It turned out that several ministers and academicians, including the USSR Minister of Culture Georgy Alexandrov, were involved in… running a brothel! The victims were young actresses and ballerinas who were simply afraid to refuse the courtship of such high ranks.
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It is still unknown exactly where the debauchery took place. According to some sources, it was in the countryside house of writer Konstantin Krivoshein, according to another, in his Moscow apartment.
The ‘gang’ was revealed by accident: the mother of one of the girls wrote a letter personally to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Khrushchev became extremely mad and called everyone into his office. He shouted at them for a long time and then asked a member of the Academy of Sciences Alexander Yegolin: “Well, Alexandrov is a young man, I can understand. But, you, at your age, why did you go there?”
According to legend, Yegolin replied: “I did nothing, I just stroked…”
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In Russian, ‘to stroke’ translates as ‘гладить’ (‘gladit’), so after that, as a play of words, the scandal was dubbed “The Gladiators' Case”.
All “gladiators” lost their posts and were expelled from Moscow. Alexandrov was sent to the Academy of Sciences in Minsk, while the others were sent to the Urals.