Danzig Baldaev was born in 1925 in Siberia, the son of an ethnographer arrested as an enemy of the people. He grew up in an orphanage for children of political prisoners, served in the Second World War, and in 1948 was ordered by the NKVD to work as a warden at Kresty, one of Leningrad's most notorious prisons. He described it as forced. He stayed for the rest of his working life. Inside Kresty and the reformatories he travelled to across the Soviet Union, Baldaev built two parallel archives. The first was the criminal tattoo encyclopaedia — over three thousand designs collected across fifty years, documenting the secret visual language of the Vory v Zakone. The KGB eventually discovered it and offered their support, realising a guard who could read tattoos was a guard who could read criminals. That archive became the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, published by FUEL in three volumes between 2004 and 2008. The second archive was different. One hundred and thirty drawings made in secret, in a code Baldaev developed himself in case they were found too early, depicting what actually happened inside the Soviet gulag: torture, murder, the systematic practices the state used and officially denied. He dedicated them to Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1988. They were not published until 2010, five years after his death, as Drawings from the Gulag. His father studied cultures and the state arrested him for it. His son studied the institution that arrested his father, from inside it, for fifty years. The state never worked out which archive it should have been worried about.
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