Periodic Reporting for period 3 - 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: 2021-11-01 to 2023-04-30
The GULAGECHOES project goes to the heart of one of the problems that has engaged scholars, the public and politicians in recent decades. As the numbers of prisoners in western jurisdictions drawn from indigenous ethnic minorities and recent in-migrants has grown, offenses committed by recently released prisoners, have fueled popular speculation about prisons becoming sites of radicalization and terrorist recruitment. The premise in-forming GULGECHOES is that before such speculation can be confirmed or allayed, we must take a step back and try to understand the varied processes and factors that shape the experiences of ethnic and ethno-religious minority groups in country-specific prison systems.
The post-communist states offer a ‘laboratory’ for exploring this question. This is because prior to the collapse of communism all the former Soviet states and countries of East Central Europe and the Baltics were compelled to develop their prison systems according to the “soviet model”. This model originated in the Stalinist GULAG and was characterizes by extreme harshness, long sentences, compulsory penal labour put to the service of state economic goals and a distinctive penal architecture. One aspect of the Soviet model that interestingly is shared by scholars in both ‘east’ and ‘west’, is that for all its inhumanity, Soviet penal policy was ethnically neutral; that is, it treated all ethnic groups equally. In fact, this was far from the truth, as the historical research for GULAGECHOES is already uncovering but it manifested itself in often-unexpected ways. Since the collapse of com-munism the successor states have followed different trajectories away from the ‘soviet model’. For example, Estonia has replaced all its Soviet-era correctional labour colonies with three ‘western-style’ prisons, while Belarus still adheres to the Soviet model. Between these extremes, there is a range of transformations in countries’ prison systems. The post-communist countries, therefore, provide a unique opportunity to examine and to compare the impact of diverse factors and processes affecting the treatment and experiences of members of different ethnic groups passing through their prison systems.
An additional advantage of looking at the communist successor states is that they include some of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe. The empirical part of the project compares the treatment of ethnic, racial and religious difference in the prison systems of a series of case study countries over a period of 150 years, starting with Imperial Russian prison reform in 1879, through the Soviet period to the 1989/1991 collapse, and up to the present time. The case study countries the project has investigated so far are the Russian Federation, Georgia, Estonia, and Romania. For each, we examine the impact on the treatment and experiences of minority prisoners of diverse factors and processes, which include practical and discursive legacies of the Soviet-era penal culture, Council of Europe leverage, geopolitics, the ethnic and racial composition of the broader society and distinctive penal architectures. Much of the research GULAGECHOES has been doing since the project started has involved interviewing people who have formerly been imprisoned in the region or who are serving sentences at the present time. Their purpose is to reach an understanding about how being imprisoned affects the salience of a prisoner’s ethnic self-identification to their experience of incarceration, and whether this has a bearing on their political association. All groups are of interest to us in the different case study countries, including the majority titular nation. The project has also singled out recently arrived transnational prisoners for a separate study, which will allow us to compare our findings as they relate to old settled minorities and more recent arrivals, the latter the perceived source of radicalization-fears in other jurisdictions. Our case studies for this part of the project are temporary labour migrants to Russia from Uzbekistan in Central Asia and Roma in East Central Europe. We also are making a separate study of the historic migrant group of Russophone labourers who were deployed to construct socialism in Estonia in the post-war period and now constitute a disproportionately large percentage of the incarcerated population in the country’s new prisons. On the theoretical side, GULAGECHOES is advancing theory on the ethnic and racial identity formation of prisoners and exploring new directions in which to take our research offered by the new discipline of carceral geography.
We believe that GULAGECHOES raises important questions that are relevant to peace and security in Europe. Today, the ‘friendship of people’ trope inherited from the Soviet era is being misused by some of the successor states to disguise a form of ‘penal nationalism’ to shore up populist agendas. In others, rehabilitative and desistence interventions that fail to pay attention to the needs of ethnically and cultural distinct groups can lead to counter-productive results (as in some de-radicalization programs introduced we have learned of in the region). Lack of understanding of prison authorities in some parts of the region of the intersection of ethnicity and class is enhancing the stigmatization of already marginal social groups. By addressing these questions, GULAGECHOES is also raising fundamental question questions about prisoners’ rights, which go to the core of the successful rehabilitation prisoners that is in the interests of everyone.
