Conspiracy Theorists

"If this "memoir" were believable, it might have some value (and serve as a pretext for invading Transnistria as a festering sore of criminality). But credulity collapses in the first pages, and not just because the chronology is a complete mess. The background to the "memoir" (in interviews on Italian television Lilin has begun to call Siberian Education an "autobiographical fairy-tale") is the deportation by Stalin in the 1930s of a group of intolerably active and anti-communist Siberian robbers westwards to Bendery on the Dnestr river, where they flourished in the 1990s. Usually, Stalin either shot such people, or sent them 1,000 miles closer to the North Pole: this would be Stalin's only recorded deportation from Siberia to Europe, all the more incredible because Bendery was from 1918 to 1940 in Romania."

"The narrative mode of the book is strange: sometimes, an anthropologist seems to be describing the traditions of a hitherto unknown Siberian ethnos who combine utterly ruthless criminality with the religious punctiliousness of the Exclusive Brethren, their traditions embodied in a Grandfather Kuzya who guides the juvenile hero and his friends on when, whom, how and with what weapon to maim and kill. At other times, author and reader wallow in a pornography of violence."

"Translation rights to this book have been sold all over the world, but not in Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, or any language which the inhabitants of Bendery and Tiraspol might read. Lilin explains this as a precaution against revenge for revealing the secrets of the Siberian urka's language, tattoos and code. Doctoral theses and Internet archives, however, tell everything about the symbolism of Russian criminal tattoos, while the beliefs of Orthodox dissenters and of "thieves-in-the-law" have been described for over a century (but never before confounded as they are in this book, where revolvers used for killing are kept under icons)."

"His works ("Free Fall: A Sniper’s Story" and "Siberian Education") are truly impressive for their triteness and the sheer quantity of outright lies, nevertheless, this man is a favorite among some Western readers in Europe and the United Kingdom."

"Nicolai Lilin's words, in which he finds himself threatening our journalists with mafia-like methods and tones, are, to say the least, shameful. [...] But it is also shameful that this character has for years been invited to important television studios to talk about the Russian war in Ukraine, and that he has had ample space to pollute public discourse in our country."

"If you would prefer Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs without their ingenious wit and structure, this may be a book for you."

"Nicolai Lilin (if that is his real name) has obviously encountered the criminal world, but he makes gross errors – claiming that fenia, the criminal jargon originated by the ofenia, Russian travelling pedlars, is an aboriginal Siberian language."

"This book reads like a fantasist's ravings [...]. The success of Educazione siberiana implies that Italian publishing is floundering in the same cesspit as Italian television. One can only hope that British readers are not so gullible."

"I met Lilin years ago after the publication of Siberian Education. He told me he was a friend of Licio Gelli and that he went around armed because he had many enemies. The book was very interesting, but it contained a series of obvious lies, both about the history of Russia and about his life. Half of my family is Russian and therefore I have direct sources, but I was amazed that everyone believed him. Shortly afterward, he wrote an article for L'Espresso, where he explained that he was a former sniper and that he had received offers from high-level mercenary groups to go and fight somewhere. It was such bullshit that I expected people to throw eggs at him. But no. The world of culture began to acclaim him as a hero, a thinker, a philosopher. Just look at those with whom he debated, who introduced him, who praised him. It was like living in a parallel world where those who loved him most were left-leaning. He took part in debates on democracy, on war, on the whole world, he had exhibitions of "Siberian" tattoos with institutional sponsorships. Every time I spoke about him I was accused of spreading shit about "someone more famous than you" or of having been fooled by Russian friends and relatives, who evidently had it in for someone who told the truth about the Putin regime."

"When confronted with glaring innaccuracies and contradictions, Lilin retorted that these charges are the equivalent of accusing Anne Frank of miscounting the number of electricity poles in Bergen-Belsen. I leave it to the reader to pass judgement on the aptness and sensitivity of the comparison."

"Over time his books began to sell less and he became a propagandist of the worst pro-Putin bullshit. I thought that everyone who had given him prestige and visibility would have done some self-criticism. Fat chance. People on the left who I knew very well decided to side with him because he was a "pacifist" and once again it seemed absurd to me, like an episode of Black Mirror. Just how was it possible for them to ally themselves with someone who published photomontages of the Ukrainian president snorting cocaine, in which he wrote that Navalny's wife was having fun with her lovers while he was dying, who insulted homosexuals hidden in the Ukrainian army? I don't know, I still can't wrap my head around it. Okay, the story is not over, given that today he made veiled threats to use polonium on journalists who speak badly of the Tsar. I just hope that, now that he is a fugitive, he doesn't become a martyr for free thought. And I also hope that those who previously praised him don't insult him now. Certain things have to be done when it's hard, not when it's convenient. But we're in Italy. Whoever talks the loudest always wins."

