Mikhail Manevich had been working in the government of Saint Petersburg since 1993. He took the post of vice-governor in 1996. At that time, he was also the chairman of the Committee for the Management of City Property of Saint Petersburg. Manevich is called one of the ideologists of privatization. According to some reports, in 1997 he was supposed to move to Moscow to take the position of deputy chairman of the State Property Committee.

The clients began looking for executors to eliminate Manevich in the spring of 1997. By early summer 1997, a team of killers had been formed. At the same time, Manevich was put under surveillance.

Near house 15/17 on Rubinstein Street, where the politician lived permanently with his family, there was a paid public toilet. In mid-June, two young men came there, introduced themselves to the cashier as law enforcement officers, and said they were tracking a deserter who had fled a military unit. They expected him to appear in the area, so they would monitor the street from the toilet’s utility room. They observed Manevich’s house, noting the times he left for work and returned.

Then the “officers” disappeared and reappeared in the paid toilet on August 12 — six days before the murder. They checked the collected information about the official’s daily routine once again.

By that time, the executors began looking for a place from which it would be most convenient to shoot. They chose house 74/76 on Nevsky Prospect, from the roof of which Rubinstein Street was well visible.

Starting August 4, witnesses periodically saw two men there. Later it was established that these were the killers preparing the firing position and escape routes. They cut the locks on the attics and hung their own. Choosing a suitable dormer window for shooting, the criminals bent back the metal sheets covering it and nailed their corners — thus creating something like an embrasure.

To avoid the shooter having to fire while standing, a metal barrel was placed next to the dormer window, with several boxes stacked on top. Also, wrapped in swaddling cloths, a Romanian copy of a Kalashnikov assault rifle (AKM) and an optical sight for it were brought to the attic in advance. The weapon bundle was hidden in a pre-prepared cache in the attic. The killers used the weapon on August 18, 1997.

At about 8:30 a.m., Mikhail Manevich and his wife Marina left the entrance of the house and got into a Volvo 940 car, driven by a driver. The investigation established that near the entrance of the house where the assassination target lived, one of the accomplices of the criminal group with a radio was stationed. As soon as the car with the target left the yard, the observer recorded this and relayed the information to the executors. A third observation post was located at the intersection of Rubinstein Street and Grafsky Lane, where another criminal with a radio was also stationed.

At 8:45, the Volvo began to slow down to turn onto the busy Nevsky Prospect, and at that moment the shooter opened fire from the attic, from a distance of about 75 meters. The killer fired single shots, a total of eight bullets were fired. The fatal bullet hit Manevich in the chest. One bullet grazed his wife. The driver was unharmed. The shooter escaped.

From the criminal case materials:

“Mikhail Manevich received multiple gunshot wounds to the head, neck, and chest and died at 9:10 a.m. Death resulted from a single bullet wound — a penetrating gunshot injury to the chest, damaging the subclavian artery and vein, lung, accompanied by massive internal bleeding and complicated by acute blood loss. His wife received a non-life-threatening tangential gunshot wound to the soft tissues and multiple blind shrapnel wounds, and a concussion. The car driver, Sinitsinsky V.K., was unharmed.

The shots at the Volvo-940 car in which Manevich was traveling were fired from the attic of house No. 74/76 on Nevsky Prospect. During the inspection of the attic, an AKM assault rifle No. GO 2294 of Romanian manufacture with a magazine loaded with cartridges and a cartridge in the chamber was found and seized, as well as eight spent 7.62 mm shell casings and a VHF radio station “Pilot” No. 001309.”

President Vladimir Putin, who worked in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office in the 1990s, said in 2016 that he had personal relations with Manevich. Sberbank head Herman Gref, who also worked in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, recalled that after the official’s murder, he was advised to leave Russia. “At that time, everything was against the backdrop of a very criminal situation in Petersburg, and I was told ‘you better leave.’ Honestly, they were very afraid for my life after Manevich’s murder,” Gref said.

The murder of Mikhail Manevich remained one of the most high-profile unsolved crimes in the history of modern Russia for a quarter of a century. During the investigation, 1,500 witnesses were questioned, 237 searches and 136 expert examinations were conducted. Thanks to the collected materials, more than 20 criminal cases were solved, whose defendants had no direct relation to the death of the vice-governor of Saint Petersburg.

