![\"\"](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ATattooed_former_Soviet_prisoner.jpg\")
<\/a>Tattooed former Soviet prisoner By pvz.lt [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>I\u2019m currently working on a book chapter \u00a0about the body in labour camp narratives. This was actually pretty much the starting point for my current research, so I\u2019m in part revisiting an article published in Gulag Studies in 2008 on the Gulag body and self-mutilation. More recently, I\u2019ve been thinking about the representation of different forms of body modification, including tattooing. When I gave a paper about my first thoughts on this at a conference on Russian biopolitics<\/a> organized by my colleague Philippa Heatherington at SSEES in the autumn, one of the subjects that came up in discussion was, perhaps inevitably, Russian criminal tattoos. I\u2019ve always been a bit reluctant to use these as sources, for several\u00a0reasons. Firstly, the subject has become such an industry in recent years, which seems fundamentally\u00a0problematic given\u00a0the supposedly closed world of the subject matter. Secondly, I am suspicious of\u00a0Danzig Baldaev, the source of the drawings in the\u00a0Russian Criminal Tattoo\u00a0Encyclopaedia<\/em><\/a>\u00a0published by Fuel that has been central to expanding that industry beyond Russia. I find Baldaev\u2019s Drawings from the Gulag<\/em><\/a>\u00a0nasty and voyeuristic, so am very sceptical about his credentials as a witness. Thirdly, whenever I\u2019ve seen the photos by Arkady Bronnikov and Sergei Vasiliev of criminals and their tattoos, I\u2019ve always felt unsure precisely what I\u2019m looking at, not least because some of them are so\u00a0incredibly camp (the guy with the cello<\/a>: what is that about?).<\/p>\n A fourth reason is the uncritical enthusiasm with which a lot of this material has been received. It\u2019s hardly a surprise that fans of tattoos have shown such interest in the designs, but I have been somewhat taken aback by academic\u00a0articles on criminal tattoos that treat them at face value, as though they are straightforward and unproblematic as sources.\u00a0Helena Goscilo\u2019s \u2018Texting the Body: Soviet Criminal Tattoos\u2019, in Cultural cabaret: Russian and American essays for Richard Stites<\/i>, ed. by David M. Goldfrank and Pavel Lysakov (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2012), pp. 203\u201330 (available on academia.edu<\/a>) is a prime example. I don\u2019t question the\u00a0analysis of the tattoos themselves, which is as fine as one would expect from a critic of Goscilo\u2019s stature. But the fact that the author doesn\u2019t think about what\u00a0<\/em>she\u2019s analysing seems to me a rather unfortunate omission. Nevertheless, such articles, and the very ubiquity of this material, persuaded me that I ought to at least take a closer look to see whether these things are worth dealing with at any length in my book. In what follows I focus on the three volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia <\/em>(London: Fuel, 2003-8), but also looked, for example, at a couple of volumes of Aleksandr Kuchinskii\u2019s\u00a0Prestupniki <\/i>i prestupleniia<\/em>:\u00a0 Zakony prestupnogo mira. Obichai, iazyk, tatuirovki<\/i> (Donetsk: Stalker, 1997) and\u00a0Lagernaia zhivopis\u02b9, ulgolovnyi zhargon<\/i> (Donetsk: Stalker, 2008). Many of the same criticisms apply to a lot of these publications because most of them repeat substantially the same material.<\/p>\n And criticisms I have plenty. As we have to start somewhere, let\u2019s kick off\u00a0with Alexei Plutser-Sarno\u2019s introductory essays in\u00a0the first two volumes. The two are rather similar, except that the smattering of semiotics in the first volume (as befits a graduate of Tartu University) is replaced with a sprinkling of Baudrillard and Lacan in the second. What they both lack is any sort of historical contextualization (that does come in the third volume – of which more below), so it\u2019s unclear what, or when, the author is actually referring to. Sources of information are equally unclear. A lot of the discussion of the meaning of tattoos is either not backed up at all, or uses Baldaev\u2019s own explanations\u00a0either from the\u00a0Encyclopaedia\u00a0<\/em>itself, or from his Slovar\u02b9 blatnogo vorovskogo zhargona, v dvukh tomakh<\/i> (Moscow: Kampana, 1997), which is rather too self-referential to be reliable.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also some really misleading use of other sources, notably of Mikhail Demin\u2019s\u00a0Blatnoi<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Moscow: Panorama, 1991; translated as The Day is Born of Darkness<\/em>) – which by coincidence I happened to have read a couple of weeks previously, and which I strongly\u00a0recommend. In the first volume of the\u00a0Encyclopaedia\u00a0<\/em>(p. 29), Plutser-Sarno cites Demin\u2019s description in chapter 3 of part 1 of arriving at Kharkov Central Distribution Prison and being divided by the guards into criminals and others on the basis of their tattoos; Demin had an ace of clubs tattoo on his shoulder, so was assigned with the criminals. But far from illustrating the wider significance and particular meaning of tattoos, the whole point of Demin\u2019s story is that he is in fact wrongly assigned, which we discover as his story unfolds. Although he ends up living with\u00a0vory<\/i>\u00a0v zakone <\/em>(thieves in the law or legitimate thieves),<\/em>\u00a0being a thief\u00a0for a while, and in the camp later is on the thieves\u2019 side in the Bitch Wars, this was all down to circumstances, namely\u00a0finding himself alone as a teenager during the purges. (The Bitch War was a prolonged period of violence between two groups: the legitimate thieves, who refused any cooperation with the authorities, and the \u2018Suki\u2019 or \u2018Bitches\u2019, who did work for the authorities e.g. by serving the army during the war.) Demin was actually real Bolshevik aristocracy – from the Trifonov family (the novelist Yuri Trifonov was his cousin) – which was about as far away from the\u00a0vory v zakone\u00a0<\/i>as you could get. The tattoo was not a sign of his status, but something he had done to remind himself never to gamble with cards again, after losing all his possessions, including the clothes he stood up in, to a thief playing with marked cards.