Given the violence in the camps and the numerical advantage of his enemies, it’s hard not to note Babushkin’s remarkable luck in surviving and remaining unbroken. Vasya Brilliant did not approve of killing as such, but these were brutal times: if you didn’t kill, someone might kill you. By some accounts, at least three men who broke with the old rules died at his hands.
He reportedly killed two of them with a signature prison method—a precise shiv strike to the heart—and strangled another. His final sentence also came from a savage act of revenge: with accomplices, he burned traitors alive in a barracks. The attack was retaliation for a close friend.
Not long before, his opponents had tortured that friend—a respected thief-in-law who refused to join them—and killed him. As a true believer in the old code, Vasya Brilliant did not seem to fear death. Fellow inmates recalled one telling episode in 1971, when a large unofficial purge was expected in a maximum-security colony.
The administration had supposedly decided to physically eliminate the most dangerous repeat offenders, and all committed thieves-in-law automatically fell into that category. The prisoners were not fed for several days, and a deep pit was dug in the middle of the camp for the bodies. On the eve of what they thought would be the final day, the thieves all put on clean underwear.
Seeing how rattled the others were, Vasya dryly remarked that being killed that day wasn’t the frightening part—the frightening part would be surviving it. Oddly enough, his calm words steadied the men, and the mass execution was suddenly called off, reinforcing his reputation as a man fortune seemed to favor. Babushkin spent nearly his entire adult life moving from colony to colony and camp to camp, where he served more than 35 of the 57 years he was given in life.
During that time, he made three failed escape attempts, was caught each time, and received additional years. He was sent to some of the harshest northern and eastern prisons and also spent time in a well-known central transit jail. In every institution, he stuck rigidly to the thieves’ code and flatly refused to work.
He dealt with prison officials only in profanity, making his contempt for the system plain. That much is clear from a dry internal report on Vladimir Babushkin dated September 1971. The document states that while serving his sentence, Babushkin showed himself to be an exceptionally negative influence and a persistent violator of prison rules.
It adds that he is a convinced repeat offender, calls himself a so-called “thief-in-law,” and uses the criminal nickname “Vasya Brilliant.” As an unquestioned authority among the camp’s criminal element, the report says, he lives as a parasite and categorically refuses socially useful labor. Instead of working, Babushkin actively robs other inmates in secret, using his enormous influence…
