Dan Snow's History Hit - Criminal Subculture in the Gulag

Episode Date: April 19, 2020

I was thrilled to be joined by Mark Vincent, an expert in criminal subculture and prisoner society in Stalinist Labour camps. Mark has looked at thousands of journals, song collections, tattoo drawings and slang dictionaries to reveal a hidden side of Gulag daily life. In this podcast, he also explained how these criminal habits laid the foundations for the Russian mafia.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got an unusual one for you now. You're not going to believe it. This is a podcast about the criminal subculture in the gulag. We're going deep, we're going on a deep dive into the Soviet system of mass imprisonment in the 20s and 30s and how people survived, sometimes flourished in those environments, and the criminal subculture. The ink, the the gangs the language and i'll be talking to mark vincent about that he is obsessed with the gulag he's an academic that's obsessed with the criminal subculture of the soviet gulags pretty pretty interesting stuff you can watch interviews like this you can watch our hundreds of history documentaries. You can listen to our almost thousands of audio podcasts on History Hit TV. It's my digital history subscription service. It's kind of like Netflix.

If you go on there at the moment, we've got a deal running for the sort of lockdown deal where if you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and then you get the first month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So it takes you through two months with pretty much all the history that you can absorb. So please go and check that out. But in the meantime, everyone, enjoy Mark Vincent. Thanks so much for coming on the show, man. No problem at all. When I think gulags, I think, I'm sure wrongly,

but of posh, formerly aristocratic sort of political prisoners. But, I mean, give me a sense of the scale of these gulags and who's in them. So, virtually everyone. No matter whether or not you're a member of the Communist Party, you're likely to upset them enough at some point to be shoved in a labour camp and sent off, you know, kind of packed away to Siberia. So it is mainly political prisoners, like kind of, you know,

aristocratic, you know, the kind of people who will write memoirs later on, but actually there's all kinds of marginalised groups, homosexuals, different nationalities and the kind of criminal recidivists that I look at in my work. You've focused on the people who might have been in prison no matter what the political system on the sort of... Yeah, I mean, it's fairly likely that a lot of them would have probably been banged up You've focused on the people who might have been in prison no matter what the political system, on the sort of crime... Yeah, I mean it's fairly likely that a lot of them would have probably been banged up anyway. But it is a society which is driving down very harshly on all forms of crime like hooliganism and so on.

So there is probably a higher density of prisoners inside and even if you're a small time thief then it's reasonably likely you would have been sent to prison or a labor camp anyway but the chances are in the Gulag you get a longer sentence and the chances of then getting out are fairly limited. Okay so let's just define what is it the Gulag it does it mean geographically right? Does it mean Siberia? Well like Gulag is the bureaucratic term they use to signify the operation of the camps so Gulag is just an acronym in the same way that the Soviet Union is filled with kind of endless acronyms.

So Gulag is the main administration of the camp system. But actually that divides up into a number of different types of camps. But it's become well known as an overarching label because of works such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, like really famous books by former prisoners. And the ones you're looking at primarily, are they near cities or are they the ones that are very, very remote? Well, in all likelihood, if you're a really serious criminal

in terms of the gangs that I'm looking at, you're probably sent away quite far. But there are labour sites in and around the major cities, which is something which is quite often overlooked. But normally they function in a kind of similar way to open prisons like you're inside a gulag near St. Petersburg or Moscow but only if really you're on a quite a kind of short-term sentence. So talk to me about the kind of gangs that you're looking at first of all what activities are they involved in that are

getting them put in these places to start with? There's a certain hierarchy to them which follows the kind of criminal hierarchy you'd probably find in loads of different prisons and camp systems. If you're a violent criminal, if you're a bank robber, those kind of crimes are more glorified in TV shows and films. You're probably the head of the gang, someone who's known as a pahan in these Russian gangs. And then you have a kind of hierarchy beneath you.

You have your kind of lieutenants or lackeys running around and delegating tasks to a kind of even lower level beneath that. So there is a certain structure to them, but the gangs that are formed are quite kind of ad hoc because the Gulag system is one which is in kind of constant flux. It's a kind of world in perpetual motion, so people are being transferred between different sites all the time.

