Waiting At The Prison Gate: Women, Identity and the Russian Penal System 9781350989689, 9781786730336

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Judith Pallot is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Russian and East European Studies, University of Oxford and Christ Church (college), and Honorary Visiting Fellow, University of Leicester. Her interest in Russia spans four decades and she is the author of books and articles on Russian and Soviet rural society and the geography of punishment. She has commentated on Russia for the media – including BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, Radio Free Europe and the Guardian. Her most recent book, co-authored with Laura Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia (2012) was awarded the Barbara Heldt Prize by the American Association for Women in Slavic Studies. She is currently President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. Elena Katz is Honorary Research Associate, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford and teaches in its Department of Continuing Education. She was previously Max Hayward Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, a senior researcher at the School of Geography, where she contributed to various projects on the Russian prison system, and has most recently collaborated with Judith Pallot on the AHRC-funded project upon which this book is based. She has published widely in Russian area studies, literary and cultural history and is the author of Neither with Them, Nor Without Them: The Russian Writer and the Jew in the Age of Realism (2008). She is currently collaborating with Laura Piacentini on a Leverhulme-funded project on rights consciousness among prisoners in Russia.

‘Waiting at the Prison gate offers an illuminating and sensitive discussion of the impact of incarceration in the Russian Federation’s penal system on the relatives of prisoners. It vividly shows how “secondary prisonisation” requires women to redefine relationships, adapt their lives and develop strategies to deal with the stigma, pressures and anxieties that affect their self-identification. Revealing quotations illustrate how they make sense of their changing reality and give meaning to it, whether by justification, denial, avoidance, or a complex web of emotions. Excellently researched, this impressive and accessible book carries wide appeal.’ Mary Buckley, Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge ‘This powerful and innovative contribution to the field focuses on the experiences of prisoners’ wives and partners in contemporary Russia. The interviews with women “prisoners-in-law” on which this study is based empower these often marginalised women, and allow the reader to hear their voices directly. By taking the perspective of individuals operating at the margins of post-Soviet society, we are provided with unique insights into the lives of ordinary Russians, and into the position of women in Russia more broadly. We are also afforded access to the nature of prison sub-cultures and prisoners’ experience of life behind bars.’ Sarah Badcock, Department of History, University of Nottingham

WAITING AT THE PRISON GATE Women, Identity and the Russian Penal System

JUDITH PALLOT

AND

ELENA KATZ

Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2017 Judith Pallot and Elena Katz The right of Judith Pallot and Elena Katz to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by the authors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Human Geography 41 ISBN: 978 1 78453 660 2 eISBN: 978 1 78672 033 7 ePDF: 978 1 78673 033 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

CONTENTS

Figures Acknowledgements Preface 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The Decembrist Wife Listening to Women’s Voices Prisoners’ Wives The Bandit’s Wife The Social Media Wife Mothers Daughters The Outer Circle Politicals’ Families

vi ix xi 1 18 37 66 88 111 135 158 173

Epilogue Prison the Leveller Appendix 1 Biographical Details of Women Interviewed for the Project Appendix 2 Prisoner-network websites

198 204 210

Notes Bibliography Index

213 238 247

FIGURES

Figure P.1 A typical morning in the ‘priemnyi punkt’ in a Moscow sizo.

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Figure P.2 A men’s strict regime correctional colony in Pot’ma, Mordoviya. The western part of the republic is a more or less enclosed penal zone consisting of 17 correctional colonies and 11 villages.

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Figure P.3 A street in the settlement of Yavas – the capital of the penal zone in a remote rural district of the Republic of Mordoviya. The blocks of modern flats are occupied by prison staff. Figure P.4 The imprisonment rate by region in the Russian Federation, 2008 –14. The map demonstrates the export of prisoners from the central European part of the country to peripheral oblasts and republics in the European north, the Urals and Siberia.

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Figure 1.1 Princess Mariya Volkonskaya, by Karl Bryullov, 1842.

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Figure 1.2 The house in which Mariya Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya lived in Siberia to be near their husbands who had been condemned to forced labour in the Blagodatskii mine, Siberia (from Memoirs of Princess Volkonskaya, 1904, p. 89).

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Figure 2.1 Open day at a strict regime correctional colony in the Volga-Urals region. After a programme of lectures and tours, visitors are finally allowed to meet up with their prisoner relatives in the detachment yard.

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Figure 3.1 Information hatch in a Moscow remand prison. This is the place to which relatives have to come to confirm the location of a prisoner and for information about all aspects of staying in touch.

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FIGURES

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Figure 3.2 Talking on the intercom phone during a short visit at a correctional colony in Krasnoyarsk krai.

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Figure 3.3 Notice in a remand prison informing relatives what clothes they can hand in for a prisoner. It reads: ‘Citizen Relatives. Permitted Summer Clothes: base ball cap; wind jammer; polo neck jumper or sweater; tracksuit; shirt; shorts; summer shoes without arch supports; slippers or flip-flops; jeans or trousers; sweatshirts T-shirts. No winter clothes permitted’.

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Figure 3.4 Visiting a correctional colony. In this colony wives are allowed on open days into the dormitory where the prisoners sleep.

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Figure 3.5 Recently refurbished room for three-day family and conjugal visits in a correctional colony in Tatarstan (http://kazan24.ru/news/ 160243.html, accessed 27 June 2016).

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Figure 5.1 Waiting.

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Figure 5.2 Newlyweds. Correctional Colony Governors differ in how prepared they are to meet couples’ preferences for the ceremony. Not all permit wedding cakes, as here, and the time the newly wed couple is allowed together after the ceremony varies widely.

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Figure 6.1 A mother arriving at a Moscow remand prison with bags of produce to hand in for onward passage to her son.

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Figure 6.2 Unpacking cigarettes for inspection by the prison authorities in the parcel reception point in a Moscow sizo.

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Figure 6.3 Set lunches. This is a notice encouraging relatives to order meals for their relative within. It reads: ‘Order set and supplementary meals in this remand prison. Healthy and good quality food. Good eating keeps people healthy: grilled chicken, baked products; pelmeni, pilaf, hallal. Your prisoners receive the order by lunchtime. Pay by credit card via the internet’. 126 Figure 6.4 Making an order. In the major cities the Prison Service has set up an online system that relatives can use to order food for their family member within. These two women are placing orders in a Moscow remand prison.

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Figure 7.1 The fences enclosing the prisoners’ dormitories in a correctional colony in the Republic of Mordoviya.

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Figure 7.2 The signpost at the entrance to the village of Leplei, the site of three penal colonies in the Republic of Mordoviya founded in the 1930s at the time of the gulag.

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Figure 9.1 Svetlana with her son on a visit to the correctional colony in Sarapul, the Republic of Udmurtiya, early in Igor’s sentence.

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Figure 9.2 Ol’ga Romanova at work for Rus’ Sidyashchaya, a website set up to support and defend Russia’s prisoners and their families.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We have many people to thank for the help they all gave in producing this book. The research on which this book is based was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. We are grateful to the members of the Oxford University Centre for the Environment who in various ways contributed towards the production of this book, from helping with the original grant proposal, to administering the finances and providing cartographic and technological support. The bulk of interviews with the women whose stories we tell in this book were undertaken by a team of researchers under the leadership of Elena Omel’chenko, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Youth Centre in the Higher School of Economics St Petersburg. Elena and her team were involved in all stages of the project from research design, to data collection and analysis. They set about the task of accessing subjects to interview in various cities in the Russian Federation, taking and transcribing interviews with characteristic professionalism drawing upon years of experience and deep understanding of ethnographic methods. So rich are the data collected that they have formed the basis of two separate volumes. Already published in 2015 is a series of essays by the Vyshka team under the title of Okolo tyur’my: zhenskie seti podderzhki zaklyuchennykh (Beside the Prison: Women’s Networks for Supporting Prisoners). Thanks are due also to many others who have contributed in various ways to the project. We should like to mention in particular, Kristina Gorelik of Radio Free Europe and former political prisoners Igor Sutyagin and Zara Mourtazalieva who, in addition to accessing interview subjects, were ready sources of information and opinion on a wide range of issues concerning people’s experience of the Russian prison system. For his exquisite translations of Russian verse, our thanks go to Professor Gerry Smith. We have gained enormously from our continuing wide-ranging decade-long dialogue about penality with Laura Piacentini, Professor of Criminology, University of Strathclyde. We are also

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grateful to Ailsa Allen of the School of Geography, University of Oxford, for the work on the map in Figure P.4. We are delighted that the publisher I.B.Tauris encourages authors to provide illustrations to go with their text. Accessing pictures in the territories of Russian prisons and correctional colonies is not at all easy and, apart from complications around access, raises ethical issues. We are grateful for the permission to publish pictures in figures given by Sofiya Gavrilova (Figures P.1, 3.1, 3.3, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4) Elena Omel’chenko (figures P.2, P.3, 2.1, 3.4, 7.1, 7.2); Ol’ga Romanova (Figure 9.2); Igor Sutyagin (Figure 9.1) and Carl de Keyzer/Magnum Photos (Figures 3.2, 5.2). This book would not be possible without the willingness of the women who were prepared to talk to us about how their lives have been affected by the imprisonment of a family member. The conversations were frequently not easy for them and we have done our best to do justice to their stories. Finally, our thanks are due to our families which have had to shown particular degree of patience and support during all stages in the preparation of this book and so special thanks go to them.

PREFACE

A woman ‘waiting at the gate’ is a powerful image in Russian penal culture. It is associated with two historical stereotypes. The first is the dekabristka or Decembrist ‘wife’, the aristocratic woman who follows her officer husband convicted for his part in the protest against the tsar in 1825 to Siberian hard labour and exile. The gate at which she is standing is to the ostrog or fortress prison where he is confined. The second is a peasant woman standing at her rural homestead gate wringing her hands as she scans the horizon for the return of her son. He can be a soldier, a prisoner or just an ordinary lad who has left home to explore the world beyond the village. This image of the mother is materialised in the figure of the matreshka, the endlessly replicating wooden doll, that was manufactured in peasant handicraft industries from the end of the nineteenth century for sale to pilgrims to Russia’s sacred monasteries. The matreshka is at once a universal symbol of motherhood and of ‘Mother Russia’ and it is to her the errant or wandering son returns for comfort, forgiveness and rebirth. Women are still to be found waiting at the gate. The twenty-first-century version of the dekabristka is the figure of a woman laden with large bags of food and cigarettes standing in line at correctional colony or prison gate. She is waiting for admittance to the priemnyi punkt, or parcel reception point, to hand in for inspection the parcels she has brought for her relative within. Today’s matreshka can also still be found waiting at the gate to her wooden izba deep in rural Russia, but more commonly she is sitting at the kitchen table in her small Soviet-era flat in some provincial city waiting for news that a son whom she has not seen for two, three, four or more years has been released from prison and has embarked on the long journey home from some distant corner of the Russian Federation. The dekabristka and matreshka are images of the woman that are deeply embedded in Russian culture and their strong association with prison (in the case of the former, directly and of the latter, indirectly) is indicative of the prominent role that penality has played in shaping gender identities in Russia.

