The And the Welcome to Human Monsters.

Part 1, Alexander Pasuskin.

Alexander Yerviich Pazushkin was born on April 9th,

1974 in Mityi, Moscow Oblast Russia.

Like many serial killers, he had titles.

He is most commonly known as the chessboard killer that and the

Bilsip Park maniac surely you would have to be a veritable antichrist, sauntering along the surface of an ocean of blood,

to have earned both those dubious honorifics.

I must admit I'm guilty of having accepted 80s era anti-Russian propaganda. I was a child after all so my capacity for critical thinking was nearly

non-existent. All I knew about the Russians was that they wore big furry hats and posed a significant nuclear threat to the United States.

It was an issue elsewhere in the West because a nuclear war gives rise to a nuclear winter and if that happens we're all

fucked.

For a while there it seemed as if the Russian threat had been eliminated.

In 1991, they ceased to be the Soviet Union and became an economically desperate nation in which people lined up for free bread for hours.

Years before the Ukraine conflict, the most significant incident of saber rattling in Russia was the

pussy riot fiasco. The Russian government didn't care for gays and

feminists.

That's hardly ideal, but it could be much, much worse.

And now it is.

The Russia of 2024 differs considerably from Russia of 1974, though some things haven't changed. At the time of Alexander Pasushkin's birth,

Russia was, as it is now, a nation with an incredibly grim environment with long winters and an overabundance of functional and

industrial architecture that served the local economy but contributed nothing to its culture and

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