Last hitman standing: assassin for Russian organised crime gangs turns kills into thrills as he pens bestselling autobiography
Alexei the Soldier’s weapon of choice was an anti-tank rocket, he took a contract on his first boss, and claims he was hired to eliminate Boris Berezovsky. Betrayed by love, he’s forged a remarkable new career behind bars and written his life story
“There were many others like me once, but they are all lying buried in the woods somewhere, all over Russia,” Alexei Sherstobitov told Russian state television a few years ago from a prison cell, where the former hitman is serving a 23-year sentence.
Sherstobitov, known as Alexei the Soldier, has described how he escaped their fate, and the events leading up to his capture, in a three-volume autobiography in Russian, Liquidator: Confessions of a Professional Assassin, the latest instalment of which was published this year.
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His life as a hitman begins after the December 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when organised crime began to spiral out of control in Russia. Gangs, often led by former military officers or KGB operatives, shook down every sphere of business for protection money, and tortured and murdered with impunity those entrepreneurs who resisted.
The gangs – known as OPGs, or organised criminal groups – quickly carved up the former USSR between them, and vicious turf wars ensued. Shoot-outs with automatic weapons were common, but specialised work such as taking out a rival boss was done by lone assassins, and Sherstobitov earned a reputation for being the most effective.
So elusive and expert was he that the Moscow police were convinced the trail of corpses left behind by Sherstobitov had to be the work of several people.
He claims he was recruited through trickery. Like many a 1990s Russian gangster, he had seen his dream of a military career destroyed by the realities of a bankrupt and demoralised Soviet army. He left the army as a junior officer in 1992, and struggled to feed his young family.