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It is conventional for scholars writing about the situation of prisoners’ relatives to begin their analyses in the prison waiting room. We follow this convention, except that in Russia’s case the street, unsheltered from snow, rain and the summer sun, has to substitute for the waiting room. The words we quote below are from one of the women interviewed for this book. She is describing the array of people she encounters waiting at the prison gate in one of the republics located in the valley of the Volga River half way between Moscow and the southern slopes of the Ural Mountains: There are, of course, many people from other towns; lots of them. Once, when I came for a visit in January there was a Mum who had come all the way from Azerbaijan. She told me that her son had simply vanished; she’d not seen or heard from him for four years. I say they’ve probably buried him, but she says she’d tracked him down and that’s why she’s come. But they were refusing her a visit because she hadn’t written an application and waited the month and a half for the Prison Governor’s permission. She’d just turned up on the off chance. Of course, in the end they did let her in [. . .] she had come a long way. She wasn’t young anymore, so I helped her. Together we ran back and forth: to one place to have our passports checked, then to another to get a receipt, then another to pay and so on. It was my second time, so I already knew what to do. My last visit was in November and that time I met a girl from Siberia which isn’t near either. And they also come all the way from Petersburg. It’s mainly wives. But there can be mothers as well, they come, say, once a year but the wives will come for every visit [. . .] I seem to remember some fathers coming with the ‘grannies’ [. . .] In July, I think it was, there were two couples. One of the men was a double-amputee. And they had all these very heavy bags full of produce for their sons and it was so hard to watch how they struggled. And then there are the young girls; even though they are healthy, they struggle as well with these bags they can hardly pick up, in their high heels and painted faces. There are also pregnant women, women breastfeeding their babies, and children. The set up is very difficult for everybody. This description conveys some of the features commonly associated with prison visiting in Russia. These are that visiting institutions where a relative is held can involve exceptionally long journeys, that family members understand putting together food and produce parcels can be key to an inmate’s survival and that visiting a Russian penal institution is to enter a hostile physical and political environment. For some prisoners’ relatives these and the other consequences of the imprisonment of a family member that we describe in the pages that follow prove to be too much of a challenge. A visit once made may never be repeated,

PREFACE

Figure P.1

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A typical morning in the ‘priemnyi punkt’ in a Moscow sizo.

with the inevitable result that the ties with the prisoner are loosened and, ultimately, may be severed entirely. The Russian Prison Service does not systematically report patterns of prisonerfamily contacts but a census carried out in 2009 found that just 38 –47 per cent of male prisoners, 26 –36 per cent of female prisoners and 33– 46 per cent of juvenile prisoners had received a visit during the twelve months prior to the census’s enumeration.1 Contact by other means (parcel sending, writing, social media and the telephone) have to substitute for visits and the statistics for these are better than for visiting, but still do not change the overall picture that when it comes to maintaining active links between prisoners and their families, the record in the Russian Federation is not good. To understand why this is the case and, more broadly, to equip the reader with the context necessary to follow the stories we tell in this book, we need to make a brief excursion into the geography, history and institutional structure of Russian penality.

The Penal Legacy The Russian Federation has yet to shake off the penal legacy that it inherited in 1991 from the Soviet Union. This is despite the fact that during the past twenty-

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Figure P.2 A men’s strict regime correctional colony in Pot’ma, Mordoviya. The western part of the republic is a more or less enclosed penal zone consisting of 17 correctional colonies and 11 villages.

five years the Russian government has introduced far-reaching reforms into the criminal-justice system. In 1996 the country joined the Council of Europe and two years later went on to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights which committed it to bringing its penal practice in line with European norms. In its attempt to comply, Russia has invested in modernising the prison estate, equipping penal institutions with up-to-date surveillance technologies, improving and professionalising prison officer training and introducing changes aimed at ‘humanising and individualising’ prisoner management. Notwithstanding improvements, even prison service insiders acknowledge that the Russian Federation still falls far short of European standards for the humane treatment of prisoners and that prison reform has stalled.2 Inadequate conditions in prisons remain a problem and as of 2011 the Russian Federation had the greatest number of rulings against it at the Strasbourg Court for inhumane and degrading treatment of people held in detention.3 The Soviet inheritance is evident in a number of ways that have a direct bearing on this book’s concern with the women drawn into the orbit of Russia’s

PREFACE

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Figure P.3 A street in the settlement of Yavas – the capital of the penal zone in a remote rural district of the Republic of Mordoviya. The blocks of modern flats are occupied by prison staff. prison nexus because of their relationship with a prisoner. The first is the sheer volume of people involved, whether as prisoners, former prisoners, relatives of past and present prisoners, or employees of the prison service. While numbers today are nowhere near the grotesque figures in the millions for the Stalin gulag, Russia remains a high imprisonment society. On 1 October 2016 there were 640,357 people held in penal institutions in Russia, of which approximately one-fifth were on remand.4 A further one-third of a million were serving non-custodial sentences, under the supervision of the penal inspectorate, or were under house arrest. The number of people employed by the prison service is correspondingly large. In 2015 there were nearly one-third of a million prison service employees, including 225,200 prison officers.5 According to the tenth world prison population list compiled by Roy Walmsley, more than one half of the world’s prison population is to be found in three countries, of which the Russian Federation is the third largest after China and the USA. In 2013, Russia’s imprisonment rate was 475 per 100,000 population, which placed it tenth on the world list, behind the USA, in first position with 719 per 100,000, Rwanda and a host of small island states and protectorates.

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When these figures are put together with the accumulated millions that were put to hard labour during the Soviet period the popularly held view that over the last three generations pretty well every family in the Russian Federation must have had a family member in prison at some time or other has credence. Small wonder that the language of prison tattoos, ‘chansons’ and slang have seeped into society at large, so that even the President evidently believes he gains legitimacy by its use.6 And small wonder also that the gender identities constructed by encounters with penality circulate through society. The shadow of prison squats in the corners of nearly every family’s life in the Russian Federation. A second element of the Soviet inheritance that is part of the context for this study is that the population of over 1 million prisoners and prison service employees is spread over a vast geographical area covering eleven time zones. The current geographical structure of the prison estate reflects its development and expansion in the twentieth century in response to the resource mobilisation and economic needs of the Soviet state.7 The estate has a distinctive geographical division of labour, with remand prisons (acronym, sizos) located in well-populated centres and the majority of correctional facilities for convicted prisoners often located in remote rural locations. Figure P.4 show the uneven geography of punishment in Russia. Its consequence is that many prisoners serve their sentences far from where they live. Currently there are 752 institutions for convicted prisoners. Most numerous are correctional colonies (ispravitel’nye kolonii) divided into three categories: ‘general’, ‘strict’ and ‘special’, including in the last of these a small number of colonies for men on life sentences and commuted death sentences. Open prisons (kolonii-poseleniya), juvenile colonies, isolation colonies for prisoners with infectious diseases and cellular prisons make up the rest. The Russian Federation adheres to the principle established at the time of the gulag that serious offenders should be confined to the most remote colonies, but Russia’s open prisons are an exception to this rule, since they are often located in villages more remote than standard regime colonies.8 The son of one of the women interviewed for this study is serving his sentence in an open prison in a small village within the Arctic Circle. The friction of distance with which this geographical structure is a major determining influence on the intensity and modalities of contact between prisoners and their families. Paradoxically, it is also responsible for one of the most progressive features of Russian penal culture: the provision of facilities for overnight family visits. (There are purpose built dormitories with private rooms where prisoners and up to three family members can spend seventy-two hours together.) This is a provision that appears in the criminal correctional code as a right for all convicted prisoners. It is one of the few positives to come out of the Russian Federation’s exceptional penal geography. It is an example of one of the

Figure P.4 The imprisonment rate by region in the Russian Federation 2008 –14. The map demonstrates the export of prisoners from the central European part of the country to peripheral oblasts and republics in the European North, the Urals and Siberia.

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changes forced on the prison service by the Europeanisation of its standards: in order to fulfil its obligations to support prisoners’ family-ties it was necessary to provide facilities for relatives to stay overnight at colonies if they were to be persuaded to undertake the often arduous journeys to the penal peripheries.9 The third inheritance passed down from Soviet times is a penal culture that has kept Russia at the harsh end of the punishment spectrum. Approaches to prisoner management and surveillance originating in the gulag have been handed down from one generation to the next. All penal institutions in Russia are state owned and run from a single central administration, the Federal Service for the Administration of Punishments (Federnal’naya Sluzhba Ispolneniya Nakazanii, acronym FSIN) which has branches in every region. FSIN is a highly militarised organisation (officers wear uniforms, hold military ranks and go in for saluting and standing to attention) and this militarism pervades penal space. Russian correctional institutions are quintessential male spaces. Today, the wives, mothers and other family members of prisoners are no longer expected to denounce their relative or are automatically assumed to be complicit in the offence committed, as they were in the Stalin gulag, but once through the prison gate they are subject to a penal regime that traditionally has viewed outsiders as an unnecessary intrusion and risk to security, and treats them accordingly. The absolute prioritisation of the needs of ‘the regime’ over those of developing family friendly programmes undermines progress made in other areas to support prisoners’ family ties. Apart from the formal rules, correctional colonies and remand prisons are also sites of informal practices that every relative has to learn to navigate. Despite the centralised and hierarchical organisation of the prison service, there is scope for ‘individual interpretations of policy directives’ at the local level. Peripheral penal regions resist innovation (and the more peripheral they are, the greater the resistance) and corruption is rife in some regions. Rather than encountering standardised and uniform practices, prisoners’ relatives find they must adjust to a localised penal culture, which may be very different from that experienced elsewhere. A final element of the context for the discussion in what follows is the current character of the prisoner contingent, as it is known in Russia. This is an area where there have been dramatic changes since Soviet times. The transition away from communism, involving far-reaching political, ideological and economic changes and the opening of borders, redefined societal norms and resulted in changes in how criminality is defined. Political articles which had sent dissidents to jail in the 1970s were removed from the criminal code, as were articles concerned with offences related to sexual orientation and entrepreneurial activity. Russia’s prisons today, like those in Western jurisdictions, have an expanding population of young male adults serving sentences for drug offences under articles 228– 234 of the criminal code. Statistics published on the prison

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service website give the figure of 21.1 per cent of the total adult prison population convicted under these articles, as against 26.7 per cent for murder, article 105. ‘Newcomers’ to the population of prisoners are men and women convicted of fraud and other white collar crimes that have come on the scene since the introduction of the market economy and, of late, a new generation of political prisoners. These newcomers and the bosses of organised crime aside, the majority of prisoners occupying the barracks of Russia’s correctional colonies herald from lower socio-economic and educational strata in Russian society, with a disproportionate number from national minorities.

Secondary Prisonisation and Women This book is about women: the wives, mothers, girlfriends and other women relatives of Russia’s prison population. As in other jurisdictions, women in Russia are profoundly affected by the imprisonment of a family member. Many suffer a degree of damage in the form of loss of income, social stigmatisation and psychological problems. These affects, together with treatment by a penal monolith that often casts women relatives as little better than the offender they are supporting, are commonly labelled as ‘secondary prisonisation’. Secondary prisonisation exaggerates gender inequalities in Russia, revealing women’s secondary status in its gender stratified society. It is, thus, as relevant and important a topic for feminist analysis as the experiences of women prisoners who make up 8.1 per cent of the prison population in the Russian Federation (and are the subject of an earlier book).10 The present study is feminist in its challenge to a status quo that is disadvantageous to women. As we will show, the disadvantages women suffer are maintained by ideologies that are accepted by the oppressed and the oppressors, the latter in this context consisting of the institutions that make up FSIN, society at large and, also, the imprisoned men the women are supporting. Much of the existing scholarship on prisoners’ relatives works within a ‘damage assessment’ paradigm; that is, its purpose is to catalogue the negative impact on women’s lives of the imprisonment of a family member. As a general rule, the economic, financial and status consequences of the imprisonment of husband, father or child for women are dire. But we also believe that there is more to the story of the women ‘left behind’ by Russia’s attachment to using imprisonment to solve problems of social deviancy, criminality and political opposition. It is a more complex story that we tell in this book. Using their own words, we examine the practical adaptations women have to make to their lives, the impact upon their relationship with the prisoner and other family members, and the strategies they employ to counter the stigma that attaches to their status as a prisoner’s relative. Above all, however, we are interested in exploring how the secondary prisonisation they experience is understood by the women

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themselves and how it affects their self-indentification. We do this by listening to their stories of ‘being a prisoner’s relative’ and noting where they position themselves in relation to the stereotypes of the prisoner’s wife, mother or daughter that society constructs for them. We discuss how we go about this in Chapter 2, but begin with a more detailed discussion of the historical stereotype informing societal expectations of the prisoner’s wife.

