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Nastya hears allegations about a third man, a mathematics professor in Denmark called Sergey Arkhipov. Sergey’s ex-wife reveals what she witnessed.
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Creators & Guests
What is The Adults in the Room?
Nastya Krasilnikova is an investigative journalist who covers sexual violence against women and children. A year and a half ago, former students associated with one of Russia’s most prestigious schools approached her with allegations of serial abuse by teachers. Her investigation has uncovered a network of harm and complicity in a tight-knit circle of Russian intelligentsia.
The story spans many years and multiple countries. It asks what happens when a community refuses to atone for the violence of its leaders. As Russia wages a senseless war in Ukraine, that question couldn’t be more pressing.
For additional materials visit our website: https://adultsintheroom.libolibo.me/
For feedback adultsintheroom@libolibo.me
This is a podcast by Libo/Libo
Before we start, a quick warning. This episode contains descriptions of sexual and emotional violence. For this podcast, I set out to investigate alleged crimes by 2 men, Mark Gondelman and Boris Meerson. Along the way, I heard stories about other men, ones who'd mistreated women and children or turned a blind eye to abuse. It was a complicated network of victims and perpetrators.
Nastya:My researcher, Vica, made crisscrossing flowcharts and color coded timelines. By now, I've told you as much about Mark and Boris as I'm able to report. But Vica's diagrams included a third man I haven't mentioned yet. I heard about him from some of the women who've already appeared in this podcast. His actions reinforced two important conclusions for me.
Nastya:People who are abused are made vulnerable to further abuse. and a community that allows one person to be abused puts all others at risk. In this episode, I want to start with a woman called Inna Mashanova. That third man was her husband. But before she told me about him, she talked about a man who will be familiar to you, Boris Markovich Meerson. How did you get to the School number 57?
Inna:I was interested in mathematics, and I was asking my mother to find me some place to study mathematics. And at some point, I found the evening class, extracurricular class. She found it for me and I started going there in School 57. So I was going there for a year. Then they said, 'Well, we're gonna have exams soon. You can go'. I was like, okay. And so I got in.
Nastya:Inna enrolled in School 57 in 2004 as a part of the mathematics cohort. Boris Meerson never taught her class, but she knew him through friends.
Inna:Well, we would talk a little when we would see each other in the corridors of the school. Like, we would flirt. He would make remarks about my clothes, like how I what I look like, that I'm attractive. At some point, we started going out for beers together, talking about things. I knew that he was dating a friend of mine at the time.
Nastya:That friend was Masha Nemzer.
Inna:So he was explaining to me how I'm unique, how I'm the only person he would pay such attention to, and I knew that it was bullshit. So it made me feel like, 'Okay, whatever, the guy is bullshitting me'. But then I was curious to understand why would he pay attention to me? What kind of attention he's paying to me?
Inna:What is behind that? There was a lot of desire to understand how this kind of, part of human interaction works for adults. I mean, I was a teenager. I was not really experienced in such things. I didn't know, like, when people wanna have sex, does it mean that they like you?
Inna:Does it mean that they love you? Does it mean that they care about you? And eventually, I learned from what he was saying, from how he was phrasing things, that he literally just wanted to have sex.
Nastya:Did you have sex with him?
Inna:Yes. We had petting in some courtyard in Moscow. I told him about my first sexual experience, and he commented on this, like, 'First sexual experience really defines'. And then I remember after we had sex, I didn't feel happy. Because when I have sex, what I really need is an emotional connection.
Inna:I care that much about the basic arousal feelings and things around it. And, I mean, especially when I was a teenager, that was important. And he looked at me and said, 'Every animal is sad after having sex'. And this was like now I think about it that this is normalizing, like, my discomfort as something that should be there. It took me maybe several years to understand that, no, if if I don't feel comfortable, if I don't feel happy after sex, I don't want to have it.
Nastya:So after that one time, was it your decision to stop having sex with him, or was it his?
Inna:It was mine.
Nastya:How did you explain it to yourself?
Inna:It just wasn't interesting be because he was lying to me. I'm saying it didn't leave in his car, but it's still very personal story, and it's still difficult to talk about it. I had to go through this several times with different people to really understand how it works and why it hurts me. And I think that just it's so important to care about people, to pay attention to them, to protect people from this.
Nastya:From Libo Libo, you're listening to The Adults in the Room. My name is Nastya Krasilnikova. This is Episode 9: Violation of Everything. Sergey Arkhipov is a mathematics associate professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. He's 52 years old, and he's an alumnus of School 57.
