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The Russian criminal was extremely class-conscious in those days. In fact, class to them was everything. In their hierarchy, big-time criminals, such as bank or train robbers, were members of the upper class. Grisha Tchorny, the head of the camp Mafia, was one of them. At the opposite end of the social scale were the petty crooks, like pickpockets. The big boys would use them as their valets and messengers and they received very little consideration. All other crimes formed the bulk of the middle class, but even there, there were distinctions.

In many ways this strange society was, in caricature, a replica of the “normal” world. In it one could find the equivalent of every shade of human virtue or failing. For example, you could readily recognize the ambitious man on his way up, the snob, the social climber, the cheat as well as the honest and generous man . . .⁷

At the very top of this hierarchy, setting the rules for all the others, were the professional criminals. Known as urki, blatnoi , or, if they were among the criminal world’s most exclusive elite, vory v zakone—the expression translates as “thieves-in-law”—Russian professional criminals lived by a whole set of rules and customs which preceded the Gulag, and which outlasted it. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the vast majority of Gulag inmates who had “criminal” sentences. The so-called “ordinary” criminals—people convicted of petty theft, infringements of workplace regulations, or other nonpolitical crimes—hated the thieves-in-law with the same passion as they hated political prisoners.

And no wonder: the thieves-in-law had a culture very different from that of the average Soviet citizen. Its origins lay deep in the criminal underground of Czarist Russia, in the thieves and beggars guilds which controlled petty crime in that era.⁸ But it had grown far more widespread during the first decades of the Soviet regime, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of orphans—direct victims of revolution, civil war, and collectivization—who had managed to survive, first as street children, then as thieves. By the late 1920s, when the camps began to expand on a mass scale, the professional criminals had become a totally separate community, complete with a strict code of behavior which forbade them to have anything to do with the Soviet state. A true thief-in-law refused to work, refused to own a passport, and refused to cooperate in any way with the authorities unless it was in order to exploit them: the “aristocrats” of Nikolai Pogodin’s 1934 play, Aristokraty, are already identifiable as thieves-in-law who refuse, on principle, to do any work.⁹

For the most part, the indoctrination and re-education programs of the early 1930s were in fact directed at thieves-in-law rather than political prisoners. Thieves, being “socially close” (sotsialno-blizkii)—as opposed to politicals, who were “socially dangerous” (sotsialno-opasnyi)—were assumed to be reformable. But by the late 1930s, the authorities appear to have given up on the idea of reforming the professional criminals. Instead, they resolved to use the thieves-in-law to control and intimidate other prisoners, “counter-revolutionaries” in particular, whom the thieves naturally loathed.¹⁰

This was not a wholly new development. A century earlier, criminal convicts in Siberia already hated political prisoners. In The House of the Dead, his lightly fictionalized memoir of his five years in prison, Dostoevsky recounts the remarks of a fellow prisoner: “No, they don’t like gentlemen convicts, especially political ones; they wouldn’t mind murdering them, and no wonder. To begin with, you’re a different sort of people, not like them .. .”¹¹

In the Soviet Union, the camp administration openly deployed small groups of professional criminals to control other prisoners from about 1937 until the end of the war. During that period the highest-ranking thieves-in-law did not work, but instead ensured that others did.¹² As Lev Razgon described it: