Citizen X is a 1995[1] American television film which covers the efforts of detectives in the Soviet Union to capture an unknown serial killer of women and children in the 1980s, and the bureaucratic obstacles they encounter.

The film is based upon the true story of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted in 1992 of the murder of 52 women and children committed between 1978 and 1990.

The film tells the story of the subsequent eight-year hunt by Burakov for the serial killer responsible for the mutilation and murder of 53 people, 52 of them below the age of 35.

Burakov is promoted to detective and eventually aided, covertly at first, by Col. Mikhail Fetisov, his commanding officer and the shrewd head of the provincial committee for crime and much later, by Alexandr Bukhanovsky, a psychiatrist with a particular interest in what he calls "abnormal psychology".

As well as taking on the form of a crime thriller, the movie depicts Soviet propaganda and bureaucracy that contributed to the failure of law enforcement agencies to capture the killer, Andrei Chikatilo, for almost a decade.

Local politicians were fearful such revelations would have a negative impact on the USSR's image, since serial killers were associated with "decadent, Western" moral corruption.

He recites from his lengthy analysis and speculation, made three years earlier, of the personality and tendencies of this sexually frustrated killer, whom he had entitled "Citizen X".

The film concludes with Chikatilo being led to a nameless prison chamber and shows him staring in shock at a central drain in the room's floor as a uniformed soldier delivers a pistol shot to the back of the killer's head.