Nastya:Early in his career, he was a teaching assistant at School 57, but then he moved to Canada, and later to Denmark. When Inna was 22 years old, she met Sergey Arkhipov at a friend's party in Moscow. He was 19 years older than Inna. Nevertheless, they got pretty close really quickly. Sergey worked abroad, so their relationship was long distance most of the time.
Inna:He was gentle. He was attentive. He I could talk to him about anything. I could hear share my deep fears and emotions with him, and he was very available. And he made an impression of a person who really cares about me.
Nastya:But none of Inna's friends really liked Sergey.
Inna:He's not a very pleasant person in general to most people. Also, there are rumors of him, like, watching child porn on public computers in the university, something like this. These are just rumors. I never like, I just heard stories.
Nastya:How did you decide to marry him?
Inna:I got pregnant. I wanted to... Like, the thing is, it was like, the moment I got pregnant, our relationship turned very radically into something rather hostile from his side. But I was pregnant, and I didn't do an abortion. So I decided that I should live with him. And in order to live with him, I had to get a Danish visa. And for a Danish visa, I needed to marry him, so I married him.
Nastya:Ina moved to Denmark. She liked the country, but she didn't like living with Sergey. She says that after they started living together, her husband became emotionally abusive.
Inna:I always knew what abusive relationship was from inside because my mother is abusive, but I didn't know the concept. So I wasn't explaining it in any way besides that the fact that he's just not nice to me anymore. Very soon, it became very bad when I was, using his computer, and I found him writing with a person, like, explicitly sexual. He would say that it's just one thing, and, like, he won't do it again.
Nastya:So you thought he was cheating on you?
Inna:Well, I knew he was cheating on me because I read this interaction.
Nastya:But at the time, you you still hope that it's possible to fix the relationship and go on with them?
Inna:Yes. Yes. I knew that something was going on for a while online because kind of you can tell when a person is lying to you. Sometimes I would read his messages. Sometimes I would look at his computer screen when he was doing something. So I was trying to understand what was going on.
Inna:And then when I was giving birth, he left his computer with me in the hospital, and I went through his files and found videos of children, him talking to them in his voice.
Nastya:So was it, like, a a screen recording?
Inna:Yes. It was a recording of a Skype call.
Nastya:So he was calling children via Skype and doing what?
Inna:Asking them to undress. Talking. It's a mix of, like, sexual and emotional abuse. Like, he would like, with me, he would pretend to be caring and attentive. One recording was of children, I don't know, 10 years old.
Inna:And then he would, like, ask them to show their asses to, like, undress, do such things. With older girls, he would be more, like, just having a conversation then asking them to take off their bra or something. He would ask for explicit photos.
Nastya:Inna also told me that she found Sergey's conversations with an online acquaintance, another man.
Inna:And they were discussing children and teenagers as though they were just a big piece of meat, not a human being with feelings and emotions, just a thing to enjoy.
Inna:Was it shocking for you?
Inna:It took me, like, 9 days to talk to him about what I found out. It took me several years to realize that I cannot change him. We would talk about it over and over and over and over again, and I would try to explain to him why it's bad, why it shouldn't be this way, why they are hurt by what he did. Once he told me that one of those girls wrote to him that she was pregnant and she lived in a small town and she needed help. The thing that he did in response — he changed his Skype name so that she wouldn't be able to access him.
Nastya:Did he explain why was he doing that?
Inna:Well, the usual things like, 'I like it. They like it themselves. They agree to it themselves. They want it. Everything is consensual'.
Nastya:Inna thought about going to the police, but she didn't save or screenshot any evidence. She was also financially dependent on Sergey. Eventually, she separated from him and came back to Moscow. She got a divorce several years later.
Inna:When we first met, we talked about Meerson. And he said how bad it was, what he was doing. And then later on, when I learned about what he was doing, I asked him, like, 'Why would you say such a thing?' And he said, well, 'He's doing it at school. It's bad to do it at school, and I'm not doing it at I'm not working with children. I'm just finding them somewhere else'.
Nastya:Do you know if he ever tried to do something like that offline?
Inna:I think so. He told me he never tried to do this, but I think he probably tried to do it, at least not being sexual, but being emotionally close with children.
Nastya:Sara Bezrukavnikova, who you might remember from the first episodes of my investigation, met Sergei Arkhipov when she was 11 years old.
Sara:I met him at at a math conference in Princeton when I was 11. I was there with my family, who are also mathematicians. My dad was organizing the conference, and, Arkhipov was one of the people who were invited. And I pretty quickly developed a crush on him, as much of a crush as an 11 year old can have on an adult person. And, eventually, I asked my dad for his email.