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

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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

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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 ‘quasiprisoners’, ‘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

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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:

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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

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female religious devotion in which a ‘woman’s mission was to serve others’, demonstrated in looking after their husbands and in charity towards convict and indigenous populations in Siberia.25 Russian historians of the late Imperial period would pattern their analyses of the Decembrist wives’ idealistic actions on this poem’s radical ideology.26 Dostoevsky, sentenced for his youthful radical activities to imprisonment and exile, met with the Decembrist women en route to his Siberian prison in 1849 and his declaration that they were ‘great martyresses’ was also an important step in eulogising them for posterity. The writer described their sacrifices as fulfilling ‘the supreme moral duty, the freest duty that can ever exist’, since ‘guilty of nothing, they endured for twenty-five long years everything that their convicted husbands endured’.27 The artistic image of Russian womanhood, with its superior capacity for self-sacrifice, was constructed by Dostoevsky as a ‘model’ for emulation in Sonya Marmeladova, the saintly prostitute in the novel Crime and Punishment (1866). In accordance with the dekabristka tradition, Sonya presents the murderer Raskolnikov with gifts (a copy of the Gospels and a cross) and follows him to Siberia. Dostoevsky received similar gifts from the Decembrist women he met. Even aristocratic women’s fashion in St Petersburg high society reflected admiration for the Decembrists with copies of bracelets made of the Decembrists’ leg fetters in great demand after the amnesty of 1856.28 Close examination of representations of dekabristki in the later periods of Imperial Russia shows that on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution the figure of the dekabristka hovered uncertainly between the political and the romantic. She was a woman of imposing strength and ‘terrible perfection’ whose loyalty was a source of strength for her husband.29 The oath from Nekrasov’s poem, ‘I will empower him!’, made by Mariya Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya reflected society’s perceptions of women as figures of remarkable power. This image of the Decembrist women represented them simultaneously as the precursors of revolutionaries and as dedicated wives, mothers or siblings acting out of love.30

The Soviet Re-telling of the Dekabristka Story The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 could have brought an end to the popularity of the dekabristka myth; for revolutionary women, such as Alexandra Kollontai who actively promoted free love, the image of wifely duty held little appeal and the class origins of the prototypes was problematic.31 But there were new models of women dedicated to the revolutionary cause who followed their comradesin-arms to Siberia during the decades of preparation for the revolutionary struggle to come. Most celebrated among these was Nadezhda Krupskaya who accompanied Lenin into exile in Shushenskoe in Siberia where she continued to support him in the production of his revolutionary tracts. They married in July

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1898, both refusing to wear weddings rings, the symbol of bourgeois marriage. The valorisation of Krupskaya’s role in Soviet official discourse emphasised her identity as a revolutionary in her own right; it was in this role, not as love-partner that she journeyed to self-imposed Siberian exile. Notwithstanding the recasting of the way in which marriage was to be performed in the worker’s state, popular and official discourse continued to show a firm attachment to the elements of the Decembrist story that reproduced gender stereotypes, construing ‘the wives’ as the ‘most happy women’. Nekrasov’s poem maintained its romantic appeal to the new Soviet intellectual elite who had grown up admiring the ‘moral feat’ of the dekabristki, with the image now much promoted by the patriotic discourse of Bolshevik ideology. Soviet universal basic education and mass media representations of the Decembrist discourse kept alive its popular appeal. Official discourse did not go unchallenged. Stalin’s Terror, the gulag and postStalin repression of dissidents gave rise to new interpretations of the Decembrist story as the oppositional intelligentsia sought to give meaning to their experiences by positioning themselves as fellow-martyrs of the nineteenthcentury political dissenters. The dekabristka trope was appropriated by women whose fathers, sons and husbands were repressed under Stalin or who were themselves transported to Siberia for the ‘crime’ of being the wife-of-an-enemyof-the-people. Literary testimonies of Anna Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam and Lidiya Chukovskaya bear witness to the long queues outside prisons as women made agonised attempts to learn about the fate of their arrested loved ones and to pass on letters and food parcels.32 These were the experiences that prompted Akhmatova to liken these women to the dekabristki.33 In her poetic cycle Requiem of 1935 –1940, she reflects from the long historical perspective on the bitter fate of Russian women who lost their loved ones to the state terror. In 1938 she went every day for eight months to Leningrad’s Kresty jail for news of her arrested son. She declared her own ‘inconsolable wailing beneath the Kremlin towers’ to have united her with ‘the wives of the murdered strel’tsy’ (referring to the executed or exiled elite guard which rebelled against Peter the Great in 1698). The memoirs and poetry, historical prose and drama of the intelligentsia, therefore, drew analogies between the Decembrists and the victims of the Stalinist repression.34 Prose memoirs from the gulag, often written as a semifictional narrative, can be read as a social commentary on Stalinist Russia, where the husband’s imprisonment meant that the protection and survival of the family fell solely on the wife’s shoulders. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, for example, relates a story of a political prisoner’s wife who scraped together the huge sum of 40,000 roubles to pay her lawyer’s fees by selling the lease of her room and begging from relatives. Her plea to fellow prisoners’ wives, whom she meets in a prison visiting room, was filled with a naive belief in ultimate success: ‘Our husbands are suffering. No one is ever released without an effort. Keep

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writing!’35 Solzhenitsyn describes another prisoner’s wife, Nadya, who commissioned a petition from a lawyer and then had to live with agonising self-doubt that she had underpaid him with the result that he had taken offence and ignored her case: I wonder – have we done everything we could? Are our consciences clear? . . . I mean that we don’t sacrifice ourselves to the limit . . . The wives of the Decembrists didn’t spare themselves, you know, they gave up everything and went to Siberia with their husbands [. . .] Perhaps it’s too much to expect to get one’s husband released, but might one not be able to arrange for his sentence to be commuted to exile if one tried hard enough? If I were given the choice I’d rather he were exiled to any place – to the tundra, to the Arctic Circle, to somewhere the sun never shines – provided I could go with him. I would give up everything.36 Similarly, the widely read memoirs of Evgeniya Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, reflect on the power that the Decembrist myth exerted on the hearts of her seventy-six camp inmates: How often our thoughts had turned to the Decembrists and their wives! I recited a passage about Princess Volkonskaya meeting her husband: ‘I fell on my knees to him. Lifting his chains, I kissed them before I embraced him’. No, these were no longer just lines in an anthology – they expressed the longing of all seventy-six of us. As I declaimed them, I saw before me all those pairs of anguished eyes [. . .] As for the Decembrist wives we felt as if we were sharing the journey with them and they with us.37 At the height of the Stalin Terror, the genre of petition writing took forward the historical traditions of plach (lament) and the timely prominence of the loyal wife trope, patterned on the historical Decembrist wives.38 Letters to the authorities described the emotional suffering, ordeals and humiliation women had to endure when they were forced to share the fate of their exiled husbands. One Leningrad woman deported to Saratov with her husband, a former nobleman, and forced to leave their children behind, was unable to find work even as a cleaner. She bitterly complained that she had lost her dignity ‘as a human being, a woman, and a citizen’: I have submitted petitions asking that my husband’s exile and mine be changed [. . .] that we be allowed to return to our children and parents – but within a month all of my petitions were rejected. Comrade Roginskii [in Moscow] told me to ‘send VTsIK a petition for mercy ( pomilovanie)’. In other words, I have to ask forgiveness for crimes I didn’t commit.

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If I actually did commit a crime by marrying this kind of nobleman, then the hardship, deprivation, insult and separation from my children fully redeems me.39 But there were limits to how far the dekabristka analogy could speak to the victims of the Stalin repression. A strong theme to surface in the gulag testimonies concerns where in the hierarchy of suffering the nineteenth- and twentieth-century victims of oppression stood. Here is Evgeniya Ginzburg comparing the conditions of her transportation to the Far East with those of the Decembrist wife forebears: I always thought that the dekabristki endured the most frightful sufferings, but listen to this: ‘of the wondrous built, so firm, so fast the carriage’ . . . They ought to have tried one of the Stolypin coaches.40 Others made the point more stridently. In a much quoted passage from his novel The First Circle and speaking through the character of a camp prisoner’s wife, Solzhenitsyn makes his view known that the sufferings of the women relatives of prisoners in Stalinist Russia were greater than anything their forebears had had to endure in the previous century: A hundred or more years ago it was easy enough to be a loving, faithful wife. I don’t think the wives of the Decembrists did anything really brave. Were they pestered with prying questionnaires whenever they tried to get a job? Did they have to hide the fact that they were married as though it were an infectious disease, simply to avoid losing their jobs, simply in order not to lose their only income of 500 roubles a month? Did they have to share a flat where everyone turned their backs on them? Did they have to hear other people whispering that they were traitors to their country every time they went to the communal tap for water? Did their own mothers and sisters advise them to be sensible and get a divorce? No, they most certainly did not! They basked in the approval of the best people in society! With their gracious help, poets turned their deeds into legends [. . .] It’s all very fine to say you’d go to Siberia [. . .]41 Anna Larina, widow of Bolshevik theorist and Stalin’s arch-rival Nikolai Bukharin, who spent twenty years in the gulag was even more dismissive of the Decembrist wives’ suffering: What are the tears of times past in comparison with the tears of the women in our prison camps? . . . Consider the ‘Russian Women’, Princess Trubetskaya and Princess Volkonskaya abandoning their lives of luxury

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Figure 1.1

Princess Mariya Volkonskaya, by Karl Bryullov, 1842.

in Petersburg and riding post chaise to join their Decembrist husbands in Siberia. There is no denying that it was a heroic deed! A subject fit for a poet! But how did they travel? Behind a team of six horses wrapped in furs, enclosed in a marvelously furnished carriage [. . .] Also they were riding to their husbands! Our women, Russians and non-Russians [. . .] were transported in cattle cars . . . and on arrival we had to line up and walk from the station to the camp, drained of strength, barely able to haul our miserable belongings in suitcases or bundles, guarded by police dogs and terrorized by the shouts of convoy: ‘Anyone steps to the side, and I’ll fire without warning!’ or ‘Sit!’ even in snow or muck, just sit! And we were not going to our husbands, though some dreamers among us naively hoped that in that camp over in the other world they would be united with their

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men [. . .] Ah, how different that road would have been to me if I could have believed that it led to Nikolai Ivanovich!42 Whilst the use of the dekabristka trope provided women with a sense of belonging, pride, self-esteem and identity, it was also a reiteration of the continuity of generations, enabling historical memory to endow their suffering with meaning and value. Yet, the application of the Decembrist women’s analogy to individual circumstances was often historically misplaced. Larina and Ginzburg were not comparing like-with-like. They did not travel voluntarily to be with an imprisoned or exiled husband but, rather, were themselves repressed and, like countless other innocents, dispatched to the gulag. The women who remained free after a family member’s arrest also suffered, especially if they set out on often pointless journeys to Siberia to find their loved one, and many wives came under pressure to divorce their husband.43 Ginzburg and Larina’s comments are instructive in showing the extent to which these intellectual women had internalised the norm that it is the nature of her relationship with a man that takes priority in a woman’s personal identity-construction.

