Chess prodigy became one of the worst serial killers in Russia’s history and told authorities he killed ‘in order to live’
Alexander Pichushkin was a chess prodigy with a sinister life mission. He dreamed of killing 64 people, one for each square of a chessboard.
Born in Soviet Moscow in 1974 near the Bitsa Park – a verdant forested area home to over 600 species of plants and animals and a popular leisure spot for city-dwellers – Alexander Pichushkin is remembered as having been a happy, smart and healthy child.
That is, until a tragic fall from a swing damaged his frontal cortex, the region of the brain that controls impulse regulation and anger management.
Family friends say that the boy before and after the accident was two different people. He became volatile and difficult; old friends started bullying him in school, further fuelling his rage. Worried by what she saw, his mother moved him to a school for children with learning disabilities.
But Pichushkin remained a prodigious child and, above all else, enjoyed playing chess with his grandfather, who saw a sparkle in the boy. The grandfather took Pichushkin under his wing and would regularly take him to nearby Bitsa Park, where Pichushkin would play and dominate all the other older men.
Pichushkin would become so close to his grandfather that he left his mother’s home to live with him. The two became inseparable.
But toward the end of Pichushkin’s youth, his grandfather passed away, pushing him back to his mother’s Bitsa Park flat. He started self-medicating with vodka and continued playing chess, but became obsessed by the “Rostov Ripper” case, involving a Ukrainian serial killer who violently murdered over fifty women and children in the USSR between 1978 and 1990.
Pichushkin first killed for himself on 27 July 1992, when he was just 18. He had planned to meet a classmate, Mikhail Odïtchuk, in Bitsa Park to jointly hatch a plan to kill 64 people, one for each square on a chessboard.
But when Odïtchuk arrived at the park, he told Pichushkin he wasn’t interested. This threw Pichushkin into a murderous rage. The young man strangled his friend, throwing his body into a nearby sewer from where it would never be recovered.
Police arrested Pichushkin once they were told the two had been seen together shortly before Odïtchuk’s disappearance. But no evidence could be found to concretely tie Pichushkin to the disappearance. The young student walked free.
Over the next 14 years, he would kill again and again, his victims a hybrid of homeless vagrants or, boldly, people he knew. At least 10 of Pichushkin’s victims were neighbours who lived in apartment blocks on the same road as his.
He would approach strangers and friends, men and women alike, with friendly offers of vodka and camaraderie, then take them to isolated areas of Bitsa Park and savagely bludgeon them with a weapon or a bottle. After the attacks, he would impale their smashed skulls with sticks or empty vodka bottles, a kind of calling card.
Pichushkin was finally apprehended in June 2006 after his 36-year-old coworker Marina Moskalyova disappeared. Moskalyova was allegedly wary of Pichushkin and so left her son a note letting her know who she was with and told him to ring the police if she never came back.
When Pichushkin, then working as a shelfstacker, was arrested, he readily confessed to his crimes, telling the police that killing gave him a sense of purpose.
“In all cases, I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live.”
Police searched Pichushkin’s home, the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his mother, and found a chessboard with little coins covering 62 of the 64 squares.
Each coin, Pichushkin said, represented a murder life he had stolen. He told them he had only two more to go until he’d reached his goal, though he admitted he would likely have carried on killing anyway.
He said: “For me, life without murder is like life without food for you. I felt like the father of all these people, since it was me who opened the door for them to another world.” He described the sensation of murdering as like playing God.
Pichushkin was convicted on October 24, 2007, of 49 murders and was sentenced to life in prison, with the first 15 years to be spent in solitary confinement.
He is still alive today, serving his sentence at “Polar Owl”, a remote Arctic “supermax” prison that is among Russia’s most notorious. It is used to hold both political prisoners and Russia’s worst serial killers, with around 10 serial killers serving there. Assassinated Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is another former inmate.
In April 2025, it was reported that Pichushkin had told authorities he was ready to admit to 11 more murders.
Pichushkin is currently believed to be Russia’s second-most prolific serial killer. He is behind only Mikhail Popkov, a police officer believed to have murdered at least 90 young girls and women in Siberia between 1992 and 2011.
