life but the victim’s family suffers psychological pain, as well as probable hardship. The consequences for the perpetrator and his or her family will also be severe. The appalling conditions in most Russian prisons are increasingly recognised as contributing to the growing rates of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, meaning a de facto death sentence for many of those incarcerated (Stern, 1999). This paper focuses primarily on the changing nature of murder and of homicide offenders in Russia during the last decade. Research on the causes of mortality more usually centres on the people who die. Such analyses are also important in relation to homicide, but a full understanding of changes in mortality from this cause of death must also take into account the characteristics of offenders. The aim of the present study is to find out whether the striking rise in homicide mortality in Russia since the end of the Soviet era is associated with changes in the characteristics of offenders and in the characteristics of the nature of the homicide event. After a brief overview of principal trends and patterns of mortality from homicide in Russia we undertake analyses at two levels. The first considers statistical data collected by the Russian Ministry of Justice on the characteristics of homicides resulting in a conviction from 1990 to 1997. The second looks in more detail at a single area by means of an in-depth study of court and
police records from one Russian region, the Udmurt Republic (Fig. 1). The analyses presented here are part of a larger study exploring a range of causes of premature mortality at working ages in Russia (Shkolnikov & Chervyakov, 2000). The Udmurt Republic was selected for in-depth study because it is a typical industrial region of Russia (The Udmurt Republic, 2001). It has a population of about 1.6 million people and its overall mortality is very close to that of Russia as a whole, with life expectancy at birth in 1998 61.7 for men and 73.4 for women vs. 61.3 and 72.9 in Russia, respectively.
Data and methods Our consideration of long-term trends and age patterns of mortality from homicide in Russia is based on time-series mortality data by cause-of-death constructed by French and Russian researchers on the basis of routine vital statistics from the the State Committee of Statistics of the Russian Federation (Goskomstat). It includes deaths by sex, age, cause-ofdeath and 5-yr age group since 1965 (Mesl!e, Shkolnikov, Hertrich, & Vallin, 1996). Mortality data are commonly considered by criminologists to be a better measure of homicide than crime data (LaFree, 1999; Rokaw, Mercy, & Smith, 1990), especially when making international comparisons (Lynch, 1995) and in particular when undertaking research on homicide in Russia (Pridemore, 2000). In Russia, even though crime data include attempted homicides, they show a significantly lower number of homicides than mortality data. In the second half of the 1990s, the difference in annual counts was about 24–27%. A part of this difference can be attributed to a difference in registration procedures. Medical registration of homicide as a cause of death is based on reports by forensic experts. If a forensic expert states that someone’s death was caused by purposeful violence of other people or by a purposeful legal action, then this diagnosis is to be reflected in medical death certificate and in vital statistics. However, the judicial system counts homicides on the basis of investigations by police departments and prosecutor’s offices. Theoretically, the initial diagnosis of homicide in the medical death certificate can be replaced by another cause of death if a further investigation shows that homicide has not taken place, but this rarely occurs in practice. On the other hand, over the course of the 1990s the Russian police were becoming increasingly overloaded by an explosive growth of serious crimes demanding criminal investigation. The overworked and underpaid police force may simply be unable to investigate each case of violent death.
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Fig. 1. Map of Russia showing the Udmurt Republic.
Thus, while there are some reasons for a difference between the two, such a large disparity between the number of homicides reported by the police and mortality data is difficult to explain and deserves further attention. Indeed the true difference may be even greater. A disproportionate increase during the 1990s in mortality from unspecified violence (i.e. it is unknown whether the injury was purposely caused or an accident) could suggest that mortality from homicide may be increasingly under-recorded in vital statistics. The second principal source of data is a report prepared by Professor A.S. Mikhlin in 1999 (Mikhlin, 1999). This drew on statistical publications of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), such as Prestupnost i Pravonarusheniya (‘‘Crime and offences’’) and Sostoyaniye Prestupnosti v Rossii (‘‘The state of crime in Russia’’), as well as unpublished statistical tables from the Russian Ministry of Justice that contain information on persons convicted of homicide in Russia from 1990 to 1997. For an in-depth comparison of homicides in the Udmurt Republic in the late 1980s and in the second
half of the 1990s, we use information drawn from verdicts of the Udmurt courts handed down in 1989– 1991 (101 verdicts, 112 offenders, 142 victims) and 1998 (124 verdicts, 182 offenders, 174 victims). These records were obtained from the archives of the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic, and we employ two types of information drawn from them. The first set of data is taken from the standard Ministry of Justice’s ‘‘Statistical card of the accused.’’ Since 1990 this has been supplemented in the Udmurt Republic by several additional types of information, including the characteristics of the offender, the relationship between the offender and the victim, and the circumstances of the homicide event. Second, a brief 1–2 page narrative was extracted for each case from the descriptive part of verdict, describing the events leading up to the homicide as determined by offenders, witnesses, and police reports. To ensure reliability and comparability, all the court data were collected by a single person, who is a secretary of the Court, and then checked for judicial accuracy and consistency with the source files by an experienced judge of the Court.