"Needless to say, Lilin has never set foot in Chechnya or a Siberian prison, but, following in the footsteps of Baron Munchhausen, this does not stop him spouting a load of exorbitant cock-and-bull stories – and everyone, at least nearly everyone, laps them up!"

"Inside Russia people watch Nikolai Lilin’s ascent with surprise and admiration. [...] Wild and uncivilized as Russia may be, it is still highly unlikely that a book by a contemporary German writer about a squadron of former SS officers hiding in the forests outside Berlin, listening to Wagner with their children and grandchildren, reading aloud from the works of Junge and banging on tin drums as they rob passing trains, would ever be published here. [...] Everyone here would immediately see this drivel for what it is. But back in Europe, strange things can happen. Plenty of second-rate books make it to print, and the most popular still seem to be this load of nonsense that no one in his right mind would ever bother reading in Russia."

"Judging by the many laudatory reviews of Nicolai Lilin's book in the European and American media, Western readers have no doubts about the veracity of the facts he presents. [...] The reviewers were not even bothered by the fact that Bender was called Tighina before 1940 and was part of Romania, and Stalin simply could not exile anyone there, especially since people back then were exiled to Siberia, not from it."

"If Free Fall were a novel, it would be just a plot-free Russian version of Andy McNab. But, marketed as a memoir, Canongate can say that it "offers a unique perspective on one of the most controversial wars in living memory"."

"If we summarize the information from Nicolai Lilin's book, his interviews in the Western press and speeches at book fairs, then by the age of 23 the author had managed to: serve two terms in a Transnistrian prison, be under investigation in Russia, serve three years as a sniper in Chechnya and a couple more years as a mercenary in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. At 24, he got a job as a fisherman on a ship in Ireland, then moved to Italy, where he got married, opened a tattoo parlor, wrote a bestseller and almost became a victim of a politically motivated assassination attempt. Now Nikolai Lilin is 30 years old, he has his own fan club and he seriously discusses why Anthony Hopkins is not suitable for the lead role in the Hollywood film adaptation of his book."

"Siberian Education feels like a compendium of the dark fantasies that Westerners have about Transdniester as a place where people are left to fend for themselves or establish their own law. The reader is led to believe that the laws of the Siberian urkas are but one set of these surrogate forms of authority that exist in the black hole of Europe. It is a laughable portrayal."

"If I called Lilin a "slasher", it's only because, having read his book which was marketed as an autobiography, I found scenes where he violently stabs his enemies. If it's not true, then the book isn't an autobiography. Tertium non datur. [...] He ought to act less touchy. In a democracy, which he clearly isn't used to, you accept counterarguments with civility."

"As an author, Lilin places himself in the unimpeachable position of a trusted insider. Yet, upon closer inspection his biography and criminal history are more fictive than real. In online forums addressing the book's content and local reactions to it, locals and former acquaintances of Lilin intimate that, far from being a criminal, he actually served in the local militia before he emigrated. Locals' reactions to translated parts of his book range from disbelief and laughter to anger and outrage at the author's hollow attempts to besmirch his native city. Perhaps tellingly, some express astonishment that he was capable of pulling such a fast one on westerners."

"I asked Nicolai Lilin-Verzhbitsky what he thought about the comments of his former friends. He thinks that they envy him: "They feel offended and inferior. I managed to leave there and achieve something, but they did not". At the same time, in a conversation with me, unlike in interviews with Western journalists, he repeatedly emphasized that his book is not an autobiography and that his Western publishers are marketing it as such. And he, they say, has nothing to do with it."

"Un tappeto di boschi selvaggi [Lilin's autobiography] includes the reabilitatsiya, the rehabilitation certificate, of his great-grandfather (Nikolay Verzhbitsky). While writing the text of this photographic and autobiographical book, Lilin included the document and passed it off as a death sentence, as if there was nobody in Italy who knows a bit of Russian. It turns out his great-grandfather was born in Tiraspol, not in Siberia. [...] He was not a Siberian criminal deported to Moldova but, on the contrary, one of the many victims of Stalin's repressions, killed because he had a foreign surname and came from Moldova."

