TV Reviews : ‘Citizen X’: Serial Killer, Soviet-Style

The fictional Hannibal Lecter is an angel compared to the former Soviet Union’s Andrei Chikatilo, a real-life disemboweler executed in 1994 for the slayings of 52 persons--most of them children--over a dozen years.

A dogged investigator’s search for the serial murderer, which dragged on through most of the ‘80s, is the macabre odyssey that drives “Citizen X,” an HBO whydunit that holds your interest even though Chikatilo’s guilt is established from the start.

Although withholding some ghastly specifics of the killings cited in the Robert Cullen book on which it is based, “Citizen X” appears faithful to the essentials of the case. The setting, 500 miles south of Moscow, is Rostov-on-Don, where the first of the bodies is turned up by a farmer’s plow in 1982. Many more follow.

The gory murders, depicted in fairly grisly detail by director/writer Chris Gerolmo, contrast with the poetic manner in which some of the victims collide with the ground in slow motion, blood trickling from their mouths.

Viktor Burakov (Stephen Rea), a police forensics expert reassigned as a detective, is the story’s unlikely hero. Although pugnacious, Rea’s plodding, minimalist Burakov never quite lives up to the super-sleuth anointing he gets from colleagues. His unlikely mentor is a local militia chief named Col. Mikhail Fetisov (Donald Sutherland).

On the surface, at least, Chikatilo himself (persuasively played by Jeffrey DeMunn) is an unlikely villain--a Jack the Ripper inside a thin, stoop-shouldered, aging body, his knife tucked inside a brown leather satchel that he carries while stalking his victims at railway stations. Head balding, nose pinched by spectacles, he could pass for just another faceless Soviet bureaucrat, exactly the sort who repeatedly encumber Burakov’s marathon investigation.

Despite its sinister heart, “Citizen X” is especially arresting when aiming wry humor at the decadence of the cadaverous Soviet system that mires Burakov’s investigation in red tape. Glasnost and perestroika arrive just in time.

* “Citizen X” airs at 8 tonight on HBO.