ABSTRACT
Vory-v-zakone (thieves-in-law) were a peculiar type of criminal that emerged in the Soviet labour camps in the late 1920s. Many dissidents encountered the vory in the camps and described their behaviour. Dmitrii Likhachev, later to become one of the most prominent scholars of medieval Russian language and literature, met the vory while he was a convict at the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii canal construction site in the early 1930s.2 After his release, Likhachev wrote a fascinating yet generally ignored essay on the language of the “thieves.” He observed that the vorovskoi mir (the world of thieves) at the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii canal construction site was far from anarchical: “Despite thieves’ apparent lack of discipline, their lives are governed by a network of strict regulations that extend to the most minute matters and ultimately by a system of ‘collective beliefs’ that is remarkably uniform among criminals with different ethnic roots.”3 The vory spent most of their lives in the labour camps, consistently refusing to work. They developed an ideology of monastic purity, a ritual for the initiation into the fraternity and achieved a leading role over the blatnye, professional criminals who aspired to become vory, the highest possible honour in the criminal world. The fraternity survived until the 1950s, when it was virtually destroyed by a new generation of criminals who rejected the rules of the fraternity and clashed and eventually killed almost all of its members. Camp authorities likely encouraged the “war” against the vory, known as such ’ia voina (1948-1953).
