A verbal message is called a ‘puff’. When an adult criminal wants to make a puff he calls a boy, perhaps one of his own children, and tells him the content of the message in the criminal language fenya, which derives from the old language of the forebears of the Siberian criminals, the Efey. Oral messages are always short and have a firm meaning. They are used for relatively straightforward, everyday matters.
Whenever my father called me to give me an oral message to take to someone, he would say: ‘Come here, I’ve got to give you a puff.’ Then he would tell me the content, for example: ‘Go to Uncle Venya and tell him the dust here is like a pole’, which was an urgent request to come and discuss an important matter. I had to set off at once on my bike, greet Uncle Venya properly, say a few conventional things which had nothing to do with the message, in accordance with Siberian tradition, such as inquiring about his health, and only then would I get to the point: ‘I bring you a puff from my father.’ Then I had to wait for him to give me permission to pass it on to him; he would give that permission, but without saying so directly. Humbly, so as not to convey the least hint of arrogance, he would reply: ‘God bless you, then, my son’, or ‘May the Spirit of Jesus Christ be with you’, indicating to me that he was ready to listen. I would deliver the message and wait for his answer. I couldn’t leave without an answer; even if Uncle Venya or whoever it was had nothing to say, he had to think of something. ‘Tell your father that I’ll sharpen my heels, go with God’, he would say to me, indicating that he accepted the invitation and would come as soon as possible. If he didn’t want to say anything, he would say: ‘As music is to the soul, so is a good puff to me. Go home with God, may he bestow health and long life on your whole family.’ Then I too would take my leave of him in the conventional way and return home as quickly as possible. The faster you were, the more highly you were appreciated as a messenger, and the better your pay. Sometimes I’d get as much as a twenty-rouble banknote (in those days a bicycle cost fifty roubles), on other occasions a cake or a bottle of fizzy drink.
We also had our own small part to play in the delivery of letters.
Letters could be of three types: the ksiva (which in the criminal language means document), the malyava (little one) and rospiska (signature).
The ksiva was a long, important letter in the criminal language. It was very rarely written, and then only by elderly Authorities, usually in order to take orders into a prison, to influence the policy of the administration of prisons, foment revolts or persuade someone to resolve a difficult situation in a particular way. A letter of this kind would be passed from hand to hand, and from jail to jail, and because of its importance was never entrusted to an ordinary messenger, only to people very close to the criminal Authorities. We boys never carried letters of that type.
The malyava, on the other hand, was the typical letter that we almost always carried, backwards and forwards. Usually it was sent from jail to communicate with the criminal world outside, avoiding the checks of the prison system. It was a small, concise letter, always written in the criminal language. On a particular day, every second Tuesday in the month, we would go and stand outside Tiraspol prison. That was the day when the prisoners ‘launched the flares’: that is, using the elastic from their underpants, they catapulted their letters over the prison wall, for us to pick up. Each letter had a coded address – a word or a number.
These letters were written by almost all prisoners and used the ‘road’ of the prison, that system of communication from cell to cell which I have already mentioned. During the night prisoners ‘sent the horses’ – various parcels, messages, letters and suchlike – along strings that ran from one window to another. All the letters were then collected by a team of inmates in the blocks nearest to the wall, where the windows didn’t have thick metal sheets over them but only the standard iron bars. From there, people called ‘missilists’ fired the letters one after another over the wall. They were paid to do this by the criminal community and had no other task in prison; they practised their skills every day by firing scraps of cloth over the wall.
To launch a malyava you first made a ‘missile’, a small tube of paper with a long, soft tail, usually made of paper handkerchiefs (which are very difficult to get hold of in prison). This tube was folded over on one side, forming a kind of hook which was fixed to one end of the elastic; then you gripped it between your fingers and pulled. Meanwhile another person lit the soft paper tail, and when it caught fire the little tube was fired off.
The burning tail enabled us to locate the letter when it fell on the ground. You had to run as fast as possible, to put out the fire and not let the little tube with the precious letter inside it get burnt. There were nearly always at least ten of us, and in half an hour we would manage to collect more than a hundred letters. Returning home, we would distribute them to the families and friends of the prisoners. We were paid for this work.
Each criminal community had its own special day on which to fire the letters, once a month. In some cases, if there was a very urgent letter, it was customary for criminals to help each other, even if they belonged to different communities. So sometimes the letters of members of other communities ended up with the letters of our own criminals, but we would still take them to the addressee. Or rather, the rule was that the person who delivered it must be the one who had picked it up off the ground, which served to prevent quarrels among us.
In cases like these we were not paid, but they usually gave us something. We would take the letters to the house of the Guardian of the area, and one of his helpers would take them and put them in a safe: later people would go to see him and say a word or a number in code, and he, if he found a letter marked with the same code, would hand it over to the addressee. This service was not paid for but was one of the Guardian’s responsibilities; if there was any trouble with the post, if a letter disappeared or none of us went to collect it under the prison, the Guardian could be severely punished, even killed.
The rospiska, or ‘signature’, was a type of letter that circulated both inside prison and outside it. It might be a kind of safe conduct provided by an Authority, who guaranteed a peaceful stay and a brotherly welcome for a criminal in places where he didn’t know anybody, for example in prisons far from his region or in towns where he went on business trips. As I have already mentioned, the signature was tattooed directly on the skin.
In other cases the rospiska was used to spread important information, for example about a forthcoming meeting of criminal Authorities, or to send openly and without any risk an order addressed to several people. Thanks to the coded language, even if the signature fell into the hands of the police it didn’t matter.
I delivered letters of this kind a couple of times: they were normal, and always open. The Authorities never seal their letters, not only because they’re in code, but particularly because the content must never throw any shadow over them; usually it has a demonstrative purpose, to exhibit the powers of the laws and spread a kind of criminal charisma.
Once I delivered a signature with an order originating from the prisons of Siberia and addressed to the prisons of Ukraine. It instructed Ukrainian criminals to respect certain rules in prison; for example homosexual acts were forbidden, as was the punishment of individual prisoners by physical humiliation or sexual abuse. At the end of this letter were the signatures of thirty-six Siberian Authorities. The signature which came into my hands was one of the many copies of the document, which was intended to be reproduced and disseminated among all the criminals in prison or at liberty throughout the USSR.
Another form of communication, called the ‘throw’, came about through the delivery of certain objects. In this case, an object which had a particular meaning in the criminal community was given to any messenger, even a child. The messenger’s task was to take it to the addressee, saying who had sent it; there was no need to wait for an answer.
A broken knife meant the death of some member of the gang, or someone close to
you, and was a very bad sign. An apple cut in half was an invitation to divide up the loot. A piece of dry bread inside a cloth handkerchief was a precise warning: ‘Watch out, the police are nearby, there’s been an important development in that case in which you’re involved.’ A knife wrapped in a handkerchief was a call to action, for a hired killing. A piece of rope with a knot tied in the middle meant: ‘I’m not responsible for what you know.’ A bit of earth in a handkerchief meant: ‘I promise I’ll keep the secret.’
There were simpler meanings and more complex ones, ‘good’ ones – intended, for example, for protection – and ‘bad’ ones – insults or threats of death.
If it was suspected that a person had relations which compromised his criminal dignity – relations with the police, say, or with other criminal communities (without the permission of his own) – he would receive a little cross with a nail, or in extreme cases a dead rat, sometimes with a coin or a banknote in its mouth, an unequivocal promise of the harshest possible punishment. This was the ‘bad throw’, the worst one, and it meant certain death.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to invite a friend to party, to have fun, to drink and enjoy yourselves, you would send him an empty glass. That was a ‘good throw’.
I often carried messages of this kind, never any bad ones. They were mostly administrative communications, invitations or promises.
Another of our duties was to organize ourselves in a decent manner so as to carry forward the glorious name of our district: in simple words, we had to be able to sow chaos among the boys of the other districts.
This had to be done in the right way, because our tradition requires that violence must always have a reason, even though the final result is the same, since a broken head is still a broken head.
We worked with the elders – old criminals who had retired and who lived thanks to the support of the younger ones. Like eccentric pensioners, they took care of us youngsters and our criminal identity.
There were many of them in the district, and they all belonged to the caste of the Siberian Urkas: they obeyed the old law, which was despised by the other criminal communities because it obliged you to follow a humble and worthy life, full of sacrifices, where pride of place was given to ideals such as morality and religious feeling, respect for nature and for ordinary people, workers and all those who were used or exploited by the government and the class of the rich.
Our word for the rich was upiri, an old Siberian term for creatures of pagan mythology who live in marshes and dense woodland and feed on human blood: a kind of Siberian vampire.
Our tradition forbade us to commit crimes that involved negotiating with the victim, because it was considered unworthy to communicate with the rich or government officials, who could only be assaulted or killed, but never threatened or forced to accept terms. So crimes like extortion, or protection rackets, or the control of illegal activities through secret agreements with the police and the KGB, were utterly despised. We only did robberies and burglaries, and in our criminal activities we never made agreements with anyone, but organized everything ourselves.
The other communities didn’t think like this. The younger generations, in particular, behaved in the European and American way – they had no morality, respected only money and endeavoured to create a pyramidal criminal system, a kind of criminal monarchy, something quite different from our system, which might be compared to a network, where everyone was interconnected and no one had personal power and everyone played his part in the common interest.
Already when I was a boy, in many criminal communities the individual members had to earn the right to speak, otherwise they were treated as if they didn’t exist. In our community, by contrast, everyone had the right to speak, even women, children, the disabled and the old.
