The red ripper, p.2
The Red Ripper, page 2
The man had not committed any crime; it was clear to Zanasovski that he was searching for women, yet the hunt had already lasted for more than nine hours and he hadn’t found anyone. But with the patience and determination of a true hunter, he had not given up.
At last his persistence seemed to be rewarded. A girl in a brown tracksuit, aged just eighteen or nineteen, came in, sat down on a bench and then laid her head down. She looked young enough to be the man’s daughter, but it didn’t deter him. He went over and sat down on the bench, next to her head. Just like in a detective movie, the two policemen sat down a couple of benches away and pretended to go to sleep. This oddest of odd couples started to talk. The girl was lying down. The man was sitting up straight, and as he talked, he was keeping an eye on what was happening in the hall around him. They must have stayed like that for twenty minutes or more. Through his half-closed eyelids, Zanasovski could see the man’s gestures; he was obviously flirting with the girl and paying her compliments.
She stood up, said something to him and lay back down again. He took off his jacket, covered her head with it and edged closer to her. Her face was hidden but the man’s was not. His expression revealed what was happening under the jacket.
Just after 5 a.m. the girl stood up and walked out. The man followed. She went to the ladies’ toilet, he to the gents’. The two detectives lurked outside for about ten minutes. Then the man emerged, hurrying towards the exit which led back towards the main railway station. He went to the nearby tram stop and took the number 5 tram. It was the first tram of the day and there were only a few people aboard, bleary-eyed workers heading for the early shift. The man got off at the central market. Still he seemed to be searching.
Zanasovski had seen enough. The man’s behaviour was more than just suspicious. As for what he had done with the girl on the bench in the bus station, that was easily grounds enough for pulling him in and charging him.
He walked up behind the man and put his hand on his shoulder. As the man turned, his whole face broke into a sweat. Although Zanasovski was wearing different clothes, he immediately recognised him as the policeman who had checked his papers two weeks before.
‘I have arrested plenty of people in my time, but never seen anything like this,’ the detective said later. For the record, he showed the man his police identification card, and then led him to the small police post in the market.
By this time, the man’s shock had passed; he was angry now. He protested as they walked through the crowds of market traders beginning to set up their stalls in the watery early-morning sunshine. Why had he been arrested? What were the grounds? What did they want with him? But after all that Zanasovski had seen his convictions were firm enough simply to ignore him, and he told the duty officer to fill out the warrant giving him authority to carry out a search.
The man’s jacket contained some personal documents, papers connected with a business trip that he had just been on for his factory, and some receipts. So far, nothing. Then they made him open his briefcase. Zanasovski could scarcely believe his eyes. Inside was a kitchen knife with a plastic handle and an eight-inch blade, some lengths of rope and a jar of Vaseline. He noticed that the tip of the knife was bent as if it had been used for hacking through something hard—like bone.
Zanasovski felt vindicated. First the strange behaviour, then the briefcase—it all fitted into place. Plus there was the fact that the man was registered as living in the town of Shakhti, the scene of several of the murders. He could barely contain the excitement in his voice when he called the duty officer at his home station in the Pervomaisky district of the city.
‘I think I have found the man we are looking for,’ he said. A few minutes later a squad car arrived and took them both back to the station. It was already 7 a.m. and Zanasovski had been on duty all night. They told him to go home and get some rest.
After more than thirty murders of unparalleled cruelty, one of the world’s most prolific and yet unlikely serial killers had finally been arrested. It had taken more than six years to track him down as he criss-crossed the south of Russia leaving a trail of death behind him. Now, it was 14 September 1984 and it was all over. Andrei Chikatilo, a soft-spoken grandfather aged 48, and a former literature teacher, was under lock and key. And that, it seemed, was that.
Chapter Two
The village of Yablochnoye is a settlement like any of the tens of thousands of others scattered across the vast territory of the former Soviet Union: little more than a collection of wooden houses set around a communal well in the middle of rolling fields. The region of the Ukraine, in which it lies, was always rich. Ever since the Tsars added the territory to their empire at the end of the seventeenth century, it had been their breadbasket; its black, fertile earth and temperate climate were the dream of any farmer. Come harvest time, wagonload after wagonload of corn would head northwards to feed Moscow, St Petersburg and the other big cities of central Russia. The peasant farmers of Yablochnoye, which means ‘apple’, sent their share of grain, too, along with fruit from their orchards.
By the middle of the 1930s, however, this natural bounty had long since been replaced by misery. The countryside was in chaos, the granaries empty, and the pigs and cattle slaughtered. Everywhere there were soldiers and hated agents of the secret police, the NKVO—the blandly named Narodni Komissariat Vnutryenikh Del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Worse than anything, there was famine, terrible famine the like of which the people had never seen before. Into this misery, on 16 October 1936, a baby boy was born: Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo.