"He doesn't belong to a family of criminals, much less a Siberian one. His surname, for what it's worth, also sounds Polish. [...] When all's said and done, Lilin is just some guy who emigrated to a country where he had little chance of making an honest living, and he screwed it up big time by exploiting his exotic origins, inventing a larger-than-life character and passing it off as real. He is a literary impostor who plays on the thin line between imagination and reality. Life is never as romantic as we would like it to be, and this compels some to play a role they never had in the real world. Posing as a descendant of a criminal tribe and a Chechen War veteran is less risky than fighting in Chechnya and carrying out illegal activities. At most, people will think you're a liar."

"He brings his fictional biography to life from beginning to end. And the more far-fetched it is, the more shocking moments it contains, the more fans he has. [...] All the facts of his biography have nothing to do with Siberia, Moldova or reality in general."

"I don't wish any harm to anyone. I hope that these people [Stefania Battistini and Simone Traini] will live to a ripe old age. I hope that these people will also be able to reflect on the mistakes that have been made, but I know very well how it works in Russia, I know very well who the Russians are and how they act when they get angry. When they are hit, let's say, in their heart, they react quite harshly. And so, my sincere wish to these Italian journalists who have done this pro-Nazi propaganda work is to be very careful, be very careful. Don't accept tea from strangers. Be careful at the café. Be careful where you eat. Be careful with new friends, because it may be that the GRU operatives, who are the military secret services, are already working against you, and if they have really taken on a task, you can be sure that in a year, two years, three years, five years, in any case they will find you and tear you to pieces."

"Obviously [the Russo-Ukrainian war was] a gift to the Jewish lobbies and BlackRock. When they arrive, they lick their fingers when they see such a situation: Here you go! A new race and ethnicity has been invented. We can destroy Russian power, massacre Slavs and force them to kill each other thanks to an idea cooked up by the Poles and Hungarians even before the First World War and which was then spread widely by the communists. This is, in summary, the pain of Ukraine. They are Russians who reject the idea of being Russian, they've invented this thing about being Ukrainians, and obviously through this crazy, stupid idea they destroy themselves and their roots. It's obviously easier to control people this way. They've installed their Jewish boy to run this degraded land and he rightly doesn't want to end the war. How come? Because this is the essence of their plan: to massacre as many Ukrainians as possible in order to replace them with Jewish colonists from Israel and other parts of the world in order to create a new state there in Ukraine."

"He has never lived in Siberia and this whole criminal story about the Urka people in Siberian Education (Einaudi), who never existed, is fiction from beginning to end. Nicolai easily and even skillfully collects artistic facts that can actually be found in Russian and Soviet writers, for example, Dostoevsky, and which, over time, turn into stereotypes and prejudices about Russia and Siberia in the minds of readers. And on this basis it transforms them into presumed facts of modern, current reality. This is called an artistic hoax."

"Lilin [has] forsaken his criminal upbringing in favor of a successful literary career in which he peddles Westerners their own deepest, darkest fears about Transdniester and Russia. Astutely aware of the region's outsized reputation, Lilin has found a literary niche, a captive audience uninterested in the facts."

"The author insists that the book [Free Fall] is based on his own combat experience in Chechnya. In an interview with Ogonyok, he said that he took part in the second Chechen campaign, but refused to give details. I learned from the Italian media that he allegedly served in the 56th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment. However, sources in the Ministry of Defense claim that there was no soldier named Lilin or Verzhbitsky in Chechnya."

"Despite the fact that he [Volodymyr Zelenskyy] is from a Jewish family, and that his grandfather served in the Soviet army, he supports Nazism for money, for economic reasons."

"My values ​​are left-wing, but not as the left is defined in Italy. I am not someone who fits into an ideology within the Italian system. I know well that in Italy some say that I am a fascist, because they quote some out-of-context phrase, or some old position of mine. But the truth is that I am the product of the Soviet system, for better or for worse."

"It was ISIS in league with the Ukrainian Nazis. [...] But the order came from the CIA."

"The West has beauty, a great cultural heritage, and enormous potential, but it must free itself from Anglo-Saxon hegemony."

"I work with news, on my private Telegram channel; therefore, I have people who pay me to be informed. If people pay to have coherent news, it means that many citizens do not agree with what the Italian media reports and it is not surprising, because the Italian press keeps telling a lot of bullshit. The Russian press is always based on a propaganda line. We must not think that in Italy they are propagandists and in Russia they tell the whole truth. There is propaganda there too, but there is a difference: Russian journalists do not distance themselves from the objective truth, which is what Westerners have started to do quite some time ago."

