Talk:List of rampage killers in Europe

Listing of Anders Behring Breivik
Should Breivik be on here or are we waiting for his conviction? 96.50.10.234 (talk) 14:35, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Due to the motive behind his attack, I think the section he is currently listed in is rather fitting. So, to answer your question, no he should not be here, no matter if he will be convicted or not. (Lord Gøn (talk) 23:07, 15 May 2012 (UTC))

Listed individuals not convicted of murder
Per the discussion at TalK:List of rampage killers (Americas), WP:BLP policy mandates that living individuals marked as 'arrested' on this list be removed. If sourcing can be found to indicate that the individual concerned was subsequently convicted, they may of course be returned to the list, with the appropriate citation. I shall be making these edits shortly, and sugest that anyone having further information on these individuals adds it now. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:36, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Russia?
Russia may be part of Eurasia, but it's not really part of Europe, so why is it included as part of the Europe list? 173.24.66.108 (talk) 12:45, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Dembsky Vladimir
"Dembsky Vladimir" named Włodzimierz Dąmbski, and he killed not 13 peoples, but only 3: http://curioza.blogspot.com/2014/02/1904-szalony-hrabia.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zaciekawiony (talk • contribs) 16:11, 1 July 2014 (UTC)


 * And what exactly is this weird picture frame in a foreign blog without a word of caption? Poeticbent  talk  16:34, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

New entries (Lukan27)
I got a couple of new entries for this list. I dare not enter them myself.

1. France 2013: 3 killed by fully automatic rifle. http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/tre-draebt-af-teenager-i-frankrig

2. Netherlands 1999: 10 shots fired, 4 wounded at a school. (last section of article) http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/tidligere-elev-anholdt-skudtrussel-i-holland — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lukan27 (talk • contribs) 10 March 2016, 8:12 (UTC)
 * Those two cases do not fit into criteria set at the beginning of this article.  Vanjagenije  (talk)  08:48, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Peter Grachev
The story of Peter Grachev seems dubious to me, I can't find anything in Russian to suggest this individual existed or anything like the events described ever happened. The sources given are either provincial American newspapers or actually seem to have taken their story from such papers (i.e. the Western Mail story is sourced from the San Francisco Examiner) and seem to me to be pretty unreliable. In addition only two are actually accessible. Reading the actual report in the Toledo News-Bee doesn't do much to allay suspicion. The report is sensational i.e. 'he became ominously quiet, merely muttering occasionally "Just wait and see; I'll get even with everybody". None took the old man seriously.' Also it is presented as being in response to communist land redistribution and, in my opinion, might well be fabricated "red scare" propaganda. If anything like this did occur (and the American press got to somehow hear of it) it seems reasonable there might be something in Russian out there on the internet about this guy but I can't find any record of him at all. I'm going to do a bit more searching but if there aren't better more credible sources I'm going to delete this as a piece of fiction. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.185.145.214 (talk) 01:32, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
 * It could very well be that the story was a hoax, but if it was, it was one that travelled unusually far. During my studies of mass murder I have found a number of newspaper articles that proved to be fabrications, but they all had in common that their publication was limited to a handful of newspapers in one country. The story of Peter Grachev on the other hand was printed not only in the US, but throughout Europe by major newspapers, so I find it unlikely that there isn't any truth to it at all - some details may be wrong however. The fact that there are no Russian sources available online on the other hand proves very little. It is highly unlikely that a mass murder in rural Russia 90 years ago would have left much of a mark, especially since the Soviets were keen to suppress any information concerning major crimes, which were generally presented as an outgrowth of western decadence. e.g. the case of Charles Whitman in 1966 was reported around the world and was exploited by the Soviets to substantiate their claim that the communist system was superior, but how many people outside of Kursk have ever heard of Victor Korshunov and Yuri Surovtsev who killed 13 people there only two years later? Regarding further sources: This article in the Gazette de Lausanne refers the story to a Times-correspondent in Riga, the Berliner Börsenzeitung reported about it on August 2, and the Latvian Zemgales Balss on August 5. The Vorarlberger Tagblatt and other Austrian newspapers reported in November that Grachev was sentenced to 10 years of solitary confinement, apparently the maximum sentence for capital crimes in Russia at the time - the death sentence was reserved for counter-revolutionary crimes. Maybe you are lucky and Russian censors weren't as rigorous back then and allowed the story to be published in contemporary newspapers, so if you want to find Russian sources your best chances probably lie in Russian newspaper archives. Unfortunately, the List of online newspaper archives isn't much of a help in this case, as it lists no Russian newspapers covering the year 1925. (Lord Gøn (talk) 14:05, 26 March 2016 (UTC))

