Mapping the landscapes of the Stalinist mass repressions

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Pallot J and Gavrilova S.In this article, we focus on the ways in which a variety of different carceral techniques used to punish and exploit people's labour during the Stalin period (1927-1953) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) created a distinctive landscape of repression. Using the tools of historical geographic information science (GIS) to map the material landscape, we foreground space in the discussion of the USSR's exceptional history of repression. The 'carceral conditions' frame allows us to deconstruct boundaries erected over more than half a century of writing the history of the USSR that have maintained artificial distinctions between the victims and impacts of different punishment modalities. In the article, we follow the example of the Stanford Holocaust Geographies Project in combining quantitative and textual data with the spatial analytical tools of geovisualisation to reveal the patterns of events as the Stalinist repressive apparatus extended its reach across Soviet space. In fixing the geolocation of carceral institutions and layering the resultant pattern with different types of qualitative and quantitative information in the same visual space, we hope to counter some of the myths and generalizations that exist in the literature about the geography of Soviet gulag. We use the case study of Perm' region in the Urals to highlight the spatiality of the production of the material landscape of repression in one region. Our aim is to position the USSR in the now substantial geographical literature discussing the twentieth century history of crimes against humanity and genocide and to suggest to historians that the geovisualisation of data can add a new dimension their studies of the Stalin period.Peer reviewe

Ethnic and religious identities in Russian penal institutions: A case study of Uzbek Transnational Muslim prisoners

Russia has become one of the main migration hubs worldwide following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of migrant workers travel to Russia from three Central Asian countries. However, Russian immigration laws and policies are ambiguous and highly punitive. The result is that many migrants resort to undocumented status working in the shadow economy, which places them in a disadvantaged and precarious position. In this position they are vulnerable to becoming targets of the Russian criminal justice system as they take to crime to overcome economic uncertainty, become embroiled in interpersonal conflicts ending in violence, or fall victim to fabricated criminal charges initiated by Russian police officers under pressure to produce their monthly quota of arrests. The impact on Russian penal institutions is that they have become ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse sites as a consequence of the incarceration of growing numbers of transnational prisoners. Using person-to-person interviews conducted in Uzbekistan with men and women who served sentences in Russian penal institutions during the past two decades, we show in this article how the large-scale migratory processes have transformed Russian prisons into sites of ethnic and religious plurality, in which formal rules and informal sub-cultures - the colony regime, so-called thieves' law (vorovskoy zakon), ethnic solidarity norms, and Sharia law - coexist and clash in new ways compared with the status quo ante. Thus, we argue there is a need to revise the prevailing understanding about the power dynamics in Russian penal institutions. Our findings undermine the prison service's insistence of the ethnic and ethno-religious neutrality and cosmopolitanism of Russian penal space, which is presented as a latter-day manifestation of the Soviet-era 'friendship of nations' policy. Russian prisons today must be understood as sites of ethnic and religious pluralism

Prisoners’ Families’ Research: Developments, Debates and Directions

After many years of relative obscurity, research on prisoners’ families has gained significant momentum. It has expanded from case-oriented descriptive analyses of family experiences to longitudinal studies of child and family development and even macro analyses of the effects on communities in societies of mass incarceration. Now the field engages multi-disciplinary and international interest although it arguably still remains on the periphery of mainstream criminological, psychological and sociological research agendas. This chapter discusses developments in prisoners’ families’ research and its positioning in academia and practice. It does not aim to provide an all-encompassing review of the literature rather it will offer some reflections on how and why the field has developed as it has and on its future directions. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first discusses reasons for the historically small body of research on prisoners’ families and for the growth in research interest over the past two decades. The second analyses patterns and shifts in the focus of research studies and considers how the field has been shaped by intersecting disciplinary interests of psychology, sociology, criminology and socio-legal studies. The final part reflects on substantive and ethical issues that are likely to shape the direction of prisoners’ families’ research in the future

The topography of incarceration : the spatial continuity of penality and the legacy of the Gulag in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia

The aim of this article is to show how the penal estate inherited from the Soviet Union has reproduced specific penal experiences in the Russian Federation. The first part describes the evolution and current geographical structure of the penal estate showing how in the years immediately after Joseph Stalin’s death distinctive carceral regions became embedded in the Russian landscape. The second part discusses how this distinctive geography has become associated with a specific punishment form, “in exile imprisonment,” that merges incarceration with expulsion to the peripheries. In the final section it explores various ways that sending prisoners long distances to serve their sentences may be understood as punitive, adding to the familiar pains of imprisonment discussed by penal sociologists. The research on which this article is based emerges from two research projects conducted by the author among prisoners and their families during the past ten years. In English, extended summary in Russian.</em

‘Gde muzh, tam zhena’ (where the husband is, so is the wife): space and gender in post-Soviet patterns of penality

Fifteen years after the collapse of communism, post-Soviet Russian remains a ‘high-imprisonment society’, second only to the USA in the relative number of people held in prison (570 per 100 000 population compared with the USA’s 714 per 100 000). This gives a total prison population of around 800 000 people. These people are detained in penal facilities built during the Soviet era, the majority of which are in peripheral locations. Because the peripheries have been selected as ‘sites of punishment’, Russia’s distinctive ‘geography of penality’ makes the maintenance of social contacts of prisoners difficult and undermines attempts to reduce the rates of recidivism in Russia. Women are drawn into the penal complex by virtue of their relationships with the majority male prisoner population, a process which transforms them into ‘quasi-prisoners’ and reproduces gender stereotypes.