The post-communist states offer a ‘laboratory’ for exploring this question. This is because prior to the collapse of communism all the former Soviet states and countries of East Central Europe and the Baltics were compelled to develop their prison systems according to the “soviet model”. This model originated in the Stalinist GULAG and was characterizes by extreme harshness, long sentences, compulsory penal labour put to the service of state economic goals and a distinctive penal architecture. One aspect of the Soviet model that interestingly is shared by scholars in both ‘east’ and ‘west’, is that for all its inhumanity, Soviet penal policy was ethnically neutral; that is, it treated all ethnic groups equally. In fact, this was far from the truth, as the historical research for GULAGECHOES is already uncovering but it manifested itself in often-unexpected ways. Since the collapse of com-munism the successor states have followed different trajectories away from the ‘soviet model’. For example, Estonia has replaced all its Soviet-era correctional labour colonies with three ‘western-style’ prisons, while Belarus still adheres to the Soviet model. Between these extremes, there is a range of transformations in countries’ prison systems. The post-communist countries, therefore, provide a unique opportunity to examine and to compare the impact of diverse factors and processes affecting the treatment and experiences of members of different ethnic groups passing through their prison systems.
An additional advantage of looking at the communist successor states is that they include some of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe. The empirical part of the project compares the treatment of ethnic, racial and religious difference in the prison systems of a series of case study countries over a period of 150 years, starting with Imperial Russian prison reform in 1879, through the Soviet period to the 1989/1991 collapse, and up to the present time. The case study countries the project has investigated so far are the Russian Federation, Georgia, Estonia, and Romania. For each, we examine the impact on the treatment and experiences of minority prisoners of diverse factors and processes, which include practical and discursive legacies of the Soviet-era penal culture, Council of Europe leverage, geopolitics, the ethnic and racial composition of the broader society and distinctive penal architectures. Much of the research GULAGECHOES has been doing since the project started has involved interviewing people who have formerly been imprisoned in the region or who are serving sentences at the present time. Their purpose is to reach an understanding about how being imprisoned affects the salience of a prisoner’s ethnic self-identification to their experience of incarceration, and whether this has a bearing on their political association. All groups are of interest to us in the different case study countries, including the majority titular nation. The project has also singled out recently arrived transnational prisoners for a separate study, which will allow us to compare our findings as they relate to old settled minorities and more recent arrivals, the latter the perceived source of radicalization-fears in other jurisdictions. Our case studies for this part of the project are temporary labour migrants to Russia from Uzbekistan in Central Asia and Roma in East Central Europe. We also are making a separate study of the historic migrant group of Russophone labourers who were deployed to construct socialism in Estonia in the post-war period and now constitute a disproportionately large percentage of the incarcerated population in the country’s new prisons. On the theoretical side, GULAGECHOES is advancing theory on the ethnic and racial identity formation of prisoners and exploring new directions in which to take our research offered by the new discipline of carceral geography.
We believe that GULAGECHOES raises important questions that are relevant to peace and security in Europe. Today, the ‘friendship of people’ trope inherited from the Soviet era is being misused by some of the successor states to disguise a form of ‘penal nationalism’ to shore up populist agendas. In others, rehabilitative and desistence interventions that fail to pay attention to the needs of ethnically and cultural distinct groups can lead to counter-productive results (as in some de-radicalization programs introduced we have learned of in the region). Lack of understanding of prison authorities in some parts of the region of the intersection of ethnicity and class is enhancing the stigmatization of already marginal social groups. By addressing these questions, GULAGECHOES is also raising fundamental question questions about prisoners’ rights, which go to the core of the successful rehabilitation prisoners that is in the interests of everyone.
