A Boy's Word. Supplemented Edition

If you grew up in Russia at the end of the 20th century, you had your share of street fights. This book is about those who made violence their credo: they beat up and got beat up — professionally, daily, mercilessly. These are the boys, members of the countless youth gangs that flooded the late Soviet Union. The first city where the phenomenon became truly widespread was Kazan. Robert Garayev, the author of this book, got into the "Nizy", 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 hundred and fifty teenage gangs that first "divided the asphalt" in fights from district to district, and then began to exterminate their own kind en masse — and how the boys themselves, former police officers, lawyers and ordinary residents of a city disfigured by fear and cruelty remember those harsh days. This is the only book composed entirely of the voices of survivors — and those willing to tell the truth.