And are these gangs in the gulags that emerge, are they based on existing gangs in the big cities of the Soviet Union? Would you go to a gang and be like, oh I know this guy? Well sometimes, you could be kind of fortunate enough to run into someone you know. But certainly the tattoos that I look at function as a kind of passport. So you'd be tattooed with specific types of crime on your knuckles. So if you're an arsonist, if you're a bank robber, if you're a house burglar, you'll have a different ring tattoo. And so the tattooing system...

So tattoos can be given by the state or is it... No, no, these are tattoos that the criminals or the inmates will tattoo on themselves. So there is an argument, quite a strong one, that it comes from the old process of branding. So back in the 19th century, they would brand people on the foreheads with the word thief or prisoner. And so an argument that I put forward in a book based on some other people's work as well is that the criminal recidivists are essentially reclaiming their own bodies and showing how they're opposed to the state. The state can bang them up and send them away to labour camps in Siberia, but they're retaining some kind of semblance

of control over themselves. See, possibly because I've grown up reading the more bourgeois literature coming out of those gulags, what strikes me is how different they've got to anything that had gone before and this was like a sort of barbaric crime against humanity. But do you think the experience of the inmates that were bank robbers that were arsonist murders, do you think they would have had a profoundly different experience under the Tsarist or the communist regime? I think if anything the size of the gulag and the composition of prisoners allows the criminal recidivists, these gangs that

are formed, to have a lot more agency when they're inside the camps. So the Gulag grows so much more than the late imperial, pre-1917 prison system. And actually, during different stages of the carceral journey, in particular the transportation process, what the authorities do if they're transporting prisoners on ships is they just lock the hold and leave everyone down there so there's no surveillance whatsoever which means that if you are of a kind of criminal mindset and you want to use that as an opportunity to kind of dominate other prisoners then that's a perfect chance for you. So the Gulag essentially creates the conditions for criminal gangs to have more agency and

also gives them a high amount of prisoners from different backgrounds who they are quite opposed to, such as political prisoners, that they can use to, again, dominate. They steal clothes off them, they make their life incredibly difficult. For these serious criminals, did they know they weren't going back to society? Some of them become institutionalised in the same way that we know that other people in different penal institutions also become very stuck in that routine. There isn't much of a life for them outside of the camps, and given the amount of control, like kind of informal power that they at least think they have or they have at certain

times. I think they almost prefer that to being on the outside and running the risk of the Soviet secret police chasing them down and hunting them. So at times you'll find that people are about to be released and they'll go away and find another prisoner and they'll commit some kind of violent crime against them just to stay inside the camps. And so what form does the domination take? So they assume they're going to be there for a long time, they sometimes don't even want to leave. The charms of Soviet Russian life, maybe, if they think it's better off inside the camp. Is it accumulating money, rewards, privileges, clothes, women, boys? What is the purpose, to what ends is this domination?

The argument that I put forward is that it's about survival. It's about survival for everyone in the camps, whether you're a marginalised nationality or if you're a political prisoner, everyone is looking to secure access to rations, especially in times when the population of the camps peak. So the biggest peak for me towards the end of the 1930s when the population jumps by about a million because of the Great Terror, which is happening in a million more prisoners in the camp. The second peak is in 1953, leading up to Stalin's death,

and the population approaches around about 2.5 million so it's the kind of seen as the zenith of the of the camp complex. At their worst are they like the the Nazi camps for the Soviet prisoners of war where they almost just being packed in there to let stuff to well they were being packed in there to starve and just die did they ever did ever approach that bad? I think there is an argument, and there's this repeated phrase, that it's Auschwitz without ovens. But I think actually when you look at what the gulag is,

it's this system of multiple detention, punitive institutions. I think it's a lot more complicated. They're trying to keep certain prisoners alive. There's some very good recent scholarship on the amount of resources being put in to keep prisoners who are seen as being healthy and can therefore contribute towards whatever work they're doing. It's those prisoners who are being targeted and they're being treated very well in the medical facilities, certainly compared to the prisoners who they're seeing as not being as healthy and not being able to contribute

