Prison tattoos a 'unique language'

By Irina Titova

WHEN the tattoo needle pricks a Russian prisoner's skin, the mark it leaves has meaning: a pirate with a knife in his teeth says the inmate is a sadist; a burning cross means the prisoner wants revenge; and ex-president Boris Yeltsin with a glass of vodka -- well, that just means the guy likes the odd tipple.

Russian prison tattoos reflect this country's vast, layered criminal lexicon, using coded designs instead of words to communicate with other criminals -- and to keep outsiders from understanding.

Danzig Baldayev has been documenting these tattoos for more than half a century, first as a prison guard, then a police detective. On Tuesday, he shared his sketches with the rest of the world, releasing his book Prisoners' Tattoos in an unusual event held at St Petersburg's dilapidated and infamous Kresty jail.

Baldayev, 76, began copying tattoos in 1948, when he first came to work at Kresty. He continued his hobby with the Leningrad police force, as the city was called in the Soviet era.

He collected tattoos from around the country, admiring them as a unique language, eventually compiling 3600 designs.

In Soviet times, Baldayev pursued his hobby secretly, paying prisoners with tobacco to allow him to copy their tattoos. At traditional Russian bath houses, he spied out old prison-house markings and jotted them down. He even visited morgues to find unusual specimens.

Russian prison tattoos tell not just the crime a prisoner committed, but his place in the underworld hierarchy, his personality, his desires, Baldayev says. His book -- envisaged as the first of a trilogy -- contains drawings of 773 tattoos.

The author said that compared with prisoners' tattoos in other countries, the Russian school of prison tattooing has an extraordinary number of styles, and they more often involve political themes. That was especially true in the Soviet era, when jails and camps held large numbers of political prisoners.

In the times of Soviet leader Josef Stalin's repression, many prisoners bore tattoos with the portrait of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, considering it an amulet against execution.

More modern tattoos, meanwhile, ironically show the ex-leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, as "The Enemy of Drunkenness" for his botched anti-alcohol campaign of the late 1980s.

Baldayev said he often met resistance to his tattoo collection from prison staff. But detectives welcomed it.

"They even said that such tattoo files could seriously help to register criminals," Baldayev said.

Valentin Tublin, the St Petersburg publisher of the book, announced a tender in Europe for publication of the book abroad. Tublin also said he is planning to publish the two additional volumes by Baldayev next year.

Kresty has held numerous prominent Russians, including revolutionary Leon Trotsky and Alexander Kerensky, the pre-Bolshevik premier.

Its 99 cells are designed to hold 3300 inmates but in recent years they have held nearly 10000. -- Sapa-AP