truepenny | UBC: Krivich & Ol'gin, Comrade Chikatilo

Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia's Notorious Serial Killer by Mikhail Krivich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book in conjunction with Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History, and the parallax view was fascinating.

Krivich and Ol'gin (which is how his name is transliterated for the copyright page) are Russian journalists who covered Chikatilo's trial. Where Lourie in Hunting the Devil was mostly interested in Kostoev (transliterated Kostoyev in Comrade Chikatilo), the investigator from Russia's Department of Crimes of Special Importance, who organized the search for Rostov-on-Don's serial killer into something effective, so was looking at the thing from top down, Krivich and Ol'gin are interested in the case, and thus are looking at it from the bottom up. They're interested in the victims, in the policemen who actually arrested Chikatilo in 1984 but couldn't prove he was the killer, in the dreadful red herrings of Aleksandr Kravchenko, who was executed for Chikatilo's first murder (although Lourie does a better job of exploring why Kravchenko was too tempting a target to be resisted) and the "fools," the mentally handicapped young men who confessed to the murders (and when the murders kept happening after the young men were in jail, the police just went out and found another of their friends and got another confession). They follow Chikatilo's trial (as Lourie does not, because Kostoev wasn't there) in its descent into gruesome farce.

They acknowledge that they wrote the book very quickly (Chikatilo was convicted in 1992; this book, like Hunting the Devil, came out in 1993; Chikatilo was executed in 1994), and it is certainly riddled with errors in dates and names that another, slower pass through the manuscript would have caught. The translator, Todd P. Bludeau, did an excellent job. The book is readable and clear, but I never lost sight of the fact that it was a translation (which I think is actually a feature rather than a bug--although I'm sure other people disagree with me--because you can't translate seamlessly from one language to another; if it reads like it was written in English, you've sacrificed accuracy in translation to make it that way). And while Lourie does an excellent job as an outsider with extensive knowledge of and experience with Russian culture, Krivich and Ol'gin are insiders. For me as an American reader this book had that weird almost sfnal feel of reporting from a worldview that is in some crucial ways is not like mine. (I don't know if Krivich and Ol'gin were writing from the beginning with an American audience in mind, but they are very good at telling details, things that demonstrate their worldview to an outsider audience.)

The book is sloppy and superficial in places, and it isn't as coherent a narrative as Hunting the Devil, but the view it provides of Chikatilo and of Russia is invaluable.

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