The pursuit of legal and penal reform
From the New Testament to present day statements from the Council of Europe, penal confinement has eschewed cultural, religious, political and social questions over the just limits of penal pain. If in the past Russian jails were a terra incognito to be learning about from the Gulag memoirs, the digital age revolutionised access to incarceration in ways hardly imaginable even a decade ago. In Russia today, prisoners, their families and extended loved ones, friends, acquaintances, activists, former prisoners and others use social media to create blogs, forums and websites on Russian incarceration. The unequivocal reality is that how one comes to be informed about Russian prisons increasingly comes in the form of smuggled out online content, but the content reveals horrific abuse, and inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners and human rights violations sanctioned, often, by prison staff. One of the most significant, shocking and potentially far-reaching examples of this was the global exposure in October 2021 of mass torture and rape of prisoners by agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB) and staff from the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) in Saratov region, in the Southeast of what is referred to as European Russia. The Russian activist organisation Gulagu.net (discussed in detail in Chapter 6) gained access to2 the secret video archive of Russian special services whose staff, it is claimed, humiliated prisoners and forced them to carry out illegal instructions. The archive contains hundreds of hours of shocking and uncompromising material of abuse filmed secretly across several prisons in Belgorod and Kamchatka and at a prison hospital in Saratov and sent to Gulagu.net3. The scale of the gruesome torture was unprecedented in contemporary Russia4 and has led to multiple sackings of staff including the Head of the Prison Region, the Head Doctor of the prison hospital and an investigation has been launched. According to Vladimir Osechkin, who leads Gulagu.net, the evidence shows how staff ‘themselves become part of the torture machine’5.
Gulagu.net has its own Instagram and YouTube channel6 with with three hundred thirty thousand subscribers, and it is a robust illustration of how Russian prisons have somewhat stepped out of the shadows and on to a virtual reality platform where the role of the internet transcends communicating meaning, to breaking down a digital divide and establish impact that creates political and cultural participation. In today’s world of Russian prisons, we have, not only, the internet as a vector for sharing and diffusing the inside to the outside. At the same time, we are seeing something we have never seen before on the subject of Russian penality, which is the internet as a field of activism and knowledge production, a vibrant, complex and dangerous place to be for those advocating for change where a position is adopted that stands in acute contrast to the culturally and historically embedded styles of penal governance in the sites where these harms appear to be becoming normalised.
Nevertheless, albeit accessible, internet access is still a hard-obtained ‘luxury’ in prisons and is a commodity that varies from prison to prison. The authorities continue to invest effort, resources and legislation to block access to broadband in prisons but with limited success, to say the least7. There are many different methods for transporting illegal phones into prison establishments in Russia. From bribing personnel (called nogi – legs), concealment in goods and parcels legally delivered onto the territory such as packing them into the log wood8, or into mobil’naya kolbasa (mobile sausage)9 and SIM cards in the soap; the list is seemingly limitless10. The current annual FSIN reports include a number of prohibited items (mainly cellular communication equipment) found in parcels for prisoners such as inhalers, deodorants, photo albums, Easter cards, cigarette packages and even in a double bottomed plastic basket with honey11. One of the recent legislative measures to prevent prisoners having illegal phones was explained as not impairing prisoners’ human rights, but rather to prevent crime being conducted in the ‘free world’ from prisons12; a not surprising measure as there are accounts of prisoners running their own illegal businesses online13.
As we hope to show, when Russia’s traumatic and hidden penal history is considered, these developments are both hugely profound and challenging because time has intersected with space and technology to create a particular form of penal-cultural spectatorship, that of the online prison world. Moreover, what these developments illustrate is just how far Russia has come from being a secreted and vast penal degradation machine to one that is porous and leaky, whose walls are moving, boundaries are broken and where its inner machinations can seep out ready to be watched on YouTube, to click ‘Like’ or add a ‘comment’. How Russian prisons arrived at this stage is rooted in a combination of factors. These include its exceptional political history, which sits distinctly from the global development of capitalism; lack of meaningful investment and legislation in alternatives to custody across the country; the rapacious speed with which judicial reform and the rule of law were designed, in no insignificant way, ‘for’ and not ‘by’ Russia’s legal elites, the withering of civil society under the current President Vladimir Putin, which has put strain on Russia’s decade long commitment to Europe-facing legal human rights culture until the early noughties and, finally, the sudden rise of social media in the mid- to late 2010s. Being online in Russian prisons is, therefore, both an expression and an impression of how this vast penal monolith has negotiated a complex global journey from a Tsarist exile system, to a totalitarian regime, to the one that faces the world through global penal policy commitments and also to some degree through an ‘online’ life.