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Results Trends and patterns of the Russian mortality from homicide Fig. 2 shows trends in the standardised death rate (SDR) for homicide since 1970 for Russia and since 1990 for the Udmurt Republic. During the period of gradual increase between 1970 and 1985, mortality from homicide increased by 47% for men and by 41% for women. By the end of the Brezhnev era, Russia had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. In 1985–1987 there was an unexpected short-term drop, coinciding with Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. In 1988, however, the rise in homicide resumed and by 1990 its level was higher than before the anti-alcohol campaign. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the beginning of the painful economic reforms of 1992, homicide mortality increased steeply to a peak of more than 32 per 100,000 in 1994 (54 per 100,000 for men and 15 per 100,000 for women). The homicide rate in Russia is now among the world’s highest, placing it below only South Africa and Colombia (Butchart & Peden, 1997, Chap 25; World Health Organization, 1995, 2001). In the Udmurt Republic, the rise in SDRs for homicide in the early 1990s was even greater than in Russia as a whole, peaking at 63 per 100,000 for men and 20 per 100,000 for women. The homicide rate then decreased and levelled off until the final years of the decade, when it again began to rise slightly. The direction of change in homicides throughout this period was the same as for mortality in general, trends that were driven largely by causes associated with alcohol consumption (Shkolnikov, McKee, & Leon, 2001).
In the Udmurt Republic this decrease was steeper than in Russia as a whole. In 1999, the SDR for homicide in Russia and the Udmurt Republic was 42 and 43 per 100,000 for men and 11 and 13 per 100,000 for women, respectively. The crude death rate by homicide in the Udmurt Republic for the total population was 26.1 per 100,000 in 1999. Overall, the increase in homicide over the 1990s was one of the largest of any cause of death. The all-Russia SDR for homicide in 1999 was 81% higher than in 1990, while the rise in SDRs for all external causes was 46%, and only 16% for all causes combined. A comparison of the age curves of mortality from homicide in Russia and the USA, another country with a very high rate of homicide, (not shown here) indicates a considerable difference in the population affected in the two countries. In the USA, homicide victimisation peaks in the early 20s. In Russia, the homicide victimisation rate peaks in the early to mid-30s and remains at almost the same level up to age 50. Trends in convictions for homicide Table 1 shows that, from 1990 to 1997, the number of people convicted of a purposeful killing of some type increased in Russia by 118%. This figure, based on Ministry of Justice data, is higher than the proportional increase in the age-standardised homicide mortality rate from vital statistics (68%). Thus, the ratio of convictions in judicial statistics to homicides in vital statistics has increased from 47% to 64%. These figures must be interpreted with care, however, as obviously more than one person may be convicted of a single homicide, one person may commit more than a single murder, and the years in which the death and conviction took place may not be the same. The increase in convictions for homicide in Russia was considerably greater than that for all crimes, which was 88% in the same period. Characteristics of those convicted of homicide
Fig. 2. Trends in mortality from homicide in Russia (1980– 1999) and the Udmurt Republic (1990–1999).
Gender In Russia, the proportion of those convicted of homicide who are female has remained relatively stable during the last decade, rising only slightly from 9.6% in 1990 to 10.7% in 1997. National statistics do not link the sex of the murderer and the victim. In the Udmurt Republic in 1998, however, 71% of those killed by males convicted of homicide were males, and 29% were females. Among females convicted of homicide, 76% of victims were male and 25% females. Murders committed by women against men commonly took place in domestic circumstances and often involved alcohol. Murders committed by men against
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V.V. Chervyakov et al. / Social Science & Medicine 55 (2002) 1713–1724 Table 1 Numbers of convictions for homicide in Russia in 1990 and 1997 Type of crime
Years 1990
Homicide Murder under aggravating circumstances Manslaughter while in a state of impaired responsibility Other attempts on someone’s life Total All crimes a
1997
Article of the criminal code of the RSFSRa
Number of convicted
Article of the criminal code of the Russian Federation
Number of convicted
103 102 104
7457 2099 734
105, part 1 105, part 2 107
13,241 4529
a
106–110
4704 22,474 1,013,431
105–107
10,290 537,643
a
Numbers were not given in the original statistical forms. Deaths due to legal action are not included. Source: Assembled by Mikhlin (1999) from the original statistical forms.
