Portraits Of A Soviet Serial Killer

Between 1982 and 1990, the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don was shaken by a series of brutal, frenzied and utterly unimaginable murders - this, in a society which believed itself immune from the violence which characterized the decadent West.

Not all the killings took place within the city. One occurred in faraway Moscow, others in towns only linked to Rostov by the railroad. Nor did they conform to a single type. The sheer diversity of victims - male and female, homemakers and whores, bright students and retarded drifters - suggested two, three, even a gang of killers.

Only a handful of investigators saw they were being committed by one man - and it still took them eight years to find a 56-year-old grandfather named Andrei Chikatilo.

"Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia's Notorious Serial Killer" (Barricade Books, $20) is the work of two Russians, Mikhail Krivich and Ol'gert Ol'gin, and as such offers the Western reader a compelling insight not into the mind of the killer, but into the mindset of the nation where the killer carried out his deeds.

Chikatilo was a product of his society, just as America's serial killers are a product of ours. The Soviet Union encouraged children to obey their elders at all times. The security disciplines with which we instill our children - never talking with strangers, never climbing into a car - were alien to Soviet children, and while not all Chikatilo's 53 victims were children, the easiest were.

The principal figure in American author Robert Cullen's authoritative recounting of the Chikatilo case, "The Killer Department" (Pantheon, $22) is Viktor Burakov, a lieutenant in Rostov's criminology lab. As the first officer to acknowledge how Soviet culture could create a monster of Chikatilo's stature, Burakov was fighting not only against a ruthless killer, but also his own upbringing.

His task was further complicated by his colleagues' refusal to follow his reasoning, a failure compounded by their eagerness to haul in suspects on the vaguest suspicions. As Cullen's book unfolds, a secondary battle also opens: Burakov's attempt to ensure that other crimes - state crimes against the innocent - were not committed. It was an understandable fear. Following Chikatilo's arrest in 1990, Burakov learned that another man had already been hanged for one of Chikatilo's earliest killings.

Throughout the investigation, Burakov's superior was Chief Inspector Kostoev, and the two despised one another. Burakov saw Kostoev as conceited and overbearing; Kostoev regarded Burakov as an inefficient bungler.

But it was the tension between the two, exploding into one-upsmanship, that eventually cracked the case. That notion itself deserves another book, and at first glance, Richard Lourie's "Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History" (HarperCollins, $22) appears to be it.

Sadly, it isn't. It tells the story from Kostoev's perspective, and Lourie confronts Chikatilo's grisly career with the same inattention to detail that drew the investigation out for so many years. Overlooking the contributions of Kostoev's subordinate, ignoring the patient chronology the other authors painstakingly detail, "Hunting the Devil" is a hollow attempt to cast Kostoev as a modern Sherlock Holmes and Burakov as a dullard flatfoot.

Both "The Killer Department," which recounts the entire investigation, and "Comrade Chikatilo," with its worm's-eye view of unfolding horror, prove that that is not only incorrect, it also does both men a disservice. Seattle writer David Thompson is the author of "The Industrial Revolution," an encyclopedia of industrial music to be published by Cleopatra Records in May. -- Donn Fry is on vacation. His column will resume when he returns.