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.”
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
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
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
Visit of Professor Pallot in early 2022 to Lepoglava, a model panoptic-style prison in Croatia.
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. Watch Towers, walls or fences and metal gates are typical for correctional colonies in Russia.
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.
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.
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 and Europe
Project Objectives
The project’s aim is to examine the impact of the system of penality developed in the Soviet gulag on the ethnic identification, social relationships and political association of prisoners in the Soviet Union and the communist successor states. The proposition underpinning the research is that prisons are sites of ethnic and racial identity construction, but that the processes involved vary within and between states, and through time.
Project Funding
Gulag Echoes is a 5 year project, plus an additional 10-month Covid 19 extension, funded by the European Research Council under Grant Agreement No. 788448.
Project Partners
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/gulagechoes/team/
Contact Details
Principal Investigator,
Professor Judith Pallot
PI ERC project Horizon 2020 GULAGECHOES No. 788448, and PI Academy of Finland project No. 343039
The Jugoslavian Penal System
Aleksanteri Institute
University of Helsinki
T: +358 (0) 294123716
E: judith.pallot@helsinki.fi
W: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/gulagechoes/ about-the-project/
Pallot, J and Katz, E., (2016) Waiting at the Prison Gate: Women and Prisoners in Russia, IB Tauris
Pallot, J., and Piacentini, L.,(2012) Gender, Geography and Punishment: Women’s Experiences of Carceral Russia, OUP
Professor Judith Pallot
Judith Pallot is a senior researcher in the Aleksanteri Institute, Helsinki University and professor emeritus of the University of Oxford. She has been researching in Russian Area Studies for four decades. In 2018, she was awarded an ERC Horizon 2020 Advanced grant GULAGECHOES to examine ethnicity in prisons in the former communist countries of Europe and Soviet Union. She has published extensively and is a frequent contributor to broadcast and print media on her research.
The project film in Georgia is about the work of prison officers in late Soviet Gulag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=QbyypWdr9lk
end of the Soviet era nationalists fighting for independence of their nation from the Soviet Union were imprisoned, including many Ukrainians.”
Researchers have also found that prison administrations exploited these ethnic differences among prisoners to maintain order in correctional colonies, particularly during times of stress, like in WW2 or political
prison. The prison officers, amongst whom there were many war veterans, treated them harshly. The Russian prison service is militarised, so officers have military rank, and they tend to view prisoners as the enemy. Some of the worst treatment of prisoners is rooted in this mindset of prison officers,” explains Professor Pallot. Today, they see the principal challenge to suppress radicalisation
“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.”
upheaval. The treatment of prisoners tended to reflect what was going on in wider society; for example, Russia fought two wars with Chechnya in the ‘90s and early 2000s, and many of those who fought for Chechen independence were subsequently imprisoned. “The Chechen terrorists – as they were called – had a very hard time in
In March 2024, the project held its final workshop at Christ Church college, University of Oxford.
of ethno-religious minority groups in prisons. Part of the research has focused on transnational prisoners, following the waves of migration that occurred after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “One member of the project team took interviews in Uzbekistan with former migrant workers who had served prison sentences in Russia. They had committed crimes, ended up in prison, then when they had served their terms, they went back to Uzbekistan,” continues Professor Pallot. “We have been looking at these trans-national prisoners, and that has been a very interesting part of the project.”
Already the team has published a number of articles, maintains a website with a blog commenting on current developments and produced a film, while monographs and an edited collection of papers from a workshop that was held recently in Oxford are in the pipeline. This work will shed new light on the evolution of prison systems and populations not just in Russia, but in countries right across the former Soviet Union. “We are interested in looking at the different trajectories that countries have followed in developing their prison systems, away from the Soviet model that they inherited,” stresses Professor Pallot.