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.
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.
Abstract
Penitentiary systems serve as breeding grounds for all kinds of diseases. Drawing upon new archival materials, this article examines the history of the management and reporting of epidemics ...in the Russian prison system from the late Imperial period to the present day. We use the case studies of cholera (1892-1893), typhus (1932-1933), and pulmonary tuberculosis (the 1990s) to examine how the general political and social conjuncture at different times affected the response of prison authorities to epidemics to show that, notwithstanding major shifts in society and polity, there was continuity in the management of epidemics by prison authorities in the long twentieth century. However, there were fundamental discrepancies in the way late Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia reported epidemiological emergencies in prisons. We argue that Russia’s tumultuous past has reinforced the tendency among the Russian penal administration towards a lack of transparency that has persisted to the present day, in relation to the latest, COVID-19, epidemic.
A characteristic feature of nineteenth-century industrialization in Russia was that much of it took place in the countryside in small factories and workshops or directly in peasant huts. These ...peasant manufactures (krest’ianskie promysly) were different from traditional peasant craft industries that served local markets, used local raw materials and household labor, and were part of the “natural economy” of the peasants. The new peasant manufactures were associated with the economic changes taking place in the nineteenth century. Improvements in transport and the expansion of demand for consumer goods meant that the goods peasants produced could reach national, and even international,
This paper identifies and addresses a significant weakness in the literature on mobility -the theorisation of mobility and power, and specifically, the consideration of mobility as an expression of ...power. It argues that the 'mobilities turn' has tended to draw a connection between mobility, autonomy and freedom, and in so doing has inadequately explored and theorised involuntary and coerced mobility. To illustrate this, the paper draws together two literatures that have thus far been poorly integrated, and that at first seem an unlikely pairing -the mobilities work that has exploded in scope and diversity over the past decade and that seeks to 'undermine sedentarist theories' in geography (Sheller M and Urry J 2006 The new mobilities paradigm Environment and Planning A 38 207-26, p 208), and the nascent field of 'carceral geography', a body of work beginning to coalesce around the spatialities of detention and imprisonment, but that, in its focus on spatial regulation, has thus far tended to overlook the mobilities inherent in carcéral practices. The two are drawn together through consideration of an example of ' disciplined mobility' -contemporary prisoner transport in the Russian Federation, which serves as an illustration both of punitive power expressed through mobility and of mobility in the carcéral context. The paper then argues that future research in mobilities must consider more fully the disciplinary nature of mobility, and suggests that the concept of 'disciplined mobility' (after Packer J 2003 Disciplining mobility: governing and safety in Bratich J Z, Packer J and McCarthy C eds Foucault, cultural studies, and governmentality State University of New York Press, New York 135-63), may form a framework for such future research.
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 (
), 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.
Gaining access to a number of penal colonies to interview prisoners, the authors show that much in the Russian prison system today is a direct inheritance from the Soviet period with the result that, ...despite wide-ranging the reforms since 1991, the Russian penal experience for women is still uniquely painful.
The article examines the processes involved in the integration of the USSR's secret places into mainstream rural society in the Russian Federation. Taking the example of one rural district in the ...Volga-Ural region that has been the site of a large prison complex over a period of ninety years, the article examines how economic changes and local government and penal reforms have eroded the boundary that marked off the penal region from the rural district in which it was located. Using interviews and social surveys conducted among the local population, the article examines the extent to which the opening of the penal sub-region has led to changes in the symbolic boundary between the communities in the rural raion. The article concludes that although new spaces of active government are being produced in rural Russia, these are not necessarily the basis for the emergence of new common identities among the people living in them.
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