Steidlville

The photographs, drawings and texts which make up the Encyclopedia are part of a collection of 3,600 tattoos compiled over 33 years in St Petersburg’s notorious Kresty prison by one of the prison guards, Danzig Baldayev. The tattoos were his passport into a secret world where he became something of an ethnographer, recording the secrets of a closed society.
The tattoos are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and sometimes simply strange, reflecting the lives and mores of the convicts. There are skulls with swastikas, naked women, a smiling Al Capone, assorted demons, medieval knights in armor, daggers and blood, benign images of Christ, mosques and minarets, sweet-faced mothers and babies, tanks and a horned Lenin.
Once the criminal language and tattoos were the codes of a restricted world, but the language has filtered into society — the tattoos remain a secret.