Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume II

'A unique social document recording a now disappearing sub-culture. The criminals inhabit as desperate a nether world as you are likely to come across. A hipnotic aspect of art and words. ' - Index

This second volume of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia is an essential companion to the critically acclaimed first volume. It features previously unpublished drawings and photographs from the extraordinary archives of Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev.

During his lifetime as a guard in St Petersburg's notorious Kresty Prison, Baldaev diligently recorded over 3,000 criminals' tattoos and their coded meanings. His drawings form a unique gallery; a passport into a hidden world of shovel-faced politicians, fornicating devils, messages tangled in barbed wire. Tattoos on hands, feet, legs, torsos, foreheads, eyelids, buttocks and genitals all take their place in this fascinating document of a rapidly disappearing criminal society, where history, status and even sexual preference are indelibly etched on the body.

Introduction by Anne Applebaum, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.

Baldaev was born in 1925 in Ulan-Ude, Buryatiya, Russia.

Danzig Baldaev's father was an academic, an ethnologist who found himself imprisoned under Soviet rule as an enemy of the people. In fact much of Baldaev's family moved through the Soviet prison system, while he became a guard. At his father's suggestion, he used his access to document and study that tattoos that were pervasive among the truly criminal portion of the prison population, the vory v zakonye, or legitimate thieves, a semi-professional class who keep their own brutal laws. During his 30 years supervising inmates in St. Petersburg's notorious Kresty Prison, Baldaev recorded over 3,000 of their tattoos and parsed their meaning--the nihilistic creativity of a closed society--in the drawings and text that made the first volume of The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia a bestseller. This essential second volume, which collects all new, previously unseen photographs and drawings, goes to the extremes of his incredible collection. Sergel Vasilev's photographs authenticate the images, Baldaev's drawings make sense of them, and through them both we glimpse an extraordinary world where the criminal's position, history and even sexual preference are displayed indelibly on his body, and that marked body serves as a passport into the underworld.

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