Periodic Reporting for period 4 - GULAGECHOES (Gulag Echoes in the “multicultural prison”: historical and geographical influences on the identity and politics of ethnic minority prisoners in the communist successor states of Russia Europe.)
Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-08-31
The Gulagechoes project goes to the heart of a problem that has engaged scholars, the public and politicians in recent decades. As the number of prisoners in western jurisdictions drawn from indigenous ethnic minorities and recent in-migrants has grown, offenses committed by recently released prisoners have fuelled popular speculation about prisons as sites of terrorist recruitment. The premise informing the project is that before such speculation can be confirmed, we must understand the varied processes that shape the experiences of ethnic minority groups in prison. The post-communist countries include some of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe providing a unique opportunity to examine the treatment and experiences ethnic minorities passing through their prisons.
The research’s main objective was to compare the treatment of ethnic difference in prisons in six case study countries - Russia, Georgia, Romania, Estonia, Ukraine and Croatia and among transnational prisoners serving sentences in a foreign country - Uzbek labour migrants in Russia, Russophone migrants in Estonia and Roma throughout region. Using archival, published sources and expert interviews, the project charted changes in policy towards ethnic minorities at various levels of penal governance and over time. This was to provide the context for taking ethnographic life-history interviews with prisoners and former prisoners from different ethnic minority groups. The aim was to uncover how the patterns of adaptation of ethnic minority prisoners to prison are influenced by personal factors and country-specific styles of imprisonment.
The project aimed to advance penological theory on the ethnic identity formation among prisoners and to contribute critically to theoretical debate about prisons as sites of political radicalisation. Today, insider/outsider notions of national belonging are being used to shore up populist agendas in Eastern Europe, while rehabilitative and desistence interventions that fail to pay attention to the needs of ethnically and cultural distinct groups has led to stigmatization of ethnic prisoners. Meanwhile, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has catapulted the need to understand states’ use of prisons in times of peace and war up research agenda. The Gulagechoes project not only has addressed fundamental questions about minority prisoners’ rights, but that are also relevant to peace and security in Europe.
The research’s main objective was to compare the treatment of ethnic difference in prisons in six case study countries - Russia, Georgia, Romania, Estonia, Ukraine and Croatia and among transnational prisoners serving sentences in a foreign country - Uzbek labour migrants in Russia, Russophone migrants in Estonia and Roma throughout region. Using archival, published sources and expert interviews, the project charted changes in policy towards ethnic minorities at various levels of penal governance and over time. This was to provide the context for taking ethnographic life-history interviews with prisoners and former prisoners from different ethnic minority groups. The aim was to uncover how the patterns of adaptation of ethnic minority prisoners to prison are influenced by personal factors and country-specific styles of imprisonment.
The project aimed to advance penological theory on the ethnic identity formation among prisoners and to contribute critically to theoretical debate about prisons as sites of political radicalisation. Today, insider/outsider notions of national belonging are being used to shore up populist agendas in Eastern Europe, while rehabilitative and desistence interventions that fail to pay attention to the needs of ethnically and cultural distinct groups has led to stigmatization of ethnic prisoners. Meanwhile, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has catapulted the need to understand states’ use of prisons in times of peace and war up research agenda. The Gulagechoes project not only has addressed fundamental questions about minority prisoners’ rights, but that are also relevant to peace and security in Europe.
The project encountered serious setbacks associated with an inhospitable research environment in Russia, the COVID-19 pandemic and war on Ukraine. The challenges led to the rebalancing of the research focus away from the Russian Federation towards the non-Russian case study countries, but this opened new avenues for research. For example, the Estonian archives focused attention on the last two decades before the communist collapse and interviews with former prisoners and prison staff in Georgia provided unexpected insights into the specific features of the late Soviet prison in a peripheral location. Georgia became the site of the successful project film, originally planned for Russia. The rebalancing of research towards the non-Russian countries chimes well with the recent call for scholarship on Soviet communism to pay greater attention to the peripheries of the ‘Soviet Empire’.
An achievement of Gulagechoes is the collection of a large corpus of data, which will become available for other scholars’ use. This includes a unique corpus of over 300 hundred extended interviews with a diverse range of research participants and 20,000 archival documents. Using these various data, the project has identified the different trajectories of penal reform in the case-study countries following the collapse of communism and confirmed the salience of ethnicity in all, albeit at different times and under different circumstance. At all times, individual prisoners have had to make decisions about whether, and how, to express their ethnic identity, which, in turn, has affected their treatment, their relationships and views of the world.