towards whatever labour, whatever industry that the camp is involved in. So can you give me an example of like where a gang becomes really well established and how they might operate and what their relationship might be with the authorities in the camp as well? So there is a particular point after the Second World War, so the Second World War changes a lot of things within the Gulag, within this system of labour camps. So a lot of prisoners are released to go and fight on the front lines in the Second World War. Around about a million prisoners are released just to be used essentially as cannon fodder. So they then return to the camps afterwards and there is a lot of animosity between the criminal recidivists who've stayed in the

camps and the ones who have left, because one of the biggest rules in criminal society is about colluding with the authorities. It's about opposing authoritarian structures. So there is a big rift between the criminal society and the gangs virtually split in two at the end of the Second World War. And they fight this quite prolonged period of violence which stretches quite far. It can be seen going from one camp to the next and going a reasonable distance across the camp system. Not every single camp in the Gulag at that point is involved in this fighting but a lot of them are so clearly you can see prisoners being transferred around as well and this animosity between the two groups spreads pretty much because of one of the groups

being released to fight on the front lines for the Soviet state. Wow, and they managed to communicate across camps? Well, so the collusion, collaboration with the authorities is the biggest rule in criminal society. So a lot of the camps and a lot of the prisons in there kind of understand this immediately. I mean, it's the same as criminal society on the outside and being a police informant, essentially. It's drawn from the same feelings. So it spreads around because of the prisoners and over time this war, which does have a name to it, which is probably unrepeatable on this podcast, it develops because of rumours that spread and prisoners are still being transferred between one place and the other.

And certainly there's a mythology that's kind of attached to it after a while. It becomes a kind of foundational moment for the criminal gangs who are later going to become Mafia organisations during the second half of the 20th century. Oh, hang on, that's interesting. So some of that we think today of organised Russian crime, that's got its roots in the gulags. Yeah, they emerged. There are criminal traditions they uphold from the 19th century, maybe even the 18th and before that, but certainly their big kind of moment, the criminal gangs which emerge and become organised crime, kind of mafia style organisations, that comes from the 1950s and this war that happens between this rift in criminal society between the

thieves, the Vori, and there's some really excellent scholarship on the Vori and then what they go on to do in the 80s and 90s. It all comes from this moment at the end of the Second World War. That's when they get a more detailed system of tattoos to mark who they are and which kind of affiliations that they have.

And the tattoos later go from gulag to prison to prison and fit in immediately to a kind of network that's all really there. Yeah again, so you get transferred and immediately upon arrival, the criminal gangs, the more kind of authoritative prisoners will be very interested in who you are and almost immediately with a lot of the criminal recidivists they can tell this because they can look at your tattoos, your hand tattoos but also significant tattoos which are on your chest and over time on your shoulders as well, almost like military epaulettes. So this codification system of tattoos really

develops around the time of the Second World War and its kind of aftermath. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive,

but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Are there examples of the prison authorities running the prisons through the gangs because it's actually easier to work with the grain of what's going on in the prison rather than try and stamp it out. There is a strong suggestion, this is something which, there's no archival documents, there's

no official memorandum to say let's let the criminal gangs run things and so we can suppress these other groups, but I certainly think that the spread of political ideas through the prisoners we were talking about earlier, the politicals, people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a group known as the 58ers, and they certainly think that the spread of kind of almost like Trotskyist ideas is worse than... criminal gangs are seen as being, in the words of the regime, socially close. And they're seen for a long time as being reformable as well, kind of malleable and open to different kind of cultural educational activities such as

writing prisoner newspapers and performing in a theatre. They certainly think that they'll be able to not necessarily control the criminal gangs, but they might be able to turn them into productive Soviet citizens. And they're not ideologically opposed to the regime. No, they're not. I mean, they're ideologically opposed to any kind of regime, which is the biggest problem they have, because the cultural educational activities never really work.

