This was originally published in Italy and translated to English by Manuela D. I made extensive clean ups to make it American.
What was the triggering factor that provoked in you such curiosity to go to Rostov immediately after having seen Chikatilo on TV?
Every time I say it I feel a little silly, nevertheless I continue to think that Chikatilo, in those short moments I saw him on TV hypnotized me. I packed in a rush to go to Rostov and have suffered the consequences of my totally irrational, inexplicable impulse. After I found many explanations that were all valid. My grandfather Ruggero Grieco founded the PCI and he was the secretary from 1934 to 1938. I am a born and bred communist, a branch of my family is Soviet, therefore it is obvious this man's history was overwhelmingly attractive to me – intellectual, communist, insane, killer and cannibal. If we add the fact that in 1992 I was a father of two little children then all is explained. Another element exists that is not explainable. An element that has revealed itself, in reality, stronger than them all. As absurd as it seems, I have gone to Rostov in order to "help" Chikatilo. And as soon as his pleading look met mine in court, the feeling that I had to help him was made still more pressing. Eventually someone will ask: why help him? Because he was a sick man and nobody wanted to recognize his sickness. And above all because this sickness could take possession of anyone who was born and bred a communist at the moment in which communism died, without anything new to start. Moreover, let's say as a writer and scriptwriter of stories and thrillers, I always take the side of the killer. I have always seen the killer, especially in the cases of serial killers as the only authentic victim of history. I had decided to tell crime stories of death and horror. But in reality, at least for me, they are stories of deep angst.
What were your impressions when in court you found the victims' relatives in front of you or when you saw the filmed material of the reconstruction of the crimes?
The feelings have been many - violent, wild-eyed and primordial. In fact it seemed to me that in court he looked like he was the first man who appeared on the Earth. A man who was very tall, slim, with a voluminous skull, a strange nearly alien form, with two very clear childish eyes and expression plus a disarming, deformed smile. Let alone the large hands and much longer fingers. Chikatilo was something unlike a man. In my mind I see him as "Nosferatu" from Murnau’s film. An expressionist vampire, faraway in time, from the mists of time. I have already said he was a figure that created anxiety in me, a nearly uncontrollable apprehension. It has been a bit like watching a scared bat, squatting in a corner, with his heart pounding. He causes aversion, but also heartbreaking pity. About the victims' relatives, they seemed like those extras you see in films with the look of one who does not know what to do because he/she does not know the script. They were numb from the pain and incredulous. Many said that he could not have been able to commit all those crimes and they spoke about conspiracies, since in the Soviet culture suspicion and conspiracies are important and recurring concepts. But like all film extras who are victims the relatives in that situation were also a bit flattered. They were above all poor people or castaways who lived in hardship. Just once they found themselves at the center of attention in a way that was prideful to them. As for the filmed reconstruction of the crimes, I have seen them, it was like watching a documentary on the Holocaust. Chikatilo described in a deadpan and infallible way all that he had did like he was a supreme commander. In that moment he was clearly perceived as an eager ideologist by design. I have seen him again as this character, in court, when convinced and concerned he said: "Why do you persecute me? What have I done basically? I have eliminated useless people, drifters without education and conscience. Is that why I’m guilty?"
How would you define Chikatilo's mental illness? And what do you think makes it unique?
I know that for ten years it has been discussed and it will never stop being discussed. But I'm not a doctor, therefore I would not want to embark in that direction. I have defined him as a schizophrenic as a matter of convenience. Chikatilo gave home to two very distinguished personalities within himself. The people who knew him defined him as lazy, slow, without regard, naïve and nitpicking. His railway office manager compelled him to move around with a note-book in order to take note of anything they asked for because he would forget the most elementary deliveries otherwise. In his criminal life, Chikatilo showed evidence of a nearly perfect efficiency and memory. He remembered every moment and every single detail even after many years distance from the facts. He successfully led magistrates and policemen to distant places after several years and thousands of kilometers from where he started, pinpointing his victim's graves, their names, their apparel and anything that had been said or done. I don't know if there is a name for these abilities, and I don't know how to connect them to his sickness or if there is necessarily a nexus there. Chikatilo had a gift of instinct, that normal humans must have lost thousands and thousands years ago. An instinct induced from cannibalism. But is important to specify one thing - Chikatilo was an involuntary cannibal. He had begun to bite his victims when he realized that the sight of blood allowed him overcome the impotence that plagued him. During the first crimes, Andrej was astonished that his victims died. He didn't want them to die. The first time, he passed the hours by mourning with crocodile tears on corpses alone in the woods. Then, inch by inch, he became a cannibal for all intents and purposes and he began to feel delight by removing parts and eating them. Here, my absolutely unscientific theory is this: Chikatilo, in consequence of his sickness, had begun a backwards journey of humanity beginning throughout the ages and recovered a prehistoric instinct. The example that comes to mind is that sometimes we read in newspapers this type of news: "Lost dog in Sicily. One year after he disappeared, he returned exhausted to Trieste to his masters' house". Only that here we have the story of a man, not a dog, and this is really disturbing news. Speaking about Chikatilo's more obvious characteristics, his vertical eyes have affected me a lot. His eyes can watch two things at the same time, at two completely various heights. I understood it when I was filming him for a long stretch of time. I discovered this characteristic is called "chameleon's eye", and it is listed in some scientific texts on schizophrenia. It's a rare symptom, but it has been documented.