The reason for the suffering was simple: Josef Stalin, and his headlong drive to bring Communism to the countryside. The two revolutions of 1917 had swept away the Tsar and brought Lenin and his cohorts of revolutionaries to power. But these essentially urban revolutions had left untouched vast areas of the old Russian empire. Even the years of civil war that had followed did little to change much of rural life. Reds and Whites came and went, but for much of the 1920s, the daily round of villages away from the capital continued much as it always had done. For most rural dwellers, the Bolsheviks’ bold promise of electrification remained little more than a dream; many probably did not even know that Nicholas II and the royal family had been driven from the throne and murdered. By the end of the 1920s, all this was to change.
The impulse came partly from the worsening situation in the cities, which were filling with the urban proletariat in whose proud name the revolution had been made. Several years of private enterprise under Lenin’s New Economic Policy had done much to repair the damage caused by the upheavals of the Civil War, but it was not enough. Although the harvests were good, the so-called middle peasants and their richer cousins, the kulaks, were handing over far less grain to the state than was needed. The fledgling Soviet Union was heading towards a serious grain crisis.
Stalin, who was by now manoeuvring himself into a position of absolute control, was angry. It was not just the lack of food that annoyed him, but also the attitude of the country dwellers. For a man who was used to seeing everything in black and white, the peasants, and the kulaks in particular, were a symbol of everything that he hated: rich, traditionalist and, worst of all, independent and continuing to live out their lives oblivious of the changes going on around them.
The first blow came on 27 December 1929, just a week after the Soviet Union had celebrated Stalin’s fiftieth birthday with the pomp that was to become typical of the ‘personality cult’ built around him. In a speech to a conference of ‘Marxist students of the agrarian question’, the Soviet leader launched a second revolution that was to be every bit as dramatic as the one twelve years before. ‘Either we go backward to capitalism or forward to socialism,’ he declared. This, he told his audience, would mean collectivisation: sweeping away the mass of individual peasant holdings that had existed for centuries and grouping their owners into collective or state farms. For Stalin, the process would solve two problems. First, the amount of food requisitioned from the countryside to keep the military-industrial machine running could be sharply increased. But equally importantly, it would also provide a pretext to take the revolution to the countryside. Asked about the suffering involved, the dictator replied with a characteristically blunt Russian proverb: ‘When the head is cut off, why cry over a few hairs?’
Inevitably, the worst hit were the kulaks themselves. Stalin had vowed to ‘liquidate them as a class.’ In reality, they were wiped out as individuals. And the assault was not just against the rich. Possession of just one cow or horse was often enough to turn a lowly peasant into a class enemy. Hundreds of thousands of them, together with their children and old people, were shipped in unheated railway wagons across the vast plains of Ukraine and Russia towards remote parts of the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan. Many of them died en route; many more when they arrived at their final destinations, which were often uninhabitable locations in the forests, mountains and steppes. But others stayed behind and fought. Resistance was particularly strong in the Ukraine and in the North Caucasus—so strong, in fact, that the only way for Stalin to subdue them was to send in regular units of the Red Army, backed by air power.
The results were disastrous. Those peasants who did not fight followed a policy of passive resistance, killing their cows, pigs and sheep as a sign of protest at the regime. As many as 150 million head of cattle were destroyed in the period from 1929 to 1934, dealing a massive blow to the country’s food supplies. Although Stalin tried in 1930 to ease the pace of collectivisation a little, it was too late. In 1921–2, the country had already been devastated by a ‘natural’ famine. The ‘man-made’ one of 1932 was far worse, and, ironically, it was the south of Russia and the Ukraine, once the country’s most prosperous areas, which were hit the hardest.
But Stalin did not want to know. His government did little or nothing to stop the hunger. Instead, it contributed directly to its spread, using it as a weapon in the civil war against the peasantry. In 1932, R. Terekhov, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party, complained at a party meeting of the terrible situation that was developing in the villages of his republic. An angry Stalin retorted by accusing him of ‘telling fables’ and suggesting he give up his party job in favour of one as a writer of fiction.
In a perverse way, the dictator succeeded. The structure of traditional rural society had been destroyed, the sturdy independent peasants of old were replaced with a new species, the collective farm worker: lazy, uninterested and increasingly divorced from the soil, but at the same time dependent on the new regime and on its local representatives. But at what price? Terekhov’s report was anything but fable: as the famine reached its peak, millions died, many of them literally in the fields or in the village streets—casualties of Stalin’s war against his own people. In their desperation, many of them were driven over the line which separates man from beast. Stories of cannibalism abounded.
No family was immune to the horrors, whether natural or man-made. That went even for those like Chikatilo’s, whose background was more humble. His father, Roman, was no kulak. A simple landless peasant, but with a quick mind and ready wit, he adapted to the new situation and found work on a collective farm as a labourer. After their second child, Tatyana, was born, his wife also went back out into the fields. The family was not enjoying what anyone outside the Soviet Union would describe as a normal life. But then they were not starving either. And in the context of the horrors of the 1930s that, in itself, was something.
As the decade progressed, things became a little better. Year by year, the harvests began to improve and production crept back up. Living standards, though, were still well below those they had enjoyed in what were by then being described as the bad old days of the Tsars. But even this slight improvement would not last. Hitler’s army was moving east, bringing in its wake blood and destruction. In 1939, in an attempt to buy himself time, Stalin made a pact with Nazi Germany, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, under which the two dictators divided up the unfortunate countries squeezed between them into sphere of influence. But Hitler had no intention of keeping his promise; two years later, in the early hours of 22 June 1941, his tanks smashed into the Soviet Union, ending the short-lived alliance between the twin evils of Fascism and Communism. Like millions of other men of his generation, Roman Chikatilo was called up by the Red Army and went off to the front.