In 1997, Anatoly Chubais promised Manevich’s friends and relatives at his funeral to find and punish those responsible for the crime. Ballistics showed that the killer used cartridges registered to the Military Institute of Physical Culture but stolen in 1990. No fingerprints were found on the Kalashnikov assault rifle. But traces of galoshes were found in the attic.

At that time, only one criminal group in the Russian underworld wore galoshes — a killer gang created by a resident of the Tambov region, Andrey Chelyshev, known as Ferganets. All members of his gang were arrested in 1998. They received sentences ranging from four to 20 years for various crimes. But it was not possible to prove the gang’s involvement in the shooting of the vice-governor.

Criminal authority Konstantin Yakovlev, known as Kostya Mogila, from Petersburg was also suspected. The motive was the corporatization of the city’s Sea Port, which the vice-governor was involved in. Various sources also named Aslan Usoyan — the “thief-in-law” Deda Khasan — and authority Alexey Gudyna, aka Lesha Pitersky, as possible clients.

It was also not ruled out that the killers simply confused the victims: in the same house as Manevich lived the authority Sergey Ots, nicknamed “Tormoz,” who drove the same Volvo 940 as the vice-governor. But none of these versions received any confirmation.

Ex-deputy of the Legislative Assembly of Saint Petersburg and assistant to Anatoly Sobchak, Yuri Shutov, was also suspected. According to some reports, he was also actively interested in the port’s shares. The executors were considered to be killers from the gang of former Afghan officer Gimranov. In February 2006, the court sentenced Shutov and Gimranov to life imprisonment. But there was not enough evidence specifically for the charge in the Manevich murder case.

Possible involvement of Shutov and Gimranov was indirectly confirmed by Anatoly Chubais. He stated that he absolutely knows all the organizers and clients of Manevich’s murder and that they will be punished. In November 2006, when the Supreme Court upheld the life sentences of Shutov and Gimranov, Chubais said he had fulfilled his promise. Journalist and deputy editor-in-chief of “Fontanka,” Evgeny Vyshenkov, recounts:

In 2009, Alexey Gardotsky confessed to the murder of Manevich. At that time, he was under investigation in the case of the gang of Sergey Zaripov (the gang leader), controlled by Yuri Shutov, “Papa Titych,” the head of one of the Petersburg gangs and a city legislative assembly deputy. Shutov had already been sentenced to life imprisonment on other charges.

According to Gardotsky, the murder of the vice-governor of Petersburg was prepared for several months under the leadership of Zaripov’s brother. On the day of the murder, standing on Rubinstein Street, he gave commands to Gardotsky via radio while Gardotsky was in the attic of the house on Nevsky Prospect. Gardotsky shot Manevich with a Kalashnikov assault rifle equipped with an optical sight. Two accomplices tracked the official’s departure from the house.

The investigation established the involvement of two members of the criminal group in the murder. One monitored Manevich, and the other fired at the car in which the vice-governor was traveling. Both confessed. The Kalashnikov assault rifle from which Manevich’s car was shot was obtained from Barsukov.

The case was officially declared solved by the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia on April 30, 2023, as reported by the Public Relations Center (PRC) of the special service.

Manevich is buried at the Literatorskie Mostki section of the Volkovo Cemetery. A monument stands on his grave — a split sphere pierced by bullets. It was created by architect Vyacheslav Bukhaev and sculptor Mikhail Shemyakin.

Barsukov, whom the media called the “night governor of Petersburg,” was detained in 2007, and in 2009 he was sentenced to 14 years for raiding and money laundering, later the term was reduced. In 2012, Barsukov was convicted of extortion, receiving a total of 15 years. Four years later, the leader of the Tambov criminal group was sentenced to 18 years for an attempt on the co-owner of the Petersburg Oil Terminal Sergey Vasilyev and the murder of his bodyguard. In 2019, Barsukov was accused of creating the Tambov criminal group. For this, he was sentenced to 12 years, and in total he received 24 years in a strict regime colony. He is currently serving his sentence in the Gaaz prison hospital (Barsukov is a first-group disabled person).

Sources:

https://www.rbc.ru/society/30/04/2023/644e04c19a7947b0ce4ca278

https://www.bfm.ru/news/524387

https://iz.ru/1506290/2023-04-30/fsb-raskryla-ubiistvo-vitce-gubernatora-sankt-peterburga-26-letnei-davnosti