“Tuk, tuk, tuk!“ A History of Russia's Prison Knocking Language

Abstract

From 1870 to the fall of the tsarist autocracy, the political prisons of the Romanov regime were filled with the sound of tapping. This was “knocking language” (perestukivanie)–a coded system of knocks and taps used by incarcerated Russian revolutionaries to communicate with one another through the walls of their solitary cells. This article tells the first scholarly history of this medium–using prison archives and radical memoirs to reveal its development in the prisons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, its varied forms and uses, and its pathways of diffusion and transmission. In doing so, the present text seeks not only to give a new empirical account of an understudied practice of carceral subversion. It also attempts to locate knocking language within the larger discursive landscape of the Russian revolutionary tradition–investigating how the specific ways in which this prison alphabet was wielded and understood reverberate within this period's considerations of self‐narration, radical struggle, and political agency.