Gulag Slang for Backyard Boys
Zura Jishkariani
EDITORIAL, STURM AND SLANG, ARCHIVE
"When the sky ends there, we say: Oh, the little paper boats were carried away by the river and killed."
— Dato Barbakadze
“We are helped by the Red Cross and other crosses too.”
— Eduard Shevardnadze, the second president of Georgia.
— Dato Barbakadze
“We are helped by the Red Cross and other crosses too.”
— Eduard Shevardnadze, the second president of Georgia.
01. King Shulgi and Rapper Kids
On a hot summer evening, I sat down to write this text to the voices of children in the Italian courtyard outside. They were rapping. With primitive rhymes and primitive words, a thin-voiced boy, no older than thirteen or fourteen, demonstrated to his opponent who was the stronger one — the more dangerous and the cooler of the two. Each witty line or insult was followed by cheers and claps of excitement from the boys and girls gathered around. This lively process reminded me of something — something both distant and familiar.
“I am Shulgi, a wild bull of acknowledged strength, a lion with wide-open jaws! Hero of battle — I have no rivals!” said Shulgi the Sumerian King at the dawn of civilization, forty centuries ago. The Shulgi Hymns contain great boasts of the king’s physical prowess, his intellectual abilities, and his accomplishments. His words reflect the same swagger and displays of dominance as the raps of the boys outside my window. “In the turbulent affray of battle, in the conflict,” says Shulgi, “I shoot out my tongue, a muchuc darting out its tongue at the foreign lands, a dragon raging at men.”
King Shulgi’s emphasis on language is striking. Violence is always followed by language — or perhaps it is the other way around — perhaps language comes first, bringing violence along with it, as if it had been created for such a purpose. An individual may endure prison and torture and yet emerge unbroken, but for every one of us there exists some combination of words able to break us. Some say such a combination exists for the world itself. In this way, the pillars of dead kings and the rhymes of living boys may each be thought of as segments of one continuous flow, which, who knows, may flow until humanity’s final hour (and perhaps even bring about that hour). As the Biblical existentialist once said, long ago: ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’
Domination, violence, and the appropriation of language as a weapon — these are ongoing processes found in the history of everyday life. The most vulnerable age groups are the easiest conscripts into the production of violence, and they often become the most brutal. This text is dedicated to them. Before we continue, I will ask you to imagine the Internationale of Wild Children — from the suburbs of Mumbai to the favelas of Rio. They engage not only in symbolic domination but also physical confrontation. This world is a world of tribes, gangs, one-week-bosses, lone wolves, etc. These reenactments of war, performed off-stage, are archetypal initiations shaped by urban planning. I was once there.
My generation is the first to grow up in a post-Soviet independent Georgia. Among the crumbling buildings and crumbled institutions of government, we received a revelation in streets full of winter, and learned a secret that became a memory, like a dream that slipped from mind a moment ago, only to be recalled suddenly in the right moment years later. In this essay, I will attempt to tell you how the collapse of society is regulated — through a language born of the gulag.
02. Days of War
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Georgia declared its independence. This happened March 31, 1991. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence, I’m not sure, but this was also the birthday of the first president. Thus Georgia awoke from another century-long coma, only to discover that reality was far more nightmarish than any visions of the night. Eight months later, a playwright-turned-thief-in-law directed a criminal-military organization of his creation to make its way toward the parliament.
Thus began the war of Tbilisi. The elected government fell, and within a month the Ossetia war broke out. Within a year, fighting also erupted in Abkhazia. The newly established Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus threw its support behind the Abkhazians. The Georgians lost these wars. At some point, a war was ongoing in Samegrelo. The entire region was engulfed in flames. To the south, an Armenia-Azerbaijan war was raging. To the north, Chechnya was fighting Russia.
During this period, we were undergoing an uneven process of socialization through the implementation of anti-social programs. We had neither power nor heating, and to keep our stoves burning, the men cut down the beautiful rows of trees planted along our city streets. Only the stations for scrap metal remained active — the entire city and all the factories were turned in for scrap. To our seaside town, where we had sought refuge after fleeing the war, the state delivered nothing but its disapproval, as only a small portion of the Western aid arriving at our port made its way to the center, to Tbilisi. Captains of small boats would sail out to sea, catching anchovies to distribute to the people.
The monster of myth became a label on a can of humanitarian aid — “USA”. Itinerant preachers with a panduri in hand. An Iranian lamp with a mirror.
