If you grew up in Russia at the end of the 20th century, then there were street fights in your life. This book is about those who made violence their credo: they beat and came under attack – professionally, daily, mercilessly. These are boys, members of countless youth groups that flooded the late Soviet Union. The first city in which the phenomenon became truly widespread was Kazan. Robert Garayev, the author of this book, got into “Nizy”, one of the local gangs, while still in high school. 30 years later, he decided to find out where the Kazan phenomenon came from – one and a half hundred teenage groups that first “divided the asphalt” in fights from district to district, and then began to massively exterminate their own kind – and how the boys themselves, former police officers, lawyers and ordinary residents of the 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.