Soviet “domushniki” – or home burglars – had a whole arsenal of tools and sneaky tricks for breaking into apartments. And lockpicks were far from being their main weapon.
To get to the nitty-gritty of the ‘art’ of burglarizing – as it was practiced in the Soviet era, let’s hand it over to a former professional. The methods he describes might surprise you.
“I began working ahead of time, a month in advance,” an elderly home burglar from St. Petersburg told me. “You had to have some funds in order to buy out the tickets to an entire group compartment aboard a train – say, one headed south, to Sochi. The performance would start on the day of the departure. I’d appear at the ticket office running, seemingly out of breath, looking for the right ‘clients’ – for example, a family with a child that already has tickets to a group compartment in my train carriage. Then comes the spin.
