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Oh, come off it. That surly c--t is squirming like a snake.
~ Zalachenko about Lisbeth Salander, his own daughter.

Alexander Zalachenko is the main antagonist of The Girl Who Played With Fire and a minor antagonist of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

He is Lisbeth Salander's father and a criminal mastermind. He's an ex-Russian spy who defected to Sweden in the 1970s. In Sweden, he fathered Salander and her twin sister Camilla. He never married Salander's mother, Agneta, and frequently beat and raped her, once injuring her so badly he caused her permanent brain damage.

He was portrayed by Georgi Staykov.

Biography[]

Early life[]

Born in Stalingrad in 1940, Zalachenko was orphaned when he was a year old when his parents died in the Second World War. He grew up in the Russian military. When he defected to Sweden he changed his name to Karl Axel Bodin. It is said that he adopted Sweden as his home because there were few Jews there.

Backstory[]

Zalachenko had a relationship with Agneta Salander, and fathered her twin daughters, Lisbeth and Camilla Salander. He was physically and sexually abusive toward Agneta, at one point hitting her in the head so hard that it caused permanent brain damage. When Lisbeth was 12, she set Zalanchenko on fire to stop him from killing her mother. He is so badly disfigured that he had to have his leg amputated, and suffers from chronic pain for the rest of his life.

A rogue section of the Swedish secret service, SAPO, considers the intelligence he could offer as a Soviet defector more important than Agneta's civil rights or those of her daughter, so they had Lisbeth declared incompetent and institutionalized in order to protect him.  

Years later, he created his own criminal empire based on drugs and prostitution, with his son Ronald Neiderman as his enforcer. SAPO continued to cover for him in order to use him as a national security asset, meaning that he was never arrested for his crimes.

The Girl Who Played With Fire[]

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is on the trail of a new story about the Swedish sex trafficking trade. Lisbeth, Blomkvist's former lover, hacks into his computer and reads his files, and becomes obsessed with hunting down and punishing the traffickers and pimps that Blomkvist is investigating. The trail leads to Zala, a mysterious underground crime boss who has a penchant for torturing women.

Meanwhile, Salander's sadistic former guardian, Nils Bjurman, hires Zalachenko to kill Lisbeth. Neiderman kills Bjurman on Zalachenko's orders, provoking Salander and Blomkvist to investigate, eventually finding their way to Zalachenko's isolated farmhouse. During a brief confrontation, Zalachenko shoots Lisbeth in the head and buries her alive. She climbs out of her makeshift grave, however, and strikes Zalachenko in the head and leg with an axe before collapsing. Their injuries are so serious they are taken by air ambulance to a hospital.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest[]

While Zalachenko is recuperating, a member of SAPO breaks into his hospital room and shoots him in the head to prevent him from testifying against the organization.

The Girl in the Spider's Web[]

The Girl in the Spider's Web, a continuation of the original series written by Daniel Lagerkrantz, reveals that Zalachenko had another daughter - Lisbeth's twin sister Camilla. She is just as amoral and cruel as her father, and as a child took sadistic delight in watching him beat her mother. After Zalachenko's death, Camilla takes over his criminal empire and renames it "The Spiders".

External links[]

Navigation[]

            Millennium Villains

Books
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Martin Vanger | Gottfried Vanger | Nils Bjurman
The Girl Who Played with Fire: Alexander Zalachenko
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest: Peter Teleborian
The Girl in the Spider's Web: Camilla Salander | Jan Holtser
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Benito Andersson | Bashir | Rakel Greitz

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