His journey to that miserable stretch of front where Hodniuk died – to becoming Stalker – began in an orphanage in Gremyachinsk, a decayed old coal town about a thousand miles from Moscow on the way to Siberia. Orphaned at birth, Kurashov was raised in a group home. As a teenager, he got into a fight with a police officer and was imprisoned for assault. He served four years, but on his release he had no family, friends or place to live, so he became a vagrant. He began robbing summer houses and shops for food and money, he said, resulting in another imprisonment, this time in a remote penal colony alongside men serving life sentences for the some of the most brutal crimes.
Six months into that sentence, representatives from the Russian military came to the penal colony and told the convicts they had an opportunity to turn a new page in their lives. Kurashov still had five years to serve. "They told us you can have a clean slate, become a clean person," he said. "Just sign this contract and go."
"Go" meant to the "special military operation" in Ukraine. Kurashov knew little about it, he said, but he thought anything was better than five more years in the penal colony or being turned out into the streets at the end of his sentence. So he signed, and was taken immediately to a training camp in occupied territory in Ukraine.
Another proof of the Marxism idea that human nature is determined by material conditions surrounded it. There is no "bad russians", "bad muslims", "bad israelis", etc., there are only "people who had been pushed down by life and rejected by society, who were outside of society"...