The Rat From Rostov: Andrei Chiklatilo

UI remember when I was a kid and a few of us would occasionally ask questions such as, "if you were standing on one of the glaciers right at the end of Alaska, would you be able to see any of the land belonging to Russia?" Obviously, being American, none of us really wanted to go to Russia, but we all thought it was a unique place. There are a lot of good things about Russia, but Andrei Chiklatilo A.K.A. "The Butcher of Rostov" is something that many Russians would rather forget about. Let's not mince words here. The reason for that is because the man killed tons and tons of people. Here are just a few things you would probably rather not know about this Soviet Union monster:

He Did Have His Share of Childhood Trauma

Chiklatilo was born on October 16, 1936 in the tiny hamlet of Yabhuchne in the Oblast region of the Ukrainian SSR. When Andrei was born, Ukraine was in the grips of a deadly famine that had been brought on by President Stalin's forcible collection of agriculture. While Andrei's parents might have been collective farm laborers, they weren't even paid any wages for their work. Rather, they were merely given the right to cultivate their tiny plot of farmland behind their one-room hut.

For one thing, Chiklatilo repeatedly claimed that he had never had bread until the age of 12 and that his family had even had to eat leaves and grass at times to even survive. Moreover, Andrei's mother gave birth to a baby girl in 1943, but there was some speculation that the daughter had been conceived as a result of sexual assault. It was common for German soldiers to regularly rape the Russian women and it would have been next to impossible for Andrei's dad to have fathered the child because he himself had been drafted into the Russian army.

To add insult to injury, Chiklatilo had a very small stature and was very timid, so he was bullied relentlessly during his formative years.

He Had Sexual Issues

At the age of 17, Chiklatilo attempted to sexually assault an 11-year-old friend of his sister, ejaculating on her as he wrestled her to the ground. Although he later moved on to individuals of his own age, he soon discovered that he had chronic impotence, making relationships with members of the opposite sex difficult, if not impossible.

In 1963, he married a woman named Feodosia Odnacheva and he had a daughter and a son. However, he was still impotent and basically had to conceive through masturbation and then inserting it into her.

He was Perverted

He would hold down various jobs in the ensuing years, including as an engineer, a protest organizer, and a schoolteacher. However, he had to leave at least two teaching jobs due to allegations of child molestation from both genders. He would ultimately leave the teaching profession for good in 1981.

In 1978, all the turmoil from both his professional and personal life would come to a head when he committed his first known murder. The victim was named Yelena Zakotnova and she was just nine years old. He lured her into a secret property that he owned, tried to sexually assault her, and then stabbed her and ejaculated on her when that failed. Unfortunately, another man was tried, convicted, and executed for this murder.

All in all, after this first experience, the only way that Chiklatilo was able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm was through brutally torturing and murdering people. His other victims included Larisa Tkachenko, 17; Lyubov Biryuk, 13; Olga Stalmanchenok, 10; Laura Sarkisyan, 15; Vera Shevkun, 19; and many, many others. It is believed that he killed as many as 55 women and girls.