Then there was another very unusual caste: Red Seed, whose members collaborated with the police and believed in the nonsense purveyed by the prison administrations, such as ‘redemption of the personality’. They were called ‘cuckolds’, ‘reds’, ‘comrades’, sucha, padla – all very pejorative words in the criminal community.
All the people in the middle were called Grey Seed, or neutrals. They were opposed to the police and observed the rules of criminal life, but they didn’t have the responsibilities, let alone the philosophy, of Black Seed, and they certainly didn’t want to spend their whole lives in prison.
The members of Black Seed were required to disown their relatives; they weren’t allowed to have either a home or a family. Like all the other criminals they idolized the figure of the mother, but many of them didn’t respect their own mothers; on the contrary, they treated them very badly. Many is the poor woman I’ve known with sons who, while they were in prison, declared to each other in a theatrical manner that the only thing they really missed was their mother and then, when they got out, turned up at home only to exploit her, and sometimes even rob her, because that is what their rule says: ‘Every Blatnoy – member of Black Seed – must take everything away from his home; only in this way can he prove that he is honest through and through…’
It was madness – mothers and fathers were robbed, threatened and sometimes even killed. A short and violent life, as the Black Seed described it: ‘Wine, cards, women, and then let the world come tumbling down…’, with no moral or social commitment. Their whole life becomes one long show, in which they must always demonstrate only the negative and primitive sides of their nature.
The balance between Grey Seed and Black Seed rests on a continual series of truces: the Men are more numerous, but the Blatnye are better organized in prison.
The caste of the Men has no hierarchy like that of Black Seed – respect is accorded to age and profession. The highest in rank are those who take the greatest risks – robbers and murderers of policemen. After them come the thieves, conmen, cheats and all the rest.
The Men take every decision together and follow rules of life similar to those of the Siberians, but they remain more neutral in every situation. Their motto is: ‘Our home is outside the village.’ Their criminal units are not called gangs, but ‘families’, and even in prison they form families where everyone is equal and shares everything; when necessary the families get together and become a power which knows no limits. Almost all prison riots are organized by them.
The highest Authority in that restaurant – whom I had to greet personally before doing anything else – was called Uncle Kostich, nicknamed ‘Shaber’. He was an old and experienced criminal, well-known all over the country; in our community and in my family he was highly thought of and treated with great affection. He was a calm, peaceful man with a very agreeable way of speaking. He expressed himself with patience and humility and was always clear and direct – if he had to tell you something he didn’t beat about the bush. He lived with his mother, a woman so old she seemed like a tortoise; she moved slowly but she was otherwise in very good physical shape. They owned a house and a bit of land. Uncle Kostich kept a lot of pigeons, and I went to see him now and then to swap some of mine with his. He was honest, and would always give me a few pigeons more. He would offer me chifir and then tell me a lot of interesting stories about his life. He had a daughter somewhere in Russia, but hadn’t seen her for a long time, and I think he was very sad about that.
In his youth, he told me, he hadn’t been a criminal; he used to work in a big sawmill, cutting tree trunks. But then one day he’d seen a boy get cut in two, when a trunk had knocked into him and he had fallen on the blade of a large saw. The foreman hadn’t allowed anyone to stop working even for a second; they had been forced to go on cutting the wood, getting spattered with their workmate’s blood. From that moment he’d begun to hate communism, collective work and everything the Soviet system represented.
He had been given his first prison sentence under an article of the penal code known in the USSR as the ‘Idler’. According to this article, anyone who was unemployed could be condemned as a criminal. So Kostich had been sent for three years to an ordinary regime prison in the town of Tver. During that period a war between castes was going on, and Black Seed was about to gain control of the prisons; at first not many were happy with this change, and the blood flowed like a river in spring. Kostich had tried to stay aloof from everyone, not to take sides, but gradually, as time passed, he had realized that it was impossible to live on your own in prison. He liked the Men better than the Blatnye because, he said, ‘they’re straightforward and don’t try to get anything by violence and bullying; they prefer to use words and common sense’. In prison he had joined a family which tried to live in a neutral manner, not siding with anyone in that war, but one day one of their elderly criminals had been killed by a young, ruthless Blatnoy, who wanted to weaken Grey Seed so that he could exploit its members, bending them to his own interests.
So the Men first organized a kind of peaceful resistance, and then, when they realized that this approach wasn’t producing the desired results, they decided to go to war. And they fought the war with knives. Many of them, there in prison, worked in the kitchens or as barbers (whereas the Blatnye didn’t work; it was against their rules), so they easily armed themselves with knives and scissors and wrought havoc among the Black Seed.
Kostich was very good at using a knife: he’d grown up in the country, and as a boy he’d learned to kill pigs thanks the teaching of an old First World War veteran who worked as a butcher and slaughtered pigs by running them through with a bayonet. So, after his first murders, Kostich earned his nickname ‘Shaber’ – the name of a knife. When he got out of prison, he already knew what he was going to do: he began a long career as a robber from ships on the rivers Volga, Don and Danube.
With Uncle Kostich I could speak freely, without worrying too much about rules of behaviour. Of course I was respectful, as I was towards any Authority, but I also took some liberties: I would tell him about my adventures and ask him a lot of questions, something that is not usually done in the criminal community.
Often he asked me to recite to him the poems of Yesenin, Lermontov and Pushkin, which I knew by heart, and when I’d finished he would say to his companions:
‘Did you hear that? This boy’s going to be an intelligent man one day, a scholar! God bless you, my son! Come on now, let’s hear the one about the eagle behind the bars again…’
It was his favourite piece, the poem by Pushkin which describes a prisoner’s state of mind, comparing it to that of a young eagle that has been raised in captivity and forced to live in a small cage. I used to recite it to him in a powerful tone and he would look me straight in the eye expectantly, his lips moving slowly, repeating the words after me. When I ended with the lines ‘Come, let’s fly away! We’re free birds! It’s time, brother, it’s time! There, where behind the clouds the mountain gleams white, there, where the blue of the sea is deepest, there, where I fly alone in the wind…’, he would clap his hands to his head and say in a very theatrical manner:
‘That’s just what it’s like, it’s true, that’s just what it’s like! But even if I could have my time over again, I’d do exactly the same!’
At these moments I found it moving to see how simple he was, and how beautiful and pure his simplicity was.