The Final Decades The use of the criminal-justice system to control dissent resumed after Stalin’s death and persisted to the end of the Soviet Union, albeit ebbing and flowing as political priorities changed. A wave of political repressions in the 1960s and 70s resulted in additions to the already vast corpus of labour camp memoirs. Dissidents were imprisoned, exiled or, in a new torment, placed in psychiatric institutions and their testimonies bore witness to the continuing power of the Decembrist trope to give meaning to their experiences. The journalist Elena Frolova, wife of Leningrad poet Anatolii Berger imprisoned and exiled to Siberia in 1969 for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, describes her troubled experiences ‘on the other side of the fence’, as the wife of a dissident. When subjected to an interrogation during which she was offered the opportunity to persuade her husband to become an informer in exchange for his freedom, she describes how she found strength by reciting to herself lines from Nekrasov’s Russian Women: A life of deep and boundless woe My husband’s fate will be, And I do not desire to know More happiness than he.44 Later, the satirical novelist Yuliya Voznesenskaya who was arrested and forced to emigrate from the USSR in 1980 for anti-soviet activities, made one of the

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Figure 1.2 The house in which Mariya Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya lived in Siberia to be near their husbands who had been condemned to forced labour in the Blagodatskii mine, Siberia (from Memoirs of Princess Volkonskaya, 1904, p. 89). narrators in her 1980s novel The Women’s Decameron parallel her journey into the harsh Siberian reality with the journey of the dekabristki: Making my way to that God-forsaken Mordoviya I felt like a Decembrist wife. The bags of food made my arms feel as if they would drop off, and as for transport – you take what you can find. The whole situation was unfamiliar [. . .] I found the camp and was even more frightened: it was just like being in a film about the Fascists! . . . A camp is a camp, but it doesn’t matter whether there is a star over it or a swastika, it’s just as horrible for those inside.45 In the last decade before the USSR’s collapse, the dekabristka mythic canon had lost much of its political content, the balance shifting towards the circulation of patriarchal representations of women. In popular culture this is illustrated in Vladimir Motyl’’s 1975 film about Decembrist wives entitled The Star of Enchanted Happiness, which remains popular today. The film portrays women’s marital dutifulness, commitment and affection, thus reaffirming an

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old-fashioned, male-dominated vision of women that is still widely shared. Such was the potency of such gendered representations, that the term dekabristka began to be applied outside prison-related narratives and was employed to critique the consequences of rapid societal changes. In Victor Astaf’ev’s story ‘Lyudochka’ published in 1987, for example, the novella’s main heroine rejects the label of dekabristka because she recognises that she cannot rise to an ‘unprecedented, selfless, desperate feat’ of self-sacrifice in caring for the sick man she is nursing: With a last Herculean effort the guy freed his fingers from Lyudochka’s hands and turned away – he expected more than feeble consolation from her, he expected her to share his victimhood, to consent to be with him to the end, and possibly, die with him. Then the miracle would come to pass: together they would become stronger than death, would rise to life; in him, almost dead, there would emerge such a mighty impulse that he would have dared everything on his way to resurrection [. . .] No, she is not a dekabristka, and where are they nowadays? In queues for wine [. . .]46 If the story lamented the contemporary woman’s loss of spiritual depth, it also pointed to the pitiful state of the institution of the family. Yet, the story also left room for the reader to reaffirm belief in the spiritual prowess of Russia’s women. Thus, Lyudochka’s ‘sense of deep guilt in the face of that dead guy’ is the start of her journey of personal redemption: She now completely understood what she had once read and apathetically learnt by heart in textbooks about how manacled prisoners survived in their solitary cells. Of course, they were themselves creators of their hardy spirit, but that spirit was formed with the help of similarly strong-spirited [women] who were capable of sharing their suffering [. . .]47 These adaptations of the Decembrist myth anticipated the full-blown polyvalence of the image in twenty-first century. Relaxation of censorship following Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to Party leadership in 1985, led to a ‘history boom’ as scholars excavated the newly opened archives and history began to be popularised for a mass audience. The consequence for the dekabristka trope was its migration from the intellectual realms of the intelligentsia to other social classes so that it was finally able to cross the boundary between highbrow and popular culture. 48 From this time dekabristka became a generic term encapsulating the experiences of women of any social or educational standing who chooses to follow a man or stand by him in times of crisis.

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Post-Communist Revisions of the Dekabristka Myth Since the collapse of the communist system the Decembrist myth has been desacralised and the positive values of the deeds of the women who followed their men to Siberia questioned. In part this is a response to political changes under Vladimir Putin which in the 2000s have put questioning the legitimacy of state power off-limits. Putin’s insistence in his answer to a question about Mikhail Khodorkovsky in a televised presidential address in 2010 that ‘the thief belongs in jail’ was a reminder to viewers that defense of human rights is not a just cause for civil disobedience.49 Sensationalist popular histories in recent decades have represented the Decembrists as rebels who infected the country with revolutionary unrest bringing an end to the monarchy and precipitating the establishment of oppressive regimes in Russia’s history.50 In popular culture both men and women Decembrists have fared badly becoming the butt of mockery and irreverence. A popular television comedy show represented them as duped followers of an unworthy cause. In an especially unflattering sketch, a wealthy woman explains to her butler that it is her fault that her husband became a dekabrist as, ‘I had a headache all November and by December he did not know where to release his energy’. The butler responds with the opinion that ‘your spouse drank; otherwise why would he screw the Tsar?’51 The Decembrist inheritance was also treated irreverently in the television soap opera Zona set in a remand prison, screened in 2005. One episode includes a conversation between two prisoners, one of them a Casanova-type whose girlfriend accepted work as a prison guard to be near him: Kostya: Aristarkh: Kostya: Aristarkh: Kostya: Aristarkh: Kostya:

What did Polina Vital’evna tell you? She said that she loves me more than life and wants to be with me in joy and sorrow. I see, she’s a dekabristka. The Decembrist wives did not guard their husbands with batons in their hands. I do not remember even one Decembrist who had five wives. I do not like it myself. How am I going to see any other women [sighs]? Oh, don’t beat yourself up over it so much, it’s not as if your Polina Vital’evna is going to be in prison day and night.52

A conference in 2000, ‘Decembrists: Heroes or Criminals?’ sponsored by the right-leaning Russian Imperial Society and Russian General Military Society is emblematic of official efforts to revitalise the Decembrist mythic narrative.53 The conference’s purpose was to answer the question of whether the men and women involved in the uprising and its aftermath are, in fact, ‘worthy’ of the lofty

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pedestal they have occupied in the Russian historical and cultural memory for such a long time. The conference’s inconclusive answer to the question is, arguably, of less significance than the posing of the question in the first place. The Decembrist women have fared somewhat better in popular discourse than the men, which can be explained by their appeal to traditional stereotypes of women’s role. As we noted earlier, Inna Khodorkovskaya was not judged to be a bad dekabristka because she shared her husband’s alleged political ambitions, but because she fell-short of her wifely duty by failing to re-locate from Moscow to Chita to be near her husband. In popular culture, the dekabristka trope has been put to the service of defeating the new stereotypes of modern women-hood such as the ambitious and successful independent businesswoman imported from the West or upwardly mobile trophy wife of the new rich. A recently posted internet cartoon shows a woman suitcase at hand declaring, ‘I am like a dekabristka – for the man I love I am prepared to go anywhere . . . Thailand, the Maldives . . .’54 The new millennium has boasted articles, historical pieces, interviews and fiction describing the experiences of women who follow their men that continue the trend in the late Soviet period of extending the Decembrist wife trope beyond the confines of prison and exile. The 2010 novel Motherly Truths of Tat’yana Plakhova by Valentina Shabanskaya describes how an army officer’s wife, ‘as a dekabristka loyal to her spousal duty’, followed her husband with her seven-month-old baby to an African country where ‘in the hell of 60 degrees Celsius heat, alien to a Russian citizen’ she was on a ‘mission to keep up the optimism of a handful of compatriots’.55 Siberia, permeated as it is with the concept of distance, remains a major repository for the dekabristka referential pool in contemporary Russia. Another contemporary novella, Man Upside Down from the Karaul’naya Village by Anatolii Tsyryul’nikov, praises a woman with two small children who is like a ‘decent Decembrist wife follows her husband to Eniseisk’ after his graduation from the military academy.56 And there is the especially prescient novella, ‘Special Case: Mata Hari against her Will’ by Vadim Mamlyga, that recounts the ‘dekabristka experiences’ of a woman from Ukraine who struggles to join her naval officer husband in Severomorsk, a military port in northern Russia closed to non-Russian citizens.57 True-life stories include a journalist interviewing the new Irkutsk governor Dmitrii Mezentsev in 2010 who jokingly refers to the governor’s new job as being in Siberian exile and calling for a ‘wife-dekabristka’ by his side.58 Marina Chyueva, wife of one Duma deputy takes the analogy even further from the original, claiming the title dekabristka for herself because she stood by her husband when his shocking first year in the Duma forced him to fight for his ethical and moral values.59 The political content of the dekabristka discourse has not been entirely eliminated, however. The media-shy Inna Khodorkovskaya has a mirror image in the figure of Ol’ga Romanova who actively seeks media exposure. Romanova is

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also the wife of an imprisoned businessman turned political oppositionist, whose encounters with the Russian prison system have resulted in her own political radicalisation and emergence onto the stage as a prominent member of the political opposition. Based on her experiences and those of the women and men she met when visiting her husband, Romanova offers a voice and support to the relatives and inmates of Russia’s correctional colonies and prisons. She regularly appears on the media to debate and critique the prison system and the political regime that has given rise to it. Figuring as the subject of a feature series on ‘New Dekabristki’ in the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Romanova has observed that women in Russia today have a limited choice: ‘we are wives either of Khodorkovsky or Putin’.60 She brings the dekabristka discourse firmly back into the penal realm. Continuing the democratisation of the trope, she insists that any woman who is supporting a prisoner has earned the right to call herself a dekabristka: If you the cultured young lady [. . .] doubt, suffer – you are a dekabristka, are you not? And when without thinking you fill bags with food and trudge through a snowfield to a prison or camp – are you not a dekabristka, and is it not a heroic feat? And here I think: for me to get to the prison it was – ten minutes by the underground! But women come from auls [a Caucasian mountain or Central Asian settlement], leave children at stations, speak hardly any Russian, know nothing and don’t understand, but make their way into this devil’s prison and there try by hook or by crook to find out anything about husbands but all of them are grilled, offended . . . talk to them about romantic love.61 Romanova’s stripping of the element of romantic love from the traditional dekabristka discourse reflects her understanding of the real, material challenges that having a family member imprisoned carries for women. Twenty-firstcentury dekabristki have a pivotal role in securing the survival of prisoners. Their multiple tasks include dispatching the monthly parcel – the basic survival kit – to the prisoner and the assembling of all the papers and documents needed for appeals and on release. These are on top of the need to care for dependents, old and young, on the outside and to make time, if possible, to trek the long distances to a remote correctional colony for a visit. The young nobles’ revolt on 14 December 1825 against serfdom was one of the epochal historical events that impressed lasting and profound meaning on Russia society’s future socio-political and cultural make-up. Internalising that moment, society ‘made a cult’ of the Decembrists. The latters’ actions and those of the family members who followed them into exile became an element of Russia’s ‘moral conscience’. Russians have a remarkable loyalty to tradition which according to one commentator verges on a ‘pathological commitment’ so that

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the myths surrounding the dekabristki have been particularly enduring.62 This commitment reflects the deeply embedded nature of patriarchy in Russia, which endured through the seventy-five years of a system officially committed to achieving the emancipation of women and gender equality and more recent conversations with feminism. Patriarchal discourses and values retain their influence in post-communist Russia and studies show that the ideal Russian woman remains someone who is resilient in the face of hardship, a juggler of work and home commitments, and a dedicated home-maker.63 The compelling reason for the endurance of the dekabristka discourse, however, is the longevity of Russia’s exceptional penal monolith where one in five families have, or have had, a family member in jail. Were levels of incarceration in Russia at Scandinavian levels, the dekabristka would be an historical figure making redundant society’s discussion about its contemporary relevance. The most obvious and, literally, intended-to-last, evidence of the resonance of the dekabristka trope in twenty-first-century Russia is the large bronze composition Decembrist Women: The Gates of Fate, standing in the courtyard of the Russian Academy of Arts in Prechistenka Street, Moscow. Created in 2008 by the sensationalist sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, it depicts eleven women dekabristki, accompanied by children and bearing flowers and icons standing at a solid prison gate. The monument bears Pushkin’s iconic lines to the banished rebels: ‘Deep in the Siberian mine / Keep your patience proud [. . .]’64 Tsereteli declared at the unveiling that this work was a ‘cry from his heart’ to commemorate the heroic women’s civic feat.65 The statue does, of course, represent the Decembrist women in familiar guise, but it also is a very solid reminder of the collateral damage of imprisonment and exile in the long history of Russian penality.