"My only commitment is to block any kind of support for the war. I have no other political interests. I have never been seriously interested in any kind of political program."

"That's the beauty of the Democratic Party: they support the Nazis in Ukraine, but they call me a fascist because I went to Casapound."

"When I was 12, Andriy Parubiy entered my town of Bender in Transnistria, leading some Nazi gangs who killed, among others, my uncle and my little cousin Tatiana."

"There is no [Siberian] community anymore. Just me, my brother, and maybe some others. The problem is that there is nothing left in Siberia either. The core of this community was deported to Transnistria and did not survive there."

"The Siberian community in which I grew up came from a much older one that had already developed a system of self-control and was opposed to any form of power. It didn't just oppose socialism, but also the Tsar's regime and its slavery. [...] By the late 1980s, I already knew that the community was dying. When I started writing I realized that this tradition had helped them survive, but it couldn't save them."

"The only thing for certain about Russia is that it will always be immersed in chaos. That's normal. It's its historical state."

"Actually, I now consider myself Italian in all respects. I have Italian citizenship, it would be wrong and incorrect to define myself as Russian, although I have recently received quite a few attacks from my former fellow Russian citizens."

"While framed as a memoir, Siberian Education deliberately embellishes the criminal elements of the PMR. As a storyteller, Lilin is the quintessential insider who confirms our darkest fears and fantasies. Born and raised in the PMR, he himself embodies its outlaw reputation and handsomely profits from it."

"Let's just say that the childhood he describes, in a context of poverty and marginalization, is credible. Just as it is likely that it led to the natural outcome of prison. Even a brief stint with youth gangs is possible. It's the part about the mafia that's unconvincing. [...] I have met members of the Russian mafia. Those who are killers certainly don't go around telling people about it."

"Nicolai Lilin has fled Italy because, he says, he was accused of being a spy for Putin. Considering all the bullshit he has spouted since arriving in Italy, probably none of this is true, except that he fled. If you are a spy, they don't take your passport away, they take you away. Who knows?"

"I've never studied Italian, I learned it through contact with people, reading children's books and watching cartoons. But now I can even tackle Dante."

"Lilin draws on the vast literature about the prison life and criminal underworld of Russia to create a sect whose putative "Siberian" origin is fantastical and whose traditions, practices and language are lifted from well-known Soviet and post-Soviet prison-based criminal fraternities [...]. Lilin's furious reactions to those who cast doubt on his criminal credentials can best be explained by the fact that some elements of the book do reflect his own experience while most of the rest is widely known in Russia to readers of quasi-fictional crime tales by Valery Karyshev and to viewers of the prison-based TV series Zona."

"According to Lilin, the Urkas were an ethnic minority, "descendants of the ancient Efey", who lived by hunting and robbery and who were deported from Siberia to Transnistria in the 1930s, when it was part of Romania (it would be annexed to the USSR in 1940, in the partition of Europe between Stalin and Hitler). Thus the communists would have populated the "Romanian empire", as the writer calls it, with Russian criminals, defeating the local gangs. "Absurd", laughs Pavel Polian, a Russian historian who has been studying the deportations of communism and Nazism for 25 years: "They were deported to Siberia, but not from Siberia, much less to Moldova. And the Efey never existed"."

"The foreword states that names, dates and places have been changed "to protect those involved" but gives no clue that the book is not a truthful account of someone's experiences. Almost a quarter of the book, pages 99-188, is an ultra-violent account of fighting in a built-up area – presumably Grozny – in which Lilin and his group rescued a cut off Russian unit, but not before it had lost 13 lieutenant-colonels."

"The consequences of corruption are not reflected solely in the impoverishment of society and the state, but in the drastic decline in the trust of citizens in democratic institutions. In addition, corruption creates uncertainty and instability in the economy and has a negative impact on the level of investments."

"The success of the BRI lies in fully taking into consideration the political and cultural differences of various countries, and China will not collaborate with different countries in the same uniform mode. Instead, countries can negotiate with China from their own specific national condition."

"After more than a year since my election to the office of the President of Serbia and the appointment of the new government, which has rightly been subject to recent reconstruction, I am pleased to confirm that Serbia has unambiguously demonstrated an adherence to European values. I am pleased to note that this commitment by my country has been recognized by our international partners. In other words, Serbia has become a responsible, sincere and reliable partner, endeavouring to perceive problems realistically and approach solutions in a constructive and effective way in the spirit of dialogue and tolerance. We take pride in the visible results that we have achieved, despite the numerous challenges that Serbia has faced in the past."