A prison-made sculpture featuring a Hetman’s mace lying on a football boot. Photo by Ihor Kruchyk, used with permission.

By Ihor Kruchyk  

This story is part of a series of essays written by Ukrainian artists entitled “Regained Culture: Ukrainian voices curate Ukrainian culture.” This series is produced in collaboration with the Folkowisko Association/Rozstaje.art, thanks to co-financing by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through a grant by the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. It has been translated from Ukrainian by Iryna Tiper and Filip Noubel.

For those who end up behind bars, the perception of the world changes. Time slows down. Space is limited by a perimeter of barbed wire. But no one wants to lead their life as cattle on a farm. And thus creativity awakens in many.

Pavlo Selezen, a native of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, served his sentence in correctional colony No. 116 in the city of Sumy. “Sashko Gres served his term with me. He knew how to make knives,” says Selezen. 

A prison-made knife. Photo by Ihor Kruchyk, photo used with permission.

Knives were made in the work area of the prison under the supervision of guards. Nothing could be brought back from that space into the living areas of the prison. Prisoners made many things in the colony: backgammon and chess games, boxes, icons, rosaries, cigarette holders, and pipes for smoking tobacco and hemp. The imprisoned men channeled their creativity into the work, and all of it was aesthetically appealing.

Sometimes, prison staff commissioned items.“Once a senior officer of the colony brought Gres a Cossack saber, and asked him: “Can you make one like this?” recalls Selezen. “They were preparing a gift for a general.” Gres was provided with food, tea, and cigarettes. Within a week, he made an exact copy of the saber from a car spring. 

And how are prayer beads made? “The guys melted colorful balls from ordinary plastic bottles on a lamp. Then they pierced a hole in them with a needle, and aligned the balls on a string — and that’s how you make a rosary.” The most expensive rosaries are made of ivory. Where did they get it? They sawed billiard balls in half. But usually, the material used was more affordable. “When I was still in the Chernihiv pre-trial detention center, we made rosaries and even backgammon from bread crumbs,” Selezen adds.

Matchbox with sculpted icon. Photo by Ihor Kruchyk, used with permission.

Prisoners manage to hide ritual objects even in prisons, despite multiple searches carried out daily. For example, an icon can be disguised as a matchbox. Dissident Vasyl Ovsienko, who served three terms in Soviet camps as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, recalls: “It is not easy to choose a moment in a cramped cell to go to the toilet, because either someone is eating or someone is praying.”

After his Soviet-era military service in Kazakhstan during the 1990s, my cousin Yurko Havryk returned to Ukraine and found himself penniless and jobless. He joined a gang and ended up behind bars. Gambling games were popular among prisoners, mostly dice and cards. Those were all hand-made: a dice was molded from bread, then painted with shoe polish. Holes were pressed with a match and filled with white toothpaste. The cards were made from ordinary postal paper, glued in several layers for strength.

Yurko also told me about other souvenirs: candlesticks, wooden mugs, cane knobs, Cossacks… In my collection, I have an artefact made of wood: it represents a Hetman’s mace lying on a football boot. Perhaps it was made for the Euro 2012 championship, which took place in Poland and Ukraine.

The famous Ukrainian film director Serhiy Parajanov was sentenced to five years in prison in 1974, during the Soviet period. In captivity, he became interested in collages and made them from anything: scraps of fabric, foil, pieces of barbed wire, fragments of broken dishes, magazine reproductions. In one case, he was forced to mend bags, but instead, he made a doll representing Pharaoh Tutankhamun from burlap. Parajanov was imprisoned in the Luhansk region in the east of Ukraine, where the Donbas dumps [caused by mining] reminded him of the Egyptian pyramids, and the situation of the prisoners, biblical slavery. Besides, the term “pharaoh” stands for policeman in traditional slang used by thieves. “Many of Parajanov’s collages were made in prison,” according to his Ukrainian wife Svitlana Shcherbatyuk. He made about 800 collages while in captivity. He also wrote in letters addressed to his wife about other camp artists who created “tattoo exhibitions on the backs of friends.”

Tattoo art as social identity

Pavlo Selezen has Jesus tattooed on his left shoulder and a scorpion on his neck. He says: “We had a German prisoner in our barracks, he used to make tattoos. He copied Jesus from some magazine.” In the world of camps and prisons, tattoos are a way to assert one’s identity. For example, you can distinguish between thieves, murderers, and robbers by the number of blue stars tattooed on the body, which represent what is called the “thieves’ suit.” Religious images are also popular: silhouettes of churches, the Mother of God, Jesus, and the cross. Patriotic tattoos are also common: a trident, a portrait of Bandera, or of Cossacks.

