Damon Murray

This book reveals the importance of playing cards in Russian criminal culture. The handmade decks are beautiful works of art in their own right. Prohibited by the prison authorities, they are constructed from innocuous materials procured from the everyday routine of prison life. During construction both the cards and their designs are adroitly manipulated so they can be read. Once they are completed, the virtuoso player prowls the prison, searching for a suitable victim. This process is described here for the first time. Extensive diagrams show how the cards are made, while decks of actual prison cards are reproduced in facsimile.

Русские Уголовные Татуировки И Игральные Карты

The post-Soviet republics seen over four different seasons, by acclaimed Russian photographer, Instagram sensation and Soviet Cities author Arseniy Kotov In Soviet Seasons, Arseniy Kotov reveals unfamiliar aspects of the post-Soviet terrain in sublime photographs. From snow-blanketed Siberia in winter to the mountains of the Caucasus in summer, these images show how a once powerful, utopian landscape has been affected by the weight of nature itself. This uniquely broad perspective could only be achieved by a photographer such as Kotov. Singularly dedicated to exploring every corner of his country, Kotov often hitchhikes across vast distances. On these journeys he chronicles not only the architectural achievements of the Soviet empire, but also its overlooked or simply undocumented constructions. He writes: "In this book I want to show how beautiful and diverse the cities and nature of this vast region are at different times of the year. I have traveled widely across Russia and its neighboring countries, where I captured the landscape of post-Soviet cities and witnessed the seasonal changes."

Photographs by Arseniy Kotov

Soviet Seasons

Stephen Sorrell

Brutalist hotels, avant-garde monuments and futurist TV towers: rare and previously unpublished vintage postcards from the Eastern Bloc Brutal concrete hotels, futurist TV towers, heroic statues of workers--this collection of Soviet-era postcards documents the uncompromising landscape of the Eastern Bloc through its buildings and monuments. These are interspersed with quotes from prominent figures of the time, which both support and confound the ideologies presented in the images. In contrast to the photographs of a ruined and abandoned Soviet empire we are accustomed to seeing today, the scenes depicted here publicize the bright future of communism: social housing blocks, palaces of culture and monuments to comradeship. Dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, they offer a nostalgic yet revealing insight into social and architectural values of the time, acting as a window through which we can examine cars, people and, of course, buildings. These postcards, sanctioned by the authorities, were intended to show the world what living in communism looked like. Instead, this postcard propaganda inadvertently communicates other messages: outside the House of Political Enlightenment in Yerevan, the flowerbed reads "Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"; in Novopolotsk, art-school pupils paint plein air, their subject a housing estate; at the Irkutsk Polytechnic Institute students stroll past a 16-foot-tall concrete hammer and sickle. These postcards are at once sinister, funny, poignant and surreal.

Brutal Bloc Postcards

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia

Dant︠s︡ik Sergeevich Baldaev

Danzig Baldaev

Drawings from the Gulag consists of 130 drawings by Danzig Baldaev describing the history, horror and peculiarities of the Gulag system from its inception in 1918. Baldaev's father, a respected ethnographer, taught him techniques to record the tattoos of criminals in St Petersburg's notorious Kresty prison, where he worked as a guard. He was reported to the KGB who unexpectedly supported his work, allowing him the opportunity to travel across the former USSR.Witnessing scenes of everyday life in the Gulag, he chronicled this previously closed world from both sides of the wire. With every vignette, Baldaev brings the characters he depicts to vivid life: from the lowest zek (inmate) to the most violent tattooed vor (thief), all the practices and inhabitants of the Gulag system are depicted here in incredible, and often shocking, detail. In documenting the attitude of the authorities to those imprisoned, and the transformation of those citizens into survivors or victims of the Gulag system, this 'graphic novel' vividly depicts methods of torture and mass murder undertaken by the administration, as well as the atrocities committed by criminals on their fellow inmates.

Drawings from the Gulag

Includes two essays by Alexei Plutser-Sarno.

Damon Murray

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