The project has seven research questions focused on three major themes: historical continuities and legacies, cross-cultural comparisons, and policy formation. At the core of the project are the questions relating to the experience of ethnic minority prisoners who have served in one of the case study countries during the past forty to fifty years. The main data source for answering these questions are in depth in-person interviews. Fieldwork to recruit and interview research participants got underway in year two of the project in all the case study countries. Unfortunately, progress was disrupted by COVID-19 travel restrictions but by mid-term in the project, we had taken seventy interviews with former prisoners in three regions in Russia, twenty-five in Uzbekistan, twenty in Estonia and fifteen in Georgia, and with fifty people serving sentences in Romanian prisons. All interviews have been transcribed and the first stage of analysis started. In normal circumstances, we would expand interviews adding respondents from the outstanding groups not yet included in the study and to new field sites and the project remains hopeful that this will be possible over the next eighteen months.
Research on the historical patterns of the treatment and experiences of ethnic minority prisoners in Imperial and Soviet Russia is the necessary first step to answering question about legacies in the post-communist prison systems today. Data collection for the Imperial Russian period scheduled for the first year, has already been completed and has resulted in four published articles. Intensive archival work is needed to be able to write the history of what happened to ethnic minorities in the Soviet gulag and after as so little is known about their treatment. Data collection in ‘GARF’ in Moscow central archives has begun to shed light on central policy towards ethnic minority prisoners that has been previously overlooked. Meanwhile, working in the Estonian national archive, the project’s historian has begun to uncover the history of the late Soviet prison system and how punishment in the peripheries of the USSR differed from in the large penal regions of the Soviet heartland. COVID-19 brought archival work in Russia to halt but we have been able to initiate research in regional archives by remote ordering of copies of potentially useful files. As has been done in the past, GULAGECHOES has to rely on the published and unpublished memoirs of gulag victims and dissident prisoners to study how different groups experienced the Soviet prison system in the middle of the last century. GULAGECHOES has approached this task systematically by creating unified corpus of all the testimonies that have been digitized, which adds up to literally millions of words, and using machine learning software to identify patterns in how victims from ethnic minority groups write about their experiences.
The final theme on which the project has been working, and the one that is least affected by the COVID-19 crisis concerns policy-formation in relation to the management of ethno-religious and racial difference in the prisons of East Central Europe, the Baltics and countries of the former Soviet Union in the past three decades. The prior stage to engaging with the ethnic issues has been to understand the different approaches of the communist successor states to penal reform. As most joined the Council of Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s and have signed the UNCAT optional protocol, there are readily available sources available on line that have enable us to identify the different reform trajectories that have been adopted and their consequences for prisoners’ rights. Interviews with NGOs activists in Russia and with prison service representatives in the other case study countries, have allowed us to drill down into the details of current practice at the level of individual prisons and correctional institutions.
Research on the historical patterns of the treatment and experiences of ethnic minority prisoners in Imperial and Soviet Russia is the necessary first step to answering question about legacies in the post-communist prison systems today. Data collection for the Imperial Russian period scheduled for the first year, has already been completed and has resulted in four published articles. Intensive archival work is needed to be able to write the history of what happened to ethnic minorities in the Soviet gulag and after as so little is known about their treatment. Data collection in ‘GARF’ in Moscow central archives has begun to shed light on central policy towards ethnic minority prisoners that has been previously overlooked. Meanwhile, working in the Estonian national archive, the project’s historian has begun to uncover the history of the late Soviet prison system and how punishment in the peripheries of the USSR differed from in the large penal regions of the Soviet heartland. COVID-19 brought archival work in Russia to halt but we have been able to initiate research in regional archives by remote ordering of copies of potentially useful files. As has been done in the past, GULAGECHOES has to rely on the published and unpublished memoirs of gulag victims and dissident prisoners to study how different groups experienced the Soviet prison system in the middle of the last century. GULAGECHOES has approached this task systematically by creating unified corpus of all the testimonies that have been digitized, which adds up to literally millions of words, and using machine learning software to identify patterns in how victims from ethnic minority groups write about their experiences.
The final theme on which the project has been working, and the one that is least affected by the COVID-19 crisis concerns policy-formation in relation to the management of ethno-religious and racial difference in the prisons of East Central Europe, the Baltics and countries of the former Soviet Union in the past three decades. The prior stage to engaging with the ethnic issues has been to understand the different approaches of the communist successor states to penal reform. As most joined the Council of Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s and have signed the UNCAT optional protocol, there are readily available sources available on line that have enable us to identify the different reform trajectories that have been adopted and their consequences for prisoners’ rights. Interviews with NGOs activists in Russia and with prison service representatives in the other case study countries, have allowed us to drill down into the details of current practice at the level of individual prisons and correctional institutions.