03. Counterculture or Anti-culture?
Researches, in the study “The Codes of the Street in Risky Neighborhoods: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Youth Violence in Germany, Pakistan, and South Africa,” highlight the following factors driving the development of violent street culture: social and structural problems such poverty, the absence of guardians, and distrust in state institutions. Accordingly, political and national wars did not monopolize national narratives, for the frontline passed through everyday life, and everyday life was passed on the streets.
Official narratives on the global wire encountered a local competitor in the secretive culture of the criminal underworld. This was the domain of the “thieves-in-law,” a network of loyalty ruled by figures whose authority lay somewhere between that of a mob boss and an urban general. To be ordained a thief-in-law required an anointing by another thief-in-law. They held power and enjoyed “immunity,” whether in prison or on the street.
Gageba (“an understanding”) found a foothold in every domain. Although this system of “understandings” was not new, it was quickly reconfigured to meet the imperatives of the post-Soviet era.
This culture first emerged as an unwritten law in the colonies of the gulag — a secret code of rituals and the language of survival, forged under the unnatural conditions of prison. In the five years following Stalin’s death, this culture escaped captivity.Mass amnesty freed four million people from the gulags. As former inmates returned to cities, the code of conduct that governed the imprisoned became the code of the released. This created contradictions in how reality was processed, but if we may consider the Soviet Union a “prison of nations,” then whether inside the gulag or out, everyone was, in one way or another, locked up.
Thus, a criminal culture spread to all the republics of the Soviet Union, though in Georgia it found its fullest expression. A country with a population of only three million, this small nation eclipsed the productivity of its sister republics in both the number and influence of its thieves.
This high rate sparked some resentment and pushback, with Georgian thieves often labeled "oranges" by Russian counterparts — a term suggesting anointment through nepotism or other special arrangements, rather than earning their status through prison time and the true criminal path.
Dr. Gavin Slade, in his work “Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia,” quotes Chalidze (1977): "The thieves’ world deserves to be regarded as a social institution since it has its own internal cohesion and ethical code."
To accelerate the radicalization of this culture, additional catalysts were required. Such elements soon appeared in parallel: war and economic depression. Georgia was introduced to capitalism, and suddenly more money than anyone had seen in Soviet times appeared. The rise of black markets - Les Fleurs du Mal. The privatization of lands, rivers, and mines. The state was powerless and the police weak, and thus the people appealed to criminals for justice, for protection, and to resolve their disputes.
Dr. Gavin Slade writes: "The presence of a massive second economy does not by itself give rise to a mafia. There must be a supply of people with necessary skills in dispute resolution, protection provision, and, fundamentally, in violence. The thieves-in-law were a criminal status group that had a competitive edge in providing this supply. They already had many pre-existing assets — a brand name that communicated a reputation for respectable toughness, a code of honor that included prescribed sanctions and rewards, and rituals transferred from the Gulag subculture outside prison walls. To some degree, they were the main representatives of not merely penal subculture but an anti-Soviet counterculture."
Consequently, life turned black on every level. “Turned black” is an old gulag expression referring to the criminalization of prison life through violence. It implies the elimination of “the reds” — informants, snitches, and police. Wild children, too, were swept up in this reorganization of resources, spheres of influence, neighborhoods, and human souls.
04. The Language
"I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction,” declared that great French thinker, the Apostle of the Sun, Georges Bataille. There is much truth in this statement. No “expansion of consciousness” is more accessible, simpler, or as free as a fist to the face, forcing your eyes shut and upon the canvas of eyelids, you see fireworks of all sizes, an explosion of neurons and galaxies. The body releases a great dose of adrenaline, and in that moment you will never feel so alive. Perhaps this is what the animals, banished from cities, have known, from our seizure of monopolies of violence.
But this was not the only method. According to the unwritten law, before or after any khipishi (confrontation), a bazari (a talk, a discussion) should take place — a garcheva (clarification), where truth (i.e. dominance) was established through the use of words. What distinguishes the Georgian example from the majority of the world's streets is this emphasis on a competition of language — a channeling of violence into narrative analysis. Once, I was present at a streli (a meeting), where some fifteen aggressive youths stood on one side, while from the other came only two. Of these two, one spoke with such mastery that no one laid a hand on them. On one side strength, and on the other — the power of words.
