— We were waiting for the police for a long time — the task force is coming to us from Kandalaksha, it's almost 100 km. Therefore, I took Maxim home — I told him to sleep at least a couple of hours. When there was a knock on the door, he went out and left with them. He did not resist and did not hide anything. I gave the knife to them myself,” says Marina (name changed at the request of the heroine) about her husband.
He is accused of stabbing a man on New Year's Eve. Almost the entire village is thrown off to him for a lawyer, considering him a people's avenger. And Marina says in bewilderment: everything happened by chance and the victim could have survived. If the state performed its functions in Umba — in the person of the police, the court, the prosecutor's office, medicine — there would be neither a fresh cross in the cemetery, nor the broken fate of Maxim.
«Authority» from the felling
New Year's stabbing in Umba — the main news that fed the journalists of the Murmansk region all the holidays. It started with news reports, as mean as a crime report; to the 9th day, when the deceased was buried — a local resident Viktor Timchenko, — bloggers «raised» his status to a criminal authority and even a thief in law. This is all, of course, not true. The truth is that for many years in the village they tried to repulse Viktor Timchenko and his brother Vladimir, but neither the police, nor the investigation, nor the court could significantly help in this. The last resort was the president. But even two appeals to him did not give any result. And that's why
participant in a random fight, former firefighter paratrooper Maxim Tyulkov, now accused of killing Viktor Timchenko, is a hero in the village for many.
Dead Viktor Timchenko. Photo from the archive
The Timchenko brothers have been living in Umba for a long time, but the locals do not consider them theirs. The family was once recruited to work in a forest plot in the Tersky district — in the village of Vostochnoye Munozero. People from different parts of the country came here for logging. Then we moved to the regional center. The elder brother, Vladimir, fought in Chechnya, was blown up by an armored personnel carrier, was wounded — and the Order of Courage. Now the minibus carries people from Murmansk to Umba. It's hard to say what the younger one was doing — the same thing as most of the peasants in the village. I fished, drank … A good half of my interlocutors asks not to take pictures of them and not to name names — the deceased has friends and relatives.
Umba is one of the oldest settlements on the Kola Peninsula. Pomors have always lived here — the descendants of Novgorodians who fled to the North from the repressions of Ivan the Terrible. There was no serfdom here, they lived by the sea, traded with the Norwegians, knew languages, discovered new lands. Now it is the center of the Tersky district — the poorest and most drinking in the region. And the center of the most expensive tourism in the Murmansk region: every summer, helicopters bring people to these parts who pay up to 10 thousand dollars a week on salmon rivers.
Officially, salmon are fished under license and mostly on a catch-and-release basis. Unofficially, helicopters fly back completely empty. Almost unlimited fishing almost brought the most valuable salmon herd in the region on the Varzuga River to complete extinction, environmentalists seriously discussed the need for a moratorium on fishing. But such will put the local population on the brink of survival. There is almost no work in the area, they feed on fish. For fish they are now and then fined by border guards. Of course, there is no border here, but it is the FSB border service that makes indicators here to curb poaching. Therefore, half of the village served its time.
A few years ago, there were rallies in Umba — people demanded that the hospital be returned to them. But the Central District Hospital is no more, there is a branch of the hospital in the neighboring, Kandalaksha district. In difficult cases, an ambulance takes you to Kandalaksha — 100 km away.
Maxim Tyulkov, accused of murdering Timchenko. Photo from personal archive
From the police here, perhaps the traffic police — everyone respects the «traffic cop Yulia», who deprived many of them of their rights for drunk driving. Julia is a local, they obey her. Artem, Maxim Tyulkov's brother, says that Yulia taught people to drive by the rules and fasten their seat belts. But even the principled Yulia did not find justice against Vladimir Timchenko: the editors have at their disposal a video in which a noticeably drunken man showers a policewoman with the dirtiest insults. People are standing around.
The girl says that she will write a statement to the offender, and he reacts: «I have the coolest lawyer.» And then — already from afar — he shows an obscene gesture and unzips his fly.
The legal consequences of this skirmish cannot be found on the websites of the courts.
On the other hand, it is possible to find another matter. In 2014, Vladimir Timchenko was convicted of punching a policeman in the face and tearing off his epaulette. By that time, Vladimir had two suspended sentences behind him — for robbery and extortion. And in a new case — under Article 318 of the Criminal Code — he again managed to get a «condition» — 2 years 6 months. Let me remind you that this is the same article according to which oppositionists are imprisoned for throwing a plastic bottle.