CHAPTER 2 LISTENING TO WOMEN’S VOICES

I won’t believe that there exists a single woman who is happy that her husband is in prison! It is an affliction of duty, pity and eternal responsibility [. . .] each on her own to wait and live with the illusion of happiness, to cry for YEARS at night into the pillow in an empty bed and in the morning to walk with the proudly lifted head of a dekabristka.1 My parents? My father is a prisoner in his genes. He was involved with the prison system for forty-five years. Mum waited for him for thirty years, also. Like a dekabristka she followed him, all over Siberia. Mum died. And Dad? Well I don’t really know. The last time he was released he came home, already an old man, but he left and went back to Siberia to live (Klara, interviewed, 2010).2 I am almost like a dekabristka because in order to see him I travel seventy kilometres.3 The relevance of the dekabristka meta-narrative for the discussion in the chapters that follow is that it is one of the cultural tropes informing society’s expectations of the women who have family members in jail. In the twenty-first century the dekabristka label can be attached to any woman, irrespective of class and nationality, who demonstrates loyalty to a man in the face of difficult odds. It is no surprise, therefore, that the dekabristka myth influences the construction of the identities of today’s ‘prisoners’ wives’ and is one of the yardsticks against which their conduct is measured. As can be seen from the quotations above, it also influences the meanings that these women bring to their experiences. The three women are commenting on the impact of their family member’s incarceration and, in doing so, they show that there is space in the dekabristka myth for a range of alternative interpretations. The first two, highlight the geographical element of the myth and the woman’s suffering and self-sacrifice

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and the third confirms that overcoming the challenge of distance remains fundamental to society’s understanding of the trope, while stripping it of the necessity of permanent migration. The women’s words demonstrate that the story of the Decembrist wives constitutes a ‘narrative resource’ upon which women can draw in telling the story of their life as a prisoner’s relative. But it is one among several discursive sources upon which the women can draw in their personal identity construction. In this chapter, we discuss how we approached listening to the life stories of women with family members in jail. Most existing academic literature on prisoners’ relatives is based on research in penitentiaries in North America and Europe.4 The majority focus on identifying the negative material and psychological impact of incarceration on individuals, families and whole communities and suggest remedies. The understanding of prisoners’ relatives that emerges from this approach is of their being quintessential ‘Others’ to mainstream society and victims of power structures that make them the invisible ‘collateral damage’ of mass incarceration.5 Recent critiques of this approach have taken issue with the focus on the victimhood of prisoners’ relatives. The American prison sociologist Megan Comfort, for example, draws attention to the ‘sociological ambivalence’ of penal institutions which are understood by prisoners and their relatives as negative social institutions but also as a sites that can contribute to the solution of personal and inter-personal problems.6 Compared with the, albeit still modest, volume of research on the secondary consequences of mass incarceration in Western jurisdictions, Russian research has lagged far behind. In the newly developing discipline of penal sociology in Russia, the experiences of relatives and families of prisoners have simply been ignored.7 To the extent that they attract attention at all in Russian legal journals, prisoners’ relatives are examined primarily for the role they can play in supporting prisoner rehabilitation and re-entry. The first articles in legal journals that addressed the question of the family-ties benefit in prisoner adaptation really only began to appear in the post-Soviet period. In 1991, for example, the late architect of penal reform, Professor Alexander Solomonovich Mikhlin published an article describing the results of an ‘experiment’ to allow women prisoners to make intercity phone calls to their families.8 This followed an article he published in the leading law journal, Sovetskaya Yustitsiya, that advocated policies aimed at maintaining contacts between prisoners and their families on the grounds that this was a major factor in the process of ‘re-education and social re-adaptation’ and to ‘moral and financial support’ of prisoners whilst serving a sentence.9 Two decades on, the Russian Prison Service demonstrates its commitment to supporting prisoners’ family ties in a range of family-friendly initiatives that have included re-vamping visiting rooms, installing telephones, introducing new technologies, such as Skype, for keeping in touch and instituting open days.

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In its approach to supporting the family ties of prisoners, the Russian Prison Service relies on practices that reinforce traditional stereotypes of women’s roles. In this respect it is no different from other jurisdictions where family programmes similarly tend to cast women primarily as carers.10 Helen Codd has drawn attention to how the very terminology used to describe the relatives of prisoners, such as ‘prisoners’ wives’ or ‘prisoners’ mothers’, places the prisoner in the possessive position.11 With women defined in terms of their relationship to the prisoner-subject, insufficient recognition is given, argues Codd, to ‘their own needs at a time which is often very challenging’.12 Comfort has taken such observations further to suggest that family programmes in the USA’s penal system recruit women to the Foucauldian task of transforming male prisoners into ‘docile bodies’.13 The Russian Prison Service is vulnerable to such criticism. It remains attached to an overtly instrumental attitude to prisoners’ relatives, as is evidenced by the final words of advice addressed to them on its official website: In addition to the rights you have as the relatives of the convicted person, you have a moral obligation to help your loved one to find the right path that will lead him to a correct and normal life after release. A lot depends on you – you have a moral, and often material, responsibility to support the prisoner.14

Figure 2.1 Open day at a strict regime correctional colony in the Volga-Urals region. After a programme of lectures and tours, visitors are finally allowed to meet up with their prisoner relatives in the detachment yard.

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The prison service’s view of the division of labour of family members of prisoners can be summarised as follows: it is the business of the women in the family to maintain the relationship with the prisoner and to keep the family unit intact for his return; the closest woman relative to the prisoner (be this wife or mother depending upon the prisoner’s marital status) will do the visiting; any children, if minors, will be sheltered from contact with the prisoner and certainly not be taken on visits, and other family members will play supporting roles including assembling and sending parcels, writing letters and looking after children when necessary (for example, when the wife visits). The same gendered frame informs the case when the prisoner is a woman, so that there is no expectation that a male partner will visit. Indeed, the assumption among prison personnel in women’s correctional colonies is that men will desert their wives because of the shame attached to women’s criminality.15 In women’s colonies the family-ties benefit is pursued by giving women constant reminders that children are suffering from the absence of their mother.16 Codd has observed that the need to support the prisoner in jail ‘places more burdens on prisoners’ partners, mothers, daughters and sisters at a time of extreme stress and disruption.’17 In Russia, thanks in part to the dekabristka discourse, this extra burden is normalised as the woman relative’s lot.

The Research Methodology and Sources In the chapters that follow we use women’s talk recorded in face-to-face interviews, supplemented by postings on various prison-related websites, to examine how women in Russia today make sense of, and give meaning to, their experience of the world after the arrest and imprisonment of a family member. We are interested, in particular, in two aspects of their experience. First, we explore the decision that all have to make about how far to invest in maintaining the relationship with the prisoner (whether to ‘stand-by-their-man’ or to walk away) and the implications of that decision for their own material and emotional well-being. Secondly, we examine their relationship with the institution of the prison (the nature of the ‘secondary prisonisation’ they experience, how they adapt to it and whether they fight back against it). How far the understandings that women bring to their experiences on both these counts draw on, or contest, societal and prison service expectations about the behaviour of prisoner’s relatives, including the dekabristka trope, runs as a thread through our analysis. Our starting position for listening to women’s talk is the assumption that whilst socially-constructed norms offer general guidelines for their role-behaviour, the women have latitude in how they act out these roles. It is their own interpretations of the ‘prisoner’s relative script’ that we are interested in identifying in our study. We paid special attention, therefore, to how each woman incorporated the circumstances surrounding her relative’s imprisonment into her biography and

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the role this played in her identity-construction.18 We are particularly indebted to the work of Stephanie Taylor in demonstrating how analysis of the narrative resources women draw upon in their talk can be used to gain insights into their identity-work.19 We assumed, therefore, that women creatively construct their own understanding of the cultural norms appropriate to being a prisoner’s relative and that this provides the lens through which they justify their decision-making and give meaning to their interactions with the prison and other state institutions, their neighbourhood, friends and family. We approached our conversations with women subjects and their online postings from a dramaturgilogical perspective, therefore. In this we follow Erving Goffman in assuming that all the subjects to a greater or lesser extent deploy strategies of impression management in their ‘talk’, providing information and cues that enable them to present themselves in a favourable light.20 We are less uncomfortable than was Laura Girshick in her study of prisoners’ relatives in Vermont USA about whether our subjects are ‘telling the truth’.21 Rather, we are assuming that our subjects were engaged in a reflexive identity project and so treat women’s talk as stories articulated at a particular time and to a specific audience.

Interviews with Women Subjects In basing our study mainly on interviews, we follow the recent practice of Western penal sociology. The earliest Western studies of prisoners’ relatives relied on mass questionnaire surveys and quantitative analysis. These generated the questions for more qualitative studies that came later. Prisoners’ families are not easily identified in the community so, typically, researchers have recruited subjects from among the population of prison visitors. The pioneering studies of Lori Girshick and Laura Fishman in the early 1990s and Megan Comfort’s more recent investigation were based on in-depth interviews with relatively small groups of twenty to thirty women.22 In all these cases, the investigators were partners of a man in the prison they studied. This gave them an advantage in establishing a relationship of trust with the interviewees, as they were perceived as insiders.23 Against this advantage, the recruitment from the pool of visitors inevitably skewed studies in favour women who were motivated to visit their partner in prison. Women who were in the process of distancing themselves from prisoners, had taken the decision to sever ties or used alternative means of staying in contact, such as writing letters or telephoning, inevitably were excluded from, or under-represented in, such studies. We also chose to interview a small group of twenty-six women but, unlike in the American studies, we broadened our search beyond those visiting a single correctional institution. One practical consideration for doing this was that we wished to avoid the need for formal involvement of the Russian prison authorities, which are suspicious of outsider interest in the functioning of its penal institutions.24 Furthermore, the anxieties of potential interviewees about

