“We can find many motivated people with high skills in the Russian police,” he said, “but the system makes it difficult even for these good police officers to do their jobs well. Their main burden is to control situations and to control the people rather than to help them.” As a result, he said: “People turn to their neighbors and to relatives and local networks to solve their problems by themselves. It’s some sort of lynch law. And in Russia we have thousands of such cases.”

Nearly a month after the confrontation in Sagra, five members of the raiding party were arrested on charges of banditry and participation in a mass disturbance, and two others were arrested later. The president of the inspection committee of the Russian Federation brought disciplinary action against the regional police chief for dereliction of duty. But that was only because the events captured national attention, Mr. Kosals said. Most times, these things slip by unnoticed. “It happens so often,” he said. “It’s a usual situation in many small villages and settlements.”

According to Mr. Gorodilov’s son Sergei, the police had waited a week before investigating the scene of the gunfight and then had tried to slough it off as “just daily life, like a quarrel in the kitchen.”

Though it is only an hour’s drive from the city, Sagra is buried in birch woods, surrounded by hills and meadows and far removed from government control or assistance. “We have everything we need here,” said Mr. Gorodilov, opening a wood gate to show a vegetable garden and a gaggle of quacking geese. “We settle our problems among ourselves. We help each other out.”

The clash with Sergei the Gypsy was the biggest event in the history of this tiny settlement, which was founded more than a century ago to tend a railway station that no longer exists, and everybody had a story to tell.

“When they shouted to me, ‘Mama, they’ve come to kill us!’ I almost died,” said Galina Kotelnikova, who runs the little village store, which originally opened as a kiosk to sell beer.

Villagers gathered nearby to recall the excitement of that night. Tatyana Gordeyeva, 37, described a scene out of a Frankenstein movie. “We picked up axes and pitchforks and ran to the road,” she said. “My legs were shaking, but we were protecting the village so we weren’t afraid. That only came later. Five women pushed a car to block the road.” The police came long afterward, after 4 a.m., she said. “They pretended they were taking down our words, but there was no record of that.”