women often involved sexual violence in addition to the presence of alcohol. Brief narrative descriptions of two characteristic cases are given below (exact dates, names of people, and locations have been removed).
After inserting an object in her vagina, S and D weighed down BB’s clothes with sand and threw her body in the water. S and D ran away from the place of the crime.
Case 1
Case 2
In August 1997, S and D were with their friends V, B, and P (all male), drinking hard spirits and consuming drugs. At between 8 and 9 p.m. they went to the discotheque in the city park. About 10 p.m. S met a young woman, BB, at the disco. She was drunk. S then decided to seek assistance to rob and rape BB. With this in mind, S left with BB and proposed to D, B, V, and P that they rape BB and steal her belongings. Taking advantage of BB’s intoxicated state and her inability to resist actively, S and D took her to a concealed place near a lake. B and V followed them. When they arrived there, S and D demanded that BB have sexual intercourse with them. BB refused. In order to suppress BB’s will to resist, S and D began to beat and kick her with their hands and feet. This caused BB to fall to the ground. S and D, acting in concert, continued to beat BB while she was lying on the ground. They demanded that she have sex with them. When BB was completely unable to protect herself, S and D undressed and raped her. BB expressed her intention to inform the police about the crime and that her brother is a policeman. Afraid of being caught and in order to hide their crime, S and D decided to murder BB. S took a belt, approached BB from behind (she was sitting on the ground) and strangled her until she stopped moving.
T lived with her husband V and their two children. V frequently drank heavily, leading to family quarrels and a hostile marital relationship. One evening in March of 1997, V, while intoxicated, insulted his wife for no apparent reason in the presence of P, her sister, who was visiting. A quarrel ensued and P, who disliked V because of his harsh treatment of her sister murdered V in concert with T. T held her husband’s legs as he lay on the bed, and P attempted to strangle him with a belt. The belt tore. The two women then strangled the victim with a pair of tights by drawing them around his neck. They continued until V ceased to show signs of life. Age Table 2 shows that those convicted of homicide in Russia are most often between 30 and 39 yr old, though the mean age of convicted homicide offenders fell by more than 10% between 1990 and 1997, from 38.7 to 34.6 yr old. In spite of the decline, the average age of Russian homicide offenders is significantly higher than in the USA (Pridemore, 2000). In the USA in 1997, more than 55% of homicide offenders were under age 25 (Federal Bureau of Investigations 1998), whereas in Russia the equivalent proportion was only half of this (27%). In addition, those convicted of homicide in Russia were older, on average, than those convicted for all crimes together.
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Table 2 Percentage distribution by age of those convicted of homicide in Russia in 1990 and 1997a Type of crime
Russia Homicide All crimes a
Year
1990 1997 1990 1997
Age groups (yr) 14–17
18–24
25–29
30–39
40 +
3.6 5.8 14.7 11.9
14.5 21.6 22.9 27.5
10.3 14.3 20.3 15.2
48.1 46.6 36.4 40.4
23.5 11.7 5.7 5.0
Total
Mean age
100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
38.7 34.6 30.6 30.9
Source: Assembled by Mikhlin (1998) from original statistical forms.
