Zakhar Prilepin

Yevgeny Nikolayevich Prilepin (; born 7 July 1975), writing as Zakhar Prilepin, and sometimes using another pseudonym, Yevgeny Lavlinsky, is a Russian writer and politician. He was a member of Russia's National Bolshevik Party from 1996 to 2019 and the leader of the national-conservative political party For Truth from 1 February 2020 until it merged into A Just Russia in February 2021. Biography Yevgeny Prilepin was born 7 July 1975 in the village of Ilyinka, Ryazan Oblast, in the family of a teacher and a nurse. His family lived there until 1984, when they moved to Dzerzhinsk. He started working at age 16 as a loader in a bread shop. He graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Nizhny Novgorod State University and the School of Public Policy. He worked as a laborer, a security guard, and served as a squad leader in the Russian police group OMON, and subsequently took part in the fighting in Chechnya in 1996 and 1999. In 1999, due to financial difficulties, Prilepin left OMON and got a job as a journalist at the Nizhny Novgorod newspaper Delo. He published under many pseudonyms, the most famous of which is Eugene Lavlinsky. In 2000, he became the editor of the newspaper. At the same time, Prilepin began to work on his first novel, The Pathologies.