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the consequences of prison authorities discovering their participation in the research reinforced the decision not to use penal institutions as the site for recruiting subjects for interview. The academic reasons for searching for subjects beyond the population of women, literally, waiting at the prison gate were compelling. First, one Russiaspecific factor was that, whilst in North America and the United Kingdom visitation may well be an indicator of an active relationship with a prisoner, in Russia this assumption does not necessarily hold true. To have recruited solely from among the women who visit their family member in prison would have underestimated the importance of parcel sending, which as we have already observed is understood as a vital role family members can play in supporting prisoners. We wanted to identify the impact of Russia’s penal geography on the choices individuals make about how to maintain contact (not everyone can afford the time and cost involved in visiting remote colonies). Secondly, we needed to capture women who were not strongly committed to maintaining a relationship with their prisoner relative. Russian custodial sentences are, on average, long and there is a fall off in the intensity of contact with family members beyond the five-year mark in a sentence. One of our aims in selecting subjects for interview was to include women at different points in their relative’s sentence in order to pick up those who were in the process of loosening their ties, as well as those who maintained active contacts. The decision to abandon a prisoner has typically not figured in studies of prisoners’ relatives. Thirdly, we wanted to focus our study on women in different types of relationships with prisoners, not just wives and sexual partners who are the most likely to make visits. We were interested in how close relative’s imprisonment impacts on a variety of family members. Finally, we also wished to capture in our analysis the effect on the relationship between family members and prisoners of variations between correctional colonies in the formal regime (‘general’, ‘strict’ or ‘special’) and in informal or customary practices. Despite the centralisation of the prison service and the existence of human-rights ombudsmen who are supposed to monitor compliance with regulations, individual prison governors and regional penal authorities have considerable leeway in interpreting central directives that shape the experiences both of prisoners and their relatives. One example is that while some prison governors grant conjugal visits to civil partners, others do not, insisting instead that the prisoner and partner marry first. Another example is the marked variations in the level of enforcement between correctional colonies of the prohibition on prisoners using mobile phones and other telecommunications devices which can have a profound effect on the quality of the links between prisoners and their families. Furthermore, where power (as between penal sub-cultures and the administration) lies in a colony can have a profound effect on the intensity and types of interactions across the colony fence.25

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Beginning in the spring of 2010, recruitment took place through ex-prisoners’ social networks, voluntary organisations involved in prisoner support, social workers and personal contacts, including those made with prisoners during a previous research project on women’s imprisonment.26 All but two interviews, took place between 2010 and 2014 in four regional capitals of European Russia. The women interviewed either lived in the capitals or had journeyed in from a rural or urban settlement in its vicinity. Whilst the interviewees came from a small number of discrete geographic clusters, the colonies in which their relatives were held were distributed over a wide area including the Arctic, the Northern Urals, the Volga region and Central European Russia. This meant that the interview subjects covered a broad spectrum in the challenge distance posed to maintaining contact with the family member in prison. The extremes among our interviewees were a woman whose husband was in a correctional colony in her home town and one whose son was in a colony nearly 3,000 kilometres away. Two of the interviewees, a mother and daughter, had relocated with other family members from their home in Moscow to a town 700 kilometres away to be near the prisoner, the daughter’s husband. The qualitative nature of the study meant that we did not aim for representativeness, but we were conscious of the criticisms of the earlier studies in the United States of the danger of ethnic bias. Fishman, for example, by recruiting all her subjects in a Vermont prison waiting-room, largely excludes Afro-Americans and Hispanics from her study. According to official estimates, approximately one-quarter of the prisoners held in Russian correctional institutions belong to one of fifty non-Russian ethnic minorities, with Roma and Muslims (both Tatars and North Caucasians) over-represented, and there are undisclosed numbers of in-migrants from former Soviet republics. We made sure that among our respondents there were women who were non-Russians (four of our interviewees belonged to this category). With the exception of the two political prisoners we interviewed, we did not select interview partners on the basis of the offence(s) for which their relative is serving time. It turned out that the majority were serving sentences of over five years for medium to very serious offences. Among our interview partners we have women related both to firsttime offenders and to repeat offenders who have served one or more custodial sentences before the current one. We are conscious of the absence from the study of certain groups. These include women related to prisoners serving life sentences in one of Russia’s five maximum security prisons and prisoners in special and strict regime correctional colonies serving sentences for child murder and sex-related crimes, who occupy the lowest position in the prisoners’ social hierarchy. The relatives of the last of these tend to conceal their identities and generally are unwelcome in prisoner-relative support groups. Apart from the exceptions noted above, we included interview subjects whose prisoner-relatives occupied different rungs in the prisoners’ social hierarchy.

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Among our interviewees are women whose prisoner-relatives occupy high and middle-rung positions in the prison sub-culture as well as the ‘rank-and-file’. They also include women related both to ‘career criminals’ and to ‘situational’ offenders.27 Following Megan Comfort, who in her study in California recruited subjects who were already in a relationship before their partner was incarcerated and those who ‘met’ their partner when he was already in jail, we also included both categories in our subject group. In Russia, the appellation zaochnitsa is given to women who seek out relationships with prisoners. Finally, given the history of the use of imprisonment as a means of controlling political opposition in Russia, we included among our interview subjects the family members of two prisoners whose imprisonment was politically motivated. Brief biographical details of all the interview subjects are included in Appendix 1. Feminist research tries to reduce the distance between the researcher and those she researches.28 Accordingly, it was our aim to make interviews an interactional exchange allowing the participants the freedom and adaptability to tell us the story of their lives and their hopes and fears for the future in the way and in an order, with which they felt most comfortable. Our interview subjects needed extra reassurance about anonymity; without exception they understood the prison service as corrupt and vengeful, so they were anxious about the possible negative impact on their prisoner-relatives were their participation in the study to become known. Accordingly, in addition to giving the normal undertakings about anonymity we also undertook to conceal the names of the cities in which the interviews took place and the colonies in which the interviewees’ family members were serving their sentences. The exception to the above is the relatives of the two political prisoners whose identities are obvious from the publicity surrounding their cases and who were content to be identified. The reassurance the participants received from the interviewers was reflected in the evident frankness with which they recounted their experiences. Typically, the participants responded to questions with multi-layered talk that ranged widely over topics. Their talk was also highly personal and illustrated by references to specific instances in their lives. The interviews fell into two parts. The first part was a biographical narrative from which the interviewee’s personal history and the place in it of the relationship with the prisoner could be reconstructed. We were interested in identifying how the interviewees talked about each of the stages between when the crime was committed to the convicted offender’s arrival at the correctional colony, the serving of the sentence and, in some cases, release. Arrest, imprisonment in remand prison, the court appearances, sentencing and despatch on the prison transport each take the prisoner further toward the deep end of imprisonment, and we were interested in understanding how this played out for relatives. Typically, these events occupied a large part of the interview and revealed the complex emotions, fears and experiences that followed the shock of the arrest (even in cases when this was expected). In the

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case of women who ‘met’ their partners when the latter were already in prison, the story of the arrest and its aftermath was replaced by no less detailed explanations and descriptions of the circumstances of the first contact with the future partner. The second part of the interviews followed a set of open-ended guide-questions which covered a series of general topics (such as, visitation, interactions with prison administrations, living arrangements, relationships with neighbours, plans for re-entry) but also took up other themes that the interviewee herself identified that spoke to her specific experiences of the criminal-justice system and the family-member’s incarceration. In both parts of the interviews we were particularly sensitive to any allusions women made to the macro-level expectations of their behaviour and decisionmaking. In narrating their experiences we found that, as expected, women drew on a wide array of narrative resources, including ideas and expectations circulating in the media and among the various professionals they had encountered, their immediate circle of friends, relatives and voluntary organisations. Their reflexive identity project involved them in negotiating multiple possible versions of the prisoner relative story. In Western jurisdictions social and welfare services exert a strong influence on how prisoners and their relatives make sense of their experiences. Among our interview subjects such influences proved to be relatively shallow, reflecting the weak development of official support networks in Russia. Far more influential, it turned out, are voluntary and virtual organisations that have sprung up to fill the welfare gap left by the failure of the state to develop appropriate programmes of family support for prisoners’ relatives.29 The internet has proved to be an especially influential site circulating ideas about what it means to be related to a person in prison in Russia in the twenty-first century, as well as offering a platform for women to approve, modify and contest popular discourses.

The Virtual Community of Prisoners’ Relatives as a Source The Russian Federal Prison Service, under pressure to become more transparent, has made attempts in the past decade to provide information to assist families to maintain contact with prisoners. To this end, regional penal authorities have been encouraged by the Moscow centre to post online basic information about how to contact colonies, their addresses, fax and telephone numbers and other information relevant to relatives such as visiting and open days, permitted items that can be brought in and how to book accommodation for long visits. In most cases, the information provided is relatively sparse compared with the official sites’ other, public relations, postings. Regional prison authority websites, typically, are dominated by reports of the achievements of personnel, innovative interventions, visits by luminaries or human rights monitors and results of sports competitions and advertisements for the products of the prison industries. When prisoners appear on these sites it is usually to demonstrate their participation in religious festivals, national holidays and inter-colony sports and entertainment

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competitions, or to tell heart-warming stories about the marriage of an inmate or of family reunions during prison open days. Women who want to learn in detail about conditions in the colonies in which their relatives are held (and, indeed, how to get to them) learn more from joining one of the many online prisoner support chat rooms or by subscribing to a local support group. Numbers of these, dedicated to providing practical information, legal services and emotional support for prisoners and their relatives, have proliferated in the past twenty years. The discussion forums that are associated with some of the online networks allow for an exchange of views about experiences, meanings and politics of the Russian prison system. They vary from those to which access is more-or-less open to anyone who has a view to express to closed groups that offer a high degree of confidentiality. These sites constitute a source for the identity-work of women who have a family member in jail. The logo of one popular site gives a taste of the message of many. It consists of a pink T-shirt on which is listed the four roles of the prisoner’s wife. These are to ‘raise the children; maintain the house; earn money; love your husband’.30 We list and give a brief description of the principal prisoner-support websites in Appendix 2. We used twenty-eight open sites in this study.31 By their nature, many websites are ephemeral; they are often set up by single enthusiasts and depend for an individual’s longevity on their continued investment in the project. Among the sites we monitored, for example, two, Arestant and Zona, are no longer accessible. The twenty-eight sites we monitored had a broad range of aims and cover multifarious topics: they provide information for prisoners’ relatives (such as visiting times at particular colonies, how to get to them, what to take and to leave behind and so on), prison jokes and anecdotes, historical data, lists of relevant literature, photo-albums, prayers for prisoners, dating services, internet shops selling goods made by prisoners, advertising (such as educational courses for prisoners), links to other prison-related sites, details of inmate searches and hunger strikes in particular colonies, cookery recipes and keep fit exercises. One of the more popular sites is tyurem.net whose main audience is people ‘in the free world’ (na svobode) and aims to describe ‘everything about life in prison’. Some websites post video clips of prisons, news, documentaries, and some campaign for better conditions, such as zashita-zk.org, gulagu.net and zonaprava.com. There are also websites offering free legal advice to prisoners and their relatives and that specifically focus on human rights. One feature of the sites that provide a forum for general discussions is that visitors are often invited to vote on various issues. For example, dekabristki.ru in 2014 ran a survey of the marital status of women prior to their partner’s arrest as part of its discussion of zaochnitsy. Such surveys are unscientific, but the results and the discussions that ensue contribute to the broader societal construction of the identities of people drawn into the prison nexus.

