Autobiographical Novels

"Many veterans of the war in Afghanistan, especially the older paratroopers, would leave these ‘monuments’ in the streets after a particularly difficult battle. They were terrifying sights, always the body of a dead enemy that the soldiers would savage in a frightening way. But the real horror in this ritual lay in the fact that in order to make these ‘monuments’, soldiers used people who were still alive."

"Our captain was convinced that the war in Chechnya was nothing but a farce, a performance that Russia had put on all by itself, making use of its friends in the Arabic world and even paying the mercenaries to fight against us. Since I had always kept my distance from political discussions, the captain’s claims weren’t always clear to me. His theories completely overturned my beliefs about the governing structures; Nosov often talked about the power of ex-KGB agents, asserting that somehow a group of veterans within our secret services had the Russian government under their thumb"

"The enemy’s bayonets and knives were almost always American, and when we could we took them for ourselves. We liked those weapons a lot because they were useful and easy to handle, whereas the Russian bayonet seemed like a sort of universal tool you could use for anything – even plumbing, if you wanted – except close combat."

"Among the terrorists, besides an unbelievable number of Russian-made firearms, like Makarov 9s, Stechkins and Tokarev 7.62s, European or American guns were always going around, generally ACP 45s, PARA 9s or 9x21s. I myself took a 9x21-calibre 98 Beretta FS from a dead man’s body, a beautiful, very handy weapon, more precise and secure than Russian pistols."

"We were all wearing light jackets, with jumpsuits underneath, trainers on our feet and no helmets on our heads, just regular beanies. Mine was grey with a pom-pom on top. The other units made fun of us, calling us ‘bums’ since we wore whatever we came across. Obviously it bothered them to have to wear uniforms; they would rather have been able to do as we did – when it was hot we could wear shorts. None of us shaved, we all had goatees or at least a few days’ stubble, and we often kept our hair long. By our looks we were more likely to be taken for a group of terrorists than a unit of the Russian Army. We did it on purpose, obviously, because we often ended up going behind the line and having to blend in with the enemy, even though every so often one of our own shot at us, thinking we were Arabs."

"I found out from some friends in the army that Captain Nosov and Moscow fell in battle – a few months after my discharge – in a mountain area between Chechnya and Dagestan. They had gone on reconnaissance and found themselves surrounded by a large group of terrorists. The infantry night explorers who went to recover the dead that day said that Nosov’s and Moscow’s bodies had been mined. Evidently one of the two, before he died, hadn’t wanted to give the enemy the chance to commit dishonourable acts on their remains. I visited their grave, in the military cemetery of the city of M—. According to army tradition, friends who have fallen together are buried together."

"Zabelin had taught us the precious rules of ‘saboteur survival and solidarity’, as he called them. They were like commandments, and each of us had to learn them by heart. The idea was to create a sense of unity, to make us into our own clan within the army. The rules were very precise: saboteurs obey no one outside their commanding officer; under no circumstances may saboteurs be transferred to other units of the armed forces; in armed combat, saboteurs are forbidden to leave their dead on the ground. If a group suffered serious losses and was left isolated from the rest of the unit, they were not allowed to retreat from the line of operations. The only valid alternative was the most drastic: suicide. Each of us carried a personal hand grenade, which we were supposed to use to blow ourselves and the others up should the unit be surrounded by enemies and run out of ammunition. They were extreme rules, and I didn’t like them very much. I didn’t understand why we would have to kill ourselves, just because the saboteur strategy had no retreat plan, unlike every other unit of the Russian army. What’s more, unlike the rest of the Russian army, we had nothing to do with military law. Every Russian soldier is required to memorise if not the entire military code, at the very least the principal articles. But as for us, we’ve never even touched our books, just as none of us has ever learned to march or salute properly."

"We saboteurs had an unusual uniform; we wore civilian clothes, things from home. As we would be conducting missions behind the front lines, travelling through territory under enemy control, it was essential that we be able to pass unrecognised."

