Nicolai Lilin

Nikolai Yurievich Verzhbitsky (born 12 February 1980), known as Nicolai Lilin, is an Italian‑Moldovan writer and tattoo artist from Transnistria. He moved to Italy in the early 2000s and published his first novel, Siberian Education, in 2009; it was later adapted into a 2013 film. The novel, which Lilin claimed was based on his own experiences as a member of a Siberian criminal gang in his native Bender, became a bestseller in Italy, though a number of journalists and historians have labelled it a fake memoir. Similar criticisms were directed at its sequel, Free Fall, which recounts the author's alleged experiences during the Second Chechen War.

Although he initially presented himself as a vocal critic of Russia under Vladimir Putin, Lilin has consistently adopted anti‑Ukrainian and anti‑Western positions since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War. He has drawn attention for expressing Eurasianist views and for disseminating conspiracy theories, false information and defamatory remarks.

Biography Ancestry Lilin claims to be the descendent of nomadic, Christianised, formerly tiger-venerating indigenous Siberian people who adorned themselves with tattoos meant to symbolise their life experiences and to serve as identification, a practice he says dates back 5,000 years. He has given differing accounts as to the exact provenance of his ancestors, from southern Siberia in 2011, These natives, which he calls "Efey", would raid Indian and Chinese caravan convoys until they were purged by tsarist forces.

Lilin's claims regarding his heritage have been disputed. Former Kremlinologist and La Stampa journalist , as well as criminologist , noted that "Urka" does not denote an ethnic group as Lilin claims, but is a term first recorded in the early 20th century referring to professional thieves, while historian Pavel Polian noted that the Efey never existed. When asked about the inconsistency of Siberians being deported to Moldova during an interview with Vanity Fair, Lilin stated that the Urkas were sent to do the Soviet regime's "dirty work" in ridding Bender of pro-European Jews, Ukrainian nationalists, Romanians and Moldovans.

According to an uncle of Lilin, the Verzhbitskys originated in Poland, and settled in Moldova during the 19th century. A rehabilitation letter and data uncovered by Memorial regarding Lilin's great-grandfather show that he was not a deported Siberian criminal, but a Kurtamysh-based factory worker born in Tiraspol who was executed by the NKVD in 1938 on charges of being a Romanian agent.

Early life 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. — Elena Chernenko He stated in a 2010 interview that he had never attended school, though he would contradict this in subsequent writings and interviews. In an interview with Delo, he described an incident where his father discovered he had smoked for the first time, and was forced to smoke three packets of cigarettes in a row as punishment, receiving beatings if he tried stopping. This resulted in him being hospitalised for a week, and left him with the habit of vomiting when in the vicinity of someone smoking.

Lilin claims that at the age of 12, with the outbreak of the Transnistria War, he was handed a firearm for the first time, and was involved with other children in gathering intelligence and munitions during the battle of Bender. He states that after the war, he took part in a gang war alongside his father, who was a bank robber. His parents separated after his father suffered three assassination attempts and moved to Greece, while his mother moved to Italy, leaving Lilin with his grandparents. In several interviews, he claimed that his grandfather was a Siberian hunter and Gulag survivor who, despite being anticommunist, fought as a sniper during World War II and was on the same convoy that took Vasily Zaitsev to Stalingrad.

Lilin has stated that he served nine months of a four-year sentence in a maximum security juvenile prison at the age of 12 for attempted murder after stabbing a drug pusher in self-defence. Still at age 14, per his narrative, he stabbed a boy in the back, leaving him paralysed for life. He further claims to have served for two years and three months in the antiterrorism corps of the GRU during the Second Chechen War. He claims he encountered very few Chechen guerrillas during the conflict, instead fighting mercenaries from Afghanistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. 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. Per his narrative, he later worked as a private security guard for a Russian opposition group with links to Chechen terrorists. He later spent three years

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, subsequently elaborating that it had been triggered after an American serviceman jumped on it. He states that he later moved to Siberia to live with his great-uncle by the Lena river, while struggling with PTSD. Prior to this, he states that he had been a vagrant travelling throughout Europe, at one point becoming romantically involved with a neo-Nazi in Germany "who was proud to be the granddaughter of an SS officer". He then went to the United Kingdom, but left the country after using a knife during a brawl. Per his narrative, he subsequently moved to Northern Ireland and started a relationship with a woman whose family had ties to the IRA.

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. and thwarted the summoning of a Swiss Satanic cult leader to a Turin nightclub. He acted as a consultant for Collimato's 2006 play AK, il Canto dei Catari (AK: Song of the Cathars), coaching the actors during action sequences. while working for Libre, Lilin was asked to write stories for the association's website. His writings were forwarded to the Einaudi publishing house by playwright Giorgio Cattaneo, and he was commissioned to write what would become Siberian Education.

