In the Soviet era, even a robbery of an ordinary savings office, if several thousand rubles were taken, was treated as an extraordinary incident. When the damage exceeded 10,000 rubles, the country’s top investigators were brought in. For that reason, the article says, attacks on socialist property were relatively rare.
News of the robbery of the State Bank of the Armenian SSR caused particular shock. More than 1.5 million rubles disappeared from the bank, and the publication says the case made waves even in the CPSU Central Committee.
“At the time, this robbery became a sensation not because of the size of the haul,” a thief-in-law introduced as Ivan Ivanov told Novaya-Europe.
According to him, in those years “vagrants” — the term the article says followers of the thieves’ code used for themselves — sometimes seized even larger sums. What made this case exceptional was something else: the target was a state bank.
The source said raids on savings offices and cash couriers happened regularly, but the criminal world usually preferred not to confront the state directly. The reason, the article says, was that misappropriating socialist property very often led to a sentence of capital punishment.
The source told the outlet that only the most daring men would attack state institutions. In his view, the Kalachyans outdid everyone else: they carried out a highly unusual robbery, took a major haul, and were not caught for a long time.