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As well as providing insights into the imaginative worlds of a particular group of internet–savvy prisoners’ relatives, we understood women’s participation in discussions on these sites as integral to performing the role of ‘prisoner’s relative’. Active participation on some sites provides an opportunity for women to contest popular perceptions of them and a platform for fighting back against the system. The prison support groups and website groups give vent to women relatives’ frustrations in relation to particular localities, prisons and individuals and to the broader structures shaping their experiences. Many sites have an implied political content in their complaints about the state’s failure to end corruption in the criminal-justice system and to put an end to the inhumane and degrading treatment to which prisoners and quasi-prisoners are subjected. Women, who would be too afraid of the consequences for their relative of speaking out, are prepared to do so online, hiding behind the anonymity the internet gives them. A majority of the women who were interviewed had at some point accessed information from internet sources and taken part in online discussions. A large minority were members of support groups which, they said, fulfilled the need to share their experiences and to communicate with people who understood their situation and the dilemmas and difficulties they were facing. The irregularity of much prison visiting in Russia and the friction of distance between home and colony reduce the opportunities for developing relationships with other women in ‘the waiting room’. Internet chat rooms are a substitute and the women who visit them report that they find them helpful in the practical advice and emotional support they give. The most effective support is when groups of women with family members imprisoned in the same town or region form a support group using the internet, telephone and personal meetings to circulate information. One of the women interviewed explained how through such groups women who have experience of visiting particular colonies can arrange to meet and act as guides for neophytes on their first visit. Another, the wife of a career criminal who had moved cities to live near her husband’s colony, formed a group to give advice and news bulletins from the colony and provide a forum for discussion. She sees herself as an activist promoting the fair treatment of prisoners and regularly takes complaints to the colony boss with, she maintains, a fair degree of success. Her website is clearly an extension of this activism, but she insists that she is ‘not political’. In thinking about her comment, we found ourselves agreeing with Girshick that the lives of women prisoners’ relatives sui generis ‘become a form of political resistance.’32 This focused our attention on the agency of our women subjects and the importance to it of their online communities.

Other Sources In addition to the interviews and various prison-related internet forums, the material on which we draw for this book extends to other rich and, in many

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cases, untapped sources that narrate people’s experience of Russia’s penitentiary system. For Imperial Russia and the Soviet period we were able to draw on numerous testimonies and memoirs. These provide a yardstick against which the experiences of today’s women waiting at the gate can be compared. The broader discussion of penal sensibilities in the pages that follow draws on literary and folkloric sources (including the poetry and songs of the prison bards), written and broadcast media. There appears to be an almost insatiable appetite in popular culture for televised productions relating to crime and punishment, reallife and fictional dramas about prison, and studio-based discussions. Examples are the prison-based television serial Zona broadcast in 2006 that was set in a fictional remand prison in a provincial town and ran for fifty weeks and the documentary series, Poka eshche ne pozdno (‘Before it’s Too Late’) devoted to examining the fate of particular offenders and their families. Quantitative sources relating to prisoners’ relatives are few and far between. There have, to our knowledge, been no surveys, official or unofficial, that set out to record data relating to prisoners’ relatives. But the census of prisoners that has been taken at approximately ten-year intervals since the 1970s does contain some ‘hard data’ relevant to the current study.33 The figures quoted in the text on the frequency of visits, parcel delivery and telephone calls prisoners receive and their marital status, are taken from this source.

Theorising the Personal Identity Construction of Prisoners’ Relatives The positive image of the Decembrist wife aside, women in Russia are confronted with the same challenge of countering the ‘courtesy stigma’ that attaches to prisoners’ relatives as their counterparts in other jurisdictions. Courtesy stigma is a concept developed by Erving Goffman to describe how society transfers the spoiled identity of people understood as social deviants onto their relatives.34 These latter are ‘implicated’ in offending behaviours through their affiliation, or shared ‘web’ membership, with the principal. The courtesy stigma attaching to prisoners’ relatives is informed by a whole gamut of beliefs about the source of their shared guilt in acts of commission (for example, approving of and benefiting from a partner’s criminality) and omission (for example, failing to discipline an unruly son), in a belief in the ‘like-father-like-son’ principle and so on. Courtesy stigma certainly attaches to women relatives of prisoners in Russia. In narrating their lives, the women we interviewed gave various examples of having suffered discriminatory or degrading treatment as a result of their status, which included being sacked from work, being abused by prison personnel and ostracised by friends and other family members. Therefore, the majority of women had had to navigate the ‘spoiled identity’ that their association with a prisoner conferred upon them.

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An underlying assumption in much of the early work among prisoners’ wives in the USA is that the rational response to an offending mate, especially if it is not his first offense, is for the woman to walk away and make a new life with a lessflawed partner. For many researchers the tenacity with which some women resist extricating themselves from a relationship with an offender, not least when that relationship has been abusive or resulted in serious material difficulties, is a cause of ‘constant awe’ or ‘startling’ and needs explaining.35 Women who actively prepare for the return of an abusive partner are perplexing to the outsider’s view, the most perplexing of all being those women who actively seek out relationships with a stigmatised, dishonoured person, such as men on death row. The explanations that have been forwarded to explain the attachment to an offender include maternal love, enjoyment of ‘life in the fast lane’, loneliness, friendship and fear. The explanation provided by Fishman on the basis of her US study is women’s determination to maintain the family intact; a majority of prisoners’ wives, she argues, are ‘traditional women’, drawn largely from lower socioeconomic groups for whom marriage and children is fundamental to their selfidentification. Furthermore, a situation that might look to an outsider as one from which any rational woman would take the opportunity to remove herself, can look very different from the point of view of someone who already occupies a marginal economic and social position. A person who has no realistic hope of upward mobility is less likely to be affected by the economic and status losses associated with a partner’s incarceration than one who enjoyed a reasonable standard of living or who was respected in the community prior to the arrest.36 The American research also suggests that imprisonment of a problematic partner can ‘buy time’ and respite for other family members.37 Somewhat counter intuitively, prison can help prolong and revive a relationship. The conclusion from such insights is that when it comes to interpersonal relationships, prison has to be viewed as multifunctional institution. Whatever the underlying explanation for the decision of women to invest in a relationship with a ‘social delinquent’, the task they have is to convince themselves, people close to them and society at large that they are not themselves also delinquent. To protect themselves against courtesy stigma they have to give a satisfactory explanation both of their relative’s law breaking and of their own investment in the law breaker. Fishman, in her research, found that her respondents resisted labelling their husbands as deviant and attempted instead to neutralise their partner’s troublesome behaviour by normalising it. Typically, they would deploy one of three arguments that laid the blame for the offending behaviours beyond their partner’s control. These were: outside forces when the husband was ‘acted upon’ rather than ‘acting’ (for example, being used as a scapegoat, under the influence of alcohol or of another person), environmental factors (such as poverty or unemployment), and a character flaw separate from the man as an individual (such as mental illness or immaturity).

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Drawing on the pioneering work of Gresham Sykes and David Matza on delinquency, researchers have identified the narrative strategies used in women’s motivational accounts for standing by their men.38 These include a variety of ‘neutralisation strategies’ that excuse or minimise the partner’s behaviour (denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners) or that appeal to higher authority to explain a woman’s support of the offender. Analysis of the varied sources used in this study found that Russian women employ much the same sort of narrative strategies to deflect the charge of social deviancy in their support of a stigmatised family member. But their explanations are mediated by the real-existing conditions of Russian imprisonment. In Russia, for example, sociological ambiguity towards the institution of the prison, which has been observed among North American prisoners’ relatives, is very rare. Russia’s penal institutions are popularly understood as supremely dangerous places that brutalise and degrade the prisoner.39 Re-education and redemption, if it takes place, is not the consequence of interventions on the part of prison authorities, but derives, rather, from the support of family and friends on the outside or the society of captives, within. It is against the backdrop of a general societal lack of confidence in the criminal-justice system that Russian women justify their decision to invest in the relationship with a criminal offender. Below, we briefly give examples of the principal narrative strands employed by the women we interviewed and that surface in the web postings we consulted that serve to neutralise the offending behaviour of imprisoned relatives and to explain the women’s motivation in maintaining the relationship with them. These narratives were crucial to the self-identification of the women, enabling them to moderate the spoiled identity associated with being involved with a prisoner.

Denial Narratives By far the most common neutralisation narrative to surface in women’s talk was that the offender in prison had been unfairly treated by the criminal-justice system. It is unimportant to our analysis whether there is any objective truth in the stories we were told (we were not in a position to corroborate them, had we wanted to) because our interest was in how they were deployed to justify the interview subject’s decision-making. The unfair treatments alluded to varied. Firstly, there was the insistence that the prisoner was innocent, that he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice. The women interviewees who made this case pointed to a combination of inefficient and lazy police officers, corrupt judges and inadequate defense attorneys. In the context of the poor record of the Russian criminal-justice system, this narrative is one that can be assumed to play out well in the public square.40 The same is true of the second frequently employed narrative about unfair treatment. This was that the punishment meted out to the prisoner was disproportionate. The women who made this case

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acknowledged that the family member had, indeed, committed a crime but complained that the offender should have been given a suspended or a lesser custodial sentence. Corruption aside, the Russian penal system has failed to develop alternative punishments to incarceration, so that prison is the default punishment for certain categories of crime and long sentences are known to be the norm; it is certainly the case that offenses that in other jurisdictions would not normally carry a carceral sentence, do so in Russia. The narrative of disproportionately harsh treatment was often combined in women’s motivational narratives by the insistence that the wrong men are in jail. Nearly all our respondents at some point in their interview drew attention to the fact that the ‘real criminals’ in Russia remain at large and are not apprehended. The people they have in mind are the millionaire oligarchs, corrupt politicians and members of the criminal-justice system and security services whose power and wealth are widely believed to give them immunity from prosecution. In addition to the arguments that relied on shared societal understandings of the imperfect functioning of the Russian criminal-justice system, women also alluded to more personal issues that had diverted their family member from the straight and narrow. We heard familiar stories about men being acted upon by outside forces of the sort identified by Fishman in her work: of the influence of alcohol and drugs and of young men being led astray by stronger personalities. Among women who had been socialised into the Soviet system, discussion of the effect of these outside forces was embedded in a critique of the pace and direction of societal and economic change since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

‘The Men in Prison are Better than on the Outside’ In denying or minimising the offending behaviours that have put men in jail, women are telling the world and/or themselves that their husband, son or brother is not as bad a person as the criminal-justice system makes him out to be. Some women take this justification further with the argument that the men in prison are, in fact, better than those on the outside. Research among Afro-American communities where there are high rates of incarceration in the USA, has found that this argument is grounded in women’s rejection of the masculinities associated with the highly-charge machismo culture of young urban blacks, which contrasts unfavourably with the way men behave when they are behind bars. Boredom and a desire for respite from the violent and competitive atmosphere of the prison can result in men becoming model, empathetic, companions and more responsive to a wife or partner’s romantic fantasies. Such behaviour modification also takes place among men in Russian correctional colonies, where there is the added incentive to keep women ‘on side’ because they are the principal source of the parcels of food, medicine and trade goods that are important to a prisoner’s survival or quality of life.

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One Russia-specific strand in the ‘there are a lot of good men in jail’ narrative is the insistence on the part of some of the women we interviewed that it is not simply a case of prisoners behaving more empathetically towards women, but that they are morally superior to people on the outside. Given the history of the Russian state’s repeated incarceration of political oppositionists, it is not surprising that this discourse should emerge among prisoners’ relatives. But we are not referring here to the women related to prisoners-of-conscience. Rather, we have in mind women whose family member may have committed a terrible crime who holds a high status position in the prison sub-culture. Russian prison sub-cultures, heirs to the so-called Thieves-in-Law (or vory-v-zakone) that took hold during the gulag, have persisted in modified form in Russian penal institutions to the present day. Membership of the ‘thieves culture’ requires a prisoner to live ‘according to the understanding’ ( po ponyatiyam), a set of rules which, today, include loyalty to other sub-culture members and a refusal to work in penal industries, to steal from other prisoners and to inform. We found that in their narratives, women represent these rules as conferring a moral authority on their husbands and partners that sets them apart from the rest of the male population, in prison and in freedom. Pioneering research in the 1950s on American prison gang culture demonstrated that women slowly and gradually take on the folkways, mores, customs and general culture of the prison.41 In Russia, popular fascination with the Thieves-in-Law has transformed the rules of prison sub-culture into a narrative resource for women married to its members that can be deployed to present their support of the prisoner in a favourable light.

