Dantsig Baldayev

Dantsig Sergeevich Baldaev (Данциг Сергеевич Балдаев, 1925–2005) was a Russian Buryat soldier, jailer, folklorist, illustrator, and author of books on forensic science. English-language sources usually render his given name as Danzig.

He is known for researching the symbolic language of prison tattoos used by Russia's underworld of career criminals for nearly half a century.

Biography Dantsig Baldaev's father was (1889–1979) an ethnologist and folklorist who studied the Buryat language. His family moved to Moscow in 1930.

In 1935 Dantsig's mother died, and in 1938 his father Sergey was branded an "enemy of the people" and arrested by the NKVD. Dantsig was sent to a ChSIR (ЧСИР) concentration camp for the children of political prisoners near Tulun for two years. Sergey somehow survived and was eventually released. According to Sergey, 58 family relatives were murdered by the NKVD.

In January 1943, Dantsig was drafted into the Red Army and deployed to the Manchukuo border. After the war in 1948, fearing Sergey would be arrested again, the two moved to Leningrad. In 1951, Dantsig became a guard at Leningrad's infamous Kresty Prison. He continued to work in the MVD prison system for the remainder of his career. Later in life, Dantsig claimed he had been dragooned into working there by the NKVD.

Because his father had once been denounced, Dantsig was relegated to "menial jobs" for the MVD even after the downfall of Stalinism in the 1950s.