"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."
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Novelists from ItalyConspiracy theoristsShort story writers from ItalyBiographers from ItalyNovelists from Moldova
Original Language: English
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Sources
On Siberian Education. Donald Rayfield (1 August 2010), "Bloodbath. Siberian Education by Nicolai Lilin (Translated by Jonathan Hunt)", Literary Review, 378
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nicolai_Lilin
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Nicolai Lilin
Nicolai Lilin (born 12 February, 1980) is an Italian-Moldovan writer. His first novel, Siberian Education, was adapted into a 2013 film directed by Gabriele Salvatores. He has since attracted attention for spreading Russian propaganda throughout the course of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
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