The purpose of this chapter is to trace Russia’s penal journey to the present through an understanding of how prisoners ‘ended up on the internet’ (their own ironic assertion of conquering the web on one of the forums)14. The chapter outlines the context and trajectory of penal reform, and the contours, ebbs and flows of how Russian penality came to be diffused with reform narratives. The argument underpinning this chapter is that the carceral modernisation processes, for the first ten years after the collapse of the USSR, were highly contingent on responding to European and international movements for penal and legal reform on the humane treatment of prisoners. Penal reform was deeply implicated not only in the visible mobilisation of rights bureaucracies from outside Russia but also in an already well-established administrative culture inside Russia where bureaucracies of compliance are systemic of a wider embracing of authoritarian cultural norms and practices in everyday Russian society. When the levers of compliance (external and internal) converged, a problematisation of carceral modernisation that subverts the cultural and social relations of incarceration emerged (see Piacentini and Katz, 2018). It is this supplanting of the sociological reform of incarceration (asking what does the prison in society mean today in Russia?) that has given the world not only the Russian prisoner with agency and rights but also, to a significant degree, ‘created the online prisoner’ venturing into a virtual world who challenges the duties of the state.
The causes and outcomes of the Marxist/Leninist project to create and expand a prison industrial complex uniquely sitting on the periphery of global penal systems are central to the analyses of Russian prisons in the twenty-first century. The critiques of the scale, numbers and true extent of Soviet imprisonment, and the achievements of Russian area studies and Russian history scholars on this subject deserve recognition for the substantial attention given to detail scale and reach of the Soviet penal system, its nature and its form. This was a defiant penal system that expanded on an exponential scale from a few hundred camps in the early 1920s to over twelve million prisoners passing through its establishments until the 1950s (see Applebaum, 2003; Bacon, 1994; Barnes, 2011). The Soviet system produced and reproduced a new penal norm that developed into a culturally bloated idea of what punishment in prisons is and whom imprisonment is for. However, until very recently Russian area studies and history scholars have produced research that limits our understanding of Russia’s historical penal trajectory to what Foucault has referred to as inexhaustible facts (Plamper, 2002) that cannot be challenged or denied. As Piacentini and Pallot (2014) note:
‘A further point of note is that Russian penality is seen by historians as a “liminal case” because Russia, its institutions and its people have seen themselves as either East or West, or neither, or both. For Foucault, therefore, Russia did not easily fit into his foundational categorization of modernity in Western Europe and “as such it [the gulag] became one case over which Foucault’s categories stumbled”.
(Piacentini and Pallot, 2014: 25).
While historical research nowadays draws out connections and parallels between how the world beyond the barbed wire fences connected with what was happening inside prisons (see Shearer 2015), it was not always thus with Gulag population numbers dominating the discussion post-1991 amongst historians. At the same time, penal reform over the last twenty-five years has been both embraced and contested because it has been concerned with modernisation, democratisation and – crucially – shifting penality from a century-long totalitarian form, towards a legally compliant, human rights facing and collaborating-with ‘Western’ systems. Penal reform certainly reflected an open and contrite Russian political establishment (Bowring, 2010). It should be unsurprising then that with the opening up of the penal system, and the archives, came extraordinary tensions between reformers and the authorities, particularly those officials who had survived the old Soviet system and between Gulag scholars debating the extent of penal atrocity (King, 1994; King and Piacentini, 2005).
The end of the USSR marked a cultural turn in the penal sphere because in consuming the penal rhetoric from the European Union, reformers were creating new sites for the production of penal knowledges such as a civil society space where third sector groups could thrive, the creation of legal rights, legal advocacy and the implementation of programmes that modelled interventions on prison rehabilitation programmes across European prison systems. For a new penal imaginary to flourish – and become embedded in policy – legal reform was crucial and aimed at ending, for example, the rates of tuberculosis, which in 1991 were seventeen times higher in Russian jails compared to Russian society, torture and inhumane treatment. The 1990s in Russian prisons were, therefore, a time of great hope but also great turbulence due to the collapse of the command economy and chronic underfunding of the penal system. With the then President Boris Yeltsin caricatured as, at best, a theatrical fool and, at worst, a plunderer of Russia’s resources, when the 1990s ended, Russia was in a desperate economic and politica...