In looking back at those first years of Andrei Chikatilo’s youth, psychiatrists have searched for a single incident or event which could have been responsible for the horrific course that his life was to take. Collectivisation and then war were not peculiar to him; they were suffered by all his generation. His relationship with his mother, a deeply religious woman, also appears to have been normal, at least as far as it is possible to tell all these years later. Until Roman Chikatilo was sent off to fight, so too was his relationship with his father. However, one incident stuck in Chikatilo’s mind which he recalled to a psychiatrist called Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, who was to work with him after his arrest some fifty years later.
In 1934, a couple of years before Chikatilo’s birth, his cousin disappeared from the village, apparently kidnapped. But no ransom was demanded. The level of hunger was such that rumours circulated that the boy had been killed and eaten. The family came to believe it. At least, this is what Chikatilo’s mother told her five-year-old son a few years later. Why she chose to tell such a gruesome tale to her child is not clear. Maybe it was simply to keep him from straying too far from the family home. Whatever the reason, it made a deep impression, both horrifying and yet also fascinating him. Was this the beginning of an obsession with death and with cannibalism which was to grow in the inner reaches of Chikatilo’s consciousness until he turned it into a reality? Bukhanovsky believes it may have been the starting point. ‘What Chikatilo lived through in his childhood was dreadful,’ he said. ‘When he started telling me about his life, it was already the story of his illness.’
An exaggeration? Such a story was bound to have an impact on any child, however normal. And Chikatilo was not completely normal. Even though nothing was detected at the time, doctors who examined him decades later found traces of lesions on his brain. Alone, they would have meant nothing. But combined with experiences which he was to have in the years that followed, they may have been enough to lay the basis for the horrors he was to perpetrate.
From the day that Chikatilo started primary school, the first signs of the psychological hang-ups and complexes were evident. Children who sat in class with him in the little building in the nearby town of Suny remember a shy, introverted, and above all secretive, little boy who never quite fitted in with the others. From the very first day, he had problems making friends. To his fellow pupils, he always seemed to be dreaming. Chikatilo, in return, found them unfriendly and thought they were picking on him. Most of all though, he was worried that they would find out about his secrets: like the fact that he was still wetting his bed at nights (which he was to do until the age of twelve) and, worst of all, his chronic shortsightedness.
The shortsightedness became an obsession. He had not really been aware of it before, but once at school he realised that he could barely read the words on the blackboard. Still, he could not bring himself to tell his teachers. As far as he was concerned, it was his fault, and so he just sat and suffered in silence, always afraid that he would be caught out. Nor would he tell his family, for fear that this would lead to his being mocked as an ochkarik—‘four eyes’—by the other children. Though, in any case, where would his mother have found glasses in rural Ukraine in the middle of the Second World War? Amazingly, he was not to get his first pair until he was 30. ‘At school I was an object of ridicule and could not defend myself,’ he wrote later. ‘If I didn’t have a pen or ink, I used to sit and cry.’
But there was worse to come. For children of his generation, the war was no far-away, abstract thing. It was being fought out virtually around them. With much of Ukraine occupied by the Nazis, there was shooting and killing everywhere. Chikatilo himself remembered years afterwards seeing corpses, blood, even parts of human bodies. He also remembered the revulsion that he felt. However, to a little boy growing up, war had another, more attractive side, too: the heroism. The heroism of the young Soviet partisans who harassed the Nazi divisions from their hideouts in the woods, which the children themselves mimicked in their play. The atrocities that the partisans committed were often every bit as horrific as those perpetrated by the occupying forces. But right was on their side, and eventually the Germans were driven away.
The stories of these partisans were dutifully recorded by the patriotic journalists and novelists of the day, and as Chikatilo got older he began to lap them up. He avidly read any that he could get his hands on. By far his favourite, though, was a celebrated book called Molodaya Gvardiya—‘The Young Guard’—a Stalin prize-winner published immediately after the war, which was required reading for all. Its bloody tale of a group of young Communist partisans who eventually gave their lives in the struggle against the Nazis fired his imagination. In his daydreams he imagined himself in the heroic role of one of the partisans roaming the woods. When his commander gave the order, he would catch a lone German scout, tie him to a tree and then beat him ruthlessly until he gave his secrets.
Post-war reality turned out differently, and not just because of the famine which swept the Ukraine again in 1946–7, causing almost as much misery as the one in the early 1930s. There was also the matter of his father. Far from being a hero who had fought selflessly for his country to the death, Roman Chikatilo had been captured by the Nazis almost immediately after Russia had joined the war against Germany, and been promptly dispatched to a concentration camp. He was liberated after 1945, courtesy of the American GIs, and brought home with him his share of war stories, which he told with a bloodthirsty gusto. But this wasn’t enough; in the eyes of his small son, he had brought shame on the family.
