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As Medvedev explains it, the camp administration were not concerned about whether particular prisoners worked or not. “For them only one thing mattered: that the mine produced gold, as much gold as possible, and that the camp stayed in order.” And, as he writes rather approvingly, the thieves did ensure that order prevailed. What the camps lost in prisoner work hours, they gained in discipline. He explained that “if someone offended someone else, they would go to the criminal ‘authorities’ with their complaints,” not to the camp authorities. This system, he claimed, kept down the level of violence and brawling, which would otherwise have been distractingly high.²⁰

Nikolai Medvedev’s positive account of the thieves’ reign in the camps is unusual, partly because it describes the thieves’ world from the inside— many of the urki were illiterate, and hardly any wrote memoirs—but mainly because it is sympathetic. Most of the Gulag’s “classic” chroniclers— witnesses to the terror, the robbery, and the rape that the thieves inflicted on the other inhabitants of the camps—hated them with a passion. “The criminals are not human,” wrote Varlam Shalamov, point-blank. “The evil acts committed by criminals in camps are innumerable.” ²¹ Solzhenitsyn wrote that “It was precisely this universally human world, our world, with its morals, customs, and mutual relationships, which was most hateful to the thieves, most subject to their ridicule, counterposed most sharply to their anti-social, anti-public kubla or clan.” ²² Anatoly Zhigulin described, graphically, how the thieves’ imposition of “order” actually worked. One day, while sitting in a virtually empty dining hall, he heard two prisoners fighting over a spoon. Suddenly Dezemiya, the senior “deputy” of the camp’s senior thief-in-law, burst through the door:

“What’s this noise, what’s this quarrel? You’re not allowed to disturb the peace in the dining hall!”

“Look, he took my spoon and changed it. I had a whole one, he gave me back a broken one . . .”

“I will punish you both, and reconcile you,” chortled Dezemiya. And he made two rapid movements toward the quarrelers with his pick; as quick as lightning he had knocked out one eye apiece. ²³

Certainly the thieves’ influence over camp life was profound. Their slang, so distinct from ordinary Russian that it almost qualifies as a separate language, became the most important means of communication in the camps. Although famed for its huge vocabulary of elaborate curses, a list of criminal slang words collected in the 1980s (many still the same as those used in the 1940s) also includes hundreds of words for ordinary objects, including clothes, body parts, and utensils, which are quite different from the usual Russian words. For objects of particular interest—money, prostitutes, theft, and thieves—there were literally dozens of synonyms. As well as general terms for crime (among them po muzike khodit, literally “move to the music”) there were also many specific terms for stealing: stealing in a train station (derzhat sadku), stealing on a bus (marku derzhat ), an unplanned theft (idti na shalynuyu), a daytime theft ( dennik), a thief who stole from a church (klyusvennik), among others. ²⁴

Learning to speak blatnoe slovo, “thieves’ talk”—sometimes called blatnayamuzyka, literally “thieves’ music”—was an induction ritual that most prisoners endured, though not necessarily willingly. Some never got used to it. One female political later wrote that

The hardest thing to bear in such a camp is the constant vituperation and abuse . . . the bad language which the women criminals use is so obscene that it is quite unbearable and they seem to be able to speak to each other only in the lowest and coarsest terms. When they started with this cursing and swearing we hated it so much that we used to say to each other, “If she was dying beside me, I would not give her a drop of water.” ²⁵