- Have you come across any interesting tattoos? - Judging by these questions, you clearly googled the prison camp where I served, found that it’s described as one of the harshest penal colonies in Russia, and are now imagining a place where tattooed musclemen with iron teeth stage knife fights for the right to claim the best bunk by the window. Read my interview with The New York Times. The links to the English and Russian versions are in my stories.