But every time the prison gates opened for him, he hurried back to crime. He got into serious trouble in October 1949 while riding a passenger train. Unable to resist the temptation, he picked the pockets of fellow travelers, but this time he badly miscalculated.
The passengers noticed their missing money before the train reached the next major stop. Chapaenok decided not to jump from the moving train and surrendered without a fight when officers arrived. It’s worth noting that, thanks to older criminals who mentored him, he had firmly absorbed one unwritten rule: never resist arrest and never injure law enforcement officers.
The old-school thieves saw it this way: “We do our job, and the cops do theirs. No point getting angry if a thief didn’t pull it off cleanly.” This time Babushkin took the full hit and had no one to blame but himself. Not long before, a new decree had strengthened protections for private property, sharply increasing penalties for theft and robbery.
After hearing the defendant’s long criminal record, the rail court did not go easy on him. In January 1950, Babushkin received the maximum sentence available under his charge: a full 10 years in prison. As it happened, he entered the camps at the height of the so-called “Bitch Wars.”
This was a brutal conflict between old-guard thieves-in-law and a newer generation of criminals who favored cooperating with prison authorities. For that loyalty to the system, their conservative opponents contemptuously called them “bitches.” In spite of the danger, Babushkin accepted his coronation in one of the remote labor camps and firmly sided with the thieves who still followed the old code.
It was around that time that the newly crowned underworld figure acquired his famous nickname: Vasya Brilliant. “Vasya” was the name he always gave officers when arrested, and the second half of the alias, according to rumor, came from a cellmate who died in camp violence. Admirers who like to romanticize the criminal life offer another explanation: that “Brilliant” was a nod to Babushkin’s rarity, a man who stayed loyal to the thieves’ code to his final breath…
