Festival Books
B orn into a Siberian criminal dynasty, convicted of attempted murder at 12 and sent to prison, Nicolai Lilin became a Russian special forces sniper during the Second Chechen War. Having moved to Italy in 2003, he now runs a tattoo parlour in Turin, helps underprivileged children and instructs on the sporting use of weapons. The 29-year-old writes on crime and poverty for various European publications, but is best known as the author of Siberian Education, the first in a trilogy of books based upon his life. Translated into 14 languages, it will shortly be made into a film by the Oscar-winning director Gabriele Salvatores.
Lilin’s candour has attracted condemnation from some quarters of Russia and death threats from Muslim extremists. Sent bullets in the post, he escaped a car bomb last year. Nevertheless, the sun is shining in Turin when we speak and he’s delighted by Salvatores’ appointment, after rejecting several lucrative overtures from Hollywood to turn his account into ‘some kind of Rambo’. Suspicious of capitalism, the world he portrays in his astonishing book is one his daughter will never know. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the flooding of Russia by Western culture have all but wiped out the Urka community.
Lilin’s father was a frequently-imprisoned armed robber who descended from a Siberian crime clan resettled by the Soviet government in the 1930s to Transnistria, a de facto independent state unrecognised by the UN and situated inside Moldova on the border with Ukraine. Preying on mercantile transport and the government forces that defended them, the Urkas practised a Christian-derived form of libertarian socialism and dubbed themselves ‘honest criminals’; murderers and robbers who would be weak and dishonest if they stooped to drug-dealing or prostitution. Believing community and moral intent to be sacrosanct, the Urkas were a terrifying blend of piety, honour and ultraviolence, rejecting material gain and prioritising loyalty, justice and respect for marginalised members of society, all the while fetishising guns and knives with a religious reverence. Lilin was given his first ‘pike’, a flick knife, at six. After the rape of an autistic girl, his adolescent gang were duty-bound to avenge her, threatening all- out war against rival gangs around the city of Bender.
The most harrowing section of the book depicts his nine months in juvenile prison, where boys were held 150 to a cell. Murder and rape were frequent and the most vulnerable were forced into pornographic films distributed through international paedophile rings, though Lilin was protected by his Siberian brethren. ‘It was like a concentration camp and I have bad memories because it was the first time I saw human beings lose
‘IF YOU START TO THINK ABOUT MORALITY, YOU WILL DIE’
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everything, even dignity,’ he recalls. ‘Thank God no one tried to hit me or put me down, there was no sexual violence towards me because our group stayed together, we made business with nobody and just tried to survive. I knew I never wanted to go back.’ Siberian Education has proved controversial, not least because the author has combined his own experiences with recreations of those of his revered grandfather’s generation. He maintains he never set out to write an autobiography or factual history but a ‘romance’. His mother feels he was too outspoken but his grandfather, acclaimed in criminal circles as an ‘authority’, gave his blessing to the memoir before he died.
Returning to Transnistria, Lilin convened the five surviving members of his gang for a meal nine days after the death, as is traditional. But he was disappointed by their materialism and found himself ‘out of this community. They don’t lead the life my grandfather led, they are not honest criminals, they are not honest people’. He recalls his friend Mel drunkenly roaring, ‘Nicolai, you must stop writing this bullshit and remembering our grandfathers. Our grandfathers are dead, they gave us nothing, no money, and they can’t help us survive, so fuck you and fuck your book!’ A skilled body artist, Lilin’s symbolic tattoos remain all but hidden. But they link him ‘now with the old world, with my grandfather and
Armedconflict
Handed his first weapon at the age of six, Nicolai Lilin was destined for a life of violence. Having fled the horrors of his past, he tells Jay Richardson why death is sometimes a better option 22 THE LIST 12–19 Aug 2010