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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolai_Lilin

Lilin has stated that he was incarcerated in a maximum security juvenile prison at the age of 12 for attempted murder after stabbing a drug addict in self-defence. He also claims that he maimed a man who had driven a young boy to suicide.[22] Lilin states that he killed for the first time at age 14, with the victim being a "Gypsy" drug dealer whom he shot with his grandfather's revolver.[23][27] Still at age 14, per his narrative, he stabbed a boy in the back, leaving him paralysed for life.[27]

Lilin claims that at age 18 he began serving in the Russian army.[24] In a Vanity Fair interview, he claimed he was drafted while studying yoga in India,[6] while in an interview with Oliver Bullough he stated he volunteered.[28] He further claims to have served for two years and three months in the antiterrorism corps of the GRU during the Second Chechen War.[29][22] Some Italian sources state he served in the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment.[5]

He claims to have briefly taken part in the battle of Grozny[30][28] and said in an interview with Il Giornale that his unit had tortured prisoners of war.[31] He claims he encountered very few Chechen guerrillas during the conflict, instead fighting mercenaries from Afghanistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.[32] He has described two instances during the war in which he was nearly killed: the first occurring when he was shot in the chest with an AK-47, surviving thanks to his body armour, the second happening when a vehicle he was travelling in was capsized by a grenade launcher which left two comrades dead and himself with damage to his hearing.[14]

Lilin claims that after leaving the army, he attempted to find work in Saint Petersburg, but was rebuffed for being a war veteran.[6] While there, he was arrested for illegal firearm ownership and held in custody for several months, during which he claims to have been regularly beaten.[33] Per his narrative, he later worked as a private security guard for a Russian opposition group with links to Chechen terrorists.[34] He later spent three years[26] working for a private Israeli security company as an antiterrorism consultant.[24] He states that at one point he worked as a drill instructor for the Afghan National Security Forces.[35]

He concluded his service after injuring his leg in Iraq while working as a bodyguard for Western businessmen. In an article he wrote for L'Espresso, he stated that he had been shot,[35] while in his interview with Elena Chernenko, he stated that his leg was injured by a landmine,[36] subsequently elaborating that it had been triggered after an American serviceman jumped on it.[20] He states that he later moved to Siberia to live with his great-uncle by the Lena river, while struggling with PTSD.[32] After retiring, he claims to have been contacted by an ex comrade offering him a position in a pro-Gaddafi mercenary group during the Libyan civil war, which he refused.[35]

He says he had originally intended to settle in Ireland to work as a fisherman, but was tricked into going to Italy by his mother, who lied about having cancer.[6][14] He claims that, from 2005, he spent two years working for a Vatican-affiliated security company infiltrating Satanic cults, during which he claims to have uncovered a child sex ring operating in Europe and Russia.[40][41] He also credits himself with uncovering the presence of MS-13 in Turin.[41] He further claims that he once suffered an assassination attempt in Turin by Islamic radicals who planted a bomb under his car.[3]

 

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If we summarise the information from Nicolai Lilin's book [Siberian Education], his interviews in the Western press and his 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 parlour, wrote a bestseller and almost became a victim of a politically motivated assassination attempt.

Zakhar Prilepin compared the premise of the novel to a contemporary German author writing 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".[51]

Oliver Bullough, in a 2011 interview with Lilin, wrote that "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". He also drew attention to a scene where an urban battle resulted in the loss of 13 lieutenant-colonels.[28] Tim Kucharewski notes how the novel perpetuates the myth of anti-personnel mines being deliberately disguised as toys or boxes of crayons, which Lilin claims were manufactured in San Marino and used extensively by Chechen fighters. Kucharewski points out how the legend originated during the Soviet–Afghan War, but that it made even less sense in the context of the Chechen wars:

What would be the tactical motivation for the Chechens to conceal mines in toy-shapes on their home turf when confronting Russian soldiers as their only opponent? If the notion is disregarded that this had been done to seduce the inner child of potentially looting Russian conscript or contract soldiers, one is hard-pressed to find an explanation. Using underage "child soldiers" or bringing [one's] "own" civilians into the combat zones as human shields are among the few war crimes that have never been alleged against the Russian federation during these wars. The only persons that these alleged toy mines could actually bait, would be Chechen children. Therefore, from any perspective other than one claiming that these Chechens were "barbarian" "bandits" that for some sadistic reason intended to kill or maim their own side's infants and children, the old yarn of the toy mine seems even less credible here than in other wars. Yet, Nicolai Lilin indeed stated this claim, in one of the more implausible paragraphs within the text, of which there is certainly no shortage.[57]