Shock in Russia as Napoleon expert confesses to chopping up lover A prominent Saint Petersburg-based Napoleon expert has confessed to murdering his young lover and former student and dismembering her body in a grisly crime that sent shock waves across Russia. Oleg Sokolov, a 63-year-old history lecturer who received France's Legion d'Honneur from Jacques Chirac in 2003, has been arrested on suspicion of murder after he was hauled out of the icy Moika River, a tributary of the Neva in central Saint Petersburg, with a backpack containing a woman's arms. IMAGES of police searching river and soundbite from head of the scientific department of the Russian Military-Historical Society Yuri Nikiforov