Some tattoos can be extremely cynical. The plot of “Hell's Stoker” was often carved on … the buttocks. They would draw a devil with a shovel in his upper hooves. When a person would walk, the devil on their ass would move, as if throwing coal into his anus. The devil is a character present in many prison tattoos. Older prisoners might carry a tattoo of a devil with Lenin’s face.

This kind of toughness appeals to adventurous criminals. Art critics explain that transgression is a psychological mechanism for creativity. It represents the desire to go beyond normalized boundaries, to break taboos. For sociopaths, a large part of the criminal population, delinquent behavior is characteristic when they are in the free world, and it appeals to them as well in its artistic manifestations.

Art historians have a French term for artifacts made by non-professional artists: art brut — rough, raw creativity. Or “outsider art,” meaning it stands outside of traditional art institutions. “Prison art” is created spontaneously, as if by itself, in moments of acute emotional upheaval: panic attacks, insomnia, attacks of paranoia, schizophrenia, or persecution mania. It represents an abnormal state of the artist’s psyche, when the subconscious breaks free, and allows for the effect of the uncanny.

People who are imprisoned read more than usual. They also write a lot: letters, requests, poems. Film director Oleg Sentsov, who is from Crimea, was imprisoned in a Russian occupation prison in 2014 and served five years. During this time, he wrote a series of stories. Religious scholar Igor Kozlovsky and journalist Stanislav Aseev were imprisoned in the self-proclaimed “DPR,” or Donetsk People’s Republic, created by Moscow in the east of Ukraine after it occupied most of its territory. Both recall that a few notes on pieces of paper helped them maintain their spirit and mind.

Prisoners have a lot of time to create, tell jokes or compose poems. Knowing the slang of thieves, called “feni prisoner proverbs, songs — is highly valued among prisoners. The poet Taras Lipolts, author of the book “Criminal Tales” (Kyiv, “Economics and Law,” 1998), collected prison folklore, including proverbs, poems, shameful jokes, and anecdotes. These miniatures always contain a topic relevant to prisoners. First of all, forced sexual abstinence.

Oh, it’s snowing, it’s snowing,

a white blizzard.

And my dick stands,

like a hare’s ears.

Those who are serving sentences are also interested in the correlation between crime and punishment:

You were beaten near the school -

because I drank vodka there.

I was beaten near the church -

that's where I fucked a girl.

Another favorite genre among prisoners includes proverbs. “He who understands life is in no hurry,” because he will stay in prison for a long time. Or, for example, a proverb that sums up the peculiar philosophy of criminals and their passion for life: “Life is a card game, and will is an ace.”

Women’s art

In women’s prisons, the most important self-made artifacts are the so-called “marochki”: gift handkerchiefs with colorful images and inscriptions. Flowers, elves, kittens, sailboats, or cupids are embroidered or drawn with felt-tip pens and multi-colored ballpoint pens. One of the prisoners’ favourite birds is the swan — a symbol of virginity, innocence, and fidelity. Also, the Virgin Mary and the Son of God often appear as a reminder of criminal sin and penitential repentance on such artifacts. 

A ‘marochka’ or handkerchief embroidered in prison. Photo by Ihor Kruchyk, photo used with permission

The “marochki” usually display monograms of loved ones, children, and friends — those to whom they are given. Eventually, the handkerchief is sprayed with cologne and placed in an envelope along with a letter. During the Soviet Union, when most families saw at least one person jailed or placed in labor camps, criminal amateur art became greatly respected. Today, the art of these prisoners is being exhibited in Ukraine, including at Kyiv’s Sholem Aleichem Museum and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. 

Prisoners may be deprived of rights, but many realize there are some values ​​that no one can take away from them. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right freely to enjoy the arts.” This, in fact, is one of the reasons why morally degraded prisoners become artists, carvers, and compose traditional songs such as Kolomyyki. Masterpieces are, of course, rare. However, it is likely that the artistic efforts of criminals contribute to their social rehabilitation.

Ukraine currently ranks among the highest in the number of imprisoned individuals within the Council of Europe. The strange art of prisoners is thus likely to become more visible in its many forms.