"‘We were here, the saboteurs!’ The man’s entire torso was skinless, from his navel to his neck. The Arab had lost consciousness, but you could see he was still breathing softly. Next to him, on the ground, there was a layer of skin. Nosov had cut it in the shape of a bat, just like the ones we drew on the city walls. The captain said to the infantrymen: ‘Go ahead and take it if you want, keep it as a souvenir. That way you can tell everyone that at least one time in your pointless lives you knew some real men… Remember that being cruel doesn’t mean cutting the noses or ears off the dead to make a necklace or a keychain… You don’t rape women or beat children. Try to look your enemy right in the eye when he’s still alive and breathing, that’s enough… And if you have the balls to do something else, well go ahead…’ We said nothing, mulling over what had just come out of our captain’s mouth. The infantrymen seemed frightened, some had stepped back, pretending they hadn’t seen anything. The silence that had fallen around that inhuman torture was broken by Shoe. With an almost indifferent and calm expression – as if he were on vacation – he proclaimed: ‘Well, not too bad, Ivanisch, that bat almost looks real!’ A young officer from the infantry pulled his gun out of his holster and went over to the Arab, aiming at his head. Nosov gave him a dirty look. ‘What are you doing, son?’ he asked, calm. ‘Enough, I can’t take it – I’m going to kill him…’ The officer was shaken up. His hand trembled as it gripped the weapon. ‘This guy stays as he is,’ Nosov yelled, ‘and in fact I hope he lives till his friends get here… They think they’re cruel? They don’t know shit about cruelty! I’ll teach them personally what it means to be cruel!’"

"Mercenaries from various countries were recruited as snipers, lured by the good pay. I often encountered Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian snipers, very competent marksmen from the former Soviet Union sports scene. They could shoot with precision, but many lacked the basics of military strategy. My hunting education in the forests of Siberia, which I received as a boy from my grandfather Nikolay, turned out to be extremely useful, and I learned everything else at training camp thanks to Yakut, the Siberian instructor I mentioned earlier."

"In war, the living made more of an impression on me than the dead. To me, the dead looked like a bunch of receptacles that someone had used and then thrown away – I looked at them as I would broken bottles. Whereas the living – the living had this horrible emptiness in their eyes: they were human beings who had seen beyond madness, and now lived in the embrace of death."

"This book is a story constructed with true details, a distorted reflection of the reality that we experienced. That is, I changed the names of characters and units to protect those involved; I omitted place names and also blurred the times when the events narrated here actually took place. N.L."

"‘Never grab them by the vest, they’re full of rats. They’re dangerous, those beasts – they eat human flesh, so they’re strong and aggressive. Last year a rat almost tore three fingers off one guy in a single bite. Follow my advice; just grab the bodies by the legs and before you tie them, tap them with your foot a couple times, and those pests will run away.’"

"Among the saboteurs, on the other hand, hazing didn’t exist. We were like brothers, because each of us knew that in hard times it’s always better to have a brother by your side than an enemy."

"Nosov looked the mullah straight in the eye and, in that tone we all knew well, the one he used when he didn’t feel like playing anymore, he asked: ‘Where are your wounded?’ The man suddenly went pale, and his hands began to tremble. Trying to keep calm, he raised his hands to the sky, as if he were asking for divine forgiveness, and addressed the captain in a humble voice: ‘What wounded, commander? Perhaps I do not understand the meaning of your words. We are only servants of God. We help the people of the village...’ Nosov smiled with the politeness of an English nobleman, went up to him, and without removing his gloves – he was wearing the tactical Kevlar ones, which are stiff and heavy – gave him a hard slap in the face. The man let out a cry and then crumpled to the floor, sliding down the wall as if his muscles could no longer support the weight of his body. His nose immediately swelled up and started to bleed; his eyes filled with tears. Nosov pulled out his gun from under his vest and pointed it at the man’s head. ‘I need your wounded, now. If you prefer, I can find them myself, but by that point everyone will be dead: old, young, women, cats, dogs...’ The man started to whimper, hugging his knees to his chest. Breathing hard, big reddish bubbles came out of his mouth, saliva mixed with blood. Nosov took a lamp from the table, broke it apart and poured the kerosene over the man, who started to squeal like a pig at the sight of an executioner’s knife, while trying desperately to unwind his kerosene-soaked turban. His dirty hair poked out from the strips of cloth. Our captain took a box of matches and lit one, holding it over the man. ‘If you don’t tell me where you keep the wounded I’ll burn you alive,’ he said cruelly, holding the match in one hand and the gun in the other. ‘I don’t give a shit about your fucking religion; I think you should all be killed...’ Sobbing, the man sputtered out a storm of incomprehensible words, among which we could just make out: ‘In the garden... around the back... under the tent...’ Nosov pushed the point of the pistol into the cloth of the turban hanging off the man’s head and fired; the bullet was muffled, as though he had used a silencer; a cloud of gunpowder spread all around. The man’s head had been pierced by the bullet from one side to the other; the wall he had been leaning against a moment earlier was covered in blood and bits of brain. For a few seconds the dead man’s left foot kept moving over the kitchen’s rough floor, scraping the cement with his fake leather shoe. Nosov spat on the ground and pointed us to the exit. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. As I stood by the door, I saw the captain dropping the lit match on the corpse, which immediately caught fire. At that point Nosov looked right at me: ‘I’m really fucking sick of these Muslims...’"

