THIEF LIFE
One can get used even to living in hell.
Russian proverb
There is something seductive about ritual, about arcane knowledge, about insider jargon. It makes you feel special, builds communities, eases you into a world of mutual and possibly difficult and dangerous commitments. A relatively low-level gangster, ‘Lev Yurist’, once described to me how he felt on being accepted into the criminal fraternity in the mid-1990s.1 He would not go into some of the details (‘that’s not for outsiders’) but other aspects he was willing to discuss. He had had to prove himself, both by being a loyal and efficient shestyorka, a gofer or runner, for at least a year, and by undertaking some specific risky tasks. Some were probably connected with actual criminal acts, others – such as stealing a coat from the cloakroom at a restaurant run by Chechens – more about demonstrating bravery and élan. He had to have three established criminals willing to vouch for him. He had to be able to recite some declaration – I’d guess pledging himself to the group – in criminal slang. Then there was a ritual that involved blood, vodka and an icon.
It was fascinating to hear, but strangely ahistorical. Proving your long-term loyalty, engaging in criminal acts, showing bravery: these make sense and are expected of a new recruit by any gang wherever you are. Even so, these sounded relatively gentle demands compared with the unyielding ways of the camps. Stealing a coat from a restaurant in the 1990s would likely earn you a beating if you were caught, but a true blatnoi was expected to be willing to mutilate himself to avoid work, or murder an innocent bystander as a wager in a game of cards. Furthermore, I had never heard Lev use more criminal slang than the terms frankly on everyone’s lips in those days, and he admitted he had had to memorise his catechism by rote. As for the rest of the ritual, without knowing the details it is impossible to pass judgement, but the implication is that it was essentially a reinvention of old rites from the glory days of the vorovskoi mir, the 1930s–1950s, blended with cinematic representations of mafia initiations and the like. The evidence suggests that the distinctive culture of the vorovskoi mir did not die out in the 1960s, but certainly became far less powerful and ubiquitous, only to be recreated as the vory reinvented themselves from the 1970s onwards. As such, their folkways would be a pallid and half-remembered reflection of the powerful, vital and brutal culture of the vory’s heyday.
Vor life
Being an inmate, I have chosen the thieves’ path and swear before equals to be a worthy thief and never cooperate with the Chekists [political police].
Thief’s oath2
Before the camps, the vorovskoi mir was about a subculture rather than a structure. Individual gangs had their own hierarchies, and cities and regions might have informal pecking orders, but there were no wider assemblages of power. The emergence of the vory v zakone as the authority figures, and the increasing homogenisation of criminal culture in the forcing houses of the Gulag camps, likewise did not create some nationwide shadow state. The vory were too independent minded, and Stalin’s regime too paranoid about anything resembling a conspiracy, to allow that. Indeed, even individual vory v zakone were not necessarily gang leaders, and not every gang leader was necessarily a vor v zakone. Rather, the ‘thieves within the code’ represented moral authority within the vorovskoi mir: people to be listened to, people to be shown respect. Former Gulag inmate Marlen Korallov noted that one such vor v zakone, Nikola, was zealously protected and coddled by the other criminals: they gave him the only metal bed in the barracks, pushed it into a sheltered corner, masked it with blankets so he had privacy, and mounted guard on it even when he was gone, so that no one else could presume to lie on it.3 The vory v zakone were, after all, a common good for the criminal community as a whole, the nodes around which a powerful and surprisingly effective network could be anchored.