I appreciate that the silence of the Russian language press might be expected to a degree, and it is difficult to determine via the internet if indeed it was in fact silent at the time. The USSR of 1925, although press censorship and propaganda was to be expected, was not as repressive as the Stalinist system which evolved later and I would expect a degree of lassitude would have existed to enable such a story to have been covered. Indeed a counter argument might be made that it may have been "good" propaganda to paint the opponents of land redistribution as homicidal maniacs. As to the fact the story was reprinted internationally I don't think that this makes a conclusive case for its validity, many erroneous stories have been diffused worldwide, indeed with regards to the USSR you only have to look at the story of the "K-1000" battleship to see how misinformation can be spread. The USSR was not the only party indulging in cold war propaganda or its 1925 analogue and I hardly think it is unimaginable that a peice of imaginative anti-Bolshevik propaganda dreamt up in one newspaper might have grown "arms and legs". I have seen a good few other 'facts' about the USSR of this period in the English language be found to be baseless after research in Russian (or just looking at Russian wikipedia). As I have said before I am not discounting entirely that this happened, but I would much rather have some indication from a Russian source that there is something substantive behind this tale. You mention Korshunov and Surovtsev and I agree that in the West they are entirely unknown but there is a page in Russian on this very site about their attack, and plenty of other references to it across the internet in Russian. Frankly I find it odd that a massacre of such a scale would not return a single result or trace in any search on multiple search terms I have made across various search engines in the Russian language. As it seems to have support in the international press of the day perhaps deletion is not appropriate but I feel some sort of acknowledgement of the paucity of good evidence for this event should be attached to it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.185.145.214 (talk) 23:15, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

After a lot of tedious searching through old issues of Soviet newspapers I can confirm the honour of the Toledo News-Bee and sundry other outlets is upheld. Although it entirely seems to have escaped the modern Runet the issue of Izvestiya for 31st June 1925 does have this story in it. This is the date of the report but the actual date of the attack was the 26th. It appears to have happened in the Ivankovo of Sudislavsky district but aside from that the reports I can find add little detail other than a mention of him "sending his wife away" and "burning all his possessions" prior to the attack. There is also an assertion all but one house in the village was destroyed and only one horse was left alive in addition to the 17 dead villagers. It is worth noting however that in a later issue (12th Aug) the number of dead is given as 10 (6 villagers shot dead in the initial attack, one rescue worker (presumably a fireman) and three wounded villagers who later died from their wounds), and the figure of wounded is given as 10 (including those who later died). In addition 14 houses are now described as having been destroyed. Unfortunately there is no way of telling which set of figures is nearer the truth of the matter, and arguments could be made for either. Grachev is described as having voluntarily surrendered to the authorities after having spent some undetermined time on the run, but aside from mention of a trial in a September issue there is little indication in the contemporary Russian reports I can (so far) find of his ultimate fate.

I am therefore satisfied this is a genuine case but I will try to see if any clarity might be obtained on the details, I expect the foreign press took the figure of 17 dead from the initial Soviet report and there is probably no way of determining now (short of perhaps trawling the official archives of the Kostroma region itself, which sadly I can't do) of unequivocally resolving one way or another if the initial or later reported totals are accurate. The one thing I will alter at present is the date which seems to be slightly wrong, understandably the foreign press seems to have used the date at which the news seems to have been reported in the USSR but from what I can find in Russian it seems that the massacre happened on the 26th as stated above. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.185.145.214 (talk) 00:51, 31 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you for taking the pains to delve deeper into the subject and I am glad you could find confirmation for the case's factuality. (I suppose in the above you meant the Izvestiya issue of 31st July, and not 31st June.) That the date and the death toll were wrong in the initial reporting, especially outside the USSR, is almost to be expected. The number of victims given in the articles published in the Austrian newspapers later on, being 11, may be more correct - they were ambiguous, however, if this included Grachev's farmhands and family who were reportedly also killed.


