Conviction Divination and fortune-telling services Zainsk, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia · 2018

Tatarstan: a rite of white sheet, live chicken, thread, water and sugar, and 292,397 roubles from three women

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

a woman convicted on three counts of claiming to detect and remove curses, two of them committed in prior conspiracy, a second woman, convicted with her on two of those counts, acting under roles agreed in advance

Organization

Zainsk City Court, Republic of Tatarstan (Заинский городской суд Республики Татарстан)

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The authority is the claimed capacity to detect a curse and to remove it by rite, and this judgment sets out the rite's contents with unusual precision: a white sheet, a live chicken, thread, water and sugar. That specificity matters because the court treats the objects as the instrument of persuasion — the manipulations are what convinced the couple the curse was real. Two structural features recur from elsewhere in the Russian set. The curse was placed on the husband, not the woman approached, so that compliance read as protecting her family rather than serving herself. And the demand for a live chicken required her to prepare for the rite in advance and to admit the defendants to her home, so that by the time property was requested she had already invested in the procedure.

Curse or witchcraft threat
Spiritual healing or treatment

Scope decision

Neither defendant is named. Russian courts anonymise published judgments as a matter of course, and this record identifies the case by number and court — case no. 1-122/2018, Zainsk City Court, Republic of Tatarstan — in accordance with CODEBOOK §10. The judgment's anonymisation is internally inconsistent, referring to the first defendant as ФИО2 and at one point as ФИО5, and appending an honorific to the second defendant's designation; no inference is drawn from any of that, and the honorific is not reproduced. The victims and the husband appear as numbered designations and are not named. All dates within the judgment are redacted as ДД.ММ.ГГГГ, so the offence dates cannot be stated more precisely than the year; the record is dated to 2018, the year of the judgment. ON SENTENCE: the fines of 150,000 and 120,000 roubles were imposed and then, under ч.5 ст.72, both defendants were released from serving them in view of time already spent in pre-trial detention. Neither therefore paid a fine nor served a further custodial term, and a reader should not take the fine figures as penalties actually enforced. Jewellery and cash recovered as exhibits were returned to the three victims, so the sums recorded as losses were not all permanently lost. The judgment states an appellate route but records no appellate outcome, and none was found.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2018-09-12 · conviction and sentence at first instance

Zainsk City Court, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia (Заинский городской суд Республики Татарстан). Two defendants, anonymised in the published judgment as ФИО2 and ФИО3, were convicted under ч.2 ст.159 of the Criminal Code. The first was convicted on three counts, two of them committed by a group acting in prior conspiracy; the second on the two conspiracy counts. The court found that at the central market the first defendant told a woman that her husband was under a curse and that she could remove it if she came to the victim's home and was provided with one live chicken; that at the victim's home the defendants, by manipulations with a white sheet, the live chicken, thread, water and sugar, convinced the victim and her husband that he was indeed cursed, and under the pretext of performing the removal rite obtained her property. Recorded losses were 106,250 roubles from the first victim, 75,515 roubles from the second and 110,632 roubles from the third — 292,397 roubles in total. Each defendant was fined 100,000 roubles on each count, aggregated by partial addition under ч.2 ст.69 to final fines of 150,000 and 120,000 roubles respectively. Both were then released from serving those fines altogether under ч.5 ст.72, in view of the time each had spent in pre-trial detention, and were freed from custody in the courtroom. Jewellery and 11,000 roubles in banknotes held as exhibits were returned to the victims. No civil claim was brought.

Documented coercion mechanisms

victims approached at the central market, a place where strangers speak to one another without arousing suspicion
the curse attributed to the victim's husband rather than to the victim, so that acting on it presented itself as protecting her family
the victim required to supply a live chicken and to admit the defendants to her home, which committed her to the procedure before anything was handed over
a rite performed with a white sheet, the live chicken, thread, water and sugar, which the court found was used to convince both the victim and her husband that a curse was present
roles distributed in advance between the two defendants on the counts charged as prior conspiracy

Cited record

Sources

court of record criminal judgment Приговор № 1-122/2018 от 12 сентября 2018 г. по делу № 1-122/2018, Заинский городской суд (Республика Татарстан) — Уголовное.: The full text of the criminal judgment, read directly from the Russian judgments database sudact.ru. The court records that the first defendant, at the central market, «ввела в заблуждение Потерпевший №1, сообщив ложные сведения о наличии у её мужа Свидетель №1 «порчи» и обладания способностью ее снятия в случае нахождения по месту проживания Потерпевший №1 и предоставлении 1 живой курицы», to which the victim agreed. At the victim's home, «путем обмана под предлогом «снятия порчи», при помощи манипуляций с белой простынью, живой курицы, нити, воды и сахара убедила Потерпевший №1 и её мужа Свидетель №1, что у последнего имеется «порча» и под предлогом проведения обряда «снятия порчи», попросила Потерпевший №1 передать ей» her property. The recorded losses are «на общую сумму 106250 рублей», «на общую сумму 75515 рублей» and «на общую сумму 110632 рубля». The operative part imposes fines of 100,000 roubles per count, aggregates them under ч.2 ст.69 to 150,000 and 120,000 roubles, and then «на основании части 5 статьи 72 УК РФ с учетом срока содержания под стражей... освободить от отбывания назначенного наказания в виде штрафа», both defendants being released in the courtroom and exhibits returned to the victims.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://sudact.ru/regular/doc/mjL5P2wcWVU5/ Corpus classification: court-of-record; evidentiary role: criminal-judgment.
Retrieval: 2026-07-29 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (Russian-language sweep; full judgment read via the browser pane; the market approach, the curse attributed to the husband, the live-chicken requirement, the itemised rite, all three per-victim losses, the fines and the release from serving them under ч.5 ст.72 taken verbatim from the judgment)

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