Special Forces
I ask Misha, a Moscow Mafia hit man, the question I have always wanted to ask a murderer: "Does something change inside you as the soul leaves a man whom you have just killed?"
When he has checked the corridor outside the hotel room for snoopers, taken off his fur hat, and swigged the flask of cheap American brandy I offer him, the young killer tells me that the man who takes a human life possesses a special force:
"It takes a special power to kill a fellow man and it gives you a secret something—a confidence, afterward. Maybe you are more of a philosopher than I am. You are a member of the intelligensia. Philosophy is your department. So I will leave that to you. But yes, there is something I feel as I do the job. It is a private thing. When you fly, at take-off, there is a strange feeling in your body, not explicable, but strange. A sort of revolution in your belly. That's the way I feel when I kill. It's no mystery."
Then he shrugs nonchalantly. "It goes with the territory. It's a little thing. Not important. It doesn't interrupt the work."
Of course. Nothing interrupts the work.
Misha adds disdainfully that the man who kills by accident, in anger, or otherwise unprofessionally ("without training or knowledge" in his words), does not experience this mysterious thrill of the man who kills for a living.
"It is different," he says. "They just feel lost. I know, because I have killed someone in a bar fight. I just felt panic and fear. But when you kill for a job, it is control you feel. A very different thing."
We talked for a couple of hours in my Moscow hotel room to answer three questions: What is the psychology of a hit man? Why does our society honor the cult of the cold-blooded dispatcher of life? What kind of man is Misha, the executioner?
The Psychology of a Hit Man
Is Misha a psychopath? A psychopath used to be defined as a "moral imbecile"—someone without conscience, free of all moral constraints. Psychologists are still arguing whether psychopaths are created by nature or nurture—from childhood abuse, mental incapacity, or criminal culture. All of these can be suggested in one case or another. But this does not help us analyze Misha.
Certainly psychopaths are often highly intelligent and able to plan and conceal capital crimes for long periods. Take the case of the "Monster of Rostov," Andrei Chikalito (sentenced to death in 1992), who managed to kill 52 people in 12 years before he was caught. Misha himself is highly intelligent, with diplomas in engineering and English language, but his use of the terms "job" and "control" is not the language of a psychopath. I discussed Misha's case and interview, which I recount in full below, with Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D., president of the American Society of Criminology and Dean of the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
"Misha," says Blumstein, "has found a chosen profession at which he can succeed, and he has found ways to rationalize it to accommodate his moral feelings. Yet he is neither strictly a psychopath nor is he mad in any sense."
Blumstein breaks his analysis into two parts: professionalism (moral considerations) and cost-benefit calculation (practical considerations). "First, he is performing as a professional, one who is able to suppress the moral reprehensibility of his acts. Obviously, he is a more extreme case than the guy selling encyclopedias to illiterates. He is more like the SS guards at a concentration camp. The point is that we all find ways to justify morally repugnant acts to ourselves.
"Second, we all make cost-benefit decisions. The cost for most of us would be too high even if we were offered $1 million, because we would fear getting caught. Misha probably began feeling that the cost was too high, but somehow he passed the point where the cost outweighed the benefits of this profession."
Although Misha's "strange feeling" from his murders is more than just professionalism, Blumstein believes that does not necessarily make Misha a psychopath. "His rush of exhilaration is often experienced by criminals and is associated with risk-taking. But there is also the phenomenon where the criminal commits a powerful act solely to show their control. It is a variant on the rape experience, where the satisfaction is a matter of control, not sexuality. Even though Misha is more interested in gaining control than giving pain, the rush he experiences when he kills is not that different from sadism."
Perhaps that is the most realistic way to understand Misha: He has a good job and he enjoys it. However, other experts do not take the "professional" claims of killers like Misha at face value. Jack Katz, professor of sociology at UCLA and the author of Seductions of Crime, believes that "killers like Misha often put forward the myth that they are working as professionals in order to endow themselves with conventional values and lives. They claim their killing is a technical skill; in fact, they want to be seen as illicit, gambling, womanizing tough guys who talk about themselves as professionals as a cynical exploitation of conventional perceptions of ordinary people."
Katz believes that the profession is simply an excuse for the thrill of killing, "like Nietzche's idea of the criminal who claims that he kills only to rob, while in fact the opposite is true—he robs in order to kill." Katz sees the overwhelming reason for a man like Misha becoming a hit man as "the excitement of confronting the prospect of raw possibility."
