You can read two chapters from Siberian Education on our sister site Bookhugger.co.uk.

Say ‘organised crime’ and most people’s first thought will be the Italian or American Mafia, Chinese Triads or East End mobsters – dislocated Siberians may not spring immediately to mind, but once you read Siberian Education, the Mafia will seem like pussycats by comparison with the Urkas of Transnistria. Relocated wholesale to the East bank of the Dniester river in Moldova by Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Siberian Urkas took with them a strong independent streak and a well-established criminal society that channeled its energies against the civil authorities, and the Communist Party in particular.

Nicolai Lilin was born and raised within this remarkable society – with a complicated code of verbal etiquette, a fetishistic, almost religious attitude towards weaponry, a very involved social structure and a fundamentally skewed sense of the world (the social mores of the Urkas, including attitudes towards disability and homosexuality, are extreme). The Urka social hierarchy extends even in to prison: Urka youths regard going to jail as a rite of passage, adult criminals view it virtually as a second home, not just an occupational hazard.

Lilin is an excellent narrator who realises that his readers need everything about this topsy-turvy world explaining to them – from the tattoos, to the relations between the Urkas and the other criminal fraternities, right down to the elaborate tea-drinking rituals. His story of his first experience in prison is extremely harrowing, yet his matter-of-fact style blunts the impact, and the tale reaches its apogee with his account of the hunt for the rapists of an autistic girl from the Urka community, which takes Nicolai and his peers from one corner of their city to another, and in to contact with all the major criminal gangs – because the victim of the crime was a minor, it has to be avenged by minors.

Lilin’s rise through the criminal fraternity of the Urkas is cut short by conscription in to the Russian army, where he initially shows just how ill-fitted his upbringing has made him to interact with authority, but where his aptitude for violence is ultimately put to good use in the brutal war in Chechnya. Now running a tattoo parlour in Turin, Lilin’s story is a fascinating and truly eye-opening one, which serves to illustrate, among other things, the extent to which morality and what is normal are shaped by the society in which a person is raised – for in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the ‘good criminals’, it really is good to be bad.

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