Welcome to Malaya Rodina (‘Little Homeland’): Gender and Penal Order in a Russian Penal Colony
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663909345097 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | Laura Piacentini,Judith Pallot,Dominique Moran |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
WELCOME TO MAL AYA RODINA
(‘LITTLE HOMELAND’):
GENDER AND PENAL ORDER IN
ARUSSIAN PENAL COLONY
LAURA PIACENTINI, JUDITH PALLOT AND DOMINIQUE MORAN
University of Strathclyde, UK, University of Oxford, UK,
and University of Birmingham, UK
ABSTRACT
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 punish-
ment 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.
KEY WORDS
distance; gender; L’govo; prisons; Russia; transportation; women
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES © The Author(s), 2009
Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
0964 6639, Vol. 18(4), 523–542
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909345097
INTRODUCTION
THIS ARTICLE presents new findings from research inside a penal colony
for girls in Russia. The findings are drawn from a new international
and interdisciplinary study into the penological and geographical
character of women’s imprisonment in late Soviet and early 21st-century
Russia.1Imprisonment in Russia remains under-researched in both crimino-
logical and socio-legal scholarship. Although the Soviet penal system was
notorious, having been discredited for decades by dissidents and the inter-
national human rights community, the horrifying scale of the brutality was
reported by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture in 1994 as follows:
The Special Rapporteur would need the poetic skills of a Dante or the artistic
skills of a Bosch adequately to describe the infernal conditions he found in
these cells. The senses of smell, touch, taste and sight are repulsively assailed.
The conditions are cruel, inhuman and degrading; they are torturous. (The
United Nations, Economic and Social Council, 1994: 19, quoted in Council of
Europe, 1996)
It is worth considering what kind of penal system is being described here.
For criminologists Russian penality presents a fascinating challenge as for
almost 70 years crime control was organized around sustaining a political
utopia. A penal fantasy was created: through forced labour and political cor-
rection, prisoners would become pioneers of communism. Such audacious
myth making allowed the penal system to operate way beyond crime control
in the normal sense. As the economy of punishment demanded prisoner
transportation to extreme locations, the penal system grew and grew to exces-
sive and inhumane proportions with upwards of several million languishing
in prisons, mostly in remote areas.
The collapse of the USSR exposed a penal system that was severely over-
crowded, badly under-funded and saturated with ill and abused prisoners.
The 1990s marked a sustained campaign to rupture the system through a
reduction of the population and reform of the legislative and organizational
structure of law and criminal justice. Human rights reports and a small
number of academic studies document Russia’s penal transition, particularly
in relation to conditions in regimes, changes in penal ideology, penal law and
human rights (Human Rights Watch, 1996; Kharakteristika, 2001; Piacentini,
2004a). Whether it was intentional or not, prioritizing judicial reform and
monitoring has resulted in the postponement of academic research so that
accountability to international human rights norms is the force impelling
penal change in Russia.
With this in mind, our more general aim in this article is to advance the
very limited scholarship conducted on Russian imprisonment by examining
the relationship between women’s imprisonment and distance from place of
domicile. By examining how the collapse of the Soviet penal monolith has
affected this significant link between distance and punishment, we seek to
make two contributions to, first, the existing scholarship on imprisonment in
524 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(4)
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