As will be discussed below, the blatnye criminals of the thieves’ world had their own languages, of tattoos, slang and even fashion. They also had their own rituals, each of which had its own practical value for the members. Prospective members, patsany, were quizzed informally, to ensure they were being honest about their criminal pasts and also to screen out informants. At least two existing thieves had to be willing to vouch for them, and eventually a skhodka, a criminal meeting, would be held to decide if they were worthy. A successful entrant with years of distinguished deeds under his belt might eventually hope to be considered a pakhan, a senior thief, simply as a mark of respect, but the process of being selected to be a vor v zakone was far more formal and intensive. Candidates had to be well known within their community, with sponsors willing to attest to their being upright exemplars of the criminal code. The regular transfer of criminals between camps, as well as the corruptibility of camp personnel, also made it easier for messages to flow between them, by word of mouth or on a small slip of paper called a ksiva. These were used to double-check a potential thief’s pedigree and consult more widely, as well as to deliver edicts and death sentences where need be. Eventually, the successful candidate would be elevated in a ritual known as a ‘coronation’, presided over by existing vory v zakone, who in the process became responsible for their continued commitment to the thievish life and its code.4
The rituals were therefore ways of screening out those who were insincere or who failed to match the standards expected, even from behind the barbed wire of a Gulag. They also provided an aura of exclusivity and near-religious standing to the brotherhood of the vorovskoi mir and the authority of the vory v zakone. Likewise, the vory v zakone played a crucial role in the survival and prosperity of the underworld by resolving – when possible – disputes that otherwise could lead to violence, and also by administering the common funds eventually known as the obshchak. Gangs had their obshchak funds, as in some cases did the collected criminals of towns, regions or even camps, although really this is a term and a concept which only came into common usage in the 1950s. Originally such funds had been mainly confined to the Gulags, to look after the dependents of jailed criminals, but they also came to be used to bribe camp officials, secure better food, ensure the blatnye were not forced to work, and otherwise do what they could to twist the everyday realities of Gulag life their way without actually cooperating with the state.5
Most vory v zakone would have one or more henchmen known as smotryashchie, ‘watchers’, who were their eyes and ears, checking up on potential new blatnye and standing in for their boss if he were moved to a different camp. Although some suggest they had other underlings, from advisers to bodyguards, this was really a product of later times from the 1960s onwards, when the vory v zakone were out of the camps and more likely to be running gangs. In the 1930s through to the 1950s, though, they were simply big men – very big men – within the Gulag underworlds, connected into nation-spanning networks of information and allegiance, protected and respected by the thieves, but generally neither seeking nor expecting any more institutional power.
Talking tough: thieves’ language
Fight resolutely against coarse expressions, swearwords, and the jargons of professional thieves.
Boris Volin, People’s Commissariat for Education, 19346
For some of Stalin’s Gulags, those deep in the northern wastes or thick Siberian pine forests, the final layer of security was not the barbed-wire fences, not guards’ guns, not the specially bred dogs, not even the local indigenous people paid handsome bounties for runaway prisoners. Instead, it was the very remoteness of the locations, the prospect of days and days on the run, often in the most trying conditions, without finding human habitation, anywhere to buy, beg or steal food. Hence in some cases blatnye desperate to escape would befriend a fellow prisoner outside their culture and invite him to flee along with them. Unbeknown to him, the companion’s actual role was to be a walking larder, eventually to be killed and eaten when needs must, in a grotesque piece of inhuman pragmatism that truly put the vor into ‘carnivore’. To be sure, reported cases in which this happened are few, but this was either common enough7 or remarkable enough, even by the standards of the blatnye, that their slang acquired a term for the hapless prey: myaso, meat.
Now, languages are not just a medium of communication, they are also expressions of values, histories, cultural influences and social activities. They are alive, constantly changing meanings, assimilating new coinages and losing old ones. They embody the environment in which they emerge and develop, and both reflect and shape the thoughts, concerns and interests of those who use them. Studying a language is thus also a means of studying those who speak it.
One can, for example, expect a language to provide particular precision and nuance to those issues and activities central to its speakers’ lives. The indigenous Sami Lapp people living in the very north of Russia’s Kola peninsula, for example, have at least 180 words for various kinds of snow and ice, and perhaps a thousand for reindeer, including – surely the height of linguistic specialisation – the word busat for a bull with a single, oversized testicle.8 In that context, it is hardly surprising that fenya could distinguish a theft on a bus (marku derzhat, literally ‘holding the brand’) from one at a train station (derzhat sadku, ‘holding the cage’).9 Likewise, the need often to pass news between cells and barrack blocks by tapping code on the walls helps explain why stukat (‘to knock’) was used for ‘speaking’.
