Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Russian: Андрей Романович Чикатило; Ukrainian: Андрій Романович Чикатило, romanized: Andrii Romanovych Chykatylo; 16 October 1936 – 14 February 1994) was a Ukrainian-born Soviet serial killer nicknamed "the Butcher of Rostov", "the Rostov Ripper", and "the Red Ripper" who sexually assaulted, murdered, and mutilated at least fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990 in the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Uzbek SSR.
Chikatilo confessed to fifty-six murders; he was tried for fifty-three murders in April 1992. He was convicted and sentenced to death for fifty-two of these murders in October 1992, although the Supreme Court of Russia ruled in 1993 that insufficient evidence existed to prove his guilt in nine of those killings. Chikatilo was executed by gunshot in February 1994.
Chikatilo was known as "the Rostov Ripper" and "the Butcher of Rostov" because he committed most of his murders in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.
Andrei Chikatilo was born on 16 October 1936 in the village of Yabluchne [uk] in the Sumy Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR. At the time of his birth, Ukraine was recovering from a severe famine caused by Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Chikatilo's parents were collective farm labourers who lived in a one-room hut, receiving no wages for their work, but instead having the right to cultivate a plot of land behind the family hut.
The family rarely had sufficient food; Chikatilo later claimed not to have eaten bread until the age of 12, adding that he and his family often had to eat grass and leaves to stave off hunger. Throughout his childhood, Chikatilo was repeatedly told by his mother Anna that prior to his birth, an older brother of his named Stepan had, at the age of four, been kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbours. However, it has never been established whether this incident actually occurred, or if a Stepan Chikatilo even existed. Chikatilo recalled his childhood as being blighted by poverty, ridicule, hunger, and war.
When the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, Chikatilo's father, Roman, was conscripted into the Red Army. He would later be taken prisoner after being wounded in combat. Between 1941 and 1944, Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which he described as "horrors", adding he witnessed bombings, fires, and shootings from which he and his mother would hide in cellars and ditches. On one occasion, Chikatilo and his mother were forced to watch their own hut burn to the ground. With his father at war, Chikatilo shared a single bed with his mother. He was a chronic bed wetter, and his mother berated and beat him for each offence.
In 1943, Chikatilo's mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. Because Chikatilo's father had been conscripted in 1941, he could not have fathered this child. As many Ukrainian women were raped by German soldiers during the war, it has been speculated Tatyana was conceived as a result of such a rape. With Chikatilo and his mother living together in a one-room hut, this rape also may have been committed in Chikatilo's presence.
In September 1944, Chikatilo began his schooling. Although shy and ardently studious as a child, he was physically weak and regularly attended school in homespun clothing, his stomach often swollen from hunger resulting from the post-war famine which plagued much of the Soviet Union. On several occasions, this hunger caused Chikatilo to faint both at home and school, and he was consistently targeted by bullies who mocked him over his physical stature and timid nature. At home, Chikatilo and his sister were constantly berated by their mother. Tatyana later recalled that despite the hardships endured by her parents, their father was a kind and caring man, whereas their mother was harsh and unforgiving toward her children.
Chikatilo developed a passion for reading and memorizing data. He often studied at home, to increase his sense of self-worth and to compensate for his myopia, which often prevented him from reading the classroom blackboard. To his teachers, Chikatilo was an excellent student upon whom they would regularly bestow praise and commendation.
By his teens, Chikatilo was both a model student and an ardent communist. He was appointed editor of his school newspaper at age 14 and chairman of the pupils' Communist Party committee two years later. An avid reader of communist literature, he was also delegated the task of organizing street marches. Although Chikatilo claimed learning did not come easy to him due to headaches and poor memory, he was the only student from his collective farm to complete the final year of study, graduating with excellent grades in 1954.
At the onset of puberty, Chikatilo discovered that he had chronic impotence, worsening his social awkwardness and self-hatred. He was shy in the company of women; his first crush, at age 17, had been on a girl named Lilya Barysheva, with whom he had become acquainted through his school newspaper, yet he was chronically nervous in her company and never asked her for a date. The same year, Chikatilo jumped upon an 11-year-old friend of his younger sister and wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled in his grasp.
Following his graduation, Chikatilo applied for a scholarship at Moscow State University. Although he passed the entrance examination with good-to-excellent scores, his grades were not deemed good enough for acceptance. Chikatilo speculated his scholarship application was rejected due to his father's tainted war record (his father had been branded a traitor for being taken prisoner in 1943) but the truth was that other students had performed better in a highly competitive exam. He did not attempt to enrol at another university; instead, he travelled to Kursk, where he worked as a labourer for three months before—in 1955—enrolling in a vocational school to become a communications technician. The same year, Chikatilo formed his first serious relationship, with a local girl two years his junior. On three occasions, the couple attempted intercourse, but on each occasion, he was unable to sustain an erection. After eighteen months, she broke off the relationship.
Upon completion of his two-year vocational training, Chikatilo relocated to the Urals city of Nizhny Tagil to work upon a long-term construction project. While living in Nizhny Tagil, he also undertook correspondence courses in engineering with the Moscow Electrotechnical Institute of Communication. He worked in the Urals for two years until he was drafted into the Soviet Army in 1957. Chikatilo performed his compulsory military service between 1957 and 1960, assigned first to serve with border guards in Central Asia, then to a KGB communications unit in East Berlin. Here, his work record was unblemished, and he joined the Communist Party shortly before his military service ended in 1960.
Upon completing his service, Chikatilo returned to his native village to live with his parents, briefly working alongside them on the collective farm. He soon became acquainted with a young divorcée. Their three-month relationship ended after several unsuccessful attempts at intercourse, after which the woman innocently asked her friends for advice as to how Chikatilo might overcome his inability to maintain an erection. As a result, most of his peers discovered his impotence. In a 1993 interview regarding this incident, Chikatilo stated: "Girls were going behind my back, whispering that I was impotent. I was so ashamed. I tried to hang myself. My mother and some young neighbours pulled me out of the noose. Well, I thought no one would want such a shamed man. So I had to run away from there, away from my homeland."
After several months, Chikatilo found a job as a communications engineer in the town of Rodionovo-Nesvetayskaya, twenty miles north of Rostov-on-Don. He relocated to the Russian SFSR in 1961, renting a small apartment close to his workplace. The same year, his younger sister, Tatyana, finished her schooling and moved into his apartment (his parents relocated to the Rostov region shortly thereafter). Tatyana lived with her brother for six months before marrying a local youth and moving into her in-laws' home; she noted nothing untoward with regard to her brother's life beyond his chronic shyness around women, and resolved to help her brother find a wife and start a family.