RIA Novosti / Konstantin Chalabov
Police have opened an investigation after an elderly survivor of WWII’s Leningrad siege, possibly suffering from dementia, died of a suspected heart attack in a police station. The old woman had been hauled there after stealing butter from a supermarket.
On Tuesday, 81-year-old Rauza Galimova, a resident of St.Petersburg, was paying for her groceries in an outlet belonging to Russia’s biggest grocery chain Magnit. According to eyewitness reports in the local media, she had already purchased most of her goods, when the cashiers asked security to check the lady’s bag in front of a busy queue.
According to the police, three packs of butter with a total value of no more than 300 rubles, or $4, were found in the bag. Theft of items up to the value of1000 rubles is not considered a criminal offense under the Russian law, but is usually punished with a fine several times greater than the cost of stolen goods.
Galimova presumably did not offer to pay for the stolen goods, and the police were called. The woman, who had history of heart disease and reportedly struggled to walk up the stairs to her flat, was escorted to the local station.
“As soon as she arrived in the lobby, she began to complain about feeling unwell,” said a statement from the St. Petersburg police.
Galimova then crumpled on the floor, her lips turning blue. By the time the doctors arrived, she was dead.
Galimova's nephew Vladimir Sokolov said that officers later found 1,500 rubles ($22) in her purse. The 81-year-old received a state pension of 25,000 rubles ($370) a month, lived in a well-kept flat, and was financially supported by her relatives.
“She wasn’t a woman on a downward slope, or on the margins of society – by any stretch of imagination,” said Emma Leshina, the head of a local organization that looks after survivors of the deadly Leningrad siege, which locked down the city between 1941 and 1944.
(ARCHIVE) A woman standing by corpses and coffins in besieged Leningrad. (RIA Novosti)
Reports said Galimova had experienced two heart attacks and may have suffered from dementia.
“When we visited her for her 80th anniversary, we noticed that she was not responding appropriately to questions, and did not exhibit alertness. But alternatively, we had a commemoration of the end of the siege just last week, and maybe psychologically she was replaying those times of hunger, and that prompted her to behave in what was for her, an atypical way,” speculated Leshina.
More than 1 million civilians are thought to have perished during the 900-day siege of Leningrad by the Nazis. With food supplies running low almost from the start, and airlifts providing only intermittent relief, starving people inside Russia’s cultural capital had to resort to eating pets, pigeons and corpses of the dead. Those who managed to survive have been accorded a status in Russian society somewhat similar to Holocaust survivors in Israel.
Galimova’s death has provoked a wave of fury on social media.
Prominent actor Ivan Okhlobystin called the police “idiots” on Twitter, while many bloggers wondered why the incident couldn’t have been sorted out locally, so that the pensioner wouldn’t have had to experience public humiliation. Others wondered why no one offered to step up and pay the trivial sum.
With the situation threatening to turn into a PR disaster for Magnit, chief executive and owner Sergey Galitskiy tweeted that it was “a mistake” to involve uniformed officers, opening himself up to questions on what the company policy on theft is, and how to avoid similar situations.
Some of the anger has been re-directed at the police. In response to public pressure, an internal review of Galimova’s arrest and death has been launched.
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