Hansen, Julie and Rogachevskii, Andrei (eds) Punishment as a Crime? Perspectives on Prison Experience in Russian Culture (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 538 successful scholarly experiment in a new and original field, it offers the reader valuable and intriguing insights into the cult of celebrity and glamour in its many manifestations within contemporary Russian society. UCL SSEES Ruta Skriptaite Hansen, Julie and Rogachevskii, Andrei (eds). Punishment as a Crime? Perspectives on Prison Experience in Russian Culture. Uppsala Studies on Eastern Europe, 5. Uppsala Universiteit, Uppsala, 2014. 193 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. SEK262.00. This edited collection includes papers delivered at an interdisciplinary workshopheldinUppsalainAugust2012,althoughtheword‘interdisciplinary’ which was part of the workshop title was for some reason omitted from the title of the collection. The word ‘eclectic’ might also have been used, and there is no explanation in the Introduction of the rather odd title. What does it mean? Igor Sutyagin has the phrase as a subheading (p. 37) but the following paragraphs, while not explaining it, do contain the following suggestive statement: ‘Criminal culture and the socio-cultural environment of the Russian penitentiary system can be likened to a sort of poison which is dangerous for any society willing to reconcile itself to it’ (p. 38). This is spot-on. The authors of the various chapters are mostly scholars of Russian language and literature, though Kragh is an economic historian, and Sutyagin is a physicist turned security consultant. The overall field of enquiry is that of cultural studies. The Introduction makes it clear that the book ‘does not claim to provide definitive answers or a comprehensive overview of the Russian prison system. Rather,itaimstooffernewperspectivesonthephenomenonofprisonexperience in Russia and beyond, drawing on factual and fictional source material’ (p. 9). By ‘beyond’ is meant the United Kingdom, since in his final chapter Andrei Rogatchevski compares and contrasts the fictionalized prison experiences of the National Bolshevik leader, Eduard Limonov (convicted of firearms offences), with those of Lord Archer, the Conservative politician (convicted of perjury). As it happens, the subjects of this unlikely pairing are near-contemporaries. For this reviewer, whose own discipline is Russian and Soviet law and legal history, the most interesting chapter is that by the well-known former prisoner IgorSutyagin,entitled‘RussianPrisonCultureToday:AParticipant-Observer’s View’ (pp. 19–42). Between October 1999 and July 2010 he was detained pretrial and then served his sentence in seven pre-trial detention centres (SIZOs, REVIEWS 539 investigative isolators) and four penal colonies (IKs, correctional colonies). The chapter is full of fascinating and horrifying first-hand detail and observations. Sutyagin is thoroughly pessimistic as to the possibility of genuine reform. In the second chapter, Martin Kragh focuses on the phenomenon of forced labour under Stalin, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and illuminates his topic with full-colour graphs and a wealth of statistical information. He concludes by noting that Stalin’s repressive machinery became increasingly costly and inefficient, and as soon as he was dead his disciples in the Politburo began to dismantle it. In the second section of the book, ‘Reactions and Representations’, Sarah Young, of UCL SSEES, returns to the tsarist period for comparisons, in her case conducting an intelligent comparison of Fedor Dostoevskii’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1861), Vlas Doroshevich’s Sakhalin (1897), Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (1954–73) and Andrei Siniavsky’s A Voice from the Chorus (1973). Andrea Gullotta explores the phenomenon of ‘Gulag humour’; while Helena Goscilo examines Vladimir Putin’s favourite rock band, Liube, and post-Soviet Russia’s ‘quirky answer to Jailhouse Rock’ — the 1957 vehicle for Elvis Presley: Igor Matvienko and Dmitrii Zolotukhin’s Zona Liube (1994). Goscilo perceptively explores this characteristically Russian musical expression, and ‘Liube’s flirtation with crime as imidzh’ (p. 115). Part three of the book is entitled ‘Comparative Dimensions’. It contains two chapters. The first, by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, is entitled ‘Punishment and the Human Condition: Hannah Arendt, Leo Tolstoy, and Lessons from Life, Philosophy and Literature’, and attempts a wide-ranging, erudite and eclectic exploration of the theme of confinement in no less than twelve Russian and Western thinkers — I will not list them — tracing a connection between the experience of confinement and storytelling as a way of making sense of it. I have already mentioned Andrei Rogatchevski’s (his...