What It Was Like to Rob Banks in the USSR
Some people earn a strange kind of immortality through wildly improbable exploits. This is the story of one such gang from the Soviet Union, whose absurd crime spree turned them into a Soviet urban legend — and forced the country’s police to upgrade their gear. Their exploits even caught the attention of Leonid Brezhnev.
In August 1941, Nazi forces seized the Bryansk region. Local families fled eastward, and one household ended up settling in Rostov-on-Don. Tragedy hounded them: the father died fighting in the Great Patriotic War, leaving a widow and her two sons. The elder brother, Vladimir Tolstopyatov, was born in 1929; the younger, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, in 1940.
Life was brutal for a widowed mother raising two boys amid wartime chaos. At sixteen, Vladimir joined the Red Army and survived the war unharmed. Vyacheslav escaped the front lines, but not prison.
He was arrested in 1960. Stalin had long died by then, and the Gulag system was largely dismantled, so what landed the teenager behind bars? Vyacheslav had an unusual gift: drawing. Untrained, he possessed remarkable skill. Many artists in 20th-century Europe dreamed of big opportunities, but Vyacheslav had a simpler thought. If drawing existed to make money, why not draw money directly?
At fifteen, he produced his first counterfeit 100-ruble note. Soviet banknote security was limited at the time, and his work was nearly indistinguishable from real currency. His first test run: he used the fake bill to buy a bottle of vodka at a shop. He tossed the vodka away, kept the genuine change, and bought what he actually wanted.
His counterfeits worked reliably, yet walking into shops every time grew tedious. He soon switched to taxi drivers, who rarely inspected cash closely and stuffed fares straight into their pockets.
Growing lazier, Vyacheslav cut corners. He drew only the front side of the banknote, folded the paper so the printed face showed and the blank white back stayed hidden, and handed it over.
Cost-cutting caught up with him. One day at a train station, the taxi driver shook the bill to pay for something and spotted the blank white reverse. Railway police arrested Vyacheslav on the spot.
He confessed without hesitation. Curious officers asked him to demonstrate his talent right there in the station house. With compasses, rulers and watercolour paints, he spent four hours recreating a 100-ruble note. The result stunned every man in the room.
Counterfeiting currency carried severe penalties. Under Stalin, this offence could easily end in execution. But Vyacheslav got lucky. He was young, soft-spoken and polite, and the police saw a talented kid who had gone astray. They pleaded for leniency on his behalf.
The court handed down a surprisingly light sentence: four years in prison.
In jail, cellmates asked whether he would keep making fake notes after release. Vyacheslav answered seriously: “No. I’ll do something bigger.”
If the Rostov police who fought for his mercy had known what he planned, they would have been devastated.
Vyacheslav walked free in February 1964. Vladimir came to collect him. The brothers remained close, though they lived apart from their mother and had a strained relationship with her.
On their way home, they ran into Sergey Samosyuk, a tough former cellmate of Vyacheslav’s. He tagged along for a welcome-home meal.
Over drinks, Vyacheslav laid out his plan. “We all have skills. Vladimir knows weapons from his army service. Sergey can fight. And you know what I can do. We’re stuck working dead-end jobs at a helicopter factory while the banks are full of cash. We could become millionaires. Our goal is one million rubles.”
He was done drawing fake money. He wanted to rob banks.
Vladimir and Sergey agreed immediately. Rostov-on-Don had a fierce reputation for banditry, paired with Odessa — locals called them “Rostov-Papa” and “Odessa-Mama”; Rostov bred armed robbers, Odessa smugglers. Bank robbery fit the city’s grim folklore.
Still short-handed, they brought in Vladimir Gorshkov, a childhood friend of the Tolstopyatovs, obedient but unremarkable, useful only as a helper. The four-man “Fantomas Gang” was born, the crew that would become one of the most famous Soviet crime legends of the Brezhnev era.
We know every detail because Vyacheslav kept a meticulous diary, logging every scheme and thought.
His robbery blueprint had three parts: build firearms and grenades, scout targets and escape routes, and hijack a getaway car. They would tie up the driver and lock him in the trunk to stop him alerting police.
He planned with obsessive care, a reaction to the lazy half-finished counterfeits that had landed him in jail. Preparing weapons alone took four years. He built seven handguns, homemade grenades and crude body armour. Investigators later marvelled at the craftsmanship.
On 7 October 1968, after four years of preparation, they struck for the first time, targeting the State Bank of the USSR in Rostov. Vladimir kept watch outside, Vyacheslav waited inside posing as a customer, while Sergey and Gorshkov went to steal a Volga sedan.
The hijacking went wrong. The driver spotted the gun, panicked and fled before they could restrain him. Afraid he would call police, the pair abandoned the car and returned to the bank. Vyacheslav, who had been waiting for hours, came up with a quick cover story. He called the police himself, told them where the car was parked, and claimed they had only been joking around with toy guns. The police accepted the explanation and let them go with a warning.
Four years of work down the drain. They blamed the hijacking step and revised their plan. Sergey worked as a driver at a shoe factory; they decided to use his work vehicle and tie Sergey up in the backseat to make him look like a hostage. Their new target: the elderly female cashier who collected the factory payroll from the bank on 10 October.
