The fog of vice hangs thick over the souls of men, and in the town of Bryansk, a most repulsive case has come to light. A youth of scarce twenty-two years—a local lad who should have been in the prime of his honest labour—has been found guilty by the courts of peddling the most unspeakable filth involving innocent children.

The facts of the case, as unearthed by the diligent detectives, are enough to make a pious man shudder. This wretch did not merely possess these cursed images upon his calculating machine; nay, he sought to turn this depravity into a trade. Like some midnight fence in a rookery, he fashioned a secret mechanism—a 'bot' of the Telegram variety—wherein he sold access to these vile videos for coin.

He dealt in the ghostly currency of the new age, receiving payments in 'crypto-wallets' before laundering the loot into common rubles. He thought himself cleverer than the law, imagining his tracks were hidden in the digital ether. But the long arm of the magistrate reached him at last.

Justice has spoken. The scoundrel is sentenced to four years of hard labour in a general colony. A fitting end for one who would trade in the innocence of babes.

It brings to mind another tragedy of similar darkness: in the great city of Saint Petersburg, the mother of a poor nine-year-old lad named Pasha, who fell prey to a predator, now finds herself entangled in the grim clutches of a criminal prosecution.