The Garage That Swallowed a Town: Aleksandr Komin, the Slaveholder of Vyatskiye Polyany
On 21 July 1997, a young woman walked into a police station in provincial Russia and said there was a factory under an ordinary garage: captives sewing for sixteen hours a day, an electrified ladder, the word “slave” tattooed on a forehead, and four people who never came back up.
Alexander Lawson tells the case of Aleksandr Nikolayevich Komin — the “Slaveholder” of Vyatskiye Polyany — who, with accomplice Aleksandr Mikheyev, spent years digging a bunker nine metres beneath a garage cooperative and turned it into a private colony of forced labour, rape, and murder between 1995 and 1997.
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