Eat Thy Neighbour by Daniel Diehl

Author:Daniel Diehl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752486772
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

From Russia with Hate: André Chikatilo (1978–90)

Life has always been hard in the Russian states and it was especially true in 1936 when André Chikatilo was born in the Ukrainian village of Yablochnoye. The peasants who worked the land in the once fertile expanses of the Ukrainian steppes were suffering through their fifth year of famine. Unlike most famines this one was man-made; it was dictator Josef Stalin’s personal revenge for the Ukrainian people’s resistance to handing over their farms to the Soviet collective system. Year after year the Russian soldiers confiscated the livestock and the harvest, including the seed grain needed to replant the fields. Sometimes they cleaned out the peasants’ cupboards and larders too for good measure. By 1936 an estimated ten million had starved to death. One of the side-effects of the famine was an epidemic of cannibalism as hunger-crazed people were forced to choose between eating their dead relatives or watching while their children wasted away. The Chikatilo family had already lost an elder son, Stephan, to a band of cut-throats who had probably kidnapped him to be sold as meat at a local market.

As if this were not enough to ensure that little André Chikatilo was off to a less than hopeful start, he was born with hydrocephalus – a condition once known as ‘water on the brain’ – which can cause damage to the frontal cortex along with a variety of physical impairments. One of the immediate effects of André’s condition was an inability to control his bladder at night. In a peasant culture where the entire family slept on a single, raised platform the presence of a bed-wetter was immediately noticed by the entire family. While André’s father and sister tried to make light of the problem, his foul-tempered mother, Anna, constantly humiliated him. Years later, André’s sister, Tatyana, would remember her mother as ‘very harsh and rude. She only yelled at us and bawled us out. She never had a kind word.’

By the time André reached the age of five, in 1940, the already intolerable situation in the Ukraine became even worse when the armies of Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. One entire army was dedicated to subduing the Ukraine in an effort to seize its vast oilfields to fuel the German war machine. As with almost everywhere the Nazis invaded, the killing and terror was beyond belief. Along with everyone else, André was constantly exposed to the sight of dead, mutilated bodies littering the streets and mass executions carried out in reprisal for the smallest infractions of German rule. For unknown reasons, André’s father was arrested by the Germans and sent to a forced labour camp, leaving an increasingly embittered Anna to bring the children up alone.

When the Germans were finally driven out of the Soviet Union, André’s father returned home, but there were new problems. By the time he reached puberty André was no longer wetting the bed, but he had begun experiencing uncontrollable ejaculations. Unlike most boys, who

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