Nikolai Modestov biography

The anniversary is always an occasion for conversation, but for us, preparing for the centenary of the newspaper, a meeting with Nikolai Sergeyevich also had a special meaning-after all, he once worked in “Evening Moscow” and headed the investigation department in it. The expectations were justified - he told us a lot of interesting things than we are in a hurry to share with you.

We are sure that you will be surprised how many memories will give rise to this conversation. All the most of the best and inspiration to you! Many readers know you as the author of the thundering books, primarily the “gangster Moscow”, which shocked everyone in x. Can't you tell you a little more about yourself? I am in this topic at least a year. He worked in many newspapers - Pravda, Moscow Pravda, and here in the "Evening Moscow".

By the way, Wikipedia reports that I am one of the owners of Moskovskaya Pravda, but this is an absolute, one hundred percent lie. So I am an ordinary person. But my ancestors are interesting and bright. The Zemsky figure from the Vladimir province, the liberal, the landowner of the Gorokhovetsky district ... His most famous novel is “reckoning”. His son, Pavel Petrovich Bulygin, my grandmother’s brother, was also known as a poet and writer, a memoirist.

He left with the White Army, and the path of his earthly ended in Paraguay - he died in Asunsion, where he was the head of the Russian community. He wrote the books “Dust of Alien Roads”, “Yantari”, the most interesting thing for us, I think, is “The Murder of the Romanov family”. It is interesting because he took part in the investigation of the circumstances of the death of the royal family, was a member of the Commission of Sokolov.

And how did you work in the "Vespers"? The newspaper is soon years old, and it's so great! In general, I think that “Evening” is a real Moscow newspaper. I remember what queues stood behind her to machine guns back in Soviet times. It cost three kopecks and was more expensive than some other publications, but they bought it willingly, because it had a lot of something that the “colleagues” did not have: something like this from the courtroom, some kind of semi-illeton and mini-detectives.

There were a lot in the "evening" of the freelays, there were wonderful authors. One of them went to me, his name was Mikhail Mironovich Mironov, it was his literary pseudonym, and I can’t remember his real name, sorry, to my shame. He was a little good -natured person who wrote the most terrible notes in the newspaper - from the courtroom. His wife was a judge, thanks to this he was aware of all the last events.

To be honest, he was not a real journalist, he wrote his notes - as a schoolboy from an essay from the series “How I spent the summer”, issued simply an indictment or sentence, starting and ending the notes - from time to time, but was diligent and punctual. Once we talked, and he first showed me his certificate. So I learned with surprise that he served in the fire troops and went through the whole war.

And this little modest man never boasted anywhere, he didn’t beat himself in his chest ... We began to communicate and even wrote something in co-authorship: about scammers, underground brothels, scammers-prostates and all that. I recall this cooperation with warmth and gratitude-it was very newly and Moskoye, “Evening” always supported the best traditions of Moscow newspapers and was close to people.

There was almost no officialdom in it, she found her reader and was on equal terms with him. It was beautiful and the “fat woman”, a weekly, which, alas, was then closed. Well, my department in Vespers was called the investigation department. I tried very hard to pull out interesting things for the newspaper. As a result, to be honest, he quarreled with all the police and investigators, because they did not really like it when their "economy" was shown from the inside.

But there were, of course, materials on how the Moscow police and investigation work. Julia Sokolova worked with me in the department. We wrote a lot with excitement. I remembered here ... It’s today that the video cameras are familiar to everyone, and then they were new. And there was such an episode.

I often remember him, because the murders, unfortunately, always happened, but for a person in the crowd, in the subway, he hit another with a knife - it was something. The operatives calculated the criminal precisely on the cameras. The process itself, how exactly it was found, reading the readings of different cameras - it was amazing! Colossal work. But, unfortunately, the investigation genre has almost disappeared.

And time drives. So it replaces all the information ... And how did you have been allowed to such topics, only honestly? Personal ties? But everything was built on personal contacts, of course. I never paid for information, although many colleagues did this, I know for sure. But the fact is that I really got into this topic before the onset of "market relations." They treated me with confidence, but I tried not to let me down: if they asked me not to publish something, I never published.

The book that I wrote, “Moscow Banditskaya”, contained about a fifth of the information that I had. Eh, you aroused memories in me! Imagine, then, for example, things have just begun related to telephone scammers who bred people for a lot of money.Now no one is surprised at this, and in the middle of X it was a shock. I remember the story when fraudsters divorced a man sitting in a wheelchair at home.

They “pumped it up” so that he threw all his savings into the window! And they picked them up and were like that. He lived on the fifth floor, did not leave the apartments, but they worked according to the scheme “Your relative fell into trouble”, and he reached the window and threw all the money to them. There was a lot of things later, but I can’t forget this case.

This is how they confused the man's head. There are scammers with the gift of hypnosis. I understand that one major unit of our special services, engaged in neurolinguistic programs for their local tasks,, against the background of what was happening in X, ceased to work actively and some people trained in it began to do what they were taught, but for their own purposes.

These trifles of pockets painfully acted professionally. Of course, none of the special services will talk about this, and, I emphasize, this is nothing more than my guesses, not confirmed by anything. And in general, we had a lot of interesting things at our disposal, I would say, unique things. I remember well how, for example, a student of MGIMO was stolen, for example, not professional criminals, but two fools who read something, listened and wanted money.

She was kept in the country, but, fortunately, without violence and sadism, one might say, culturally, frightening only with words. The girl escaped from them, but the story was loud. Of the famous - with Kosyrev, Ryakhovsky, Golovkin. Do you know, by the way, what struck me? Once I represented them bright, but they actually-boring, stupid and gray, absolutely not charismatic and non-memorable people.

And I think, whoever says what, they are all crazy, and even recognized as sane - insane. It’s scary if the maniac served the deadline and went out. They are not subject to correction. It is impossible for them to go far as Ryazan, or rather, the Skopinsky bastard. Remember it is disgusting. Golovkin was the last of those to whom the highest measure was applied. Before the meeting, I re -read it again.

How quickly we forgot the nightmare x: racket, showdowns, lawlessness ... - and really forgot. Then in Moscow there was shooting every day. I returned home late, went to the house through the boulevard, and in one month I found three corpses there. There has been nothing similar for a long time, and I do not think that repetition is possible. We are criticizing police officers and police officers, and it is often fair, since there are many shortcomings in their work, but we must admit that it was they who stopped the lawlessness, and not some otherworldly forces and not economic levers.

You are right: everything is quickly forgotten. And in E, we survived to the point that street shootings, abductions of people, including infants, ceased to surprise us. The record holder of Kidneping was the eight -month -old Nastya Krasnobaeva. She was kidnapped in order to obtain a ransom from parents-business parents. The main argument of criminal diplomacy was explosions. One day in the branches of Lefortovsky Bank, three explosive devices worked at the same time: so the lads “solved issues”.

I think the whole thing was in the presentation. Now, perhaps, the fashionable word “tolerance” would be applied to it - in the sense that I had not accused anyone of anything, did not present anything to anyone, only set out the proven facts against which there could be no arguments. You can say the book was impassive. Already after it, books about the criminal world of Russia or bandits of the period of socialism, capitalism or something else there began to appear.

I think it was interesting for the reader to know the essence of what happened, and not the author’s versions of this. It seems that I succeeded. It is difficult to say as a book is perceived now - the reader is smarter than any writer today, and everyone has seen enough of the movie. And in e, they told me that a black BMW rolled up to the book collapse at the Tula metro station with tinted glasses.