Considering the challenges that the GULAGECHOES project has faced, which apart from COVID-19 have also include a worsening environment for conducting research in the Russian Federation, significant progress has been made towards realizing the project’s goals. One goal that we are already on the way to achieving was to put the post-communist prison systems on the research agenda. The absolute number of prisoners and the rate of imprisonment in the post-communist countries exceed those in the other member states of the Council of Europe. Yet, the lessons that can be learned from their experiences over the past thirty years are commonly overlooked or overgeneralized in discussions in Europe about prison reform. GULAGECHOES is analysing the consequences of the different paths prison systems in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union have taken since 1989/1991 and can show that not all are necessarily leading to a replication of the type of prison systems that exist in ‘old Europe’. We will continue to examine the impact of different paths on the experiences of ethnic minority prisoners, backing it up with our empirical studies as the project goes forward.
On the methodological front, the project is advancing the state of the art in prison studies by its use of the biographical or oral history approach to probe the experience of people who have served prisons sentences in the region. The interviews we have taken are extraordinarily rich, have provided opportunities for a diverse range of people with different histories to tell their stories, and to disclose hidden angles of the prison experience and reflect upon the role prison has played in their lives. Analysis of the interviews is still at an early stage but we are confident that this method will allow the project to identify the processes that have a bearing on the salience of prisoners’ ethnic and racial identity, which, in turn, can provide clues to their post-prison life histories. The current aim is to collect further interviews prioritizing those groups or inhabitants of sub-national regions, which we had not reached before the COVID-19 crisis. These include the Roma in East Central Europe, the Mingrelians in Western Georgia, the ethnic-Estonians (as opposed to the Russo-phone nationals) in Estonia and, former prisoners within Russia in the capital city region and Siberia. Already planning for re-starting interviews in Georgia and Estonia is underway. It is difficult to predict what possibilities will open up for filling in the other gaps but the project has already employed the use of telephone interviews successfully to interview people from the north Caucasus. One of the principal new finding to emerge from the interviews that has broadened the methodological and epistemological standpoint of the project is the way in which after the Soviet collapse, interconnections across ‘the correctional colony’ fences or prison walls with local communities have begun to be forged. These were rare in the Soviet era because of the practice of sending offenders to the geographic peripheries. This development is most pronounced in Georgia where much of the research has moved to the connection between the prison and the ‘street’. This strand will be followed up in the future in all the case study regions and with the historical data.
The historical research for the project has already began to undermine the received wisdom about ethnic-neutrality in the gulag decision-making. Archive data have revealed that that ethnicity did, in fact, play a role in the authorities’ decision making at all levels, in the form of ethnic quotas, the existence of ‘ethnic detachments’ in labour camps, and terror campaigns aimed at specific ethnic groups. However, these existed against backdrop of a strong rhetoric of national harmony and ‘friendship of peoples’. Discriminatory policies and practices appear to have been episodic and deployed at times of crisis and, sometimes, with the intention of promoting ethnic conflict. The implication of these findings for how we theorise gulag legacies in the later Soviet and post-Soviet prison systems will be strong focus over the next two years. Also going forward and suggested by the relationships emerging in the analysis of the current interviews and memoir analysis, the project will a shift its focus away from the largest Soviet-era penal regions in the Siberian and northern heartlands, to the peripheral national republics. This will enhance the cross-cultural and geographical analysis at the heart of the project challenging the universalist assumption about penality in the former Soviet and communist East European sphere.
