The disappearance of Sergei and Irina Usoltsev, their five-year-old daughter Arina, and the family dog in the taiga of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region on September 28, 2025 remains unsolved nearly a year later, drawing renewed attention to a long history of baffling missing-persons cases in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
The Usoltsev family had set out on a hiking trip to Buratinka rock despite warnings of approaching snowfall and were never seen again. Investigators named an accident as the most likely cause, but no physical trace of the family was found. The only lead was a cache of hundreds of thousands of rubles discovered in the family’s car. Searches were relaunched in May 2026 and a checkpoint was established at the site to restrict access, but no results followed.
A Family Erased in Volgograd, 1989
On July 14, 1989, Taisiya Tyurina, 42, left her apartment in Volgograd’s Krasnoarmeysky district to collect documents from a technical college and never arrived. Her husband Vyacheslav, 38, went out to search for her, came home briefly, then left again around 10 p.m. and also vanished. Their 16-year-old daughter Svetlana was last seen walking the family dog near the building entrance around 11 p.m. She returned the dog to the apartment, went back outside, and was never seen again.
Neighbors raised the alarm days later when no one had been seen entering or leaving, and a dog inside the apartment would not stop barking. When they gained entry, they found the dog alive, having survived by drinking from an aquarium. Money and valuables were untouched. The only family member to escape the disappearance was the eldest son, Andrei, 19, who was serving in the army. He said he learned what had happened only when he came home more than a month later and an elderly neighbor told him the news, describing arriving to find everything locked and the dog barking.
Vyacheslav Tyurin had amassed considerable wealth through illegal sturgeon fishing. Andrei later said the family owned two apartments, two cars, and several garages, and that neighbors typically borrowed money from them rather than the reverse. He said he believed racketeers killed his parents when his father refused to share his money, and that his sister was also taken because she knew the people involved.
A large sum of money subsequently surfaced in the possession of a police officer named Yerofeyev, who had been providing protection for Tyurin’s operations. Investigators found insufficient evidence to charge him, and he refused a polygraph test. A car shared by Yerofeyev and Tyurin was found burned the day after the family vanished; investigators determined the fire was deliberate. Yerofeyev was eventually jailed, but only for illegal weapons possession, and was released after a few years. He reportedly received a shop as a gift shortly afterward, said to be compensation for his inconvenience and silence.
The original investigating prosecutor was Mikhail Muzrayev. When investigators reopened the Tyurin case in 2019, a senior investigator from the regional Investigative Committee said that Yerofeyev had most likely helped transport and kill the family, but that proving it after 30 years was far more difficult. Muzrayev, by then a lieutenant general, was himself convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for the attempted murder of Volgograd’s governor.
The KGB Major Who Surfaced in the United States, 1980
On May 19, 1980, Viktor Sheymov, a major in the KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate, failed to report for work. His wife and five-year-old daughter were also missing. His unit handled communications security and cipher development. A regiment of soldiers searched forests outside Moscow and divers examined waterways. The family had left dirty dishes in the kitchen and a full refrigerator. Nothing was found.
Soviet authorities learned the truth only years later: Sheymov had defected. He later said publicly that his aim was to inflict maximum damage on the communist system, and that he had first approached American intelligence in 1979 while posted to the Soviet embassy in Warsaw, slipping away from his escort during a cinema visit by claiming illness and climbing through a toilet window to reach the US embassy. He was given the codename Sapphire.
At a meeting in a Moscow park in April 1980, Sheymov agreed to hand over KGB cipher codes in exchange for resettlement in the United States with his family. On May 16, according to one account, he was disguised as an American pilot while his wife and daughter were concealed inside a diplomatic cargo container that could not be searched, and all three were flown out on a military transport aircraft. Sheymov worked for American intelligence for 15 years before moving into cybersecurity. He died at his home in Virginia in 2019 at the age of 73. He later sued the CIA, alleging he had not received the full payment he had been promised.
Two Brothers Lost in the Forest, 2013
On November 3, 2013, brothers Vladimir, 10, and Sergei, 8, Kulakov walked from their home in the village of Rechny in Kirov region toward the forest edge and never came back. Hundreds of volunteers, police, divers, and rescue workers searched the surrounding taiga and 123 nearby bodies of water. Nearly 900 interviews and 350 searches were conducted. Search dogs followed the children’s scent to the forest edge and stopped. No trace of the boys was ever found.
In summer 2026, the boys’ mother, Marina Kulakova, asked investigators to re-examine the case using new technology. She said she understood it was unrealistic to expect results but wanted everyone connected to the case checked again, noting that the law required searches to continue for 25 years.