Time and again, this language also emphasised the criminals’ conscious and contemptuous withdrawal from mainstream society.10 Ordinary people were frayery, a world derived from Yiddish where it means a ‘john’ – a prostitute’s customer – or a sucker. The term lyudi (‘people’) was used specifically for svoi (‘our own’) members of the vorovskoi mir. Victor Herman, an American who spent eighteen years in the Gulag, recounted the tale of when he fought so hard against some thieves who tried to bully him that the camp’s criminal godfather assumed he must be a blatnoi. The way he framed it, though, was to ask ‘Who are you? . . . Are you a person? Are you an Urka? . . . Are you one of us?’11 So only the vory were truly people; even the other criminals – known as muzhiki, ‘peasants’, or occasionally zhigany, ‘whipping boys’12 – were there simply to be used and exploited. Interestingly enough, this was echoed by the Gulag guards, who would often tell the zeki, the convicts, that they were ne lyudi, not people.13
This was not simply a collection of specialised jargon, though. Every profession, legal or illegal, has its technical vocabulary, from colloquialisms to terms of art relating to its particular activities. However, fenya did not confine itself to defining crimes and the underworld life, it even extended to provide substitutes for all kinds of day-to-day words, like varezhka (‘mitten’) for mouth.
Of course, there was a practical value to fenya in that it allowed criminals to communicate without fear of being understood by others. Some kind of thieves’ cant even appears in the eighteenth-century tales of Vanka Kain. There is an account of the key to his fetters being smuggled to him in prison, baked in a loaf of bread, along with an explanatory note that the guards could not understand as it was couched in slang.14 It was a safeguard, making it harder for the authorities to place agents in their ranks. It also represented a means of intimidating outsiders: even if they could not understand the cant, they knew what it meant when people used it. More than that, though, it was also a way of requiring and demonstrating a commitment to this alternative world, and those who hoped to rise within the vorovskoi mir had to learn and use fenya. This also helps explain the authorities’ periodic and unsuccessful attempts to stamp fenya out: it represented another way in which the blatnye could live separately from the common folk. In 1934, Stalin warned that ‘the person who speaks thieves’ cant ceases to be a Soviet citizen’.15 What he may have failed to realise was that this was precisely the point.
One world, one language
Know the language, know the world.
Russian criminal saying
The homogenisation of this criminal language speaks to the homogenisation of the Russian underworld. It is now widely known as fenya or ofenya, after an earlier beggars’ cant dating back at least to the late eighteenth century, in which extra syllables, typically ‘fe’ and ‘nya’, were inserted between the syllables of regular words.16 Thus tyurma (‘prison’) would become tyurfemanya. By the mid-nineteenth century this particular practice appears to have fallen into disuse, but the name remained.17 However, it seems likely that in the period when fenya was most widely used, from the 1920s to the 1960s, it was more likely actually referred to as blatnaya muzyka, ‘the music of the blatnye’, or the more prosaic blatnoi yazyk, ‘blatnye’s tongue’. The other language is – or, as will be discussed below, now largely was – a visual one, encoded in the often complex tattoos with which career criminals inscribed their bodies. While neither is unique to the Russian vorovskoi mir, with criminal cants in Europe identified as far back as the fourteenth century,18 they are distinctive in their spread and interaction. Even in the early twentieth century, the Russian language spoken by commoners was still fragmented, branched into countless local dialects. Yet both the spoken and visual languages of the vorovskoi mir were largely universal, promulgated not just in the yamy and the drinking dens but perhaps most importantly in the prison system. Tellingly, the slang term for a prison was to become akademiya, ‘academy’.19
It was in the nineteenth century that this thieves’ cant really became widespread within the underworld. There are certainly suggestions that it had become so by the 1850s. Vladimir Dal’s ground-breaking Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Russian Language, first published in 1863, notes the distinctive jargons of groups such as the mazuriki, St Petersburg’s criminal subculture.20 Even so, it was at first a very fragmented argot, or rather a series of connected but distinct ones. It was never a true replacement for Russian: rather, it provided a parallel body of new words, existing words given new meanings, and phrases with commonly understood implications, with which criminals could pepper their conversations, and in doing so demonstrate their identity and allegiance.
