A prominent Russian Napoleon scholar has confessed to murdering and dismembering his young lover and former student after he was found in a canal in St. Petersburg with a rucksack containing her severed arms.
Oleg Sokolov, a 63-year-old professor at St. Petersburg State University’s history department, was arrested after he was pulled from the freezing waters of the city’s Moika canal on Saturday. Rescuers discovered the arms along with a pistol in his bag, Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The judge asked Sokolov why he had killed Yeshchenko. He replied that he had not wanted to, saying it happened during a quarrel over his children from a former marriage and appeared to claim he had acted in self-defense. The judge ordered Sokolov held two months in detention ahead of his trial. His defense had requested he be placed under house arrest but Sokolov himself demanded to go to jail. He had been briefly hospitalized with hypothermia from the canal waters but by Monday had been signed off as healthy, his lawyer said.
Sokolov is one of Russia’s most prominent Napoleon experts and has lectured at Paris’ Sorbonne university. The author of several books on the French leader, in 2003 he was made a member of France’s Legion d’Honneur, one of the country’s highest state honors. Accounts from his students posted on social media over the weekend portray Sokolov as a talented lecturer and a master of his subject, but also eccentric, domineering and sometimes aggressive. “Everyone viewed him as a freak, completely immersed in his subject,” Fyodor Danilov, one of Sokolov’s students told the St. Petersburg site Fontanka. “But no one thought he was capable of such a murder.”
Sokolov was censored by a university ethics committee in 2018 after an incident where a student supportive of Ponasenko was violently removed from one of Sokolov’s lectures.
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