The novel is said to be based on Lilin's childhood experiences among exiled Siberian gangsters in Transnistria. It quickly became a bestseller in Italy, ranking number 10 on la Repubblicas list of top ten most sold books in April 2009. By July of that year, the book had sold over 50,000 copies domestically and had been published in 40 countries by 2011.

Skepticism 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. — Federico Varese 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".

Lilin later claimed the novel is not an autobiography, being instead a collection of stories recollected from his childhood and the narratives of elders. Nevertheless, it has been presented as autobiographical on the covers of both the original and German editions. Per his interview with Elena Chernenko, Lilin stated that he had no control over how the novel was labeled, and that it was done for marketing purposes.

The novel has never been translated into Lilin's native Russian but was criticized for including numerous factual innaccuracies relating to warfare and the Chechen wars in general. 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.

During his interview with Bullough, Lilin denied the novel was a memoir and stated that it was actually based on the experiences of a fellow soldier rather than his own.

Other works In 2012, he released Storie sulla pelle, a novel in which tattoos act as a metaphor for the evolution of the modern world. He released Il serpente di Dio in 2014, a novel set in the Caucasus regarding the peaceful coexistence of Christian and Muslim communities. In his 2016 novel Spy story love story, Lilin narrated the stories of characters living through the upheavals following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2022, Lilin released Ucraina. La vera storia ("Ukraine: The True Story").

Other ventures Lilin claims to be a "kolshik" ("piercer", a slang term for "tattooer", from the Russian word kolot, "to pierce"), a hereditary title given to Siberian tattoo artists who act as "psychologist, judge or confessor" to those they mark. He has stated that he first began tattooing at the age of eight and that he was mentored in the art of traditional Siberian tattooing while serving time in a Russian juvenile prison. In 2013, Lilin opened a tattoo parlour in Solesino called Il Marchiaturificio, and Italian rapper Emis Killa were among his clients.

In 2010 he founded the Pro Patria Italia sports association, whose membership included military veterans and law enforcement officers.

He has collaborated with Maserin and Paolo Pinna in designing knives, and released teaching material for Tadpoles Tactics. He has also written articles for l'Espresso, la Repubblica, Lilin stated during a 2024 interview with the Huffington Post that his values are leftist but "not as they are defined in Italy", and that he is "for better or for worse, a product of the Soviet system". he later praised Italian right-wing youths for advocating for the withdrawal of Italy from the EU. In September 2009, Lilin attracted criticism for having presented his debut novel at a CasaPound conference centre.

His views have been described as neo-Eurasianist. In a 2014 opinion piece, he called Eurasianism a "worthy and logical alternative to American dominion", and stated in 2021 that he would be prepared to vote for the right-wing Lega party if it mended diplomatic relations with Russia. In 2024, Lilin became a candidate for Peace Land Dignity during the 2024 European Parliament election in Italy. He got 2,300 votes from the North-West Italian constituency, but the list did not go over 2.08%, falling short of the 4% required for the electoral threshold.

Russia and Putin Lilin was initially critical of Vladimir Putin and his administration. In a series of interviews and writings during the late 2000s and early 2010s, Lilin denounced the Second Chechen War, the beating of Oleg Kashin and the murder of Russian journalists. In 2012, he accused many Russian politicians of having earned their fortunes by enabling the production of child pornography for Western consumption since the 1990s. the 2010 Moscow Metro bombings and the Domodedovo International Airport bombing, After the Russian annexation of Crimea, Lilin deleted his previous critical posts and began expressing views defending Russia's conduct. In a 2014 interview, he stated that Putin's negative reputation in Italy was based on distortions created by "people who support the Atlanticist bloc". In a 2020 interview with il Giornale, Lilin expressed the view that "true" Russians desired a tsar and that Putin was fulfilling their wish. Regarding the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lilin has said:[...] Russia has never started colonial wars or [wars] to expand its territory. [...] Russians don't want to invade anyone. The only reason they wage war is to ensure the integrity of their borders. That's why Putin has sent the army to Ukraine, because NATO has been doing military activities there since 1998, threatening Russia's borders. Saying that Putin wants to invade Poland and the Baltic states is nonsense. Putin wants to live in peace, not have a NATO pistol aimed at his face.

In 2019, while commenting on the alleged financial dealings between United Russia and the Italian Lega party, Lilin compared the situation of Russians living in Italy to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. He is an "honorary partner" of Lombardia Russia, an association linked to Lega whose aims include "spreading Russian political ideas" in Italy.

Anti-Ukrainian views After the Revolution of Dignity, Lilin made extensive allegations of genocide in Donbas and of the presumed Nazism of Ukrainians. Lilin denies Ukrainian statehood, declaring that Ukraine is Russian and refers to the Russian-occupied territories of eastern Ukraine as "Novorossiya". He believes that the 2014 Revolution was a foreign-backed coup and that America is using Ukraine to prevent Europe from forming closer ties with Russia and China. During his candidacy for Peace Land Dignity in 2024, Lilin's only policy position was to stop arms shipments to Ukraine.

