'A rare and astonishing book a glimpse of a deeply secretive world that has taken the author a
lifetime to penetrate. It reveals more graphically than any Gulag history the unreformed horror
of Russia: the lack of law the rule of violence the brutality anti-Semitism and xenophobia.
And yet it is filled with a poignance and a sense of personal tragedy that brought tears to my
eyes.' - The Telegraph The photographs drawings and texts published in this book are part of a
collection of more than 3 000 tattoos accumulated over a lifetime by prison attendant Danzig
Baldaev. Tattoos 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 sometimes just strange reflecting as they do the
lives and traditions of Russian convicts. Skulls swastikas harems of naked women a smiling
Al Capone medieval knights in armour daggers sheathed in blood benign images of Christ
sweet-faced mothers and their babies armies of tanks and a horned Lenin - these are the signs
by which the people of this hidden world mark and identify themselves.
