Free Siberian Education by Nicolai Lilin Page B

valid and had no real power behind them. To do this they needed to strike at some great Authority, and they chose the figure of Grandfather Kuzya, because he represented the highest power in the Siberian community. They devised a simple and very offensive plan, sending to him in prison a letter of invitation to a meeting that was to be held in St Petersburg, informing him that if he did not attend they would no longer consider him to be an active criminal.
    This kind of blackmail is a very serious matter for a criminal, far more serious than the murder of a relative or a personal insult, because it affects the prestige that is attributed to an individual by the entire community, so the insult extends to the whole community and its representatives.
    Well, Grandfather Kuzya forced the prison administrators to grant a week’s release to him and five other Siberian Authorities who were being held in different prisons in Russia, by threatening a mass suicide, which none of them would have hesitated to implement.
    In the middle of the meeting, when the young St Petersburg criminals were already planning in minute detail how to compel all the supporters of the old Authorities to hand over control of the area to them, taking it for granted that none of them would attend, Grandfather Kuzya and the other five prisoners arrived.
    After that encounter the young men disappeared, they just vanished into thin air: many thought of the old Siberian ritual which involves the bodies of enemies being minced up to the point of complete disintegration and then mixed in with the soil of the woods.
    According to the Siberian criminal law, every active criminal can give up his post and retire – become a kind of ‘pensioner’. Once he has done this he no longer has the right to use his name or express his opinion on questions connected with criminal affairs or the resolution of conflicts. The criminal community supports him by giving him enough money to live on, and in exchange he takes on the responsibility of educating the young. He becomes, as has already been mentioned, a ‘grandfather’: a name that is given as a mark of great respect. People who are so called are regarded by the rest of the community as wise men able to give essential advice to younger criminals, and usually criminal meetings are organized at their homes.
    Grandfather Kuzya had retired from business – or, as we say, ‘tied the knot’ – in the early 1980s, when I was born. His retirement had caused considerable tension in the criminal community: many feared that without him a lot of old truces would be broken and there would be war.
    Grandfather Kuzya said that with or without him things were bound to change, because it was the times and the individuals that were different. When he discussed the matter with me, he explained it like this:
    â€˜The young want easy money, they want to take without giving anything in exchange, they want to fly without first having learned how to walk. They’ll end up killing each other. Then they’ll come to terms with the cops, and when that happens, I hope for your sake, my dear, that you’ll be far away from here, because this place will become a graveyard of the good and honest.’
    Naturally I considered everything Grandfather Kuzya said to be the highest expression of human intelligence and criminal experience.
    We talked about the future, about what our life would be like and how things would be organized. He was very pessimistic, but he never feared that I would disappoint him; he considered me to be different from the other youngsters of our community.
    After 1992, when the military forces of Moldova tried to occupy the territory of Transnistria, our town was abandoned by everybody; we were left to fend for ourselves, as in fact we always had done. All the armed criminals resisted the Moldovan soldiers, and after three months of battles they drove them out.
    When the danger of an