Education Detailed information on educational attainment of those convicted was obtained from Ministry of Justice records in the Udmurt Republic. Fig. 3 shows that in the early 1990s, most of those convicted of homicide had completed a secondary education only. By the late 1990s, however, this group had diminished substantially and had been joined by an increasing number of people with either incomplete secondary education or who had undergone specialised education (typically vocational training not leading to a university degree). There are no data for Russia as a whole for the years around 1990, but in 1997 the educational attainment of the homicide offenders was very similar to that in the Udmurt Republic: 34.5% had less than a secondary education, 48% had a secondary education, 14.5% had a specialised secondary education, and 3% had at least some college education. It is unlikely that the change in educational structure of homicide offenders can be attributed to changing
educational composition of the general population, since the latter did not undergo substantial changes between the census of 1989 and the micro-census of 1994 (Goskomstat, 1995). Location It is now apparent that the increase in mortality in the early 1990s in Russia was greatest in cities, where all causes of violent death, including homicide, increased rapidly (Walberg, McKee, Shkolnikov, Chenet, & Leon, 1998). Fig. 4 employs annual mortality data from the Udmurt Republic to reveal the evolving pattern during the 1990s. In the Udmurt Republic, death rates from homicide at age 15–54 were lower in urban than in rural areas in the mid-1980s, but by the mid-1990s, when homicide rates peaked, this pattern had reversed. Information from court files on the place of permanent residence of offenders shows that the proportion of murders leading to convictions of people living outside the Udmurt Republic increased from 0.9% in 1989–1991 to 6% in 1998. In addition, 1.1% of convicted offenders were homeless. For all of Russia in 1997, these figures are somewhat higher: 10% and 4.5%, respectively. This difference is probably due to the fact that the Udmurt Republic is a region where migratory exchange with other regions is relatively low. Characteristics of the homicide event
Fig. 3. Educational attainment of those convicted of homicide in the Udmurt Republic.
Means of assault Soviet and Russian mortality statistics have always been based on broad diagnostic categories, where all homicides have been combined in one item. In 1999, however, detailed ICD-10 codes were included in individual death records in many regions of the Russian Federation. We had such records for the first half of the year 1999 for the Udmurt Republic, giving us an opportunity to look at the distribution of victims by means of assault. Among the 215 homicide deaths officially registered during this time, the greatest number was committed by the use of a sharp object 45.1%, 25.1%were committed by unspecified means, 13.5%
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Fig. 4. Mortality rates from homicide at ages 15–54 per 100,000 by location, the Udmurt Republic. Source: Trudosposobnoye Naseleniye Udmurtkoi Respubliki. Chislennost’ i sostojanije zdorov’ja. (The size and health condition of the working population of the Udmurt Republic)FIzhevsk: Ekspertiza, 1998, s. 48–49.
were committed by a blunt object, 7.4%were committed by strangulation, and 4.7% were committed by firearms. Unfortunately, detailed classification of deaths according to the ICD-10 is not available for Russia as a whole, and thus we cannot see to what extent the Udmurt pattern can be considered as typical. Table 3 presents means of assault from another angle by classifying the use of different methods by offenders convicted in Udmurt Republic in 1989–1991 and 1998. Homicide with the use of a sharp object was the modal category of weapon chosen in both 1989–1991 and 1998. However, between 1989 and 1991 and 1998 the proportion of all homicides in which a sharp object was employed decreased from about 60% to about 40%, while the use of a blunt object and strangulation by offenders substantially increased. The percentage of convicted offenders using firearms appears to be stable, constituting about one tenth of all offenders convicted both in 1989–1991 and in 1998. It is not clear to what extent the latter observation reflects the general Russian situation. For example, one might think that firearms might be used relatively more frequently in metropolitan areas like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Samara or in regions situated close to the Chechen war. Acting alone or in concert? The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation identifies crimes committed with the help of accomplices as especially serious. In Russia as a whole in 1990, only 11.9% of convicted homicide offenders acted with the help of accomplices, and there were no cases involving organised gangs. By 1997, 20.5% of all murders leading to convictions were committed with the help of accomplices, with 4.9% of murders leading to convictions shown to be committed by organised gangs. Fig. 5 shows that homicides involving more than one offender have increased faster in the Udmurt Republic than in Russia as a whole, and they now account for more than half of all homicides leading to convictions.
Table 3 Percentage distribution of homicide offenders by primary means of assault: Udmurt Republic, convictions of 1989–1991 and 1998a
All means Hanging, strangulation, suffocation Firearms Sharp object Blunt object Bodily force Other a
1989–1991
1998
100.0 9.8
100.0 20.3
(5.0–16.8) 9.8 (5.0–16.8) 57.1 (47.4–66.5) 11.6 (6.3–19.0) 4.5 (1.5–10.1) 7.1 (3.1–13.6)
(14.7–26.9) 10.4 (6.4–15.8) 37.9 (30.8–45.4) 21.4 (15.7–28.1) 6.6 (3.5–11.2) 3.3 (1.2–7.0)
Ninety-five percent confidence limits are given in brackets.
