Penality and the Social Construction of Gender in Post-Soviet Russia: the impact prisoners' relatives of their encounters with penal Russia

There is a large corpus of literature about the history and culture of imprisonment in Russia and the former Soviet Unon that draws on the testimonies of former prisoners and detailed analyses of archival sources. In this literature the presence and importance of the relatives of prisoners - their wives, partners, siblings and parents - whilst acknowledged, are generally not the focus of interest even though their experiences may be no less important in shaping the understanding that Russians have of their penal past and present than those of the prisoners' themselves. Prisoners' relatives, occupying a space between 'incarceration' and 'freedom', are a type of 'quasi-prisoner', drawn into the penal system but never wholly part of it. The proposed research project will bring to foreground the experiences of this group of people, examining the nature of their encounters, both real and imagined, with the penal system and the transformative affect of these have on individual and collective identities in post-Soviet Russia. Inevitably, the research will take and historical and cultural approach since, despite the Russian government's avowed commitment to introducing into its penal institutions international standards for the humane treatment of prisoners, penal practices in the Russian Federation have strong continuities with the Soviet past, just as have popular attitudes to imprisonment. As an example, the geographical distribution of prisons in the Russian Federation laid down during the Soviet period when prisoners were used to mobilise resources in the peripheries of the state means that visitors, predominantly women, have to endure long journeys to reach penal colonies in which their relatives are incarcerated. These journeys continue a more-than-century-long tradition of women following their 'husbands' to their place of exile, a tradition that continues to shape gender identities in Russia today. Women today are less likely than some of their forebears to re-locate to places of penal exile, but the decision to undertake the journey to the penal colony, as in the past, involves a choice about whether to submit to the disciplinary control of the penal authorities. By the same token, although not courting the same dangers as in the past, the decision about whether to tell their friends, neighbours and children about their situation is a difficult one for women in Russia today, as, indeed, it is for the relatives of prisoners in other high imprisonment societies. The project is, therefore, informed by the idea that Russia's carceral archipelgo extends well beyond 'the prison walls' and is implicated in the forging of Russian culture. The project will use various accounts and representations (including fiction, documentary, popular, internet, and interviews) to explore how the experiences of quasi-prisoners have been transformed, reproduced and contested in the 20th and 21st century. Many of the sources relating to the Soviet period are available in the UK or in Russia. For the current period, the two sources key to the success of the project are a self-help website for prisoners and their families that includes postings made over a five year period in the early 2000s by visitors returning from visits to penal colonies all over Russia of which PI already has a copy, and interviews with prisoner relatives that will be conducted by a team of researchers in Russia experienced in ethnographic interview methods. The project will draw on debates in the humanities and social studies about penality, social marginalization, gender and human rights. It is cross-disciplinary, drawing upon Areas Studies background of the PI and the experiences of the research assistant in literary and historical analysis. The research will mainly take place in the UK but will require a visit to Russia for library and archive work. The principal output of the research will be a monograph, Russian-language report and dissemination workshops.

There a several potential beneficiaries from this research internationally and in the UK. We expect the findings to be of particular interest to prison reform NGOs operating within the Russian Federation, principal among which are Penal Reform International, a part UK-funded organization with an international brief including Russia and other former communist countries, and the Moscow Centre for Prison Reform. The PI already has a close relationship with the first of these and maintains contact with Lyudmila Al'pern the leading independent analyst of women's imprisonment in Russia, in the second. In addition to these Russian-focused NGOs, the research has a broader relevance to voluntary and government organisations concerned with prisoner welfare. Although Russia represents an extreme case, the problems associated with the distance of penal institutions from prisoners' normal place of residence are universal. In the UK, the debate about 'titan prisons' has raised questions about the impact of distance on the quality of the contacts prisoners' families are able to maintain with their kin in prison. The importance of the negative impact on young offenders of the relative location of juvenile offender institutions, in particular, is recognised in home office reports, as well as by independent penal reform organisations such as the Howards League for Penal Reform. We therefore would expect our research to find an audience among governmental and non-governmental penal reform activists outside the specific region in which the research is located.
The 'life writing' aspect of the research, involving as it does people narrating their experiences of being drawn into the carceral system, will make our research accessible also to a wider audience and will help to raise awareness of the issues surrounding of prison location, and more generally of the impacts of the punitive turn in Western and 'Transitional' societies. In this respect, the involvement of the media though programmes such a Women's Hour and Thinking Allowed is crucial. The PI has experience of working with the media to disseminate her research results (Women's Hour and NBC radio Canada). It barely needs stating that Russia has a problemmatic penal history that still casts a shadow of penal practices in the 21st century. The authors of this project are under no illusions that their research will make much impact on Russia's penal collosus but they are convinced that research into the origins and social consequences of Russia's penal culture are essential if Russia' is to address the human rights issues surrounding the past and present treatment of the vast numbers of people drawn, in one way or another, into the carceral system. Russia's success in engaging with such issues is not just of local relevance, but is of importance to European security as a whole. Therefore, although at the present time the Russian penal service is cautious about independent researchers, foreign or domestic, who take an interest in its penal institutions, we nevertheless, hope that utilizing the agency of local reseachers and domestic NGOs, we will be able to contribute to debate iwithin Russia about the historical roots of its current penal practices. For this reason we are planning to produce a Russian language report and mongraph of our findings avaialable to the Russian based NGOs and to involve them in dissemination workshops.