I mean, they work with a lot of political prisoners who are interested in writing for the newspapers and performing in the theatre, because it's similar to activities they would have done on the outside. Criminal gangs, I mean, their main pastime is playing cards and telling stories and other more kind of violent pastimes. And presumably if you're in a criminal gang, are you on lighter duties? Do you have better rations?

Well, you can certainly manipulate the situation. I mean, a lot of the criminal gangs, at least senior figures in them, just refuse outright to work for the regime, and they'll stay in the barracks. And if they continue to refuse, then they'll be sent to a kind of punishment compound. But then there's very little that the regime can do. The punishment compound is pretty much the most punitive thing that they can do while they're in the camps. So they are opposed to working for the regime, they do what they can to steal other prisoners' rations, to get the lower ranked members of criminal society, of the gangs, to go away and they basically stage card games with other prisoners. Essentially, the games are complete nonsense because everyone

cheats and everyone understands that as well, but they're used against newly arrived prisoners, you know, prisoners who are very kind of naive to the situation. And so they'll be played for food rations and for clothing and for everything else that's in there. If you can't spot the sucker at the table in the finals, you are the sucker. Well, the word that they have for the, yeah, the Russian word that they have for a lot of these prisoners is sucker, like pretty much a direct translation of that.

So yeah, they see a lot of people coming and they kind of dupe them into... I mean, this is something that happens in the 19th century. In the 19th century, they actually, because of the difference in the system, they have prison marriages which are set up where they can... Essentially, they use these

marriage ceremonies for prisoners to switch places and so someone who's a criminal recidivist will find someone who's on a lighter sentence and they'll often switch places with them and then they'll go on and they'll pretend to be that prisoner, they'll take their prisoner number, there's no photographic identification during that time so they'll use it as a way to manipulate the system and hopefully get released early. And so the reason that you're fascinated is partly what just because of the gang culture, the ink, but also its lasting impact. It's obviously got an impact on Russian society

and lasts up to the present day. Yeah, of course. I mean, I watched an incredible film called Eastern Promises, which is set in London. It's about the Russian mafia. It's got Viggo Mortensen in it. And so I watched an incredible film called Eastern Promises, which is set in London. It's about the Russian mafia. It's got Viggo Mortensen in it. So I watched that film and I found out there was a tattoo exhibition happening in Shoreditch. Went along to that and I was just dragged in by it or just completely fascinated and remain obsessed with it to this day. There are a lot of very good people doing stuff on the mafia

in the 80s and 90s, which is when that film was based and when a lot of the tattoo drawings that I saw in the exhibition are from. So I just began working my way backwards, like, let's see how far back this thing goes, and to kind of find my own niche, which happens to be a bit more in the 1920s and 30s. And what happened to the goulags? It just became the Russian prison system. Russia has this long tradition of expelling its unwanted elements to the peripheries. So a lot of the more strict Russian prisons today are located in the same place as gulag sites from the 20th century. The functioning of them has slightly changed, but certainly the locations remain the same. And a lot of the attitudes between prisoners and the guards, they continue to use the same slang, for instance, that they were using in the 1920s, 30s, 40s.

And they use the same words to describe the transportation process. So the transportation process is in wagons, and it's firstly kind of like initiated or connected to a guy called Stolypin who's very kind of senior figure in the Russian government leading up towards the revolutions in 1917. Stolypin is seen as being a very harsh man like he gains his reputation for hanging people like so they begin to use the the phrase Stolypin's necktie to refer to prisoners being hung.

But they also attach his name to wagons as well, so the transportation process becomes connected with him, and they refer to it as Stolypin wagons, something that prisoners still continue to use in Russia today. The book is called? Criminal Subculture in the Gulag. It's out now, and what's the next book? I'm working on a project. It doesn't have a title at the moment but it's an archive of the Criminal

Tattoo Collection and it should be out, so the first book is out this summer and we're hoping that the second book will be out the following summer. Do you have people following you on social media? Yeah I'm at Vincent Criminal on Twitter. Vincent Criminal. Vincent Criminal, yeah. Nice. I'm not sure how proud my parents are for that name. But, yeah, and I've got a website that you can find through my Twitter account. Thanks very much, come on the show. Great, thank you. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request.

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