They tailed her out of the bank and accelerated to intercept her. At the last second, a truck pulled up beside her. The driver recognised the cashier and offered her a ride. The truck drove away with their target, leaving the robbers stranded.
Two failed attempts, not a shot fired. Vyacheslav picked an easier mark: a remote village shop in Minil, far from police stations. On the drive there, their Volga broke down. Soviet cars were notoriously unreliable.
They spotted a roadside grocery store and improvised. Masked and armed, they burst inside. The shopkeeper quickly hid most of the cash in a lump of dough, leaving only small change on the counter. The gang grabbed 250 rubles, roughly three months’ wages for an ordinary worker, a tiny fraction of their million-ruble goal.
Then a customer walked in: Chumakov, a Second World War veteran out to buy sausage. He saw the robbery and charged the robbers, beating them back. Panicked, Vyacheslav fired four shots and killed him. They snatched another 276 rubles from the veteran’s pocket and fled by tram. Their total haul came to 526 rubles. After accounting for supplies and ammunition, they actually lost 27 rubles on the job.
By this point, the Fantomas Gang was a joke among Rostov’s underworld.
On 25 November 1968, they ambushed a woman leaving a bank and stole a parcel, only to find it full of clothes. On 29 December 1968, they robbed a general store. The shop reported losses of 1,498 rubles, but Vyacheslav’s diary recorded he received just 377 rubles, and he fumed about being cheated. On 22 January 1969, they hit a hardware store. The shop claimed 2,700 rubles had been taken; the gang got barely a fraction. On 8 February 1969, a food shop was robbed of 87 rubles and five salted fish. This was not the Fantomas Gang.
Copycats and frame-ups were everywhere. Petty thefts across Rostov were blamed on them. Even Vyacheslav and Vladimir’s own mother was robbed by someone pretending to be part of the crew.
Internal strife followed. Sergey Samosyuk skimmed their meagre loot. Vyacheslav disciplined him and brought in a new recruit, Boris, to replace him. The Fantomas Gang 2.0 formed: Vladimir Tolstopyatov, Gorshkov and Boris. Their next four planned robberies all collapsed for random, absurd reasons.
Vyacheslav set his sights on a major score: the October Revolution Chemical Plant, a large facility where cash deposits of over 100,000 rubles were common. They disabled the plant’s transport ahead of time and waited for the female cashier to come out with the deposit on 21 April 1969.
At 3 p.m., she stepped outside with her hands raised in surrender. There was no money. The heavy cash bags were carried separately by a security guard, who immediately drew his pistol and opened fire. The gang scattered. Gorshkov was shot. When they reached their stolen getaway car, the bound driver had freed himself and locked all the doors. They hijacked a truck to escape.
The botched chemical plant robbery drew KGB attention and a task force of hundreds. The gang lay low.
They resurfaced in August 1971 and pulled off two relatively successful jobs: 17,000 rubles from a construction firm and 20,000 rubles from a savings office. Gorshkov was wounded again. Even combined, the haul was less than 4% of their million-ruble target. Wild rumours spread across the USSR: people whispered they were GRU veterans, plotting to steal a helicopter and raid Moscow’s state treasury. The stories reached Brezhnev.
The manhunt intensified. Spurred by the Fantomas Gang’s long run of escapes, Soviet authorities boosted police funding, issued radios and deployed mobile patrols.
The gang hid for eighteen months. In June 1973, Vyacheslav targeted the Southern Hydraulic Engineering Research Institute, which held payroll cash exceeding 300,000 rubles on payday. They seized a money bag holding 125,000 rubles — their biggest take ever.
Researchers and security staff swarmed after them. When Vyacheslav fired at the lead pursuer, his homemade pistol misfired. Convinced the robbers only carried toy weapons, the crowd chased harder. Civilians with private cars joined the pursuit alongside police. Vyacheslav crashed their getaway car into a boulder.
They exchanged gunfire. A retired army sniper among the pursuers killed Boris with four well-placed shots and hit Gorshkov for the third time. The Tolstopyatov brothers stole an old Moskvich sedan and kept running. A furious taxi driver tried to ram them, only to back off when he saw Vyacheslav holding a grenade.
Cornered in a dead-end alley blocked by a 2.5-metre wall, they surrendered. Police initially did not realise they had caught the famous Fantomas Gang until Vyacheslav confessed freely.
At trial, Gorshkov broke down and claimed he had been coerced the whole time. Vyacheslav mocked him openly, calling him the “bullet catcher”, the fool who got shot three times in fourteen robberies.
The Rostov court found the gang responsible for fourteen armed robberies, two murders and three injuries. The total value of stolen funds stood at 150,000 rubles, including the 125,000 rubles seized in the final botched heist.
On 6 March 1975, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Vladimir Tolstopyatov and Boris were sentenced to execution by firing squad. Vyacheslav’s last request to the executioners was simple: “Keep me far away from that idiot. I don’t want his blood on me.”
Tales of the Fantomas Gang are still widely told along the Don River. Western governments and media seized the case as supposed proof that Soviet state authority was crumbling. In a strange, terrible way, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov left his mark on history.
If you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me! Every little bit means the world! ❤️
☕ Buy me a coffee