Russian Criminal Tattoos (Work-in-Progress)

If every society is a prison for the spirit, as Marx believed and Orthodox Christians accepted, then the vast hinterland of Eastern Europe has kept a restless people close to itself for a thousand years, marking them with the special signs of its power. The people of Ukraine and Russia have lived under the bonds of social restraint for so...
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Russian Criminal Tattoos (Work-in-Progress)

If every society is a prison for the spirit, as Marx believed and Orthodox Christians accepted, then the vast hinterland of Eastern Europe has kept a restless people close to itself for a thousand years, marking them with the special signs of its power. The people of Ukraine and Russia have lived under the bonds of social restraint for so long,they have developed a science of private unhappiness and a philosophy of universal guilt. What family does not have a history shared by the Gulag and the secret police? The tradition of sentencing men to long-term exile may have been borrowed from the medieval Greeks, along with the idea of Christ as Judge.The Slavic refinement was interior exile, a system of prisons built as artificial islands, where thieves and free thinkers could get to know each other in the fullness of time.

The citizens of this universal program are called zeks.

The Zek is a special kind of person: a prisoner who values his experience and is ranked according to his awareness of the rules.The thief -- who died next to Jesus on the cross -- constitutes the noble class in Eastern prisons. His sign is a upside-down Orthodox cross, tattooed on his middle finger. Murderers rank in the middle; the rapists are at the bottom. The language of zek tattoos dates to the early 19th Century, when the Russian prison system was expanded after the war with Napoleon. Now a new war looms, called Globalization, and the prisons of Ukraine and Russia are filled with men and women who wear the tattoos of Modernity, the tigers and dragons and eagles of the forbidden World outside. Still tring to figure out a plan and format of the images.

Part of a larger series on Russia.
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