Siberian Education
Family, Honour, and Tattoos: An Extraordinary Underworld Life
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A vivid, shocking, at times poetic revelation of a world we never imagined existed. Siberian Education is a real-life Eastern Promises seen through the eyes of a boy growing up in the close-knit community of the Urkas, descendants of criminals relocated from Siberia to the banks of the Dniester River, between Moldavia and Ukraine, in the 1930s. A tale of an extreme boyhood — violent, governed by rules of honour passed down through legend and taught via elaborate and mysterious tattoos, and ultimatedly doomed to disappear amidst post-Soviet capitalist gangsterism: an utterly unique look at a vanished society from someone who knew it intimately, even though he is not yet 30 years old.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's honor aplenty among the noble thieves in this glamorized memoir of post-Soviet gangster life. Lilin, a tattoo artist living in Italy, where this mafia-positive saga was a bestseller, grew up in the 1980s and '90s in a Transnistrian town (on the border of Ukraine and Moldova) settled by hereditary criminal clans exiled from Siberia. Their "Urka" subculture is thick indeed: switchblades are religious icons, elaborate tattoos depict criminal exploits, and a strict ethical code parses purification rituals and dietary rules. (Take note: an outlaw never accepts food from a cop's tainted hands.) There are gory rumbles "to leave him a souvenir from Siberia, I cut the ligaments under his knee" and lurid prison gang rapes, but Lilin paints the Urka underworld as the last stand of pious morality ("We didn't use swear words... we never talked disrespectfully about elderly persons") against Kremlin despotism and Western decadence. Many of his reminiscences, which contain "combined" characters, "condensed" events, and "imaginative recreations," have a distinctively Russian, folkloric tone: "how beautiful and generous Plum's soul was," Lilin writes of a friend who allegedly murdered 12,000 policemen over three decades. Factual or not, his portrait of high-minded banditry "The exploitation of prostitution had always been considered an offense unworthy of a criminal" never feels true to life.
