Introduction

Before getting deeper insight with this study and its dangerous world, we consider some information is necessary on the source of photographs, drawings and documentation, nonetheless the circumstances of the birth of this study.

While our "Tattooed People and Tattoo Makers" album was being released in 1987, we got acquainted with Dancig Baldajev by almost a chance, who is an Investigator in St. Petersburg and have done hundreds of drawings and notes on condemned ordinary criminals' tattoos in different prisons and work camps. As he got to know our earlier studies, worrying for his collection would be destroyed, he asked us to work it up and we accepted his request.

While the data and drawings were received in bulk through both legal and illegal channels, Sergei Vasiliev's photographer's photo drew our attention which is seen on the back cover of our book. The geometrical formations tattooed on the hand of a kissing young man were the same as the ones we already worked up, so called ring-tattooing so we were able to "decode" them, to read them.
We certainly right away looked for Sergei Vasiliev who - as he wrote it - did not know neither the meaning of these ring-tattoos nor that they are part of a so far unknown non-verbal system of signs.

At this time, in the beginning of 1990, came up the idea of writing a book and joined Sergei Vasiliev to our work and sent 1200 dramatical pictures of the inmates of the colonies in Tseliabinsk, St. Petersburg, Perm and Niznii-Tagil.Vasiliev and Baldaiev certainly knew about the book being made in Budapest, they worked thousands of miles away from each other so they did not know or see the other's work.

Not even to summarize the world and culture of the criminal organizations was easy as the data were very incomplete. There are scientific work on the culture of the Stalin and Post-Stalin era, but its "counter-culture" is hardly known. For this reason we used further to the Stalin Gulag, Varlam Salamov, Aleksander Solzenitzin, Anatolii Marcenko and others' novels, memoirs that were languished in prison among common criminals condemned in Soviet forced labor camps. The unbelievable, absurd stories are integral part of the Soviet prison folklore and "lager-mythology" and considered "scientific data" for us, ethnographers.

We are very grateful to all those condemned people who gave their bodies and faces to the cameras. This collection would not come to life without them.

Akos Kovacs - Erzsebet Sztres