Gender, Geography, and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia by Judith Pallot and Laura Piacentini (review)

What is peculiar about the incarceration of women in Russia? The question, at the heart of this fascinating study by two British scholars, one an historian turned human geographer and the other a prison sociologist, has two dimensions. The first is what makes Russia different from other countries in terms of its carceral practices in general. The second is how such practices differ by gender.

Russian distinctiveness boils down to two things. One is the surprising (to this reviewer) strength of its legacy of repressive policies from previous regimes—not only the notorious gulag of the Stalin era, but also tsarist institutions and structures. Hence the frequency with which the authors cite the metaphor of the archipelago, made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Much of prisoner jargon, including the term for prisoner (zek), is indebted to Stalin-era invention, as is the application of military terminology such as the brigade and the detachment (otriad), and indeed their centrality as mechanisms of self-regulation that Maria Loss, another expert in the field, describes as a form of “totalitarian surveillance-oriented bio-politics.” As for imperial Russian contributions, the train carriages transporting prisoners to their destinations are still known as “Stolypin carriages” in honor of the tsarist official who organized the repression of the revolutionaries of 1905. The authors also refer in passing to actual—not merely metaphorical or epithetical—structures dating from the tsarist era, in one case a provincial prison dating from the early nineteenth century.

The second—and this is what makes Pallot and Piacentini’s study so relevant to readers of this journal—is the role of geography in the punitive repertoire. They note the “paradox” that “as the conditions of confinement have improved in Russia and the most serious excesses of the Soviet camp are eliminated or moderated, the geographic factors have moved to the foreground” (69). The chief geographic factor is distance. Russia’s “penal heartland” lies in the outlying and sparsely populated regions of Komi, Mordovia, Krasnoiarsk, Perm’, Arkhangelsk, and Sverdlov. Moscow, by contrast, has not one correctional institution for convicted prisoners. This means “Moscow is still exporting its prisoners to other parts of the Russian Federation” (57). In chapters on remand and etap and quarantine, the authors analyze prisoners’ “coerced mobilization,” that is, what the Australian economic historian Geoffrey Blainey referred to in a different context as the “tyranny of distance.” We know how women prisoners experienced their journeys to prison colonies and a great deal else about their distanced confinement (lack of privacy; contact with children and other relatives; social relationships in the colonies; eventual rehabilitation) thanks to the 119 interviews conducted by three different research teams at facilities in Mordoviia and Riazan’ oblast’ between 2006 and 2010. Distance from one’s home region, the authors found, generally meant fewer visits by relatives, and correlates feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and depression. Some prisoners reported that they felt like they were not just in another part of the country, but in another country.

This brings me to the second dimension of the distinctiveness of women’s incarceration in Russia. Women, it turns out, have to travel farther than men to reach their carceral destinations. The majority of women prisoners in Russia are mothers, which means that except for children up to the age of three who are accommodated at prison colonies, the physical separation from their children can be over considerable distances. This too is part of the punitiveness of geography. And while prison officials pride themselves on catering to the gender-specific needs of women, dissatisfaction with their treatment oozes out of the statements of many women who were interviewed. One of the strengths of this study is its rigorous refusal to portray confined women merely as victims. Pallot and Piacentini weave women’s subjectivities into their narrative. They also grant them agency in compensating for deprivations—material and otherwise. They push beyond...