Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Print No.12

Taken between 1989 and 1993, Sergei Vasiliev’s photographs of Soviet prisoners document the secret code language of criminals in the USSR, exposing a gritty spirit of picaresque resistance within a violently repressive culture. Vasiliev worked as staff photographer for a newspaper in Chelyabinsk, west-central Russia, for thirty years, during which time he was also a prison warden. Since 1948, a fellow worker, Danzig Baldaev, had been drawing and cataloguing the extensive range of designs made by prisoners onto their skin. These homemade tattoos, scraped and inked into skin with melted boot heels, ash, urine or blood, contained a whole range of coded messages against the Soviet regime and about the prisoners’ individual crimes. Although this tattooing was illegal, and Baldaev was initially forbidden from continuing, the KGB realised what a resource it could be for their criminal files and eventually supported his documentary project. Vasiliev was brought in to supply hard evidence of the designs’ authenticity. Raunchy, grotesque, filled in with insults against the authorities, the imagery developed its own formulas and conventions: a skull meant a conviction for murder, a cat marked a thief, and so on. To have no tattoos would have meant the lowest status, a lack of toughness; certain tattoos could be the sign of an untouchable. Far from being isolated illustrations from a catalogue in a tattoo parlour, Vasiliev’s powerful photographs are a humanising record that places the faces, bodies and stories of the owners right at the centre of the picture.