ndrei Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in the Ukraine state of the USSR. Chikatilo had a difficult childhood and the only sexual experience as an adolescent ended quickly and led to much ridicule, leading to later sexually violent acts. When the police caught him, he confessed to the gruesome murder of 56 and was found guilty in 1990 and executed in 1994. Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in Yablochnoye, a village in the heart of rural Ukraine in the USSR. During the 1930s, Ukraine was known as the "Breadbasket" of the Soviet Union. Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization caused widespread hardship and famine that decimated the population. At the time of Chikatilo's birth, the effects of the famine were still widely felt, and his early childhood was influenced by deprivation. The situation was made worse still when the USSR entered World War II against Germany, bringing sustained bombing raids on Ukraine. In addition to the external hardships, Chikatilo is believed to have suffered from hydrocephalus (water on the brain) at birth, which caused him genital-urinary tract problems later in life, including bed-wetting into his late adolescence and, later, the inability to sustain an erection, although he was able to ejaculate. His home life was disrupted by his father's conscription into the war against Germany, where he was captured, held prisoner, and then vilified by his countrymen for allowing himself to be captured, when he finally returned home. Chikatilo suffered the consequences of his father's "cowardice", making him the focus of school bullying. Painfully shy as a result of this, his only sexual experience during adolescence occurred, aged 15, when he is reported to have overpowered a young girl, ejaculating immediately during the brief struggle, for which he received even more ridicule. This humiliation colored all future sexual experiences, and cemented his association of sex with violence. He failed his entrance exam to Moscow State University, and a spell of National Service was followed by a move to Rodionovo-Nesvetayevsky, a town near Rostov, in 1960, where he became a telephone engineer. His younger sister moved in with him and, concerned by his lack of success with the opposite sex, she engineered a meeting with a local girl, Fayina, whom he went on to marry in 1963. Despite his sexual problems, and lack of interest in conventional sex, they produced two children, and lived an outwardly normal family life. In 1971 Chikatilo changed careers to become a schoolteacher. A string of complaints about indecent assaults on young children forced him to move from school to school, before he finally settled at a mining school in Shakhty, near Rostov.

• published: 15 Sep 2014
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