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Others tried to analyze it. As early as 1925, one Solovetsky prisoner speculated upon the origins of this rich vocabulary in an article he wrote for Solovetskie Ostrova, one of the camp magazines. Some of the words, he noted, simply reflected thieves’ morality: language about women was half obscene, half sickly sentimental. Some of the words emerged from the context: thieves used the word for “knocking” (stukat) in place of the word for “speaking” (govorit), which made sense, since prisoners tapped on walls to communicate with one another.²⁶ Another ex-prisoner remarked on the fact that a number of the words —shmon for “search,” musor for “cop,” fraier for “noncriminal” (also translatable as “sucker”)—seemed to come from Hebrew or Yiddish.²⁷ Perhaps this is a testament to the role that the largely Jewish port city of Odessa, once the smugglers’ capital of Russia, played in the development of thieves’ culture.

From time to time, the camp administration even tried to eliminate the slang. In 1933, the commander of Dmitlag ordered his subordinates to “take appropriate measures” in order to get prisoners—as well as guards and camp administrators—to stop using the criminal language, which was now in “general use, even in official letters and speeches.” ²⁸ There is no evidence whatsoever that he succeeded.

The highest-ranking thieves not only sounded different but also looked different from other prisoners. Perhaps even more than their slang, their clothing and bizarre fashion sense established them as a separate identifiable caste, which contributed further to the power of intimidation they exercised over other prisoners. In the 1940s, according to Shalamov, the Kolyma thieves-in-law all wore aluminum crosses around their necks, with no religious intent: “It was a kind of symbol.” But fashions changed:

In the twenties, the thieves wore trade-school caps; still earlier, the military officer’s cap was in fashion. In the forties, during the winter, they wore peakless leather caps, folded down the tops of their felt boots, and wore a cross around the neck. The cross was usually smooth but if an artist was around, he was forced to use a needle to paint it with the most diverse subjects: a heart, cards, a crucifixion, a naked woman . . . ²⁹

Georgy Feldgun, also in the camps in the 1940s, remembered that the thieves had a distinctive walk, “with small steps, legs held slightly apart,” and wore gold or silver crowns on their teeth which they had affixed as a sort of fashion: “The vor of 1943 went around normally in a dark-blue three-piece outfit, with trousers tucked into boxcalf boots. Blouse under the waistcoat, tucked out. Also a cap, pulled over the eyes. Also tattoos, usually sentimental: ‘I’ll never forget my beloved mother.’ ‘There is no happiness in life . . .’”³⁰

These tattoos, mentioned by many others, also helped to distinguish members of the thieves’ world from the criminal prisoners, and to identify each thief’s role within that world. According to one camp historian, there were different tattoos for homosexuals, for addicts, for those convicted of rape and those convicted of murder.³¹ Solzhenitsyn is more explicit: