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 DR. JUDITH PALLOT, PI “GULAGECHOES”
In a new blog post, Judith Pallot analyses data on Wagner recruits, and explains the limitations of the available sources. A previous, shorter version of this post was published as an article on Riddle, entitled “Lies, damn lies and statistics — how many prisoners has Wagner really recruited?”
Continue reading “How many prisoners have been recruited by Wagner?”
Judith Pallot and Olga Zeveleva have been commenting on Russian prison conditions in international media after news broke that American basketball player Brittney Griner has been sent to a facility in Mordovia.
For more links to news stories featuring our work, see https://blogs.helsinki.fi/gulagechoes/gulag-echoes-in-the-media/
BY DR. COSTANZA CURRO
Dr. Costanza Curro, a Postdoctoral research fellow on the Gulag Echoes project, has been analysing criminal subcultures in Georgia’s penal system. In this blog post, Costanza reports on an online workshop she organised on 30 March 2022 as part of the GULAGECHOES project.
BY DR. SOFIA GAVRILOVA
In a new blog post, geographer Dr Sofia Gavrilova explains the importance of studying the geography of Stalin’s Terror, and presents her innovative approach to the topic. Sofia Gavrilova has been collaborating with GULAGECHOES PI Judith Pallot for the past decade, mapping the GULAG and developing the on the gulagmaps.org website. Now her expertise in Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping is advancing the GULAGECHOES project. This blog post shows how she has mapped the ethnic deportations that began in the 1920s and culminated in the war-time deportations.
Continue reading “Why does the geography of Stalin’s Terror matter, and how do we study it?”
BY DR. MIKHAIL NAKONECHNYI
At the beginning of March 2021, Mikhail Mishustin, Russian Prime Minister, declared that the government intends to invest 780 billion rubles into the development of transport infrastructure, including the audacious modernization of the Baikal-Amur Railway, popularly known by its acronym BAM (Baikalo-Amurskaia Magistral’). In a new blog post, Dr Mikhail Nakonechnyi analyses the implications of this news from a historical perspective.
Dr Olga Zeveleva gave a talk on the intersections of ethnicity and class in carceral settings in Estonia at the UCL SSEES Politics and Sociology Seminar Series. The talk is available for viewing on YouTube.
For more videos of public talks, media articles, podcasts, and radio programmes that draw on Gulag Echoes research, see the page Gulag Echoes in the Media.
On 9 February 2020, Dr Olga Zeveleva presented her ongoing research on the Estonian prison system at the Coffee & Sociology seminar, hosted by the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki. In this first presentation of this part of the Gulag Echoes project, she discussed her preliminary reflections on ethnicity, language, citizenship, and class in the Estonian prison system. You can read more about research conducted in Estonia by project PI Judith Pallot and postdoctoral researcher Olga Zeveleva here.
BY JUDITH PALLOT, PI “GULAGECHOES”
The press has reported on the arrest of opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, after his arrival back in the Russian Federation. He was immediately taken into custody, where an impromptu court chose to detain him on remand for a period of thirty days. We now know that he is being held in FKU SIZO-1 FSIN, one of seven Russian prisons directly subordinated to the central prison administration or FSIN (Federal’naya Slyuzhba Ispolneniya Nakazanii). In this new blog post, GULAGECHOES PI Judith Pallot describes this unusual remand prison, what we know about the conditions in which Alexei Navalny will be held, and whether they constitute a threat to his human rights.
Continue reading “Thirty Days in ‘Kremlin Central’: The Detention of Alexei Navalny”
BY JUDITH PALLOT, PI “GULAGECHOES”
Judith Pallot analyses the state of prisons in Belarus in a blog post on the project website. A previous, shorter version of this post was published as an article in OpenDemocracy Russia, entitled “Overcrowded and violent: what awaits Belarusian protesters in prison”.
Continue reading “What awaits convicted protesters sentenced to the Zona in Belarus”
On 20 October 2020, the GULAGECHOES team hosted a seminar with Ksenia Runova and Leonid Zhizhin of the Institute for the Rule of Law (Saint Petersburg). They presented their recent work on prison geography and social contacts between prisoners and their families. Read more about their findings here (in Russian).