"[...] it contains tales so unlikely that most editors would surely have spotted them as false, such as when Lilin finds a Chechen with a rifle loaded with hyper-accurate bullets filled with liquid mercury. Such an idea is nonsense since the liquid would shift in flight and render them useless."

"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."

"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."

"Although Lilin's book is about a Russian-speaking region and his native language is Russian, he writes in the language of his adopted native land, following in the tradition of Nabokov, Serge, and Triolet (nee Kagan). His choice to write in a non-native idiom firmly places his audience outside of the Russian-speaking world, yet the subjects of his two books – criminality in Transnistria and his experiences as a saboteur in Chechnya – emerge from distinctly Russian contexts. Perhaps most tellingly, both issues touch upon a perceived incommensurability between Russia and the West. It is somewhat ironic that Lilin's audience consists of the very same westerners who previously were the objects of his scorn. The enemy that he once hated, the West, now provides his bread and butter; the fact that there will soon be a film based on the book only adds to the absurdity."

"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."

"‘Don’t worry, Nikolay, you’re safer here than you would be with them… Have a good rest, because in a couple of days they’ll be taking you to the train that will carry you to Russia, to the brigade you’ve been assigned to… Have they told you where they’re sending you yet?’ ‘The Colonel said they’re putting me in the saboteurs...’ I replied in an exhausted voice. He paused, then asked me in alarm: ‘The saboteurs? Holy Christ, what’s he got against you? What have you done to deserve this?’ ‘I’ve received a Siberian education,’ I replied, as he closed the door."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I did yoga: I was slim and supple, I could do the exercises well and everyone was pleased with me. One of my wrestling coaches had advised me to attend the yoga lessons given by a teacher in Ukraine, a man who had studied for many years in India. So I often went to Ukraine for advanced courses, and every year, with a group from my sports club, I spent a month and a half in India. By the age of eighteen I was about to take my diploma as a yoga instructor, but I didn’t like the way things were run at my school; I often quarrelled with the teacher, who told me I was a rebel and only let me stay on because many of the other boys were on my side. [...] I dreamed of opening a sports school of my own and teaching yoga to the people of my town."

"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."

"I fired without thinking too much about it, adopting my usual Macedonian technique. I didn’t take aim, I fired at where I knew the guys were, and watched their dying convulsions."

"Since my childhood I had been surrounded by handicapped adults and children, such as my close friend Boris, the engine driver, who met the tragic end that I have already described. Many mentally ill people lived in our area, and they kept coming to Transnistria until the 1990s, when the law against keeping the mentally ill at home was abolished."

"It was rumoured that the plot had in fact been hatched by the police, in an attempt to weaken the criminal community of our town. They finally succeeded in doing this five years later, when they set many young criminals against the old ones and sparked off a bloody war. That was the beginning of the end of our community, which no longer exists as it did at the time of this story."

"Some of the guards often raped the boys, too; this usually happened in the showers. You were allowed to take a shower once a week if you were in the ordinary regime, whereas in the special regime, where I was, you could only do so once a month. We used to improvise with plastic bottles, rigging up a shower over the toilet, since we always had plenty of hot water. When we went to the shower block it was like a military operation: we all walked close together; if there were any weak or sick boys among us we put them in the middle and always kept an eye on them; we moved like a platoon of soldiers."

