21/06/2024
‘I am a son of the world of thieves’
Konyashin Hospital Morgue, 104 Moscow Prospect, Leningrad. 1966.
Right side of chest.
An original ink on cardboard drawing of a Russian criminal tattoo by Danzig Baldaev documented in 1966; photograph of an inmate by Sergei Vasiliev c.1989; both taken from the book Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive.
[Extended caption by Mark Vincent PhD, derived from Baldaev’s notes made on the reverse of the drawing.]
The bearer of this chest tattoo had been killed by a guard outside Leningrad’s House of Soviets building, following the attempted theft of the guard’s weapon. The text refers to the characteristic familial relationship formed by groups of criminals in the ‘vorovskoi mir’ (‘Thieves’ World’). Tattoos like this one marked an important rite of passage, signifying the transition into adult spheres of criminality. Such designs included specific iconography, such as roses or tulips wrapped in barbed wire, and were often made on sixteenth or eighteenth birthdays. These symbolic dates usually reflected the transfer from juvenile institutions into the larger, adult camps of the Gulag. They also reveal the extensive problem of youth homelessness and crime faced by Soviet authorities. This was particularly evident during both the Russian Civil War and collectivisation drive of the early 1930s, as millions of destitute and abandoned children known as ‘bezprizorniki’ (‘uncared for’) formed street gangs in order to survive. Built on a similar hierarchical structure to adult criminal gangs, with initiation rituals, the use of slang and tests of loyalty, these groups sought to maintain control over key territorial sites such as railway stations. Another similarity between youth gangs and adult crime groups was the prominence of tattoos. Studies indicated that many were made in juvenile institutions, which began developing a reputation for atrocious conditions, comparable – or in some cases, even worse – than those of the adult labour camps.
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