The project can already claim to be advancing a field of knowledge in respect to the large incarcerated Muslim populations in Russia. We are not surprised that the interviews we have taken with Muslim prisoners (of which we have 20 in Russia plus the 25 in Uzbekistan), challenge popular assumptions about prisons as sites of Islamic radicalization. In the project, we have already begun to unpick the various factors impinging on what, inevitably, turn out to be the multiple different transformations of ethno-religious identity among North Caucasians, Tartars/Bashkirs, Central Asian migrants, and ethnic Russian coverts, at the various stages of the criminal-justice process. The interviews have revealed large differences in the salience of ethnic identity between various Muslim groups, and its intersection with religion, politics, and class. Selective discrimination by prison authorities against Muslim prisoners from different regions of Russia is strong theme in the interviews, which also have begun to yield clues to the range of adaptive responses among Muslim prisoners. Analysis of findings is at an early stage and we are exercising caution over their dissemination at this stage in the project because of its sensitivity.
On the methodological front, the project is advancing the state of the art in prison studies by its use of the biographical or oral history approach to probe the experience of people who have served prisons sentences in the region. The interviews we have taken are extraordinarily rich, have provided opportunities for a diverse range of people with different histories to tell their stories, and to disclose hidden angles of the prison experience and reflect upon the role prison has played in their lives. Analysis of the interviews is still at an early stage but we are confident that this method will allow the project to identify the processes that have a bearing on the salience of prisoners’ ethnic and racial identity, which, in turn, can provide clues to their post-prison life histories. The current aim is to collect further interviews prioritizing those groups or inhabitants of sub-national regions, which we had not reached before the COVID-19 crisis. These include the Roma in East Central Europe, the Mingrelians in Western Georgia, the ethnic-Estonians (as opposed to the Russo-phone nationals) in Estonia and, former prisoners within Russia in the capital city region and Siberia. Already planning for re-starting interviews in Georgia and Estonia is underway. It is difficult to predict what possibilities will open up for filling in the other gaps but the project has already employed the use of telephone interviews successfully to interview people from the north Caucasus. One of the principal new finding to emerge from the interviews that has broadened the methodological and epistemological standpoint of the project is the way in which after the Soviet collapse, interconnections across ‘the correctional colony’ fences or prison walls with local communities have begun to be forged. These were rare in the Soviet era because of the practice of sending offenders to the geographic peripheries. This development is most pronounced in Georgia where much of the research has moved to the connection between the prison and the ‘street’. This strand will be followed up in the future in all the case study regions and with the historical data.
The historical research for the project has already began to undermine the received wisdom about ethnic-neutrality in the gulag decision-making. Archive data have revealed that that ethnicity did, in fact, play a role in the authorities’ decision making at all levels, in the form of ethnic quotas, the existence of ‘ethnic detachments’ in labour camps, and terror campaigns aimed at specific ethnic groups. However, these existed against backdrop of a strong rhetoric of national harmony and ‘friendship of peoples’. Discriminatory policies and practices appear to have been episodic and deployed at times of crisis and, sometimes, with the intention of promoting ethnic conflict. The implication of these findings for how we theorise gulag legacies in the later Soviet and post-Soviet prison systems will be strong focus over the next two years. Also going forward and suggested by the relationships emerging in the analysis of the current interviews and memoir analysis, the project will a shift its focus away from the largest Soviet-era penal regions in the Siberian and northern heartlands, to the peripheral national republics. This will enhance the cross-cultural and geographical analysis at the heart of the project challenging the universalist assumption about penality in the former Soviet and communist East European sphere.
The project can already claim to be advancing a field of knowledge in respect to the large incarcerated Muslim populations in Russia. We are not surprised that the interviews we have taken with Muslim prisoners (of which we have 20 in Russia plus the 25 in Uzbekistan), challenge popular assumptions about prisons as sites of Islamic radicalization. In the project, we have already begun to unpick the various factors impinging on what, inevitably, turn out to be the multiple different transformations of ethno-religious identity among North Caucasians, Tartars/Bashkirs, Central Asian migrants, and ethnic Russian coverts, at the various stages of the criminal-justice process. The interviews have revealed large differences in the salience of ethnic identity between various Muslim groups, and its intersection with religion, politics, and class. Selective discrimination by prison authorities against Muslim prisoners from different regions of Russia is strong theme in the interviews, which also have begun to yield clues to the range of adaptive responses among Muslim prisoners. Analysis of findings is at an early stage and we are exercising caution over their dissemination at this stage in the project because of its sensitivity.