Looking at the legacy of the gulag The gulag was formally closed in 1960, yet some of its features still persist in the Russian penal system today, while other countries in the former Soviet Union have followed a different path. Researchers in the GULAGECHOES project are looking at these trajectories and the extent of ethnic discrimination in different penal systems, as Professor Judith Pallot explains. The gulag was an important part of the system of political repression in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, a network of labour camps in often very remote areas where dissidents and criminals were imprisoned. While the gulag itself was formally closed in 1960, elements of the system persisted to the end of the Soviet era, and in the case of Russia itself right up to the present day, whereas many of the former Soviet republics have followed a different approach. “Georgia, Armenia, Estonia, and the former communist countries in Eastern Europe have transformed their prison systems away from the Soviet model,” outlines Professor Judith Pallot, from the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki. The prison system in Russia still has echoes of the gulag, for example in the way that prisoners are accommodated and managed. “Once they’ve been convicted and sentenced, prisoners are sent to what are referred to as correctional colonies, where they are accommodated in dormitories of up to 120 people, sleeping in bunk beds. The dormitory, or ‘detachment’, is a whole social system, and it is handed over to what’s known as prisoner self-government,” explains Professor Pallot. This collectivism is one of the features of the prison system that has been carried over from the Soviet era to the modern day. Convicted prisoners in Russia may also be sent long distances to serve their sentences, a practice common in the Stalinist era, when Professor Pallot says labour camps were widely distributed across the entire Soviet Union. “There were camps way up in the Arctic, in the Far East, Siberia, northern Kazakhstan, and penal labour camps and colonies were scattered through the rest of the country,” she says. The penal estate contracted inwards after 1960, in large part because of releases and the expense of transporting prisoners to remote areas, yet it remains extensive today. “What the Russia has now is what I call the penal heartland, a big arc that runs from the north of European Russia, all the way down through the Volga/Urals region and into Siberia,” continues Professor Pallot. “There are still some correctional colonies in the Arctic, but the vast majority are in this sort of penal heartland area of the Russian Federation.”
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Visit of Professor Pallot in early 2022 to Lepoglava, a model panoptic-style prison in Croatia.
Gulag Echoes project As the Principal Investigator of the ERCfunded Horizon 2020 GULAGECHOES project, Professor Pallot is now investigating the history of the gulag and its legacy across the former Soviet Union, including research into the treatment and experiences of prisoners from different ethnic backgrounds.
This research covers the period from the 1930s up to the present day, with Professor Pallot and her team looking at different sources of material to build a deeper picture. “We’re using archival data on prison policy to look at how prisons were run from the ‘30s onwards. We also look at the thousands of memoirs written by victims of the gulag,” she outlines. Researchers have also been able to conduct interviews with people who served prison sentences in later periods, although this work was disrupted by the pandemic. “We have been interviewing former prisoners from the late ‘70s onwards in Russia, Georgia and Estonia, and prisoners still serving sentences in Romania,” says Professor Pallot. “We’re looking at the different paths that have been followed over the last 30 years or so by the different countries that were part of the Soviet Union.” These paths have diverged significantly. For example, Estonia closed down all its labour camps within a few years of the fall of the Soviet Union, and replaced them with just three cellular, western-type prisons. “Estonia is at the opposite, milder end of the spectrum from Russia, which has a prison system that is still based on collectivism, labour and prisoner self-government,” says Professor Pallot. One of the consequences of this prisoner selfgovernment is that a very strong gang culture
The core research team of Mikhail Nakonechnyi, Olga Zeveleva and Costanza Curro, who have been with the project for five years. They have brought the insights of historian, sociologist and anthropologist to the project.
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Abandoned mining settlement of Svernyi Kopashskiy in the Urals coalfield that was worked by gulag prisoners and German prisoners of war. The coalfield went into decline from the 1960s and was finally closed after the USSR’s collapse.
developed in the dormitories where inmates were housed, a major topic of interest in the project. “There’s a particular traditional prison sub-culture known as the thieves-inlaw, the vory-v-zakone,” continues Professor Pallot. “This is a highly institutionalised, welldeveloped prison sub-culture, which enforces a hierarchy of statuses. The sub-culture rules the barracks in many correctional colonies, rather than the prison administration. When a new prisoner arrives, they are assigned a status. The lowest status is the outcasts, who
Post-doctoral researcher, Rustam Urinboyev, during field work in Uzbekistan where he interviewed former prisoners who had served sentences in Russian correctional colonies for offences committed while migrant workers.
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are shunned and given the worst, dirtiest jobs, in the barrack.” The project team are also looking at ethnicity of those imprisoned in the gulag and the successor prison systems, an issue which has been neglected, partly due to the emphasis historically placed on class over other social differences. The Russian Federation is one of the most ethnically diverse states in the world, yet the authorities have long insisted that there is no discrimination in the prison
system. “The Russian authorities argue that the system was – and is – ethnically neutral,” says Professor Pallot. This is a topic researchers are investigating in the project, and Professor Pallot says evidence shows that, in fact, certain groups have been subject to discrimination at different periods. “In the late Stalin era, there was a drive against Jews for example, who were disproportionately likely to be imprisoned, and they had a particularly bad time in the camps,” she outlines. “Then towards the
Watch Towers, walls or fences and metal gates are typical for correctional colonies in Russia.
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