Waiting at the Prison Gate

Women, Identity and the Russian Penal System

Judith Pallott, Elena Katz

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784536602
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720337
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Russian Federation has one of the largest prison populations in the world. Women in particular are profoundly affected by the imprisonment of a family member. Families and Punishment in Russia details the experiences of these women-be they wives, mothers, girlfriends, daughters-who, as relatives of Russia's three-quarters of a million prisoners, are the "invisible victims" of the country's harsh penal policy. A pioneering work that offers a unique lens through which various aspects of life in twenty-first century Russia can be observed: the workings of criminal sub-cultures; societal attitudes to parenthood, marriage and marital fidelity; young women's quests for a husband; nostalgia for the Soviet period; state strategies towards dealing with political opponents; and the social construction of gender roles.

CHAPTER 1

THE DECEMBRIST WIFE

What heroines?! It is the poets who made heroines out of us, but we just followed our husbands …

A.I. Davydova after returning from exile¹

No figure could be more inspiring and grand
Than a wife, resolution displaying
To die in the snows of a desolate land,
Preferring that fate to betraying
Her love.

Nikolai Nekrasov, Russian Women (1871–2)²

In the closing months of 1826 a woman set out from St Petersburg bound for Siberia. Climbing into her horse-drawn carriage that would take her on the first leg of a 7,000 kilometre journey, she knew that she would never return or see again the child with whom she had bid a tearful farewell. Her departure signalled the abrogation of her noble status and the civic rights associated with her rank. The woman was Princess Mariya Volkonskaya and the reason for the journey was her decision to follow her husband into penal exile in Chita – effectively, to share his punishment for having taken part in a revolt of army officers against serfdom.³ Mariya Volkonskaya is celebrated as a dekabristka (a Decembrist wife), one of the mythic figures of Russian history that symbolises the virtues of marital love, devotion and personal sacrifice.⁴ Fast forward to the twenty-first century and we meet the figure of Inna Khodorkovskaya, wife of Mikhail Khodorkovsky one of the first post-Soviet Russia's prisoners of conscience.⁵ Khodorkovsky served a prison sentence also in Chita (and, later, the European Russian North) before he was released in December 2013, as one of the beneficiaries of Vladimir Putin's pre-Sochi Olympics prisoner amnesties. Inna visited her husband frequently. In the eyes of her husband this made her his dekabristka.⁶ Majority popular opinion in Russia did not share the prisoner's view of his wife; Inna was criticised for not moving to Chita to live in the town where her husband was incarcerated and the implication that Khodorkovsky himself could be compared to one of the 1825 rebel officers was also judged inappropriate. Neither husband nor wife measured up to the prototypes of Russian national mythology; after all, he had been convicted of fraud and tax evasion.

During the nearly two hundred years separating the one–way journey of Mariya Volkonskaya and Inna Khodorkovskaya's repeated back-and-forth to Chita, the lives of many women in Russia have been transformed by the incarceration of a family member. In the everyday realities of having a family member in jail they can lay claim to be following in the footsteps of the dekabristki. In Russia the quotidian life of prisoners' relatives is shaped by the country's exceptional penal culture forged over the centuries, a foundation pillar of which is the belief that expelling people to the geographical peripheries is an appropriate way to deal with political opposition, social deviancy and criminality.⁷ In Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation, exile and incarceration have been used in different combinations for the purposes of retribution, incapacitation and rehabilitation. ‘Excisionary violence’ and ‘regulation by exclusion’ have been associated with other persistent features of Russian penal culture such as collectivism in penal management, prisoner self-organisation, prisoner-on-prisoner informing, cruel and brutal penal back-up and forced labour, which together have kept Russia firmly at the harsh end of the punishment spectrum.⁸ Even though in the twenty-first century Russia has formally pledged itself to humanise and individualise its approach to punishing offenders, the revolutions in penality that took place in Western jurisdictions in response to nineteenth-century penal reform movements largely continue to pass Russia by. A custodial sentence in Russia remains a terrible punishment exposing men, women and juvenile suspects and convicts to the supremely unhealthy and dangerous environment of Russia's penal institutions and to a degree of remote isolation that is guaranteed to place the severest of obstacles in the way of maintaining their familial and social relationships.