The project met its target of academic publications and presentations at international conferences. It will continue to publish into the future. The project’s findings were presented at a final workshop in March 2024. Thirty-five scholars from different disciplines and fourteen countries were invited. The workshop is the basis for an edited volume, “Continuity and Change in the Multicultural Prisons of the Former Soviet Union, East Central Europe and the Balkans”. This will be first major collection comprehensively to examine the history and legacy of penal institutions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. Two other books are in the pipeline including a co-authored monograph on the former USSR and a monograph on Central Asia transnational prisoners.
An achievement of Gulagechoes is the collection of a large corpus of data, which will become available for other scholars’ use. This includes a unique corpus of over 300 hundred extended interviews with a diverse range of research participants and 20,000 archival documents. Using these various data, the project has identified the different trajectories of penal reform in the case-study countries following the collapse of communism and confirmed the salience of ethnicity in all, albeit at different times and under different circumstance. At all times, individual prisoners have had to make decisions about whether, and how, to express their ethnic identity, which, in turn, has affected their treatment, their relationships and views of the world.
The project met its target of academic publications and presentations at international conferences. It will continue to publish into the future. The project’s findings were presented at a final workshop in March 2024. Thirty-five scholars from different disciplines and fourteen countries were invited. The workshop is the basis for an edited volume, “Continuity and Change in the Multicultural Prisons of the Former Soviet Union, East Central Europe and the Balkans”. This will be first major collection comprehensively to examine the history and legacy of penal institutions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. Two other books are in the pipeline including a co-authored monograph on the former USSR and a monograph on Central Asia transnational prisoners.
The historical research has been ground-breaking in its critique of received wisdoms in Soviet historiography. Rather than there being a monolithic model imposed top-down by Moscow on the national republics and East European countries, the project has shown that local internal penal traditions moderated or rejected the Stalinist model of the labour camp. In communist Romania, for example, penal labour was not a driving force behind penal transformation, and in the USSR, there were large divergencies in the character of penal facilities between the core penal heartland and the peripheral republics.
The project found that a common assumption that there was a uniform starting point for the post-communist transformation of penal systems is incorrect. This finding is important in the project’s questioning of the modernization paradigm applied to the trajectories of prisons in the former communist countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall. With European-style cellular prisons in Estonia and Soviet-style camps with communal accommodation in Russia, popular taxonomies in penology that identify a distinctive penal system associated with the former communist countries east are untenable.
The exploration of how ethnic minority prisoners have experienced incarceration since communism’s collapse has filled in significant gaps in prior research. The project revealed variations in the degree of the commitment in the case study countries to non-discriminatory treament of ethnic minatory groups, finding that programmes to support cultural and religious expression can exist alongside discriminatory treatment. The interviews with former prisoners has allowed the identification of factors affecting their ethnic self-identification, whether this is a process of discovery, concealment or manipulation. The most eye-catching discoveries have been in relation to Muslim prisoners in Russia. Gulagechoes found that while there is a sense of community across different Muslim prisoner populations, which is consistent with research in western jurisdictions, the precise geographical origin of Muslim prisoners plays a large role in their place in prison society, how they interpret the penal sanction and their relationship with authority. Research confirms the initial position of the project that factors having a bearing on the variability of individuals’ responses to imprisonment must be considered in any theorization about their vulnerability to recruitment to political violence.
The project found that a common assumption that there was a uniform starting point for the post-communist transformation of penal systems is incorrect. This finding is important in the project’s questioning of the modernization paradigm applied to the trajectories of prisons in the former communist countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall. With European-style cellular prisons in Estonia and Soviet-style camps with communal accommodation in Russia, popular taxonomies in penology that identify a distinctive penal system associated with the former communist countries east are untenable.
The exploration of how ethnic minority prisoners have experienced incarceration since communism’s collapse has filled in significant gaps in prior research. The project revealed variations in the degree of the commitment in the case study countries to non-discriminatory treament of ethnic minatory groups, finding that programmes to support cultural and religious expression can exist alongside discriminatory treatment. The interviews with former prisoners has allowed the identification of factors affecting their ethnic self-identification, whether this is a process of discovery, concealment or manipulation. The most eye-catching discoveries have been in relation to Muslim prisoners in Russia. Gulagechoes found that while there is a sense of community across different Muslim prisoner populations, which is consistent with research in western jurisdictions, the precise geographical origin of Muslim prisoners plays a large role in their place in prison society, how they interpret the penal sanction and their relationship with authority. Research confirms the initial position of the project that factors having a bearing on the variability of individuals’ responses to imprisonment must be considered in any theorization about their vulnerability to recruitment to political violence.