Fig. 5. Number of offenders involved in homicides leading to convictions in the Udmurt Republic.
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Aggravating circumstances Murders with aggravating circumstances are considered as representing a special danger for Russian society. In the Russian Criminal Code of 1990 these were defined by Article 102 (Article 103 for murders without aggravating circumstances). In the new Criminal Code of 1997 they are defined by Article 105, Part 1 (Article 105, Part 2 for non-aggravated murders). According to official statistics, the absolute number of offenders convicted for murders with aggravating circumstances in Russia more than doubled between 1990 and 1997, while their proportion among all convictions for murder increased from 20% to 25% (Table 1) during this same period. These figures might, however, be influenced by substantial changes in legal and judicial practices during this period. Changes in the number of people convicted for each crime and the degree of individual culpability in the murder are also relevant. Therefore, in respect of analyses of aggravating circumstances, it is more appropriate to relate figures to murder cases rather than murderers. The detailed information about cases available from court files in the Udmurt Republic makes it possible to ascertain the extent to which circumstances aggravating homicides changed in the 1990s, by applying the same criteria to murders committed in 1989–1991 and 1998. Table 4 shows that the overall proportion of homicides
with aggravating circumstances increased markedly during the 1990s, with several types of circumstances showing steep increases. For example, the proportion of murders of person(s) in a helpless state increased almost 13 times, those committed in complicity with others increased more than 4 times, those committed for mercenary motives increased 2.3 times, and those committed either in order to conceal other crimes or attended by a rape doubled. In addition to information on aggravating circumstances, Udmurt files show a new phenomenon in the Russian criminal world. These are murders by hired killers, which accounted for 3.3% of all those convicted of first-degree homicide by the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic in 1998. It should be noted that the absolute number of these types of murders is likely to be undercounted, since murders for hire are usually committed by more professional and skilful offenders and thus are less likely to result in a conviction. The role of alcohol Alcohol intoxication at the time of the offence is considered an additional aggravating circumstance in Russia. In the country as a whole, the percentage of those convicted of homicide who were reported (according to data from police investigations) to have been
Table 4 Aggravating circumstances associated with murders in the Udmurt Republic in 1989–1991 and 1998 (in percent)a (95% Confidence intervals) Aggravating circumstances of a murder
Murder of two or more persons Murder of a person (or his/her relatives) in connection with performance by this person of his/her professional or public duty Murder of a person whose helpless state was obvious to the murderer. as well as a murder accompanying kidnapping or taking hostage(s) Murder of a woman whose pregnancy was obvious to the murderer Murder committed with special cruelty Murder committed by a method that places at risk people other than the intended victim Murder committed by a group, conspiracy by a group, or committed by an organised group Murder committed for mercenary motives or for a payment, as well as a murder accompanying armed robbery, extortion or banditry Murder for hooliganb motives Murder committed in order to conceal another crime or facilitate it as well as a murder accompanying a rape or other sexual violence Repeated murder a
Year 1989–1991
1998
19.6 (12.7–28.2) 7.1 (3.1–13.6)
19.8 (14.3–26.3) 1.6 (0.3–4.7)
1.8 (0.2–6.3)
23.1 (17.7–29.9)
0.9 (0.0–4.9) 28.6 (20.4–37.8) 0.9 (0.0–4.9)
0.5 (0.0–3.0) 23.6 (17.7–30.5) 4.4 (1.9–8.5)
12.5 (7.0–20.0)
51.6 (44.1–59.1)
13.4 (7.7–21.1)
30.8 (24.2–38.0)
15.2 (9.1–23.2) 18.8 (12.0–27.2)
9.9 (6.0–15.2) 38.5 (31.5–45.9)
19.6 (12.7–28.2)
12.1 (7.7–17.7)
Categories in the table are not mutually exclusive. The total of each of the columns exceeds 100% since each murder might have more than one aggravating circumstance. b Hooliganism is defined as purposeful actions, violating civil order and expressing disrespect to the commune/society and to moral rules. In the Russian Criminal Code hooliganism implies violent actions characterised by marked cynicism and audacity towards other people or representatives of authority.
