In Plague Doctor, one of the cops at the station tells Dima Dubin that there are two kinds of people who take up police work: pussies, and hounds. In A Rough Childhood, the chief of police is a woman who masquerades as Anubis: a dog-man.
Why does Elena Khmurova choose to represent Anubis, a god of death, rather than a god of justice? Because bringing criminals to justice isn't the goal: killing them is! Anubis is also associated with the afterlife (where the cult sends its enemies) and mummification (what they do with the bodies).
The symbolism goes deeper than that. The goddess of justice and judgment in Egyptian mythology is Ma'at, a bird-woman; in fact, one of her feathers is weighed against the soul after death. There is no representation of Ma'at in the film, but they carry out a semblance of that same ritual — with a metal feather. Not only is there no real justice present, but the scales of justice are stacked against whoever is on trial from the very start; the cult of Anubis has effectively taken on the role of judge, jury, and executioner.
And twenty years or so later, another hugely influential vigilante will arise in Saint Petersburg — in the guise of a humanoid bird.
In one scene, Khmurova doubts Konstantin's sanity, remarking that he previously claimed "an eight-year-old burned his peers to the ground". In Plague Doctor, we see the police investigating the murder of the three boys from The Teaser, and even see Konstantin talking to Sergei Razumovsky, yet Khmurova scoffs at idea of a child committing such a crime. The police had solid evidence that an eight-year-old boy had committed three heinous murders — and was likely a budding serial killer — and they let him go.
It's goes further than that: Khmurova was the one who told them to close the case in the first place. With that in mind, how many other budding serial killers were able to slip through the cracks on her watch?
It gets worse: given the concern he expresses for the case, and his penchant for working off the books, it's entirely possible that had Konstantin remained alive, he would have continued to keep tabs on Sergei — and possibly prevented him from becoming a full-blown serial killer. By contributing to his father's demise, Igor inadvertently had a hand in creating his greatest enemy.