What do you think about Chikatilo's son Yuri, perhaps the first son of a serial killer in history that also became a serial killer?
I have tried to meet Yuri after his arrest, but while I was going through the legal procedure to get into Moscow's penitentiary, I was suddenly informed that he had been killed by other prisoners. If he has met his end, the established fact is that Yuri has killed and eaten more than twenty people. Nearly all men, nearly all middle aged. His father killed children - the sons, and he killed the adults - the fathers. When he was arrested, he said verbatim, "Do not believe the papers, they are untrue. I am Yuri Andreievic Chikatilo, and I am continuing my father's mission." If I as a novelist wrote that history of father and son, they would have called me too imaginative and too far fetched at the same time. Whereas in reality it is extraordinarily similar to a gloomy Shakespeare tragedy. On the other hand, if Andrej Chikatilo followed the paternal model's doctrine (Stalin) killing the drifters and rebel’s children, dissenters of the Soviet dictator’s rules then Yuri has followed Andrej's model, killing post-Soviet adults that, by now, had denounced the communist faith. It is also far fetched, but extraordinarily fascinating, is it not?
Can you explain why you associate Chikatilo's crimes to the end of communism?
The communist party was a unique experience in the history of humanity, beginning with the 1917 October Revolution and ending because of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, even if the Soviet Union ended only three years later at the end of 1992. When I say that it's a unique experience, I mean it's like traveling without going back. In the days of the trial, a Jewish journalist explained to me the end of the communism this way, "Communism is like a car squeezed into narrow alley. When it reaches the end and learns that the only solution is to turn back, they realize they didn't have any reverse." What is the reverse? Reverse is the history. History always indicates the way for humanity to exit from a period of crisis. Consulting history we discover that what is happening to us has already happened in the past and we find the solution, the same solution in the past, possibly updated for the present. But there is no past in communism’s history, so there’s no solution. In fact, more than ten years later, former Soviets are still searching. I don't know why, from the word 'go' it seemed clearer to me when I arrived in Rostov, than the millions and millions of people there when communism fell who have suffered an identity crisis. I thought all these people, without their reality, without earth under their feet would be sick. And it seemed to me that the "Monster of Rostov's” history could represent the ideal metaphor for this hidden collective sickness. I know well that some people, particularly the people who saw Evilenko, realized this thanks to my novel and remain a bit doubtful to this reasoning. To some it seemed forced. I answer by using an American sociologist's excerpt, entitled "Un paese di vedove", that tells how during the 1980s soviet males over the age of forty had begun to die in impressive amounts, like during a war or a famine. They died of many disparate diseases, but in reality they probably died of an identity crisis, when their immunity systems were lowered it threw them to the mercy of life’s daily obstacles.
At the end of your novel and in your film you have a dark hypothesis that Chikatilo has not died. To what extent are you sure about this? Can you explain why?
Unfortunately, I'm sure of this. I say unfortunately because I realize I sound like a visionary, but I'm authentically convinced. Chikatilo had been considered of sound mind and in October of 1992, he was sentenced to death. Some months later, his lawyer successfully obtained an appeal, with new psychiatric examinations and all the rest. In December 1994 Der Spiegel, a German newspaper, published the news that two research institutes, one German and the other American, had gone to Moscow offering money in order to obtain Chikatilo alive. On February 14, 1994, a week after my novel "The Communist who ate Children" was released, Reuters circulated a very important, concise letter in which it read that Chikatilo had been put to death in Novocerkassk, a small village where the Rostov Monster lived before being arrested. The next day Reuters put out a correction: he had been put to death in Rostov's prison. But Rostov's prison wasn’t qualified to carry out capital punishment, let alone the fact that the suspect was granted an appeal and was in the process. A year after, I met Moscow's mayor and I said to him as far as I’m concerned Chikatilo had not been put to death, but sold to the highest bidder. He, unflappable, told me that all the people in Moscow thought the same.
And as far as you’re concerned where is Chikatilo now?
I don't know, obviously, if he is still alive. If he were alive, he would be a little more than seventy years old. Often I have fantasized about his fate. I have always thought that he could be in Finland in a clinic. Why Finland? Finland is historically a socially democratic country that has always had a good relationship with the Soviets. It was in Finland that Soviets and Americans exchanged spies or held secret summits during the so-called Cold War. But it is a novelist’s hypothesis and not even the most bizarre one. The truly chilling hypothesis is that in some way someone was able to successfully clone Chikatilo, transmitting his exceptional primordial instinct to highly gifted warriors able to fight the many frightful wars that we see over the horizon. And frankly as a writer and director the perspective seemed interesting and stimulating to me, as a common mortal I hope to God that it has not happened. Lastly, I have also asked myself: what has happened to his wife, she was his partner in crime, or his daughter who lives somewhere with false documents, or his son Yuri who perhaps was not killed in jail? Who knows? Perhaps The Addams family is in a happy place all back together. I asked myself if one day they will read my novel or see my film, but by no means am I curious to know their opinion.
This translation 2007-08 Alex D Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net