"There was one disgusting old screw: he had been a guard in an adult prison all his life, and after studying child psychology had asked for a transfer to a juvenile institution. He wielded a lot of power in our prison. Although he was only a warder, he rivalled the director, because he had links with people who organized a new activity which had arrived from abroad along with democracy, as a form of free life. These people made paedophile films and forced the boys to prostitute themselves, having sex with foreigners, people who arrived from Europe and the USA, people who had pots of money and hence, in the new democratic system, immense power. Many boys were picked up at a particular time of day from the cells and came back the next day with bags full of food and all kinds of stuff, such as glossy magazines, colouring pencils and other things which nobody in jail could dream of possessing. Their cellmates were forbidden to touch them or mistreat them; they were untouchable, nobody dared to raise a finger against them, because everyone knew those boys were the old warder’s whores. They called him ‘Crocodile Zhena’, after a character in a Soviet cartoon. The whores they called by women’s names. Their bunk was usually down at the end, near the door, and they stayed there all the time."

"Between Black Seed and us there had always been a kind of tension; they described themselves as the leaders of the criminal world, and their presence was very evident both inside prison and outside, but the foundations of their criminal tradition, most of their rules, and even their tattoos, were copied from us Urkas. Their caste emerged at the beginning of the century, exploiting a moment of great social weakness in the country, which was full of desperate people – vagabonds and small-time criminals who were happy to go to prison for the sake of the free meals and the certainty of having a roof over their heads at night. Gradually they became a powerful community, but one with a lot of flaws, as many Authorities of Black Seed themselves acknowledged."

"Grandfather Kuzya died of old age three years later, and his death – in addition to other events – caused an upheaval in the Siberian community. Many criminals of the old faith, unhappy with the military and police regime that had been established in our country, left Transnistria and returned to Siberia, or emigrated to far-off lands."

"[...] to Siberians wearing glasses is like voluntarily sitting in a wheelchair – it's a sign of weakness, a personal defeat. Even if you don't have good eyesight you must never wear glasses, in order to preserve your dignity and your healthy appearance."

"[...] in our culture a 'cockerel' – that is, a homosexual – is an outcast: if he isn't killed he is prevented from having contact with others and forbidden to touch cult objects such as the cross, the knife and the icons."

"We Siberians had made friends with the Armenian family. We had known the Armenians from way back; there was a good relationship between our communities and we resembled each other in many ways. We had made a pact with them: if there was ever any serious trouble we would support each other. In this way the power of our communities had increased. We celebrated our birthdays and other special days together; sometimes we even shared our parcels from home. If anyone needed something urgently, such as medicine, or ink for tattoos, we would help each other without hesitation. We were good friends with the Armenians, and also with the Belarusians, who were good people, and with the boys who came from the Don, from the Cossack community: they were rather militaristic but good-hearted, and all were very brave. We had problems with the Ukrainians, though: some of them were nationalistic and hated Russians, and for some strange reason even those who didn’t share those sentiments ended up supporting them. And our relationship with the Ukrainians deteriorated markedly after a Siberian from another cell killed one of them. A real hatred grew up between our communities. We kept well away from the people from Georgia; they were all supporters of Black Seed. Each of them was desperate to become an Authority, invented countless ways of making others respect him, and conducted a kind of criminal electoral campaign to win votes. The Georgians I met in that jail knew nothing about true friendship or brotherhood; they lived together while hating each other and trying to cheat everyone else and make them their slaves, by exploiting the criminal laws and changing them to suit their own purposes. Only by doing this did they have any hope of becoming chiefs, and of gaining the respect of the adult criminals of the Black Seed caste."

