How Soviet prisons spread a secret 'language of thieves' now spoken by millions

The tricks of the jail jargon Fenya were once used to bewilder guards in Stalin's Gulags. Now they are now being used by Russian cyber-criminals.

When would you hide in a raspberry? Why don't you want to be a sixer? And what does it mean to go to the akademiya?

Russian often takes slang to complex levels, such as through Mat, its linguistic system for obscenities. But even a matershchinnik (a well-practiced master of swearing) might find the above phrases nonsensical – unless, of course, they are familiar with Fenya, the language of Russia's colossal prison system. 

This language of criminals has been deployed by underworld figures for centuries to puzzle and evade. But during the 20th Century, its curious mixture of double entendre and loan words ballooned in Soviet prisons. 

With German, Greek and Yiddish influences, Fenya is brimming with confusing hidden meanings. In Russian, babki literally means "grandmas", but in Fenya, it also means "money". Varezhka means a "mitten" but also a "mouth, while khalyava, derived from the Hebrew for "milk", is a "freebie" or "giveaway".

A single word in Fenya can contain hidden codes known only to speakers of the slang. And just as it once bewildered prison camp guards, its language tricks are now being being used online, obscuring the intent of cyber-criminals and confusing authorities. 

For instance, while the Russian words мусор or musor normally translate to "trash", its Fenya equivalent today means a cop who may have infiltrated the dark-web forums where cyber-attacks are organised. 

With Russian cyber-crime booming, investigators must now familiarise themselves with this jargon if they want to get the drop on perpetrators. Even with advances in artificial intelligence, though, machines can struggle to pick up Fenya's constantly evolving nuances.

So how did we get here? While Fenya was muttered on the streets of Tsarist Russia for centuries, it was a series of decisions taken by the Soviet justice system that resulted in its explosion into the mainstream – and ultimately onto the internet too.

Clandestine beginnings

Broadly speaking, Fenya is a type of cryptolect – a camouflaged language often used to confuse others. Today, it has burrowed into broader Russian culture to the degree that some may be unaware of words' original ties to the underworld. 

Fenya's origins are shrouded in mystery. One intriguing (though disputed) theory suggests it began with nomadic salesmen called Ofeni who travelled on foot across Russia selling religious knick-knacks. A 17th-Century church schism, the theory goes, declared their wares items heretical, so wayfaring merchants adopted their own unique modes of speech.

More is known about how Fenya spread. The vocabulary is thought to have started expanding in the 19th Century, writes Mark Galeotti, an expert in modern Russia, intelligence consultant and honorary professor at University College London, in his 2018 book The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia. It was then, he says, that street urchins and criminals started to place "fe" and "nye" sounds in the middle of words. 

These particular tics, redolent of an underworld pig-Latin, were eventually dropped, writes Galeotti. But not before gangs of pickpockets and street scammers adopted Fenya. Initiations into their crews counted on a basic understanding of it. Words and phrases were documented at length in an 1863 dictionary of living Russian,which attempted to categorise Russian as it was lived and spoken.

In Fenya, hierarchies are expressed through card-game jargon, with suits and clubs symbolising bona fide thieves. Animals take on secret double-lives as objects, so speakers know that a monkey is a mirror and a fox is a folding-knife. Altogether, Fenya's vocabulary is thought to comprise between 10,000 and 27,000 words.

Among the intelligentsia of the late Tsarist period, the tantalising suggestion of a shadow criminal society fascinated literary figures and inspired so-called vagabond music – where performers sang in Fenya and romanticised slum life.

But it was the enormous social upheaval of wars and revolution to come that really cemented Fenya's rise. 

After winning the Russian civil war and creating the USSR in 1922, the Bolsheviks experimented with expanding the country's prison camps. In these........

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