Judith Pallot

Lipstick, Lace, and Longing: Constructions of Femininity Inside a Russian Prison

This paper examines the construction of femininity within Russian womens prisons. On the basis of fieldwork carried out in three womens prisons in the secure and restricted penal zone within Mordovia, Russian Federation, we present unique and original qualitative data, as well as a critical engagement with contemporary Russian press sources. Starting from the assumption that the (free) female body is a particular target of Foucauldian disciplinary power, in that gender is a discipline which produces bodies and identities and operates as an effective form of social control, we examine the ways in which this disciplinary power of gender is compounded by bodily imprisonment. Criminal women are often considered not only to have broken the law but also to have offended against their culturally specific gender role expectations, and punishment applied to women prisoners is grounded not on what women are like, but on how women ‘ought’ to behave in a particular cultural context, with interventions coercing or persuading women to reintegrate into a recognisably ‘feminine’ form. We uncover Russias exceptional and exclusionary geography of womens imprisonment, and rehabilitative and educational processes, including a beauty pageant, which seek to rescript criminal women toward a predetermined ‘ideal’ of Russian womanhood, and also explore the ways in which women seek to resist.

‘Gde muzh, tam zhena’ (where the husband is, so is the wife): space and gender in post-Soviet patterns of penality

Fifteen years after the collapse of communism, post-Soviet Russian remains a ‘high-imprisonment society’, second only to the USA in the relative number of people held in prison (570 per 100 000 population compared with the USAs 714 per 100 000). This gives a total prison population of around 800 000 people. These people are detained in penal facilities built during the Soviet era, the majority of which are in peripheral locations. Because the peripheries have been selected as ‘sites of punishment’, Russias distinctive ‘geography of penality’ makes the maintenance of social contacts of prisoners difficult and undermines attempts to reduce the rates of recidivism in Russia. Women are drawn into the penal complex by virtue of their relationships with the majority male prisoner population, a process which transforms them into ‘quasi-prisoners’ and reproduces gender stereotypes.

Trajectories in people's farming in Moscow oblast during the post-socialist transformation

Abstract The importance of personal food production to the reproduction of rural households in the Russian countryside has been widely acknowledged in the literature on the post-communist transition, but the variety of forms this mode of food production takes has not been explored. The authors show that there is a complicated micro-geography to the pattern of production on the allotments allocated to rural inhabitants that is related to a variety of geographical and historical factors, and to the nature of the relationship that exists between large and small farm sectors in post-communist Russia. Under certain circumstances, allotment production has become highly commercialised and has occupied the niche reserved in post-communist land reform legislation for private farms.

Patriotic Discourses in Russia's Penal Peripheries: Remembering the Mordovan Gulag

Abstract Using materials gathered during field work in the penal region in the southwest corner of the Republic of Mordoviya in 2007, the authors examine the official representations of the history of the Mordovan gulag from 1930 to the present day. Through an analysis of the penal authoritys institutional newspaper, its museum and anniversary celebrations marking the founding of the Mordovan gulag, the authors argue that a stress in the official history on continuity and tradition of service is evidence of growing confidence of this part of the security apparatus after their loss of status in the 1990s associated with the collapse of the penal economy and negative comment by international monitors and domestic penal reformers.

Welcome to Malaya Rodina (‘Little Homeland’): Gender and Penal Order in a Russian Penal Colony

This article presents findings from research conducted in a penal colony for young women in Russia. Russia’s penal system remains under-researched in socio-legal and criminological scholarship. This contribution is the first multi-disciplinary study of Russian imprisonment to be conducted in the post-Soviet period, bringing together criminology, human geography and law. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a landmark moment in Russia’s penal trajectory due to the excessive scale and use of imprisonment as a political and cultural corrective. Our findings reveal the punishment of young women in Russia to be exceptional and exclusionary. Personnel play a crucial role in shaping penal strategies that encourage young women to adopt blame and shame sensibilities. We develop a conceptualization of Russian penality as it relates to young women prisoners. We argue that the prisoner transport is the first stage in a penal continuum where gender, penal order and culture come together to create a specific penological place identity, which we conceptualize as Malaya Rodina (Little Homeland). We conclude that Russia’s penal geography, and its attendant penological imagination, is a vestige of the Soviet penal monolith.

The specifics and spatial structure of circular migration in Russia

Abstract This article aims at distinguishing recurrent population movements within the territory of the Russian Federation between urban localities of different sizes and rural areas in connection to the processes of urbanization, suburbanization, and de-urbanization. Incomplete urbanization and the strong polarization of socio-economic space in Russia have resulted in two powerful contradictory population flows: centrifugal seasonal sub- and de-urbanization and centripetal labor migration from rural and small towns to large urban centers. The article discusses three forms of recurrent population mobility in Russia: (1) daily commuting of urban and rural inhabitants within metropolitan areas; (2) commuting to large cities and their suburbs for long-term employment intervals (weekly, monthly, etc.), (3) second-home commuting to countryside dachas. Unfinished urbanization in Russia not only attracts rural and small towns’ population to major cities but also keeps it within the latter. It slows down the real de-urbanization and induces specific dachas (second-home) suburbanization/de-urbanization, with these processes being closely interrelated. An opportunity to earn money in cities together with the impossibility of moving to major centers due to expensive housing encourages households to remain in small towns and rural areas. Meanwhile, inhabited rural localities (even ones distant from cities) attract seasonal population (dachniks).

Did the Stolypin Land Reform Destroy the Peasant Commune

Since Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, there has been a reappraisal of the role of Stolypin in Russian agrarian history. In contrast to the hitherto exclusively negative evaluations of the reforms, one now reads in the press that Stolypin had just the right solution for the agrarian problem — not only the pre-revolutionary, but today’s as well. The words of one deputy to the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies are interesting in this respect: ‘I think that the farmers we are so afraid of will be a buttress of our perestroika in the countryside. Stolypin was no fool. He understood who could be the foundation, so to speak, of the state’.1

Recent approaches in the geography of the Soviet Union

For a country of its size and obvious importance in so many spheres the Soviet Union has been strangely neglected in western geography until comparatively recently. This neglect can in part be explained by the language difficulty and by the very real problems that face people from the west in obtaining reliable and relevant information for their studies, but it is related also to the methodological developments that took place in postwar geography. If ’economic man’ was found

‘As the Thread Follows the Needle’: The Social Construction of the Prisoner’s Wife in Russia from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Imprisonment was central to Soviet history and rates of incarceration remain high in the Russian Federation today with the result that prison discourse is pervasive in Russian culture and the carceral experience the subject of many cultural productions. While men undergo the rite of passage associated with the motto ‘Every real man should pass through prison’, their women relatives become the innocent victims of the penal monolith and have to exercise ingenuity and agency to adapt to their situation. This chapter examines how Russian culture and society have constructed different versions of the ‘prisoner’s wife’. The Decembrist wife, the ‘wife by correspondence’ and the ‘bandit wife’ are three major social models upon which women whose lives and identities are irrevocably transformed by the penitentiary can draw to interpret their experiences of penal Russia.