"According to the Siberian tradition, homosexuality is a very serious infectious disease, because it destroys the human soul; so we grew up with a total hatred of homosexuals. This disease, which among our people has no precise name and is simply called ‘the sickness of the flesh’, is transmitted through the gaze, so a Siberian criminal will never look a homosexual in the eye. In the adult prisons, in places where the majority of inmates are of the Orthodox Siberian faith, homosexuals are forced to commit suicide, because they can’t share the same spaces with the others. As the Siberian proverb says: ‘The sick of the flesh do not sleep beneath the icons.’ I never fully understood the question of hatred for homosexuals, but since I was brought up in this way, I followed the herd. Over the years I have had many homosexual friends, people with whom I have worked and done business, and I have had a good relationship with many of them; I found them congenial, I liked them as people. And yet I have never been able to break the habit of calling someone a queer or a pansy if I want to insult them, even though immediately afterwards I regret it and feel ashamed. It’s Siberian education speaking for me."

"The Ukrainians drank a lot, a habit they shared with the rest of the Soviet population, certainly, but they did so in a particularly unrestrained manner, without the filter of tradition and without a trace of morality. In Siberia alcohol is drunk in obedience to certain reasonable rules, so as not to cause irreparable damage to one’s health: accordingly, Siberian vodka is made exclusively of wheat, and is purified with milk, which removes the residue of the manufacturing process, so that the final product has a perfect purity. Moreover, vodka must only be drunk with food (in Siberia people eat a lot, and dishes are very rich, because you burn off a large amount of fat in resisting the cold and preserving vitamins in winter): if you eat the right dishes, it is possible to drink as much as a litre of vodka per person without any problem. In Ukraine, however, they drink vodka of various kinds: they extract the alcohol from potatoes or pumpkins, and the sugary substances make you drunk at once. The Siberians never get too drunk, don’t pass out and don’t vomit, but the Ukrainians drink themselves unconscious, and it can take them as long as two days to work off the hangover."

"An insult is regarded by all communities as an error typical of people who are weak and unintelligent, lacking in criminal dignity. To us Siberians, any kind of insult is a crime; in other communities some distinctions can be made, but in general an insult is the quickest route to the blade of a knife. An insult to an individual may be ‘approved’: that is to say, if I have insulted someone and they take me before an old Authority, I will have to explain to him the reason why I did it, and he will decide how I will be punished. Punishment is inflicted in any case, but if the insult is approved, they don’t kill me or ‘lower’ me; I remain myself and get off with a warning. An insult is approved if you utter it for personal reasons and in a non-serious form: for example, if you call someone who has damaged your property an ‘arsehole’. If, however, you offended the name of his mother, they are quite likely to kill you. Insults are forgiven if they are uttered in a state of rage or desperation, when a person is blinded by deep grief – for example, if his mother or father or a close friend dies. In such cases the question of justice is not even mentioned; he is judged to have been ‘beside himself’, and there the matter ends. Insults are not approved, however, in a quarrel that arises from gambling or criminal activities, or in matters of the heart, or in relations between friends: in all these cases the use of swear-words and offensive phrases usually means certain death. But the most serious insult of all is that known as baklanka, when a group or a whole community is insulted. No explanations are accepted: you deserve either death or ‘lowering’ – a permanent transfer to the community of the lowered, the tainted, like the people who lived in the district of Bam. So from childhood onwards we learned to ‘filter words’, and always to keep a check on what came out of our mouths, so as not to make a mistake, even unwittingly. For according to the Siberian rule, a word that has flown can never return."

"On my eighteenth birthday I was abroad. I was studying physical education in a sports school, trying to build myself a different future, outside the criminal community. [...] Post-Soviet consumerism was an appalling thing to someone like me. People wallowed in branded detergents and toothpastes, no one would drink anything unless it was imported and women smeared themselves with industrial quantities of French face-creams they saw advertised every day on television, believing they’d make them look like the models in the commercials."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Hailed as an insider's account of a cruel yet unknown world, Siberian Education was a literary sensation when first published in Italy in 2009. Lilin's raw and ungrammatical Italian has now been smoothed into readable English by Jonathan Hunt. The veracity of the story's basic elements has been fiercely defended by Lilin and accepted by many critics; yet many readers may feel they have landed in the Hayborian age invented by Robert Ervin Howard, among the likes of Conan the Barbarian and the Vanir warlords."

"I met Lilin years ago after the publication of Siberian Education. [...] 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."