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I'm Hannah. I'm Sruti and welcome to Redhanded. I have nothing to say.

The end. The end. Thanks so much for coming. Red Hop in it.

No, we basically got down into the studio today and then just immediately were like nothing's work.

I can't hear your voice through my headphones. Why is this not lighting up? Why are all the cables in a big snake nest?

Why is it? It's been a tricky morning, but we are now running 45 minutes behind schedule and everything's gone to pot.

But it's okay because we have got the Queen's birthday this weekend. No, it's next weekend, isn't it?

Well, I mean, we get to celebrate this weekend. Well, we get to. She does like having to.

Well, whatever. We get four days off this weekend, so there we go.

And we'll have to pay for that next week anyway. We've got a tricky case for you. It's just been a tricky week.

This is absolutely a big hitter. You probably have heard it on other podcasts, maybe you've watched a

documentary or two, but the thing about this case is that it is so enormous telling the story

in a succinct and listenable way is quite difficult, but we've done our absolute best.

So let's take ourselves off to the USSR. In the mid 1980s, in the smallish mining town of Shakty

in then Soviet Russia, a woman working in a factory looked over her colleague's shoulder.

He always carried a notebook with him and could often be seen scribbling away in it.

She'd always wondered what he was doing in that little book. So one day, she took the chance

and had a look. It's like you imagine he's going to be, you know, drawing romantic pictures of you

or writing love poems. Yeah, or, you know, copying out all of the Communist leaders. He loved doing

that too, but that's not what he was doing. When she did finally see the internal pages of her

colleague's notebook, she saw that he hadn't been writing notes or love letters or pictures of

dogs. He hadn't even been writing words. All he had doodled was rows and rows of little crosses.

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