<\/p>\n If Plutser-Sarno\u2019s contributions don\u2019t provide the sort of authoritative support one might hope for, Ann Applebaum\u2019s Introduction to Volume II doesn\u2019t do much better, because it\u2019s very general and a lot of it doesn\u2019t deal with tattoos at all. Where it does, it relies to a great extent on standard information, such as the well-worn story about criminals tattooing pictures of Lenin or Stalin on their chests as insurance against firing squads (not sure this would have helped them much in the purges, when a bullet in the back of the neck was the standard form of execution).<\/p>\n Alexander Sidorov\u2019s Introduction to Volume III is a better proposition, as it has a far stronger historical basis and traces the development of tattoos in relation to Russian criminals. But the historical context he advances creates another problem. He identifies the Bitch War as the moment when the hidden meaning of tattoos took on real significance as thieves\u2019 knowledge of who belonged to which group became a matter of life and death (pp. 33-5). Sidorov goes on to cite the emptying of the Gulag after Stalin\u2019s death and Khrushchev\u2019s Secret Speech as the moment when that hidden symbolism began to be lost, as tattooing moved into the mainstream with the reappearance within Soviet society of many criminals (p. 39). So if we\u2019re generous and locate the beginning of the Bitch War at\u00a0the start of the Great Patriotic War, rather than its end as if often suggested (certainly many of the memoirs I\u2019ve read recently, including Demin\u2019s Blatnoi\u00a0<\/em>and Dmitrii Panin\u2019s\u00a0otherwise fairly obnoxious\u00a0Lubianka-Ekibastuz: lagernye zapiski<\/i><\/a> (Moscow: Skify, 1991; translated as The Notebooks of<\/em>\u00a0Sologdin<\/em>) indicate that a great deal of this violence was going on during the Great Patriotic War), and stick to 1956 rather than 1953 as the end point, that means these tattoos, with all their mysterious symbolism, were basically in circulation\u00a0for around 15 years. Do they in that case really have the significance they are habitually endowed with today?<\/p>\n This sort of time-scale raises another issue when we look at the photos of criminal tattoos. Arkady Bronnikov began documenting tattoos in the mid-1960s, so is likely to have come across designs from this period, but it\u2019s not clear which those are,\u00a0as most of the information given is about the images but not their origins, dates etc. Sergei Vasiliev\u2019s photos are dated 1989-1992, i.e. 30-odd years after tattoos ceased to have a meaning exclusively used and understood by criminals. It\u2019s possible that one or two of his subjects are old enough to have gained tattoos before the time when their significance was diluted, but clearly most are not. So we really don\u2019t know what we\u2019re looking in these photos, whether the tattoos have meaning or are simply decorative.<\/p>\n Which, finally, brings me to one of the problems of Baldaev\u2019s drawings themselves. Examining the drawings in all three volumes, alongside the photos by Vasiliev in the\u00a0Encyclopaedia\u00a0<\/em>and elsewhere, as well as those by Bronnikov, reveals something a mismatch. Yes, many of the designs are the same, but many are not. Again, this raises questions about what is decorative and what has the specific meaning we have been led to believe. On the one hand, quite a few of the designs sported by the criminals in the photos look as though they may well be more decorative than meaningful (rather a lot of what look like perfectly standard portraits of women), especially in the case of Vasiliev\u2019s images. On the other, at least we know these are indeed pictures of convicted criminals, as both photographers\u2019 work comes from police and penal facilities.<\/p>\n The same cannot be said unreservedly of Baldaev\u2019s drawings. The first thing I noticed is how vaguely many of them are attributed. I ended up doing a rough count, and came up with the following percentages:<\/p>\n I was fairly generous about what I counted as an attribution. Quite a few are attributed to people the author apparently met in bathhouses or on beaches. Make of that what you will. I can sort of imagine the conversations, but nevertheless gave these the benefit of the doubt as long as the bearer claimed to be a criminal or to have served a criminal sentence. Unattributed designs are those that simply indicate where on the body they are found, say there are multiple versions of a particular design, or just discuss the content but make no reference to\u00a0the origin. Under \u2018dubious attributions\u2019 I counted ones that give no indication at all of criminal origins, including some taken from bodies in the morgue, tattoos belonging to German prisoners of war, sailors, nationalists etc. In other words, only just over 50% of all of Baldaev\u2019s designs across the three volumes\u00a0have any sort of reliable(-ish) indication of criminal origins. That doesn\u2019t strike me as a great deal, and it certainly doesn\u2019t strike me as being the sort of source a sensible academic should rely on. So I think that decides it: while I will have something to say in my book about tattooing practices as they are described in various memoirs, the criminal tattoo industry will probably merit a footnote at most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m currently working on a book chapter \u00a0about the body in labour camp narratives. This was actually pretty much the starting point for my current research, so I\u2019m in part revisiting an article published in Gulag Studies in 2008 on the Gulag body and self-mutilation. More recently, I\u2019ve been thinking about the representation of different […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[554,549,552,551,529,68,38,550,39,548,553],"class_list":["post-8103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gulag","tag-bitch-wars","tag-criminals","tag-danzig-baldaev","tag-dmitrii-panin","tag-gulag","tag-khrushchev","tag-lenin","tag-mikhail-demin","tag-stalin","tag-tattoos","tag-yuri-trifonov"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-26H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8103"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8128,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8103\/revisions\/8128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n