To be a Muslim in the Penitentiary System of the Russian Empire: Evidence from Tatar Ego-documents of the Early 20th Century

Abstract

The article sheds light on the experience of being an inorodets (a non-Russian, non-Christian subjects of the Russian Empire) in the imperial penitentiary system. The Tatar intellectual elite of the early 20th century pondered over the “prison experience” of this period in a number of texts, and the most significant of them are ego-documents written by a new generation of the Tatar elite that reflect new trends in the public discourse of the Muslim community of late imperial Russia. The present publication is based on the texts of private origin (autobiographies, memoirs, diaries) of a number of Muslim prisoners who had a difficult relationship with the authorities as well as with the officially recognized Muslim clergy. The article analyzes three works representing different views of Muslim authors on their prison experience. The prison reality at the turn of the 1870-1880s is depicted in the autobiography of Gabdrashid Ibragimov, who described it from the position of a young Muslim believer. He experienced feelings of shame during in time imprisoned; and at the same he realized that the prison had become for him a “school of life.” The other two writings are the famous work “Prison [Tiur’ma]” by Gaiaz Iskhaqyi and “Prison Reminiscences [Tiuremnye vospominaniia]” by Iusuf Akchura. They were published in 1907 and describe the prison experience of a Muslim in a Tsarist prison from an alternative perspective. We see that the emerging Tatar intellectual circle was quite seriously incorporated into the political context of the late Russian Empire. Therefore, religious aspects of prison reality occupy a rather modest place in the works of the Tatar political activists, and the personal experience of religious feelings is marginal. This corresponds to the circumstance that personal religious experience did not dominate the general worldview of the authors. At the same time the description of prison experience in the form of a more or less developed literary work reflected the level of the various authors’ “personality as well as cognitive and human maturity.”