It is, of course, true that the twentieth-century communications revolution has ‘shrunk’ the distance between prisoners and their relatives. Whereas it took Mariya Volkonskaya six weeks to reach the silver mines where her husband was imprisoned, Inna Khodorkovskaya was able to reach her husband's colony in a day by combining air travel and taxi. Similarly, sending letters and parcels today has been cut to days and weeks rather than months, whilst the invention of telecommunications allows for ‘real time’ conversations between prisoners and the outside world. Relatives do not, therefore, need to relocate to where their family member is imprisoned today. However, in terms of the diminution of their civil rights, societal attitudes towards them and their treatment by authority, the plight of the women who have a family member in jail in the twenty-first century is not so very different from that of their predecessors. Today's ‘prisoners' wives’ occupy that same ‘liminal space’ between captivity and freedom as did Mariya Volkonskaya and her contemporaries. ‘In-betweenness’ is, in fact, a universal feature of prisoners' relatives in jurisdictions throughout the world. This is reflected in their labelling in academic discourse as ‘quasi-prisoners’, ‘prisoners-once-removed’ or ‘secondary prisoners’.⁹

It is the way that their story is told that turns Mariya Volkonskaya and Inna Khodorkovskaya into the mythic figure of a ‘Decembrist wife’. In this book, we explore the enduring resonance of the story of the women who followed the Decembrist officers to Siberia in the lives of women relatives or partners of prisoners in Russia today. Even though a majority of the women concerned are only distantly familiar with the original story and its re-tellings, the assumptions about women's role in the dekabristka myth are deeply embedded in Russian culture and inform society's expectations about how the relative of a prisoner should behave. And, as we show in the chapters that follow, women position themselves in relation to these norms in their own story-telling about what it means to be a ‘waiting at the gate’ in Russia today.

The Invention of the Dekabristka

Mariya Volkonskaya's story begins on 14 December 1825, the date scheduled for the Imperial Russian army's swearing of the oath of allegiance to the new Tsar Nicholas I. On that day, a group of young and well-educated army officers, among them the princess's new husband whom she had married a year previously, led their troops onto Senate Square in St Petersburg as a public declaration of their refusal to swear allegiance to the Tsar.¹⁰ They were motivated by a hatred of serfdom. They called for its abolition, the enactment of a new constitution and the establishment of a government guaranteeing universal rights, freedom and equality. The demonstration was put down by force and the five ringleaders were sentenced to death by hanging. The remaining one hundred and twenty-one guilty officers underwent ‘civil death’ that stripped them of their rights of rank before they were dispatched to Siberia to spend the rest of their lives in penal labour (katorga) and exile.¹¹ Eighteen women, among them eleven wives (the remaining six were mothers and siblings), took the decision to follow their men folk, but they were made to pay a high price for their loyalty. The Tsar granted their petitions to make the journey to Siberia only on condition that they also surrender their titles and that they leave their children behind.

In petitioning the Tsar, Mariya Volkonskaya could have pointed to the already established practice in Russia of women voluntarily following their convicted men into exile.¹² The majority of such women were ordinary folk, the narod, who regardless of their true motivations (for many, rural and provincial society offered no alternative livelihoods) were perceived as obeying their feminine and religious duty to follow and obey their husband, ‘as a thread follows the needle’ (nitka za igolkoi). In the nineteenth century, under regulations governing exile and punishment (Ustav o ssyl'nykh, 1822) the state belatedly attempted to provide some protection from ‘the severity of supervision’ and penal labour for convict-followers, but dire economic circumstances meant many were forced to live in the prison barracks and work in penal industries. In a very real sense, then, they shared their husbands' punishment. Noblewomen were expected to be dutiful wives too, but Tsarist family law, in their case, allowed them to petition for divorce. Nevertheless, prior to 1825 there were cases of noblewomen following their husbands. One celebrated example was Natal'ya Dolgorukova who was the subject of the Decembrist poet Kondratii Ryleev's ‘meditation’ of 1824:

I have forgotten my native town,
Wealth, honour and fame,
In order to share with him the cold in Siberia
And to endure the vicissitudes of fate¹³