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intoxicated at the time of the offence has declined between 1990 and 1998–1999 from about 80% to about 70% (Nemtsov, 2001, p. 35). In 1990, the percentage of chronic alcoholics ordered to undergo compulsory treatment of alcoholism among those convicted for murder in Russia was 20.4% in 1990 and 8.4% in 1997 (Mikhlin, 1998). The latter, however, can be attributed (at least partly) to reduced financing of the system for compulsory treatment of alcoholism. Data from the Udmurt case transcripts provides additional information on the extent of intoxication of those convicted of homicide. In 1989–91, 84% of homicide offenders were intoxicated with alcohol at the time of their offence, while in 1998 this figure was 67%. Although the proportion of intoxicated offenders has declined in the Udmurt Republic, its level remains high and the absolute annual number of intoxicated offenders has grown. The narrative description of cases in the Udmurt Republic shows that, in the majority of cases, both the offender and the victim were under the influence of alcohol at the moment of crime. Recidivism Table 5 shows that in 1989–1991, 62% of those convicted of homicide in the Udmurt Republic had previous felony convictions. In most cases, homicide offenders had more than one conviction on record, and 35% had 3 or more prior convictions. By 1998 the situation had changed markedly, with only 32% of convicted homicide offenders in the Udmurt Republic having no previous convictions. In Russia as a whole in 1997, the proportion is even lower (27%). The difference might be due to the fact that there are prisons and penal camps within the territory of the Udmurt Republic from which convicted offenders, who may have come originally from other regions, are released back into the local population. In any case, the majority of homicides in the late 1990s were committed by people with no previous criminal history. In the Udmurt Republic, of those convicted in the early 1990s who had previous convictions, the overwhelming majority (90%) had completed their previous sentences when they committed the homicide. Among the remaining convicted offenders slightly under half committed murder while released on parole, and the remainder offended while still in prison. By 1998, many of those who had previously been convicted were still on parole (19%) or serving a suspended sentence (16%) when they committed their murder.
Discussion The various forms of homicide data discussed here are unique. Due to restrictions by the Soviet government,
Table 5 Percentage of those convicted of murder in the Udmurt Republic with prior felony convictions, 1989–1991 and 1998 Number of previous convictions
None One Two Three Four and more
Percentage 1989–1991
1998
38.4 (29.4–48.1) 14.3 (8.4–21.1) 13.3 (7.7–21.1) 10.8 (5.7–18.0) 23.0 (16.5–33.1)
59.8 (52.3–67.1) 25.2 (19.1–32.2) 9.9 (6.0–15.2) 2.7 (0.9–6.3) 2.4 (0.6–5.5)
crime data of any sort were rarely made public in Russia until the 1990s (Butler, 1992; Connor, 1973). Falsification of data related to crime and justice was common during the Soviet era, and public reports about crime were invariably vague and often misleading. Thanks to the increasing transparency, new research has begun to appear on violence in Russia (Chenet, Leon, McKee, & Vassin, 1998; Gondolf & Shestakov, 1997; Goskomstat, 1995; Pridemore, 2001). Of great importance for this study, the recognition of the seriousness of the situation on the behalf of Udmurt authorities, and thus their subsequent co-operation, has allowed the authors the opportunity to obtain detailed information about homicide in the region. Although death rates from homicide in Russia have declined from their peak in 1994, as have overall death rates, the level remains much higher than before the break up of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the proportionate increase relative to the 1980s is among the highest for any cause of death. In spite of this and its severe personal and social consequences, homicide in Russia has received little scholarly attention from those who commonly study social structure and violence, such as public health researchers and sociologists. This paper begins to redress this imbalance. It is of course necessary to consider the validity of these data when carrying out this type of research. Other empirical work has shown that Russian mortality data are of generally high quality (Leon et al., 1997), and with few exceptions, such as the precision of cancer diagnosis among the elderly in rural areas (Shkolnikov, et al., 1999), have remained so since 1990. One possible criticism is that the increase in homicide mortality may appear greater than it reallyis because of underrecording during the Soviet period. This has been the subject of a previous study, which concluded that, at least in the Slavic republics of the Soviet Union, the data
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were valid, with no pressure to distort them (Wasserman & Varnik, 1998). The present study employs additional sources of original data from court and police records that have specific limitations, as well. For example, the MVD and Ministry of Justice obviously only know and can report information about offenders that have been arrested. Offenders arrested (and subsequently convicted) for homicide are likely to be different in several ways from those not arrested, and are thus not representative of all offenders. Further, the court records examined here are homicide cases stored in the archives of the Udmurt Supreme Court. Theoretically, this set of cases should be complete or nearly complete. But it is possible that some cases have been dealt with elsewhere and those on which information is available are not representative of all