Like so many such cants, fenya was a hotchpotch of borrowings from other, often more localised slang, from sailors’ to merchants’, as well as foreign languages and Russian words given new meanings. Thus, the fenya word musor for the police means ‘trash’ in Russian, but actually came originally from the Yiddish moser, for an informant. The Russian word for a lynx, rys, acquired the meaning of an experienced criminal wise in the ways of prison. The word amba, for death, was shared between both criminal and sailors’ slang, while shirman, ‘pocket’ (hence shirmachy as one term for pickpockets), was found on the lips not just of crooks but also of some local traders.21 Fenya also included numerous terms for particular criminal trades and acts. The German ‘good morning’, guten Morgen, for example, came to be used for a burglary carried out in the morning. It also had essential descriptors of different levels of social status, from the humble shestyorka (‘sixer’, from the lowest score in a card game) up to a pakhan, a boss, something essential given the prickly sense of status within the vorovskoi mir – it wasn’t enough for a senior thief just to be senior, he needed to demonstrate it, and have others acknowledge his status.
In the first half of the twentieth century, though, fenya would achieve a level of standardisation that made it a genuine criminal lingua franca. This was a perverse outcome of the increasing detention of criminals in prisons and labour colonies. In 1901, there were on average almost 85,000 prisoners in detention at any one time; by 1927, the figure had risen to 198,000; by 1933, it was 5 million.22 The overwhelming majority were petty criminals and political prisoners, but many professional criminals were also swept into the system. The lengthy etapy on which the Gulag system relied could involve weeks or months of marching and being crowded into the notorious Stolypin railway carriages, with zeki being picked up and dropped off on the way. Even before they reached their labour camp, prisoners from different towns and regions were forced together, an experience repeated when they arrived. Furthermore, inmates would be shuttled from one camp to another, as bureaucratic or economic needs dictated.
With a far greater proportion of the professional criminals now assembled in the Gulags, and with the regular transfer of prisoners from camp to camp – as well as the tendency of those released to reoffend and be reimprisoned – fenya began to become increasingly homogenised through practice and intent. The fact that the professional thieves were often kept separate from the politicals, not least on etap transfers, also meant that they had greater chances to mix with their own kind. Facing both new opportunities and new temptations, the very identity of the blatnye became much more powerful and much more self-conscious. A central expression of that identity was the rise, transmission and use of their own language, one that increasingly merged with the wider world of Gulag slang, as well as mat – drawn literally from the root-word ‘mother’ – which is Russia’s rich and distinctive language of obscenity.23
From the late 1950s, though, the Gulags would be opened and the code of the vory redefined in such a way that they lost their abhorrence of mainstream society and also of the muzhiki of the petty criminal world. As will be discussed, the later Soviet gangster derived his wealth and opportunity precisely from dealing with the corrupt officials and black marketeers who thrived as the system began to grind to a standstill. Slang still abounded, but it no longer divided two worlds so sharply. Moreover, the homogeneity and exclusivity that had characterised it was no longer as important, nor was it possible to maintain. By the 1970s, one could hear fenya and Gulag songs on the streets, but increasingly terms also cropped up which were distinctive to a particular city or region.
Tattoos: writing resistance on the body
Do you stand by your tattoos?
Usual challenge to new inmates when arriving in a cell24
Like fenya, the thieves’ code of tattoos drew often upon traditional visual themes, not least religious iconography. However, given that classic motifs included naked and voluptuous Virgin Marys and angels enjoying oral sex, the intent was clearly deliberately sacrilegious. This demonstrated the criminals’ lifetime commitment to their ‘world’ and a deliberate and defiant alienation from mainstream society. Later, new forms of blasphemy became popular: Nazi swastikas or obscene caricatures of Marx, Lenin or Stalin had a similar consciously iconoclastic intent. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it so evocatively in his The Gulag Archipelago, the vory
surrendered their bronze skin to tattooing and in this way gradually satisfied their artistic, their erotic, and even their moral needs: on one another’s chests, stomachs and backs they could admire powerful eagles perched on cliffs or flying through the sky. Or the big hammer, the sun, with its rays shooting out in every direction; or women and men copulating; or the individual organs of their sexual enjoyment; and all of a sudden, next to their hearts were Lenin or Stalin or perhaps both . . .25
The most extreme tattoos, such as barbed wire across the forehead or ‘don’t wake’ on the eyelids, could hardly be hidden – and that was intentional. The extensive tattooing, often done in the Gulag with makeshift needles sanitised simply by being passed through a flame and using ink mixed from soot and urine, was done to symbolise not just a permanent commitment to the vorovskoi mir, but also manliness. It was painful and carried the risk of septicaemia. The aforementioned ‘don’t wake’ tattoo involved sliding a spoon under the eyelid before starting the inking.26 You needed to demonstrate your willingness to endure pain and risk your life, as well as your separation from the world of the frayery to be a true vor.