Sara:And my dad, I don't really think, understood what was happening, and he was like, yeah, sure. Like, go for it. And we started emailing, pretty quickly. And it was, you know, stuff, like, very sort of superficial, like, short emails about what we're doing.
Sara:It wasn't, you know, an everyday, like, long thoughts and feelings kind of email. It was very brief, very friendly, and jokey. But to me, at the time, it meant a lot that he would, email me.
Nastya:So when Sara met Mark Gondelman a year later, Mark wasn't the first grown up man who was grooming her into a relationship. She already had a crush on Arkhipov, who appeared to be very interested in her.
Nastya:I can see what your interest there was. You had a crush on him, but what was his interest? Did you understand it then, and what do you think of it now?
Sara:He told me at some point that his interest is in how I see him. So I think for him, it was the validation of intense crush from a young person, which is pretty sick to think about. And at some point, my dad I think my family got really concerned. My dad emailed him being like, 'Oh, you know, are you basically trying to, you know, seduce my daughter?' And he was like, 'No. No. Everything is very platonic. You know, we're just good friends and there's nothing more than that happening'.
Sara:And my family didn't really know what to do because I wasn't talking to them. He wasn't telling the truth, which was that... I mean, I think he, A — that he got a lot of validation, but also, B — that he is attracted to children.
Sara:So that kind of left everyone at an impasse. The further course of action was unclear because I wasn't asking for help. I wasn't asking for anything. I just wanted to keep talking to him because I felt, like, seen and understood by him.
Nastya:You just said that, he was attracted to children. Is this something that you know for a long time?
Sara:I knew that after he came on to me. I was 14 at that point, and I still thought of myself as, on the one hand, extremely, you know, personally and intellectually developed, and on the one on the other hand, I still felt very much like a kid. And it was after Mark too, so I'd already had, you know, exposure to sex and to things that I didn't feel comfortable with. I already knew what my internal boundary was because it was already crossed at that point. And with Mark, I just, I didn't feel con any sort of control in the situation, and I was just uncomfortable and tense the whole time.
Sara:And then with Arkhipov of I had a question on him for a long time. I trusted him and I sort of expected better of him or I think I had an expectation of continued support. And then we went out, I think, yeah, we grabbed coffee or something, during one of his visits to Moscow, and I just turned 14, and he, started kissing me and tried to grope me. And that, to me, felt like a hard violation of everything. And I couldn't really believe that this person who I've known again, whom I'd known and, like, kind of was in love with for a long time since I was a child would do something like that.
Sara:But, again, that was a fact that I was a child and he was attracted to me. Therefore, he is attracted to children. I called him an asshole and I blocked him for a couple of years. And, unfortunately, I unblocked him, when I was a new immigrant in Boston. And I started college when I was 16, and he, visited Boston at the time.
Sara:I was overwhelmed by immigration and by everything. My English was pretty rusty at that time, so I just felt completely torn out of everything that I'd known before and, you know, thrown in this new world, in this new environment. And he visited Boston, and he came over to my family's house, and we had dinner together. I just wanted to be with someone who who'd known me well, even though I knew that he was not a good person and that I shouldn't trust him. We hung out a few more times when he was in Boston, and pretty soon, we started relationship that was largely over text.
Sara:And I turned 17 my freshman year, and he came over to Boston and we slept together, and that was my first time having penetrative sex with someone. It was, like, in a shitty hotel room, and it was weird, and I felt weird. And I tried to hang on to the version of the story where, you know, this is somebody familiar, and this is sort of honoring an old crush, but it felt fake and just untrue. I tried to end it several times because I was growing continuously miserable and guilty because he was married, and this was, you know, a full on affair. I felt like I was ruining... Actively ruining lives by doing this.
Sara:I wasn't the one ruining lives, but it didn't feel like that at the time. And he also sort of became such a huge source of support for me that it was hard to cut him off. But, again, I keep finding things out about him that just make my skin crawl.
Nastya:Sergey allegedly prayed upon Revekka Gershovich too.
Revekka:So I met him because I was friends with Sara, and at some point, I commented something under her post in VK, and he responded. And, like, we had some nonsensical, like, little, you know, conversation chat about, like, whatever she posted. I don't even remember what it was. And then later he added me to friends in VK saying that Sara has been talking about you and saying that you're a cool person in essence. And for me, you know, if Sara, like, hearing the name Sara was a really good introduction.
Nastya:Did you ever see him or meet him in the school? Was he coming there as a teacher? Or...
Revekka:At the point when he met me, no. But he also used to teach at the school, and he used to tell me stories about how, like, oh, 'We were all young, and we like to start flirting with a girl we were teaching as students when we would come and help in the math classes' and stuff like that.