The difference between the education we had received and the education (or lack of it) received by members of the other communities created an immense gap between us. Consequently, even if we weren’t aware of it, we felt the need to assert our principles and our laws, and to force others to respect them, sometimes by violence.
In town we were always causing trouble; when we went into another district it would often end in a fight, with blood on the ground, beatings and knifings on both sides. We had a fearsome reputation; everyone was scared of us, and this very fear had often led to our being attacked, because there’s always someone who wants to go against his natural instincts, to try his luck and attempt to overcome his fear by attacking the thing that causes it.
A fight wasn’t always inevitable; sometimes by diplomacy we managed to persuade someone to change his mind, and there would only be a few punches thrown on both sides, after which we would start talking. It was nice when it ended like that. But more often it ended in bloodshed, and in a chain of ruined relations with an entire district, relations which after their death it was very hard to revive.
Our elders had taught us well.
First of all, you had to respect all living creatures – a category which did not include policemen, people connected with the government, bankers, loan sharks and all those who had the power of money in their hands and exploited ordinary people.
Secondly, you had to believe in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and love and respect the other ways of believing in God which were different from our own. But the Church and religion must never be seen as a structure. My grandfather used to say that God didn’t create priests, but only free men; there were some good priests, and in such cases it was not sinful to go to the places where they carried out their activities, but it definitely was a sin to think that in the eyes of God priests had more power than other men.
Lastly, we must not do to others what we wouldn’t want to be done to us: and if one day we were obliged to do it nonetheless, there must be a good reason.
One of the elders with whom I often discussed these Siberian philosophies used to say that in his opinion our world was full of people who went down wrong roads, and who after taking one false step went further and further away from the straight path. He argued that in many cases there was no point in trying to persuade them to return to the right road, because they were too far away, and the only thing that remained to do was to end their existence, ‘remove them from the road’.
‘A man who is rich and powerful,’ the old man would say, ‘in walking along his wrong road will ruin many lives; he will cause trouble for many people who in some way depend on him. The only way of putting everything right is to kill him, and thereby to destroy the power that he has built upon money.’
I would object:
‘But what if the murder of this person were also a false step? Wouldn’t it be better to avoid having any contact with him, and leave it at that?’
The old man would look at me in amazement, and reply with such conviction that it made my head spin:
‘Who do you think you are, boy – Jesus Christ? Only He can work miracles; we must only serve Our Lord… And what better service could we do than to remove from the face of the world the children of Satan?’
He was too good, that old man.
Anyway, because of our elders we were certain that we were in the right. ‘Woe betide those who wish us ill,’ we thought, ‘because God is with us’: we had thousands of ways of justifying our violence and our behaviour.
On my thirteenth birthday, however, something happened which gave me a few doubts.
It all began like this: on the morning of that freezing cold February day, my friend Mel came round to my house and asked me to go with him to the other side of town, to the Railway district, where the Guardian of our area had ordered him to take a message to a criminal.
The Guardian had told him he could take only one person with him, no more, because it was ill-mannered to take messages in a group: it was considered to be a display of violence, almost a threat. And Mel, unfortunately, had chosen me.
I had no desire to go all that way in the cold, especially on my birthday: I had already arranged wi
th the whole gang to have a party at my uncle’s house, which was empty because he was in jail. He had left his house to me, and I could do what I liked there, as long as I kept it clean, fed his cats and watered his flowers.
That morning I wanted to get things ready for the party, and when Mel asked me to accompany him I was really disappointed, but I couldn’t refuse. I knew he was too disorganized, and that if he went on his own he was bound to get into trouble. So I got dressed, then we had breakfast together and set off for the Railway district. The snow was too deep to cycle, so we walked. My friends and I never went by bus because you always had to wait too long for one to come; it was quicker on foot. As we walked we usually talked about all kinds of things – what was happening in the district or elsewhere in the town. But with Mel it was very hard to talk, because Mother Nature had made him incapable of constructing comprehensible sentences.
So our conversations took the form of a dialogue conducted entirely by me, with brief interjections of ‘Da’, ‘A-ha’, ‘M-m-m’, and other minimal expressions which Mel could emit without too much effort.
Every now and then he would stop dead, his whole body would freeze and his face would become like a wax mask: this meant that he hadn’t understood what I was talking about. I would have to stop walking too and explain: only then did Mel resume his usual expression and start moving and walking again.
Not that his normal face was a thing of beauty – it had a fresh scar running right across it, and a hole where his left eye should have been. This was the result of an accident he had caused himself. He had handled the explosive charge of an anti-aircraft shell clumsily, and it had blown up a few centimetres away from his face. The long series of surgical operations to reconstruct his face was not yet complete, and at this time Mel was still going around with that horrible gaping black hole on the left side of his face. It wasn’t until three years later that he got a false eye, made of glass.
Siberian Education Page 11