It is hard to be confident about dating a coherent ‘language’ of tattoos, not least because any conclusion rests largely on the negative data that while earlier police reports referred to criminal slang, they were essentially silent about a specific tattoo code. Nonetheless, it seems to have emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. Originally, the vorovskoi mir was simply a culture which arose amongst outsiders excluded from mainstream society by poverty and ill fortune. Increasingly, though, there emerged a strand within it that did not just accept but embraced and exalted this exclusion. It actively turned its back on the mainstream, starting a process which would lead to the rise of the blatnye criminals.
The tattoos that reflected this also encoded a criminal’s career and rank, with designs denoting the kinds of crimes he had committed, where and how long he was imprisoned and his ascent within the underworld.27 A vor v zakone might sport a star on his chest; a dagger denoted a killer for hire; shattered fetters on the ankle indicated someone who had broken out of prison; an onion-domed church marked the number of prison terms served, a cupola for each one. The hand was a virtual curriculum vitae, with tattoos marking criminal convictions and specialities, whether a second-storey cat burglar or a convicted armed robber. Others were acronyms whose meanings were well known, but also deniable. For example, KOT (literally ‘CAT’) stood for ‘Native of Prisons’, NEZh ‘Fed Up with This Fucking Life’, and ZLO meant ‘Take Revenge on Informants’. Irony also played a part: NKVD, the abbreviation for the political police through much of Stalin’s reign, was used to stand for ‘There’s No Friendship Stronger than Criminals’ ’. Tattoos could have a declaratory purpose, expressing such sentiments as ‘if you lose at cards, pay your debt’ or ‘life is short’. This could even be a way of communicating a very specific message: two bulls tattooed over the shoulder-blades, for example, symbolised an intent to challenge for gang leadership.
The language of the tattoos would also change over time. During the ‘bitches’ wars’, declarations of renewed commitment to the traditional code were inked. Tattoos on the shoulders, for example, expressed a commitment never to wear epaulettes – symbols of military rank and also of the voyenshchina – while stars on the knees symbolised a refusal to kneel before the authorities.28 This was, of course, fighting talk, or at least ink. Earlier generations of criminals may well have sported their own tattoos, but they were less prone to regard them as part of a formal language, less eager to use them as a permanent and defiant demarcation between their world and that of the legitimate sector. They were also less punctilious about the ‘right’ meaning of each image, something that would later become essential. By the 1930s, a vor who sported a tattoo encoding some distinction he had not deserved might find it being stripped from his skin by the traditionalists, eager to punish transgression and preserve the commonality of their visual language.
By the same token, Gulag tattooists were a privileged group, prized not just for their skill and their ability to scrounge and assemble the necessary ink and implements, but also their almost sacral role as the chroniclers on the flesh of thieves’ identities, accomplishments and ambitions. Inmates with this talent might find themselves protected by the blatnye for this reason, even if they were muzhiki or politicals. This was, for example, the saving grace for Thomas Sgovio, an American Communist who moved to the USSR, buoyed by a sense of mission, and who was then arrested in 1938 when he tried to reclaim his US passport on seeing just how this workers’ paradise was turning out. Sent to the Kolyma labour complex, he was fortunate enough to be able to demonstrate his skill as a tattooist, which helped win him food and protection from the criminals around him.29 Conversely, a tattooist who dared ink someone with a design they had not earned could expect violent, even fatal treatment. After all, in a world where there were no paper records and honour and appearance were all, this was as close to an official record as the vorovskoi mir could have.
The brutal counterpart to this was the use of forced tattooing to demean, isolate and punish those who fell foul of the thieves and their code. Sometimes, blatnye would not be allowed to redeem their sins through physical punishment and yet had not done enough to be killed. One option was for them to be seized and either physically restrained long enough to be tattooed, or forced to undergo it on pain of death. Even more pernicious was the treatment meted out to inmates who had been sexually assaulted by other male thieves and were thus deemed ‘debased’ in the macho vor culture, considered to have been the victims of their own weakness. They were treated as pariahs, not even allowed to eat at the same time as the blatnye, and they might also be forcibly tattooed with eyes over the groin or the word ‘slave’ on their face. In this respect, the language of the tattoos was as brutal, complex and hierarchical as the underworld subculture which had spawned it.
