Gulag Echoes in the “multicultural prison”: historical and geographical influences on the identity and politics of ethnic minority prisoners in the communist successor states of Russia and Europe
BY PROFESSOR JUDITH PALLOT AND DR. BRENDAN HUMPHREYS
In this new blog post we discuss what the future might hold for captured combatants in Ukraine and protesters against the War in Russia.
Shorter versions of this post are published in Riddle and The Guardian newspaper.
The Gulagechoes team is joined by Dr Elena Katz who is helping with the coding of the interviews taken with prisoners and former prisoners over the past two years in Russia, Estonia, and Georgia. Elena is a visiting scholar of the Aleksanteri Institute for the rest of 2022. Her profile is at https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/elena-katz
On March 7-8, Dr Costanza Curro and Dr Vakhtang Kekoshvili attended a two-day meeting in Paris concerning the war in Ukraine, which had started just a couple of weeks before. The meeting took place instead of the international conference ‘The Making of the 1990s: The genesis of post-Soviet society through its material culture’, organized by Center for Russian, Caucasian and Eastern European Studies (CERCEC / EHESS – CNRS).
The originally planned event was supposed to host a number of scholars to discuss social and cultural dynamics of the Soviet 1990s through the prism of material culture. Dr Curro and Dr Kekoshvili had prepared a paper for presentation titled ‘People, time and tea: The end of the Soviet Union in the labour colony of Khoni, Georgia’. The paper explored life in the town of Khoni (Western Georgia) and the big correctional colony that it hosted in the late 1980s, through residents’ and former employees’ narratives related to the tea plantation where prisoners worked. Other topics covered by the papers to be presented included value, barter, the materiality of space, art, culture and music.
The beginning of the war in Ukraine urged organizers and participants to consider the appropriateness of holding the conference amidst such events. After a discussion on participants’ opinions and feelings – among whom there were scholars from both Ukraine and Russia – the organizers decided to cancel the conference. Instead, participants who were still able and willing to travel to Paris were invited at a meeting to discuss potential ways to deal with the conflict as academics and experts on the region. The main points of the discussion focused on ways to deal with Russian academic institutions and Russian scholars in connection with the opposition against the war (or the lack thereof), as well as on the future of research in Russia and the former Soviet region.
Dr Larisa Kangaspuro attended the online conference ”From One Crisis to the Next? Mediating Border Crises and Solidarity Activism”. The conference provided a possibility to hear about the results of the research project “Border Crises in Two Languages: Mediatized Politics and Solidarity Activism in the Wake of the 2015 Asylum Migration”. More about the project at https://blogs.helsinki.fi/bordercrises/
Dr Larisa Kangaspuro attended the webinar “Building forward better”. The Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Universal Rights Group and the Permanent Mission of Denmark to the UN in Geneva where co-host the event following the Fourth Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Human Rights Council on Human Rights and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Link to the webinar programme
ASEEES Annual Convention is the biggest annual international conference of Russian research area. Dr Larisa Kangaspuro was the organiser and chair of the panel section “Diversity and mutual influence on the outskirts of the Russian Empire” comprising of leading experts from the Nordic countries and Russia.
Link to the conference programme
On 15th October 2021, Professor Pallot was speaker at the Annual DELF (Defence Extradition Lawyers’ Forum) in the Ashworth Centre, Honorable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, London. She addressed the conference on how recent geopolitical and domestic political developments of Russian and countries of the former Soviet and East Central European countries have affected the human rights of prisoners in these countries. She was joined on the panel by John Lough of Chatham House and Siarhej Zikratski, legal representative for the Belarussian opposition.
11th October 2021
Judith Pallot led a discussion at the Cheltenham Literature Festival (UK) with Mark Galeotti, prolific commentator on current affairs in Russia, and Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, about historical legacies, what it means to be Russian and the future direction of Putin’s Russia in front of live audience of 400 in Cheltenham Town hall. This session will be available on the #CheltLitFest Player until December 31st.
Researchers: Costanza Curro and Vakhtang Kekoshvili
Our main fieldwork site was Khoni, a small town in the Western region of Imereti that was home to a penal colony from the 1930s to the beginning of the 1990s. Prisoners worked in a vast tea plantation that spread across the hills surrounding the town. The economic and political, but also social and cultural life of Soviet-era Khoni (which was then named Tsulukidze) revolved around the colony, which was the source of employment for nearly the totality of the population. We were hosted by a local family, which helped us establish contacts with the town and its inhabitants. During our time in the field, we talked to several people involved in the colony’s life in the 1970s and 1980s. We recorded 16 interviews with former colony directors or deputy directors, heads of otryady, accountants, doctors, inspectors, guards, suppliers and prisoners. Since little is known about the colony and there is nearly no material available, we were interested in reconstructing the history of the colony, the tea plantation and their relationship with the town in the first place. Against this background, we collected professional and personal experiences from a variety of perspectives, which helped us shed light on the politics and economics of the colony, as well as on the social, cultural and moral dynamics underpinning its life. In addition, we explored the vast space of the colony and the tea plantation. In particular, we were able to access some of the buildings which in the past housed prisoners, guards and administration. We also mapped the spatial organization of the five separate units – locally referred to as zonas – that made up the colony.
The International Council for Central and East European Studies finally held its quinquennial convention, delayed from 2020, last week. We were supposed to be in Montreal but, as has become the norm, the conference took place virtually. This was originally planned as the event when GULAGECHOES would present its preliminary findings to the international Russian, Eurasian and East European area studies audience and we still had the opportunity to do this. Jeff Hardy of Department of History, Brigham Young University and Judith Pallot, Director of the Aleksanteri Institute had organised a two-session panel entitled Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Tensions in the Gulag and Its Successors I & II. There were eight paper givers and two discussants five of whom were from the project. Mikhail Nakonechnyi talked about how people from the southern republics fared in the gulag northern camps based on the work he was able to do in the Russian archives before they were closed by lockdown. The other papers were given by Emily Johnson of the University of Oklahoma and Tyler Kirk, University of Alaska on letters and testimonies written by gulag prisoners. In the second session three of the papers were from the project; Judith introduced the theme of ethnicity in Russian prisons today with a paper analysing the official discourse on the concept of the multi-cultural prison; Albina Garifzyanova and Elena Omelchenko from Kazan University and HSE St Petersburg respectively, presented the findings from interviews with former prisoners in the Urals, and Rustam Urinboyev, presented his findings form Uzbekistan. Jeff Hardy rounded out the pane with a paper on religion in the late Soviet gulag. Recordings of all these papers, and the proceedings of the conference in general will be made available on the ICCEES conference website (panels 3.2 and 14.5) for the next two months at https://sites.events.concordia.ca/sites/iccees/en/iccees2020
Discussant Professor Alan Barenberg delivers his verdict on our papers in session 14.5.