Nastya:So would you say that he was praying on young girls and getting access to them using his, access to the school?
Revekka:Yeah. Definitely. That's how he was preying on young girls. I think that's also like, I think he had a lot of internal information about the school too, and that was helping him to get to us. Like, if he was an outsider, being from the same school establishes some sort of level of trust.
Nastya:Sergey started talking to 16 year old, Revekka, about rock music.
Nastya:It was in 2014. And then in the late autumn or winter of my 11th grade, he came to Moscow and he asked me if I would like to meet up in person and we could go drink some tea in a cafe, which is what I did. I was sleeping with Meerson by that time. And basically during that meeting, like, it was pleasant in parts, but I had the very uncomfortable feeling and I remember it very clearly that I felt like he extorted out of me the information that I was sleeping with Meerson. And since Meerson was telling me not to tell anybody, I felt like, all the mixed feelings of, like, how could I have told him, guilt, et cetera. And at the same time, I felt like, you know, he got this information out of me by carefully constructed series of questions where, like, I tried to avoid it.
Revekka:And then at some point, I just told him. And I think he might have known by that time, but it was important for him to get me to say it. But after that, he had an incredible leverage over me because he was one of the few people who knew anything about it. And he was one of the few people whom I could actually talk about it without breaking my promises to Meerson, which is a huge thing. So he started kind of playing my psychologist and, I started telling him things and then he started using that power of being my psychologist to try to get me to do things for him.
Revekka:Like, we would talk on Skype and he would ask me to undress and show him my breasts, et cetera. And, actually, Mark was doing that before that. And, he would, like, say, 'Hey, but what's, what's it for you? Like, you're just showing me your breasts'.
Revekka:Like, you're not getting harmed by it or anything'. I'm not even touching you'. And he would, like, kind of guilt me into it. If he just came to me and said, 'Hey, undress for me'. I would say, 'Well, you fuck off for me'. Right?
Revekka:But if you come to me and you become my psychologist and you start talking to me, et cetera, and he used his education, used the knowledge of that social group, used the knowledge of me that he probably also partially got from Sara, use the knowledge of the school to kind of have that, thrilling chase of trying to get me to do things that he wanted. I think it was more about power than even, like, whether he sees my breast or not. Who is all that interested in my breast?
Revekka:My breast is like any other woman's breast. I think the fun thing is to force somebody to do something that they're uncomfortable with doing. And then at some point, I've met up with Sara and we were walking and she was telling me about how she has a relationship with him. And she was living in the US and she was in college already, and it was really difficult for her there. I mean, immigration is generally difficult.
Revekka:And when you are already traumatized, it's even more difficult. I know that very well, unfortunately, too. So she had a relationship with him. I think it was based on the same thing. Like, he was playing her psychologist and then he got her to do things for him and then he called it a relationship.
Revekka:And I told him about how he was, like, trying to extort naked videos out of me, et cetera, et cetera. And Sara got very angry because he keeps telling her that he loves her, that blah blah blah.
Nastya:So Sara and Revekka both blocked Sergey and got on with their lives. As you might remember, after graduating from School 57, Revekka also moved to the US.
Revekka:Somebody added me on Facebook. Person was Canadian, and I asked them, like, 'Hey, why are you adding me on Facebook?' And they answered me, 'Oh, well, I did it by mistake, I guess, but it's an interesting experiment'. And I was like, 'Experiment?'
Revekka:And he's like, 'Yeah. Well, but you turned out to be a very nice person. I wouldn't have added myself if I were you, but you know'. And then I started talking to him because, like, and I wrote it to him, actually. Like, I was rereading this whole conversation and I said, well, I don't think anybody could really harm me on Facebook, like, a person I don't know, a person from Canada with whom I speak English.
Nastya:Revekka started texting with this guy from Canada. His name on Facebook was Samuel. It was a difficult time in Revekka's life. She had just emigrated from Russia, and back in Moscow, the scandal at School 57 was about to go public.
Revekka:And then the scandal started happening, and I and my mental health went to hell, like complete hell. And then I started telling him that, 'Hey, I don't wanna live. I wanna die'. And he started playing a psychologist again back to what's been happening several times now. And then one day, I started just scrolling through his Facebook because he was a person I was hanging out with.
Revekka:And suddenly, I come across a Russian post. And just like days before that, we had this conversation where he said, 'Oh, I Google translated your post, but I don't understand this word in that post'. And I was explaining to him, like, what it means in Russian, et cetera. And then I'm like, he has a Russian post? I mean, it was a repost.
