[7] Yevgeny Prilepin was born 7 July 1975 in the village of Ilyinka, Ryazan Oblast, in the family of a teacher and a nurse.

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.

[4] In 1999, due to financial difficulties, Prilepin left OMON and got a job as a journalist at the Nizhny Novgorod newspaper Delo.

In July 2012, he published a short essay titled "A Letter to Comrade Stalin,"[11] a Stalinist critique aimed against modern Russian "liberal society", which was widely regarded as antisemitic.

[14] In February 2017, Prilepin gave a lengthy interview, in which he revealed that he was leading a volunteer battalion in the self-proclaimed People's Republic of Donetsk.

[30] In July 2012 Prilepin published a short essay titled "A Letter to comrade Stalin",[31] which provoked outrage[32] and accusations of antisemitism.

[33][34][35] In the essay written in the 1st person of collective Jewish consciousness[13] contains "autoaccusations" of antisemitic nature, and "admissions of crimes" against Russian people, culture and economy.

[36] On 6 May 2023, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, on the way to Moscow from the Russian-occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk, Prilepin's car was blown up.

[40] On 30 September 2024, Alexander Permyakov, a former pro-Russian separatist fighter from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the attack.