Through constant threats, he allegedly forced work-crew leaders, through intermediaries, to credit him with fake production totals. In one labor colony, a memorable exchange reportedly took place between a senior prison official and Vasya Brilliant. One day Babushkin flatly refused an order from guards to leave his cell.
When the warden heard about this unheard-of defiance, he personally came to the prisoner and immediately started shouting, demanding an explanation. Brilliant answered calmly that the warden had merely been appointed to run the prison, while the real authority there was the thief. After that, the officer turned around and left without another word. Brilliant often refused not only to come out on command but also to enter new cells assigned to him.
This happened whenever he learned that inmates who cooperated with the administration were already being held inside. His written refusals were always simple and direct, stripped of any grand language. In official paperwork, Babushkin often identified himself and signed with his invented surname—Ivanov.
According to some accounts, Vasya Brilliant used that plain alias as a quiet tribute to earlier generations of criminal elders from an old caste of offenders known as the “Ivans.” According to a popular legend, only drifters, seasoned thieves, and robbers who were considered permanently lost to respectable society could enter that privileged circle. One important rule of that closed criminal community was that a man was to have no documents at all.
Whenever arrested, a member of the group would monotonously identify himself to police as simply Ivan Ivanov. Interestingly, cellmates consistently described Brilliant as an unusually calm and soft-spoken man who never used profanity around his own people. According to inmates from one detention center in 1983, one foreign prisoner kept mixing up the nickname and calling Babushkin “Diamond.”
“What do you mean, diamond? Brilliant, you’re not from around here, are you?” Vasya would correct him, always in a joking, good-natured way. In appearance, too, this mild-looking man did not fit anyone’s picture of a hardened criminal. He was slight of build and wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses with thick bifocal lenses.
Because of serious vision problems, Vladimir even underwent a major operation that prison doctors successfully performed in the prison hospital. When he entered a new group of cellmates, no one initially guessed the quiet inmate’s status, often taking him for a small-time con man or a white-collar offender. Unlike many of his peers, Babushkin had no hang-ups about everyday chores and would readily pick up a broom and sweep the floor in the cell…
