Illustrated men

The Mark of Cain 2000 U.S./Russia (73 minutes) directed and co-produced by Alix Lambert; cinematography Anastasi Mikhailov.

This documentary works within the context of the barbaric conditions of the Russian prison system to tell the stories of two dozen men and women inmates who have illustrated their lives in tattoos.

The legend is that ‘traditional’ Russian criminal society, the so-called vóry v zakóne, or ‘thieves who follow the code’ (the literal cardboard rendering ‘thieves-in-law’ suggests in English the agency of a spouse’s family), has a hierarchical structure, and that its members’ lives and careers are memorialized in elaborate nakólki, or tattoos, which identify them like a resume, passport, or military badges, rank and insignia.

Their stories are bleak and intense; the illustrations are elaborate. The scariest-looking subjects often seem calm and philosophical; some of the friendlier ones give off a vibe that makes one feel it would be better not to meet them in a crowded, day-lit street, much less alone in a dark alley. Several camera-curious, genuinely frightening-looking characters drift occasionally through the background. Russian criminal society may be male-dominated, but women appear to hold their own throughout the ranks.

Prison rules prohibit tattooing, but the visual evidence indicates that officials do not strictly enforce them. The pain the procedure can cause lends to its mystique.

We see stars on pecs and knees (‘I don’t bow or kneel to authority’), torso-covering churches for which each cupola stands for a conviction, spiders on webs (thief, or drug addict), and heavily muscled, hooded executioners or Christs on the cross (‘I follow the thieves’ code’). Sailing ships indicate a ‘roving life.’ German and Nazi symbols display disdain for conventional social norms and authority, as with 1950s American bikers, not pro-Nazi or racist views.

During the Soviet period, prisoners facing death sentences sometimes tattooed images of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin over their hearts, chests and backs, on the theory that guards would not dare mar such sacrosanct images with bullets.

However, any ‘tradition’ of tattooing and what the images mean seem open to a variety of interpretations. Several subjects said there are serious consequences for not being able to ‘answer’ for one’s markings. But among younger inmates, tattooing would work more along the line of creating a criminal Facebook page. As in other things, the more display suggests the less actual play.

According to Colonel Anatoli Teryokhin of Perm Central Penitentiary, tattoos fell from fashion among an element in prison and in the military among whom certain symbols and images once held specific meanings. Like everything else in the New Russia, tattooing is not what it used to be.

One of the most interesting details Lambert records is not a ‘what’ but the ‘how.’

Aleksandr Borisov, a career criminal doing nine and a half years for robbery, was the tattoo artist-in-residence at Perm Central Penitentiary, a high-security facility where Lambert and her crew appear to have done most of their interviews.

Borisov improvised a rotary tattoo machine from a hand-held mechanical wind-up razor. His ‘needle’ is a five-inch (13 cm) section of metal guitar string with one sharp end, mounted on the razor housing. The blunt end attaches to a lug on the razor motor and the sharp end trains through a repurposed ballpoint pen tip fixed to the other end of housing. The razor motor agitates the needle quickly up and down.

For ink, Borisov used the finely sifted soot of burnt boot sole dissolved in urine—preferably a client’s own. ‘I use only soot,’ Borisov said. ‘It turns out darker, doesn’t fade over time, and everything comes out bright.’

Lambert could not have picked a better time to make this film. She shot it in the late 1990s. Her subjects disparage the post-Soviet, moneyed New Russia of Boris Yel’tsin, Russian president from 1991-1999. This phase ran roughly from the last geriatric gasp of the Soviet Union in the failed 1991 August Coup to the dawn of the age of Vladimir Putin, who became president in 2000.

The result is a living document of an important transitional period in the country’s history, as well as in the history of the penal system that came out of the 1917 Revolution, which former political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled extensively as the GULag Archipelago. (GULag is a Soviet-era acronym for Glávnoe Upravlyénie ispravítel’no-trudov‎ykh Lágerei, which means Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps.)

‘The GULag still exists,’ said Valerii Abramkin of the Center for Prison Reform and a former prisoner at the notorious Byélyi Lyébed’, or White Swan, Prison in Solikamsk in Perm Oblast’. ‘The GULag is not only a system of camps. It is an unscrupulous, abundant, and incredibly cruel “repression”.’

Lambert shot footage inside White Swan but did not interview any then-current inmates. The prison was set up and run on Soviet state security founder Felix Dzerzhinsky’s principle that ‘prisoners could be made to eradicate each other all by themselves,’ said former inmate Slava Yermanov. The institution’s original task was to ‘break’ clergymen. Since the Khrushchev era thaw, the Interior Ministry has used it to ‘soften’ the hardest vory and ‘to solve unsolved crimes,’ Abramkin said.

Abramkin and Yermanov described the most notorious and effective method that White Swan authorities employ, called press-kámera, or ‘cell press.’ They place an inmate they want to break in a crowded cell with other inmates—‘crocodiles in a hole.’ The result is a free-for-all in which the other inmates may do as they like with him, which usually turns the hardest case into an ‘amoeba,’ Abramkin said.

Lambert tells an incredible tale. It is hard to imagine any Russian government before Yel’tsin’s, and certainly not Putin’s afterward, allowing a foreigner, especially a curious American woman, such open access to so unvarnished an aspect of Russian life.