There was a time when it seemed as if the entire country was talking, with some discussions so significant that they passed almost instantly, from person to person, neighborhood to neighborhood. They spread through schools as snow fell, and the teacher threw wood into the stove. They were repeated on the seashore with a Gali joint in hand, and recounted in the park with the falling autumn leaves, and shared on New Year’s Eve. The shkodka (gathering) were attended by dozens, sometimes hundreds of thieves, and the stories told by criminals were recorded like the archives of central meetings of the Communist Party. The skhodka was a kind of de facto parliament, where pressing issues were decided through bazari, including matters of official governance by the state. There was also the blatnoy, a genre of music where bards sang of prison, of separation from family, of ill-fated love, and of the hard life of a tough guy. And just as Dante placed the souls of sinners into different circles of hell, so society was divided hierarchically, with the “thieves-in-law” on top and the lowest of the hellish circles reserved for pedophiles, informants, and homosexuals. The last of these were called tsisperi (sky blue) — even the most beautiful words can be used to dehumanize. Everyone else found themselves in the middle, moving upwards and downwards as if on an escalator. This was referred to with a Russian word — “масть” — which denotes the categories into which a deck of cards is divided — much like the French suits of trèfles (clovers or clubs ♣), carreaux (tiles or diamonds ♦), cœurs (hearts ♥), and piques (pikes or spades ♠).
The language regulating the collapse of society was both coded and precise, and served as a tool to impose order amidst chaos. For us, this was a new language — a blend of kivruli the Judeo-Georgian dialect with Megrellian rhythms and a secret Russian criminal lexicon where, for some reason, “futurist” was an insult — a word that brilliantly reflected the point of contact between criminal culture and the world of avant-garde art completely unknown to us.
Simply put, the culture was characterized by its own living, ever-renewing folklore and charismatic personalities. And listening to these was far more captivating than any session of parliament, where they did not possess the art of words, only the impossibility of words.
05. To the Defeated
Now in my city, this chaos has become a thing of the past, but the region and conditions remain fragile. There is no guarantee, nor an illusion, that something similar — or even worse — won’t happen again for our children. Still, I nevertheless find comfort in reassessing our childhood.
Looking back, I think that perhaps bazari was popular, not only for its practical criminal function but because the world before our eyes had seen failure so many times. After all, war is the herald of failed conversation, and perhaps it was only through bazari that anyone felt as if they had control over their destiny.
Early on, we confronted lessons for which we were not yet prepared. For instance, one such lesson was that any totalitarian ideology is a cruel illusion, crafted with such precision that it becomes difficult to distinguish from reality, especially when reality no longer resembles itself.
I came to a late understanding that poetry also is not so far removed from the fevered confrontations of the street — not least in the intensity of the emotional impulse. There is cruelty too, but in contrast to confrontation, poetry is not much interested in domination. Perhaps it is more correct to say that in poetry, we all discover our own end in beautiful defeat.
And when I think back on all those boys, I realize that they, too, were already defeated — whether of status high or low. They mastered a language that had no place beyond the walls of their prison. They knew how to fight, but they did not know how to love.
Violence has a remarkable capacity to adopt the forms of local culture, arming itself with the lexicons and languages of the oppressed. To appear, this requires neither war nor social collapse — it slips through the cracks and crevices of any system, like night, like the spread of darkness rousing primal instincts and awakening the death drive even in the sleeping mind. I saw fragments of eternal conflict interwoven with the narratives of neoliberal capitalism and nationalism. And I know that young people around the world face similar struggles — even those in the eternal suburbs — they too are defeated.
It is with these defeated souls that I feel an extraordinary closeness. My words belong to them, dedicated to the defeated.
Drawings by Ana Gzirishvili, Untitled, 2024, Aquarelle Pencil on Paper.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Zura Jishkariani, a writer and self-proclaimed mayor of Sukhumi, is an IDP from Abkhazia. His first novel "Chewing Dawns" received the Saba Literary Award for Best Debut and the Ilia State University Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2017. In his latest work "Tanapha" (2024), the author explores flat ontology, authenticity, sacred and border situations, introducing main characters that are not human beings.
Alongside literature, Zura is known for musical projects such as Kung Fu Junkie, described as “second-hand techno,” and Kayakata - psychedelic hip-hop prayers for urban warriors.
By blending programming languages, personal experiences, and psychogeography, he has created diverse multidisciplinary works: the movement “illegal kosmonavtika,” which aimed to explore if the survival tactics used by Zura and his generation of war children in 90’s post-Soviet Georgia could be applicable to survival in a post-societal world in caseof massive societal collapse (2008);
a sentence erected on a Soviet building in Tbilisi suburbs with Tbilisi Public Art Fund (2024); interactive oracle avatars at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2018);
a ship suspended in the air and connected to the sea at the SOU Festival (2017);
and the first Georgian-language chatbot in 2010-2012, which was a textual interactive simulacrum of a Georgian poet, used by many teachers in their classrooms, among other projects.
Today, he is studying sociology at Tbilisi State University and plans to pursue a master's degree in Europe.