 * Concerning the propaganda wars between the west and the east I really can't claim to be an expert in this regard, but from my experience I would say that the great division in Europe and the deliberate spread of misinformation began in earnest only after WWII - especially Germany and Austria at the time of Grachev's crime still had ties with and strong tendencies towards the east, and if their newspapers, as in this case, reported about a subject from this region there probably was a grain of truth in it. Of course, after the war the whole situation changed completely and eastern Europe is barely existent in the western media even today - it's almost as if the Iron Curtain remained largely intact in this regard and the expansion of the European Union seemingly did little to alleviate this fact.


 * That the internet is oblivious to the case is hardly surprising, however. The years after WWI were a very difficult time for many European countries, so this was likely just one terrible incident among many others and thus didn't really stand out enough to be memorized, especially considering the hardships many people were facing on a daily basis. Also, a lot of newspapers had to cut back their page numbers and reporting was often limited, especially regarding subjects of little national significance, so these years are somewhat of a dark age, and at least in Germany and Austria the situation began to improve only around 1924/25. I have no experience with Russian newspapers, but I would assume that it was similar there. Furthermore, occurrences prior to WWII are getting increasingly more difficult to research due to a lack of available sources, and consequently have less chance to be uncovered once they are forgotten. As far as I can see there are only very few people who are researching mass murders, and most of them restrict their field of research to one or two countries and the not too distant past. An effort to systematically find and research cases around the globe and throughout history does not exist, and I may very well be the only one at least trying to do so.


 * Another reason is certainly the lack of a lasting impact this and similar crimes had on the general population. It is unlikely that people will remember something that was covered merely in a handful of brief articles. Only very few mass murders become part of the collective memory, and if you look through the list of rampage killers you will find that most cases have been largely forgotten. Around the same time as the Grachev case, for example, Rosario Tranchita killed nine people in Librizzi. Nowadays there is an article about the murders at the Italian Wikipedia, but before I have uncovered it there was absolutely no mention of it on the internet, and information about it was only available through newspaper archives. The same is basically true for the case of William Unek, or the Wilno school massacre. The Bremen school shooting only received fleeting mention in a handful of mostly local German publications, before I wrote the article here on Wikipedia, and the same is true for Fritz Angerstein. The case was no less of a sensation in Germany at the time than that of Fritz Haarmann, but this did not prevent it from falling into oblivion until fairly recently. Even the United States, with its obsession with mass shootings did little to preserve the memory of cases like Gilbert Twigg, or the Jones brothers, and not too long ago the claim was still prevalent that Howard Unruh was the first of his kind.


 * Eastern Europe had a number of pretty gruesome crimes during the early 20th century, banditry and its often accompanying mass murders were still quite prevalent, but as far as I know none of these cases have made it into the body of common knowledge, or left a mark on the study of criminology. In 1926, e.g., a man only identified as Ruczuk was arrested in Poland for killing 53 people, mostly by torturing them to death, so he is on par with someone like Andrei Chikatilo. Nonetheless, I wasn't even sure if he actually existed, until I found a brief article about him in a Polish newspaper. Only two years prior a couple surnamed Zbonski was arrested in Grodno for killing 51 people, and in 1912 a woman named Kusnezow, who had run an orphanage near Archangelsk, was arrested under the suspicion of having killed 1000 children within 35 years. There are many more such cases, but I think those mentioned should suffice to show that Grachev is not the only one who hasn't succeeded so far in gaining a foothold in the virtual world. (Lord Gøn (talk) 20:34, 31 March 2016 (UTC))

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Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:List of rampage killers (Africa) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 04:17, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Andrey Shpagonov
Andrey Shpagonov needs to be added. Lightiggy (talk) 01:44, 2 February 2022 (UTC)


 * He has a robbery motive. And robbers are not added to this list. Unknown4321unknown (talk) 11:31, 2 February 2022 (UTC)