Cultures, clothes and custom
They finished me, the bastards, they finished me.
They destroyed my youth,
My golden hair turned white,
And I am on the edge of ruin.
Gulag song30
When zeki were being mustered for a march to a work site or transfer, the guards would deliver the same murderous catechism: ‘A step to the left or a step to the right will be considered an attempt to escape. The escort will shoot without warning.’ There are other ways of forcing people into narrow paths, though, and for all their freewheeling airs, the thieves actually lived very constrained lives. Their crude ‘honour amongst thieves’ code was enforced by collective beatings and murder in a direct carry-over from samosud, the peasant lynch law of pre-Soviet times.31 However, their values were also encoded in, and enforced through, the superstitions and rituals of the vorovskoi mir.
We have little evidence about the conduct and content of these rituals beyond hearsay, but Federico Varese uncovered a fascinating case of a skhodka that had to decide on whether or not a new recruit was worthy of joining the fraternity while locked down in a transit prison’s isolation cells.32 Unable to meet and talk, they had to communicate with each other by notes, notes which the police later found and impounded, representing a unique primary source. Two sponsors, as was required, recommended the candidate to the others, writing that ‘his behaviour and aspirations are totally in accordance with the vory world view’, not least because ‘he defied camp discipline for a long period of time’. Eventually, of the other nine cells, two expressed themselves in favour (‘if his soul is pure, let him in’) and none of the rest demurred, so the application was successful. Grappling in their own way with the patsan’s ‘soul’ and his capacity for defiance took precedence over simply enumerating his crimes.
On joining the fraternity, a thief would gain his klichka, his criminal nickname, both as practical security and also as symbol of the start of a new life. Dmitry Likhachev, whose life spanned both time in the Gulag and a career as a distinguished scholar of medieval Russian, considered this ‘a necessary act of transition to the sphere of the vory’ akin to ‘the taking of monastic vows’.33 The choosing of this name was very important, for it generally could not be changed (although one could acquire several over time) and would become a central element of the thief’s new identity. While presented during the initiation as something placed upon the new member, in practice it would typically be agreed beforehand by the prospective thief in discussion with his patrons. Most such nicknames were permutations of the criminal’s original name or patronymic (the second, ‘son/daughter of X—’ name all Russians have), perhaps reflecting the way his new identity overwrote his old. Thus, Alexander Chapikin became ‘Chapai’ and Miriam Mamedov ‘Miron’. Often, the person’s place of birth or operations also featured: Eduard Asatryan became ‘Edik Tbilisski’ (‘Tbilisi Edik’) because he was born there, and Nikolai Zykov was ‘Yakutyonok’ because he was by birth a member of the Yakut minority. Others, though, were plays on words – Vadim Fedorchenko became ‘Fedora’, after the hat – or moral, physical or other attributes, such as ‘Fierce’, ‘Cross-Eyed’ or ‘Lucky’.34
Luck mattered, after all, as gambling was central to life in the vorovskoi mir. It was not just to while away time spent in the camps, but was a metaphor for their intensely competitive ethos and a way of demonstrating skill, cunning and honour. It is no coincidence that derzhat mast, ‘to hold the suit’ – in the card-playing rather than sartorial sense – was a fenya term for holding authority over other prisoners.35 To fail to pay one’s debts was, as has been mentioned, a terrible crime against the code, sure to bring violent consequences. One classic form of atonement with honour was to scale the barbed wire of the outer zone and die by the guards’ guns. Yet these debts were often themselves symbolic: two thieves might, for example, wager the possessions of another inmate, a frayer or a muzhik, and the loser was then expected to go and take them to hand them over to the winner. In this way, the game also reinforced the predatory relationship between the thieves and everyone else. Even more strikingly, jailed historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko recalled encountering a blatnoi whose forfeit had been to stay mute for three years. Even while transferred from one camp to the next, he knew he had to stay silent because word of his situation had spread on the underground grapevine and ‘no one can evade the law of thieves’.36