Historians' interest in the dekabristka image has focused on examining the women's rapid descent of the socio-economic hierarchy and their consequential loss of social status and material well-being. They had much more to lose than their non-aristocratic sisters. Isolated by virtue of their relationship with a prisoner, the women were no longer protected by rank. They were deprived of aristocratic luxuries and found themselves plunged into a dangerous milieu of convicts and government outcasts. Having left families and everything else familiar behind, they found themselves simultaneously inside and outside the quintessentially male Imperial penal nexus. Their celebrated response was to learn practical skills necessary to do housework such as grow vegetables, sew clothes, pluck chickens, dress wounds, and a huge array of other tasks which their servants did for them back home.¹⁴ Combined with friendship, mutual support and frugal management of their limited material resources, these new skills allowed the women to gain some security and stability in their new lives. At the same time, the women were able to exploit their noble origins and society's respect for their spouses to the benefit of their lives in Siberia; they were able to procure financial, medical and other necessary goods and services and to persuade the prison authorities to allow the imprisoned officers to maintain links with their families back home. In the eyes of their incarcerated husbands, these women were their ‘guardian angels’.¹⁵ The women were subject to penal regulation visiting their husbands but, over time, they began to win concessions that indicated that their elite identities were not so easily dispossessed in pre-Emancipation Russia. Ivan Yakushkin, one of the Decembrist officers recalls in his memoir:

After the irons were removed from us [referring to the decree to unchain prisoners in 1828] our imprisonment was not too strict. Husbands went every day to visit their spouses, but if any of them were unwell the husband remained to spend the night at home. Later the husbands did not live in barracks at all, just continued to go to work when it was their shift … Little by little we received more privileges.¹⁶

The decision of the women to follow their men and their refusal to be cowed by the life that they had to make in Siberia caught the public imagination and contributed both to the endorsement of the Decembrists' actions and concurrently to the women's own mythologisation.¹⁷ In the century following Mariya Volkonskaya's arrival in Siberia, Russian literature, an incessant conduit of Russian national identity narrative and a largely male medium of expression, assigned the eighteen women hagiographic status. The claim to near sainthood was certainly based on the evidence of their self-sacrificial spousal devotion but, even more, on the lofty, politically-charged dimension of their actions. Yurii Lotman, the prominent Soviet semiotician, explains their actions as a ‘protest’ and ‘challenge’, which created a heroic female equivalent to the moral norms of the Decembrist men.¹⁸ According to Lotman, the Decembrist women encapsulated a ‘particular psychological stereotype’ of the daring heroine in a literary cult of suffering in Russia, as the above poem about Natal'ya Dolgorukova exemplifies. Entering the annals of national history as mythic figures, the Decembrist women's actions attained a ‘truly historical significance for the spiritual history of Russian society’.¹⁹ The sanctifying virtues of voluntary loyalty, self-sacrifice, altruism and selfless love became the ideal model of femininity for subsequent generations of Russian women.²⁰

The canonisation of the Decembrist wives in liberal and radical circles of the Russian intelligentsia owes a particular debt to the populist poem of 1871–2 by Nikolai Nekrasov. The poem was originally entitled ‘Dekabristki’ but was later modified to ‘Russkie Zhenshchiny’ (Russian Women) although three of the women were, in fact, French nationals by birth.²¹ While the poem focuses on two of the Decembrist wives, the princesses Mariya Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya, it treats these women's superior spiritual powers as qualities not only of the dekabristki, but of all Russian women.²² The poet construes the women's mythic martyrology in religious terms and in terms of the revolutionary ideas of the late 1860s and 1870s.²³ Thus, in Nekrasov's eyes, Ekaterina Trubetskaya's political rhetoric characterises Russian society as being transformed by Nicholas I from an ‘earthly paradise’ to one of a people ‘decaying alive’ where men had become ‘the mob of Judas’ and women, ‘slaves’. Mariya Volkonskaya descends into the ‘hell’ of a ‘cursed mine’ in Siberia to meet her husband and when she kneels to kiss his chains, the parallel with Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet is obvious.²⁴ The dekabristki represented a secularised version of an older Russian tradition of female religious devotion in which a ‘woman's mission was to serve others’, demonstrated in looking after their husbands and in charity towards...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. The Decembrist Wife
• 2. Listening to Women’s Voices
• 3. Prisoners’ Wives
• 4. The Bandit’s Wife
• 5. The Social Media Wife
• 6. Mothers
• 7. Daughters
• 8. The Outer Circle
• 9. Politicals’ Families
• Epilogue Prison the Leveller
• Appendix 1 Biographical Details of Women Interviewed for the Project
• Appendix 2 Prisoner-network websites
• Notes
• Bibliography