Revekka:And I'm like, that's weird. And then I see that, like, he has very few friends, but he actually has a friend or two that are common with me. And I'm like, that's weird. And then I and then it suddenly clicks for me. He is saying that he's Canadian. And I know that this guy taught in in the University of Toronto, so it's probably him.
Nastya:So Samuel, who befriended Revekka on Facebook, turned out to be Sergey Arkhipov.
Revekka:And I wrote to his other like.. I unblocked him in one of the networks, and I wrote to him, like, 'Hey. You are this person'. Well, his fake account was Samuel Verliben or something like that. And he's like, 'Yeah. How did you guess?'
Revekka:And I'm like, oh my freaking my fucking god. This is so painful. It was such a violation of privacy. I mean, I've been talking to the person for months telling him everything by the end of it. And, like, also feel so stupid when you are told to explain, like, what Russia is like, et cetera, apart from any anything.
Revekka:Like, you know, like, the guy got under my skin in every single way. And then he wrote to me, like, his last message was, that, 'Hey. I was just worried about you'. And then he wrote to me, 'And come to think of it, I never lied to you. You just added a person based on zero information'.
Revekka:For me, it was like after I lost a ton of friends and I'm isolated, for me, it was just another thing I needed to grieve. And it was and I needed to also accept that my privacy was violated big time, which was also very painful.
Nastya:I contacted Sergey Arkhipov. He told me that he didn't want to discuss his private life with journalists and that he no longer considers himself a part of the School 57 community. Revekka, Sara, Inna. Some of the women in this podcast were involved in multiple abusive relationships when they were young, and that's not uncommon.
Sherry:They are definitely not responsible for it happening to them more than once.
Nastya:Sherry Hamby is a psychology professor at the University of the South in Tennessee. She's an expert in trauma and victimization.
Sherry:Because the first victimization can lead to, dissociation PTSD symptoms. So dissociation is just kind of like spacing out or getting lost in your thoughts or, you know, and not paying attention to what's going on around you. And that's a very common post traumatic symptom of child sex abuse and loss of other victimization experiences too. And that, can make you more vulnerable to other perpetrators. So that they recognize that someone is not really paying attention, or perhaps if they're depressed and they've gotten socially isolated, that they're sort of off from their peer group at the playground or things like that.
Sherry:And perpetrators can be very expert at identifying the kids who are struggling the most for whatever reason or another and then taking advantage of that. And that's not because that child is looking to get victimized again, but it's because that child is already suffering from the first victimization. But from the perpetrator's point of view, that makes them a terrific target..
Nastya:Sergey Arkhipov almost certainly knew Revekka and Sara were struggling and isolated. He played their psychologist when they were most vulnerable. His fake identity, Samuel, befriended Revekka when she just got out of a deeply traumatizing relationship with Boris. Sergey knew at the time that she was desperate and used it. I've read that chain of messages, and one of Samuel's first texts says, 'Your recent photos are amazing in their open passion and eroticism'.
Nastya:He started sleeping with Sara when she had just immigrated to the US and was lonely and lost.
Sara:But then, eventually, when I, I think, started coming to terms with immigration more and, making friends and my English got a lot better. I managed to block him for good and say... I think I said goodbye in some way, but I think I just had enough. And I think at that point, I already had that support system of actual, like, people around me, who were kind and not pedophiles.
Nastya:Revekka also pulled through with the help of her new friends and her then American boyfriend, Tyler. He was there when Revekka was dealing with her PTSD.
Revekka:It was helpful to have, somebody who supports you, and Tyler was that person. And it was helpful that he was weirdly prepared for it even though he never dealt with anything like that. But he was prepared to learn about it. Like, he was prepared to learn about the condition. He had the idea that children shouldn't be sleeping with adults.
Revekka:He had the idea that consensus is important. So that was really important that he was that person and was ready to help.
Nastya:Adults shouldn't be sleeping with children. It sounds obvious. But to this day, I am not sure that the institutions in this story have gotten the message. That's on the next episode, which is the final one of this series. The Adults in the Room is produced by Libo Libo Studio.
Nastya:All episodes are out now, so you can play the next one right away. This podcast has a website where you can find additional visual materials collected throughout our investigation and feedback contacts. The link is in the description box. This show is hosted, reported, and written by me, Nastya Krasinikova. A huge thank you to my colleagues, researcher and fact checker, Vica Lobanova.
Nastya:Producers and editors, Nastya Medvedeva, Sam Colbert, and Dasha Cerkudinova. Composer and sound designer, Ildar Fattakhov, and the head of Libo Libo, Lika Kremer. Legal support provided by Michael Sfard and Alon Sapir from Michael Sfard Law Office, and Sergey Markov, managing partner of the law firm, Markov and Mandaminov. Thank you for listening.