Patriotic Discourses in Russia's Penal Peripheries: Remembering the MordovanGulag

Abstract

Using materials gathered during field work in the penal region in the southwest corner of the Republic of Mordoviya in 2007, the authors examine the official representations of the history of the Mordovan gulag from 1930 to the present day. Through an analysis of the penal authority's institutional newspaper, its museum and anniversary celebrations marking the founding of the Mordovan gulag, the authors argue that a stress in the official history on continuity and tradition of service is evidence of growing confidence of this part of the security apparatus after their loss of status in the 1990s associated with the collapse of the penal economy and negative comment by international monitors and domestic penal reformers.

Leaving behind the ‘total institution’? Teeth, transcarceral spaces and (re)inscription of the formerly incarcerated body

“…With this in mind, and before presentation of empirical material, some discussion of the Russian penal context of this research is required. In Russia, the legacy of the Stalinist Gulag and later Soviet imprisonment practices has generated a particular penal geography (Moran 2004;Piacentini 2009, 2011;Moran 2010, Pallot and. Although the contemporary penal system is fundamentally different from its Soviet predecessor, amongst the continuities with the Soviet period are high imprisonment rates, and the fact that prisoners, and particularly women, are still sent to geographically peripheral locations to serve their sentences.…”

COVID-19 and European carcerality: Do national prison policies converge when faced with a pandemic?

“…In addition, the relationship between overcrowding and infectious and communicable diseases is still under-researched (Simpson et al., 2019). Crowding can also work very differently in different carceral settings: while crowding may result on one kind contagion dynamic in individual cellular accommodation, communal life in barracks typical of the Russian system and some postsocialist states (Badcock and Pallot, 2018; Pallot et al., 2009) would require very different strategies of enforcing social distancing, and infections may spread at a faster rate.…”

From monuments to mahallas: contrasting memories in the urban landscape of Osh, Kyrgyzstan

“…These interviews were also supported by ethnographic fieldwork and the collection of secondary documentary and photographic sources, providing a multifaceted image of events on the ground. The ethical and practical challenges of undertaking fieldwork in Osh were numerous, as can often be the case when undertaking fieldwork in the post-socialist context (De Soto & Dudwick, 2000;Pallot, Piacentini, & Moran, 2010). These included the potential antipathy of local security services to researchers operating in Osh (International Crisis Group [ICG], 2012a; Kloop, 2014), and participants' caution regarding audio recording of interviews, which resulted in many being recorded in note form.…”