homicides. We were unable to compare them with a complete set of data on cases processed by lower courts in the Udmurt Republic in the relevant years. Even with these limitations, however, it would be unwise to disregard these unique data. They provide us with a valuable first glimpse at the serious problem of lethal violence in Russia and the Udmurt Republic and allow us the opportunity to examine its evolving nature. This study demonstrates how homicide in Russia has changed in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, the homicide rate in the late 1990s was nearly double what it was at the beginning of the decade. Given the increased levels of poverty and social disorganisation in Russia during the transition, this is not surprising. Studies of violence elsewhere have consistently shown a positive relationship between homicide rates and the proportion of the population living in poverty (Sampsen and Lauritsen, 1994) and a negative relationship between homicide and social cohesion (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). Initial research in Russia yields similar results (Pridemore, 2000). There is also evidence from elsewhere that homicides are more common in areas with greater income inequality (Kawachi, Kennedy, & Wilkinson, 1999; Szwarcwald, Bastos, Viacava, & de Andrade, 1999), and the level of income inequality in Russia increased greatly during the 1990s. Other parts of the world that have undergone a major political transition, such as South Africa, have seen similar increases (Wigton, 1999). The characteristics of the homicide event and of those committing murder have changed. On average, homicide offenders are younger and less criminally experienced than their counterparts a decade ago. Further, the urban–rural gap in mortality from homicide diminished during the period under study. The educational level of offenders has also undergone a curious change, with both those with less than a secondary education and those with a specialised secondary education now representing a larger proportion of homicide offenders
than before. In general, these observations suggest that homicide offenders have become a more socially diverse group. The newly unemployed or newly poor have probably joined a formerly selected group of criminally experienced offenders. Alcohol continues to play a very important role, with over four in every five Russians convicted of homicide reported as being in a state of intoxication when the offence was committed. In a majority of cases, victims of homicide are also often intoxicated at the time of the murder. The importance of alcohol in the genesis of homicide and non-lethal violent injury has been welldocumented (Hougen, Rogde, & Poulsen, 1999; Macdonald, Wells, Giesbrecht, & Cherpitel, 1999). Some of the decrease in the percentage of offenders who were intoxicated between the early 1990s and 1998 might be due to a rise in premeditated murderers committed by groups of people. Finally, the proportion of homicides carried out by more than one offender and the proportion of homicides committed under aggravating circumstances have risen since the early 1990s. Similarly, murder for hire has become an increasing problem, as has premeditated murder carried out by organised gangs, though these murders still represent a small proportion of the overall total. Homicide is an important preventable cause of mortality in Russia and thus is a legitimate subject for attention of the public health community. In some parts of the health policy community in Russia there is a view that little can be done to address the high levels of premature mortality in the face of continuing economic problems and, by implication, that health will improve when economic recovery takes place (Tkatchenko, McKee, & Tsouros, 2000). Economic development will not automatically lead to a fall in rates of homicide. In the period from the 1960s to the 1980s there was no obvious association between economic circumstances and homicide rates. Furthermore, despite its much greater affluence, the level of homicide in the United States is comparable to that in Russia and has been for over 30 yr (Pridemore, 2001). Instead, there is a need to address the climate of hopelessness that faces so many Russians and to change a culture in which extreme violence is so often seen as a way of resolving relatively minor problems. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this study is that behaviour that once was confined to those on the margins of society is now spreading more widely, with long term consequences for attempts to establish the rule of law in Russia. There are no easy answers and the first step must be to obtain a much better understanding of the nature of the problem. This demands an interdisciplinary approach and a recognition that effective policies will require interventions that span many different sectors of society.
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Acknowledgements A core part of this study was completed within the framework of the UNDP/Moscow project on ‘‘Policies for the Control of the Transition’s Mortality Crisis’’ (project RUS/98/G51). MM’s work in Russia is funded by the UK Department for International Development. However DfID can take no responsibility for the views expressed. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Yu.V.Sukhanov, Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic, our consultants Professor A.S. Mikhlin, Academy of the MVD in Moscow, and E.E. Stekh, former judge of the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic, for their valuable help. We are also grateful to Mrs. I. Cheredinova, secretary of court in Izhevsk, who has extracted all narrative descriptions of homicides from very long court files.
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