Between and , during his career as a prison guard, Danzig Baldaev made over 3, drawings of tattoos. They were his gateway into a secret world in which he acted as ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and provocative, reflecting as they do the lives, status and traditions of the convicts that wore them. Baldaev made comprehensive notes about each tattoo, which he then carefully reproduced in his tiny St.
Petersburg flat. Caricature of the Communist Party. The tattoo of an otritsala a convict who refuses to submit to any kind of authority , who was frustrated with the length of his sentence nine years.
He was caught stealing food and gasoline from a kolkhoz collective farm warehouse. Corrective Prison Camp No. An anti-social tattoo, a caricature of the ideologists and leaders of the Communist Party — Marx, Lenin and Stalin. The bearer was a persistent violator of prison regulations who refused to work. Common in the s and s. The tattoo was made in a Arkhangelsk Region corrective labour colony in Top centre: An anti-Semitic tattoo worn by a woman convicted for stealing food from a depot.
She had cohabited with a Jew who was the head of the food depot where she worked. When she had a child by him, the Jew stopped seeing her and took up with a different lover — a young Russian girl. Bottom right: This image of the Devil and a woman can either mean that a woman pushed the bearer to commit a crime, or that both the Devil and woman are hatched from the same egg.
Work lasted for twenty months between and , costing the lives of over , political and criminal prisoners. The elderly man who had this tattoo was found frozen to death on the bank of the Vvedensky Canal near Vitebsk Station. The autopsy was carried out by students at the Military Medical Academy. An artistic tattoo from a former convict who worked on the White Sea — Baltic Canal — a cup in the form of a star, a hammer and sickle, shackles, carnations the flower of the revolution and barbed wire.
