A note before we begin.

While we aim to be judicious, there are some descriptions of sexual violence laid out here that can't be avoided to understand the case.

Please take care.

Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even

earn the label, Crime of the Century.

But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist, and author, and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.

This is Crimes of the Centuries.

Music No one disputes that Andrei Chiquetilo endured the worst of Soviet childhoods.

Born in 1936 in a small village in Ukraine, his parents were collective farm laborers who had little to offer their children aside from want.

As the Soviet communal experiment demanded, his parents were not paid for their work, but

were allowed to grow vegetables in the small plot

behind the one-room family hut. They could do this after they had toiled long hours in the

state-owned fields to feed others. That was all part and parcel of the forced collectivization

of agriculture, a political policy as envisioned by the USSR's new leader, Joseph

Stalin. The idea? That the work of Andre Chiquitillo's parents, and millions like them, would

feed an entire nation. All boats would rise. Efficiency and output would be maximized.

Ah, utopia.

As theory, it may have sounded swell.

In practice, it led to, in addition to thousands of other ills,

one of the largest famines that area of the world had ever known.

...