Gambling could take many forms, from playing draughts with pieces moulded out of stale, wetted bread and a board scraped on the ground, to wagering on the weather or which guard would be on duty that night. But the true sport of the vorovskoi mir was cards, which assumed an almost mystical significance as portents of the future (and thus also appear disproportionately in tattoos). Even in the 1980s, in a more relaxed age when convicts could get hold of cards openly, a soldier whose brother had been in prison told me that one of his cellmates had hanged himself because he had drawn four jacks in a row and had considered it a most terrible omen.37 In earlier times, even the making of a deck of cards was a complex exercise in scrounging and ingenuity. Rectangles of paper salvaged from any available source were glued together with wet bread to form the cards, then dried under a bunk until hard. Crude stamps fashioned out of the base of a tin mug or cut into a shoe heel were used for printing the pips; black ink was made out of ash, red out of clay, blood or streptomycin (an antibiotic often used in camps to address the frequent outbreaks of TB).38 In particular cases, where the craftsman could get hold of pencils or ink (usually through a trusty working in the camp administration), the face cards would be hand drawn, occasionally with some artistry. These cards were, after all, more than just a pastime: they were a prized possession and symbol of the chance and honour that the thieves felt was at the heart of their life. As Vlas Doroshevich observed from his time in prison, ‘the card game is the all-grasping, all-absorbing terror of katorga [penal colony]. I saw [thieves] lying in hospital because of emaciation: they’d gambled away their rations and eaten nothing for weeks . . . [or] betting their medicine against other patients in the hospital.’39
Rituals, games and tattoos were not the only identifiers of this subculture. Senior vory often affected particular styles of dress to distinguish themselves from frayery and lesser criminals alike. This is something that predated the Gulag: military officers’ caps predominated during the First World War, perhaps as another deliberate act of sacrilege, then flat trade-school caps like those of classic American newsboys in the 1920s. In the Gulags, demonstrating that you could still find and retain particular items of clothing had a particular significance, as it attested to your authority, protection, connections or outright toughness. According to political prisoner Varlam Shalamov, in the 1940s the Kolyma vory wore leather caps and home-made aluminium crosses, although according to Michael Solomon, whose time there followed Shalamov’s, they later favoured raincoats, as much a mark of rank as a practical item, and a counterpart to the leather coats affected by the camps’ political commissars.40 The French-Russian Maximilien de Santerre, sentenced to the Gulag on espionage charges in 1946, also mentions the crosses, and that they would wear waistcoats and shirts not tucked into their trousers.41 Caps, waistcoats and untucked shirts also featured in Georgy Feldgun’s reminiscences of 1940s camp life.42
And they sang. In the days before Uber transformed the world of Moscow’s taxis, anyone using a cab would likely be blasted by the throatily saccharine sound of Radio Shanson, a station specifically dedicated to the shanson, a genre of ballad not confined to but very heavily influenced by the music of the Gulags. By definition, this made it very much the music of the vorovskoi mir, and blatnaya pesnya (‘thieves’ songs’) are a popular genre even today. The later popularisation of the genre is discussed in chapter 16, but for the thieves in the Gulag, music became a way to safely express their feelings, from their hopes and dreams of the outside, to their anger and despair inside the zona. Perhaps it is not surprising that one of the common terms for living a criminal life was po muzyke khodit, ‘to move to the music’. Beyond ways to pass time and cope with life in the Gulag, the songs also became part of the oral history of the camps, a necessity given the perennial absence of writing materials and the inability to save and distribute accounts in any other form. The song ‘Kengir’, for example, is a detailed telling of the 1954 prisoners’ rising there. ‘Although the enemy is strong,’ it warns, ‘the masses are breaking their fetters.’43
Women in the thieves’ world
The moral code of the professional criminal . . . prescribes contempt for women . . . This is true of all women without exception.
Varlam Shalamov44
Of course, the vory forged fetters of their own, and oppressed and preyed on those around them with less organisation but as much enthusiasm as the Stalinist state. To this end, perhaps it is worth concluding this chapter by looking at the role of women in the voroskoi mir, as it encapsulates the tensions between the crude machismo at its heart and the practical and emotional realities of any human collective. This was an unpleasantly, often horrifically misogynistic culture, exalting a caricature of manliness in which women were confined to the roles of idealised mother, wanton prostitute, helpless victim, gangster’s moll or excluded outsider. From the portrayals of women in their tattoos – typically naked and sexualised – to the sentimental stanzas of their songs, the thieves might affect to revere or despise women, but never to respect them.
