Andrei Chikatilo was born on 16 October 1936 in the village of in the Sumy Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR. At the time of his birth, Ukraine was in the grip of a famine caused by Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Chikatilo's parents were both collective farm labourers who lived in a one-room hut. They received no wages for their work, but instead received the right to cultivate a plot of land behind the family hut.