Conspiracy theories He has spread conspiracy theories on White Tights, 9/11, the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel,

During a conversation with Russian writer , Lilin revealed that he believed in the Jewish war conspiracy theory, and that he had been influenced in this belief by Licio Gelli. In November 2024, he claimed that the Russo-Ukrainian war was a plot formulated by BlackRock to depopulate Ukraine of Slavs and replace them with Jewish settlers.

In a 2011 interview, Lilin alleged that some members of the Russian government and ex-KGB servicemen were members of the "Holy Trinity", a group which includes members of "Black Seed", a criminal organisation originally created by the Soviets which he described as "the largest and most powerful community in the Russian criminal world". He described murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov as "obsessed with pussy" and alleged that he had been killed by the husband of one of his lovers.

He believes that the Russian-backed side of the Transnistria War was fighting foreign mercenaries "from all over the world", including Hungary, Germany and the Baltic states, rather than the Moldovan army, Later that year, he shared an article from the German conspiracist website Wahrheit fuer Deutschland claiming that a Ukrainian pilot had confessed to having shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The website subsequently specified that the source of the information was a satire page. Later that year, he shared an article from Imola Oggi stating that the Iraqi armed forces had shot down two British planes carrying armaments for ISIS. He deleted the post after a backlash, but posted the same story from the Fars News Agency.

In 2023, he posted a video on his YouTube channel claiming that a Ukrainian war veteran in Ternopil had murdered his wife and children after mistaking a French flag on an inflatable castle they were using for a Russian one, providing no source for the information. In September of that year, Lilin spread the Russian-fabricated allegation that Human Rights Watch had accused Ukraine of using cluster munitions against civilians. After the 8 July 2024 Russian strikes on Ukraine, Lilin posted a video on his YouTube channel claiming that the missile that struck the Okhmatdyt children's hospital was American. On 10 July 2024, Lilin shared a video on his Telegram channel claiming that Joe Biden had committed adultery with the wife of Jens Stoltenberg. In November of that year, Lilin spread debunked allegations that The Coca-Cola Company was profiting over the Russo-Ukrainian war by furnishing mobile morgues to the Ukrainians.

On 7 November 2025, Lilin shared a video he claimed showed EU-funded Ukrainian "Nazi-Zionists" assaulting an Orthodox church during an anti-Christian persecution. The video, in fact, showed pro-Russian rioters of the Moscow Patriarchate storming Saint Michael's Cathedral in Cherkasy and assaulting Ukrainian supporters of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine with fire extinguishers and tear gas. In December of that year, he falsely claimed that Ukrainian major general Andrii Hnatov was wearing the emblem of the Dirlewanger Brigade.

Threats and legal issues On 19 August 2017, Lilin posted a tweet accusing the then President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies Laura Boldrini of being "friends" with the perpetrators of the 2017 Barcelona attacks. In subsequent tweets, he claimed that the post was in response to Boldrini's meeting with far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy, whom Lilin accused of being in league with Islamic terrorists. Boldrini, after initially ignoring the tweet, sued Lilin for libel after he had given subsequent interviews claiming that she supported Nazis and ISIS.

On 9 August 2024, Lilin uploaded a video on his YouTube channel in which he claimed that his Italian passport had been confiscated and that he had "escaped" Italy on account of legal inquiries and of being declared a Russian foreign agent. An investigation into Lilin's finances by the Italian UIF (Unità di Informazione Finanziaria) found that he had been receiving substantial undeclared cash payments over a two year period, 70% of which from untraceable sources paid through Russian cryptocurrency channels.

On 19 August 2024, it was announced by Tommaso Foti that Brothers of Italy would open a parliamentary inquiry into death threats Lilin posted on his YouTube channel against journalists Stefania Battistini and Simone Traini for their coverage of the August 2024 Kursk Oblast incursion. In October 2025, Lilin was summoned directly to the Milan Courthouse to stand trial, bypassing a preliminary hearing.

During the "Voices from the Donbass" conference in Genoa on 1 March 2025, Lilin attracted media attention for expressing anger over a comedy sketch by Luca Bizzarri and Paolo Kessisoglu which mocked pro-Kremlin Italian journalist Vincenzo Lorusso, stating "I get it, the jokes, the satire, I do them too, but when I see two bored, useless, intellectually limited characters ... who mock those who report real information from the war, I feel like smashing both of their skulls". Bizzarri would later express disappointment that no politicians denounced Lilin's words.

Personal life Lilin has two daughters from different women. In 2022, he was in a relationship with a Milan-based woman from his native Bender who owns a cosmetics company. In 2023 he started living in Saudi Arabia with an Italian woman associated with Red Sea Global. He is a practising Catholic.