Although in many cases efforts were made to keep male and female prisoners apart, camp memoirs are depressingly packed with accounts of not just one-off rapes but women forced, through violence, intimidation or the prospect of slightly better – more survivable – conditions, into sexual relationships with blatnye, officials and those zeki whose occupations gave them even a slight degree of privilege and impunity.45 In some cases, this was a ruthlessly deliberate strategy in literally murderous conditions, more often a reflection of the brutal social relations of the times.
For the thieves, these relationships were precisely meant to be unequal and meaningless. Varlam Shalamov, an outsider with a sharp axe to grind but no less observant for that, said that they learned ‘contempt for women from childhood’, a belief that ‘woman, an inferior being, has been created only to satisfy the criminal’s animal craving’.46 He was, sadly, not wrong, and he also perceptively noted the saccharine but ultimately empty cult of the blessed mother in vor culture: ‘There is one woman who is romanticised by the criminal world . . . This woman is the criminal’s mother . . . [But] no criminal has ever sent so much as a kopek to his mother or made any attempt to help her on his own.’47
As ever, there was something of a gap between code and reality. Just as especially gifted storytellers, singers, even famous sportsmen, and those who just happened to catch a senior vor’s eye with their wit or spirit might find themselves sheltered under his wing, for all that they were frayery, so too could different relationships emerge between male criminals and women. The code of the pre-Stalinist vorovskoi mir had demanded that, when one joined the fraternity, one severed all existing ties – to church, to family, to wife – as a mark of one’s new commitment. In practice, many remained married, but the unfortunate wife was considered within the underworld now to be little more than gang chattel: her husband’s first, but that of another member of the gang were he to die or be imprisoned. She was lucky enough to be considered of greater status than a prostitute – arguably not the highest bar to vault – but in Valery Chalidze’s words, ‘the relationship of a thief and his wife is that of master and slave’.48 Ex-convict Gustav Herling recounted a scene when Marusya, the lover of a thief called Koval, spat in the face of one of his fellows in response to an insult. Rather than defend her, he at once turned on his lover and forced her to submit to gang rape by the rest of the group in punishment.49 Whether out of fear of the consequences for himself or a genuine outrage at this perceived transgression – as if it matters either way – Koval unhesitatingly placed his male comrades over his lover.
As ever, there were exceptions, such as thieves with genuinely loving feelings towards their spouses, and a very few female gangsters who gained a degree of respect within the professional underworld. These rare cases, though, in no way moderate the overall impression of a subculture where gender relationships were almost prehistoric in their imbalances.
This was also visible in the female underworld. Although formally there was no room for them in the vorovskoi mir, a women’s equivalent of sorts had emerged even before the Gulag era, and anchored itself in their side of the prison zona. Just as the vorovskoi mir ended up defined by the Gulag, so too this female criminal subculture was essentially shaped by its masculine counterpart. Individually or in groups, the female thieves undoubtedly could be formidable. Eugenia Ginzburg describes her shocking encounter:
But the worst was yet to come, our first meeting with real, hardened female criminals . . . down the hatchway poured another few hundred human beings, if that is the right name for those appalling creatures, the dregs of the criminal world . . . the mongrel horde surged down upon us, with tattooed, half-naked bodies and grimacing, apelike faces.50
For all that Chalidze claims such gangs ‘are treated with respect’, this seems hard to substantiate.51 Instead, denied any official status by the men, the women were relegated to a subaltern role, which they seem to have embraced, following the male habits of swearing and fenya. Even their own tattoos to a large extent reflected the chauvinist aesthetics of the men’s, with representations of women essentially confined to three archetypes: the Madonna, the mother or the whore.52 In their loudly proclaimed freedom from the manners and values of regular society, the vory actually managed to create alternative, less extensive but much more fiercely policed constraints for themselves – but these were nothing to the ways they abused and distorted the subculture of their female counterparts. No wonder this was essentially a product of the zona, something that could only truly flourish in an artificial world of barbed wire and forced labour, casual violence and institutionalised abuse. When the thieves were let out into the wider Soviet world, a world of freedom and choice compared with the Gulags, this vicious society would change dramatically.