Word of a Guy. Criminal Tatarstan 1970–2010s

If you grew up in Russia at the end of the 20th century, street fights were a part of your life. This book is about those who made violence their creed: hitting and getting hit – professionally, daily, mercilessly. These are the guys, members of countless youth gangs that flooded the late Soviet Union. The first city where this phenomenon became truly massive was Kazan. Robert Garaev, the author of this book, joined the 'Nizzy', one of the local gangs, while still in high school. Thirty years later, he decided to find out where the Kazan phenomenon came from – one and a half hundred teenage gangs that first 'divided the pavement' in fights from district to district, and then began to exterminate their kind en masse, – and how those harsh days are remembered by the guys themselves, former police officers, lawyers, and ordinary residents of the city scarred by fear and brutality. This is the only book entirely made up of the voices of survivors – and those who wish to tell the truth.