The Appeal to Higher Moral Authority A more direct means of countering courtesy stigma than neutralising a prisoner’s offending, is for a woman to appeal to a higher moral authority to justify her decision-making. By appealing to a higher moral authority women do not reject societal norms about the nature of crime or deny the need to punish sometimes harshly, but they are simply giving precedence to higher norms. In the USA, women who enter into relationships with serious offenders, including men on death row, typically give religious belief as the explanation. Religion is woven into the story of one of the women we interviewed but, with secularism still prevalent in Russian society, it was always unlikely that religion would figure prominently in women’s narratives. Rather, the women interviewed turned to traditional highly gendered discourses as the source for the moral authority of the decision to stand by their men. ‘Duty’, ‘Love’ and ‘Self-Sacrifice’, courtesy of the dekabristka discourse, were elevated in women’s narratives to the status of a higher moral norm. An example is this posting on one website: Girls everyone is happy in her own way. Some need their loved one to embrace them every night. But for others it is enough to know that he exists

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WAITING AT THE PRISON GATE in the world [. . .] My Mum was fourteen years old when she met my father. When she was sixteen, he was imprisoned for the first time. And already then she knew that it would not be for the last time. Yes, that was his way of life; he did not try to change. And she knew that she would never change him. He served his sentences and she waited. Certainly, it made it easier that we were well provided for, but when I used to ask her ‘Why did you spend your life at his feet?’ She used to smile and answer, ‘I couldn’t have done otherwise. I was happy with him even at a distance.’ And I can’t argue. I saw their eyes when they were together. Eyes filled by love.42

The appeal to love can be made regardless of the venality of the offence committed or, as in the above case, whether or not the perpetrator reforms, but the idea of redemption is strongly associated with the appeal to higher moral authority. The religious motivation for the ‘choice’ of a man on death row made by women in the USA is, in their narratives, ‘repaid’ when the offender responds with his own religious conversion. The redemptive power of woman’s love (conjugal, maternal, filial and familial) is deeply embedded in Russian culture. It is embodied in the figure of the dekabristka and in the fictional character of Sonya Marmeladova but it inheres in other tropes that inform society’s expectations of the role of the prisoners’ relatives. Most notably this is in ideas about women’s special feminine powers of virtue and womanhood that find their ultimate expression in motherhood, the matreshka symbol of the caring and protective mother who gathers her children ‘under her skirts’.43 We discuss the impact of this trope on the identities of mothers of prisoners in a later chapter. Here we draw attention to the potential conflict between the matreshka and dekabristka tropes in the identity construction of those women who are prisoners’ wives and also mothers. The original Decembrist wives had to abandon their children to follow their husbands, an action that offends against the maternal imperative of the matreshka trope and would today be considered shocking by society at large. For most of the women we interviewed the potential conflict between dekabristka and matreshka discourses proved not to be troublesome; references to wifely and maternal duty usually sat happily side-by-side in their narratives. There were some cases, however, when the woman felt the need to choose between tropes. For example: It’s no use saying that it is possible to provide for the child on 3 roubles. It costs a lot more. I look at some such children and am simply horrified— what rags they are dressed in! I personally don’t want such a future for my child and never will [. . .] We’re talking especially in this case about the child of a prisoner. And I’m not a dekabristka to have children by a prisoner and then ruin their future.44

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In contrast, another woman who took part in the discussion on the same internet forum is very conflicted responding to advice given her by other women not to have her prisoner husband’s child: Let them say what they want [. . .] we are indeed dekabristki – where the husband goes so does the wife. But children, they are sacred [. . .] I will have a child. I want this child, not because of my age, but because I need it. It makes me cry when I think about it.45

When No Justification is Needed There is a category of prisoner’s relative that does not suffer from courtesy stigma. These are the people whose family members are imprisoned for their political beliefs. Unlike the relatives of rank-and-file offenders and career criminals who in their identity-work have to develop narratives that moderate their spoiled identity-by-association, no justifications are needed in the case of the relatives of political prisoners. Even if, as is often the case, only a minority of the public support the cause for which the person has been imprisoned, society’s expectation is that the relatives of ‘politicals’ will stand by the prisoner to the end. Indeed, to walk away would court opprobrium. This does not mean that the relatives of political prisoners do not have to engage in identity-work as they position themselves in relation to society’s expectations about the behaviours appropriate to their new status. And the task can be as challenging for them as for the women who have to explain their continued investment in a relationship with a criminal offender. This, Inna Khodorkovskaya learned in the comparisons made between her and her ‘real’ dekabristki forebears.

Writing Women’s Stories The chapters that follow give voice to women in a variety of different familypositions in relation to the prisoner. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 we consider prisoners’ wives, dividing them into three different groups; the wives of rank-and-file prisoners, the wives of medium to high ranked members of the prison subculture and women who marry men who were already imprisoned when the relationship began. In Chapters 6 and 7 we consider, respectively mothers and teenage daughters of prisoners. Chapter 8 is devoted to women, generally not considered in scholarly literature, who belong to an outer circle of relatives. Chapter 9 focuses on the family members of political prisoners. In each chapter we examine the meanings women vest in their experiences of being drawn into the prison nexus through re-telling their stories. We make maximum use of the women’s own words but establish a narrative order in their talk, the better to convey the sequence of critical points that challenge their self-identification. Consistent with the findings of other studies, our research shows that the

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interpretations women bring to the experiences we describe in the chapters that follow are influenced in large measure by the nature of the relationships and material conditions that existed prior to their involvement with the criminal justice system. In order to capture this, the stories we have chosen to tell are of women from different social classes, economic status and relationships with the prisoner. Sensitive to Megan Comfort’s critique of ‘victimology’ in the approach to studying women prisoners, we include in our analysis women who have not suffered multiple material disadvantages as a result of a family member’s incarceration. It turns out that it is possible for imprisoned career criminals’ affairs to be organised in such a way that the life style of their family members can be maintained. And we have also been careful to explore cases where it appears that prison has brought respite to a troubled relationship. In what follows, therefore, we explore how the family histories combine with cultural definitions of women’s role in the twenty-first-century telling of the dekabristka story.

CHAPTER 3 PRISONERS’ WIVES

It’s worse than being some female convict, God forgive me. You are lower than any base creature! But what am I higher than? A convict gets a food ration but I get a fig with butter. I went to the district commander for help. ‘Regulations’ he says, ‘You get nothing. Half a rouble for each child but nothing for you according to regulations.’ A woman penal labourer gets provisions, but those who come here of themselves get nothing. Some low-life of a woman, who with her lover murdered her husband, she gets a ration. I abandoned my kin and came here and get nothing. (From the letter of a woman who followed her husband to Sakhalin island prison in the nineteenth century)1 A few days before the visit the temperature was above zero but then on that day it dropped to minus 15 [centigrade]. We stand in this waiting room in the administrative block, but it’s as cold as outside. Thank God, they’ve opened a cafe. There were three little pies on sale and we bought two, someone else had grabbed the other one. The coffee wasn’t bad but we had to keep running to the toilet because it was all so stressful. (Gulya, a prisoner’s wife describing a visit to her husband’s correctional colony in 2010) The term ‘wife’ in the twenty-first century can apply to women in a variety of relationships. Among the original dekabristki there were Paulina Gue`ble and Camille Le-Dantu who were not married to their Decembrist officers when they were exiled to Siberia. At the other end of the social spectrum Sonya Marmeladova, Dostoevsky’s fictional ‘dekabristka’ heroine, was not married to Raskol’nikov. So too today’s ‘prisoners’ wives’ include women in different legal relationships with the partner in jail. There are women who are legally married to the prisoner, those who are in a long term relationship and have been living with him without being married, fiance´es and girlfriends and all the ‘former’ versions

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of these, such as divorcees. The legal status of the partnership gives women different rights in relation to the prisoner, as indeed was the case in the nineteenth century, but all are equally affected by society’s construction of them and what they need to do to fulfil their wifely duty. The popular Russian saying ‘as the thread follows the needle’ sums up that duty; the wife should follow the path chosen by her husband, wherever this may take her. The imperative ‘to follow the needle’ to a greater or lesser extent applies to all women partners of men in jail.2 Prisoners’ wives in twenty-first-century Russia are drawn from a broad spectrum of social types (as indeed the majority of prison followers in nineteenth-century Russia were drawn from the masses or narod). Their partners are serving sentences for anything from hooliganism to robbery, drug dealing, murder, fraud and espionage. The majority of prisoners serving sentences in the Russian Federation’s correctional colonies belong to the rank-and-file of prison society; that is, they are neither members of the criminal elite, nor do they belong to the stratum of prisoners who occupy the lowest rung in the society of captives (men with non-traditional gender roles, sex offenders, the mentallyincapacitated and the bomzhi or homeless). Men belonging to this stratum are typically unmarried and if they are supported in prison, it is by their mothers. High profile political prisoners like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and prisoners on life sentences are also in a special category. Excluding these, the ordinary prisoners who remain make up the majority population in Russian correctional colonies. According to one authority they make up between 65 and 75 per cent of all prisoners.3 It is the ‘ordinary’ wives of these ‘ordinary’ prisoners that this chapter is largely about. As well as being in the majority, the wives of rank-and-file prisoners are in many respects like the simple folk of the nineteenth-century exile system who, as distinct from the wives of the Decembrist officers, did not have the means to make the journey to Siberia in enclosed carriages but had to join their convict husbands on the long march on foot to Siberia. Once there, they were often forced by circumstances to work in order to survive. Anton Chekhov in his famous treatise on the penal colony in Sakhalin described the women, such as the one whose words are quoted in the epigraph above, who followed their husbands to the colony as ‘tragic figures’ who ‘came here in a search to improve their husband’s lives but instead lost their own.’4 The lives of the ordinary wives of ordinary prisoners in Russia today are also profoundly affected by the incarceration of their husbands, similarly in mostly negative ways. Experience has taught many of them a healthy scepticism towards the stereotypes that are supposed to inform their behaviour. One visitor to a social media website asks of the needle-and-thread metaphor, ‘And what if his sewing is faulty?’5 Valya, one of our interviewees, uses a different metaphor to describe the choice of a woman not to abandon her prisoner-husband: ‘A husband is like a suitcase without a handle; it’s difficult to carry but a pity to throw out.’

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Researchers of prisoners’ relatives in the USA have noted that the ‘stand-byyour-man’ strategy comes at a cost. The same is true for women who ‘follow the needle’ in Russia. And just as in other jurisdictions, individuals’ responses to the challenges that this strategy throws up also vary. There are some generalisations that research in West has identified that we have found are relevant also to the Russian case. A couple’s back-story, for example, is important in explaining how a relationship fares when one party is imprisoned. So, too, are economic factors, the support networks a wife is able to call upon and the level of discrimination she encounters. We illustrate how these factors bear on the experiences of women partners of ‘ordinary’ prisoners with the rather different stories of two of the women we interviewed.

Olya’s Story Olya was thirty-two years old when interviewed. The interview took place in one of the regional capitals of the Volga-Urals Federal District in a centre set up by volunteers to support inmates’ families. Olya was not herself from the capital; she had travelled up that day to the registry office to deliver papers needed to marry her partner of five years standing, who was incarcerated in the city’s correctional colony. Olya was not happy to be getting married, though it was clear from the interview that she loves her husband-to-be. What she resented was that she was being forced to marry by the need to secure her right to a residential or ‘family’ visit with her partner. Whereas in the past, the colony governor had allowed her such visits, a tightening up of the regulations now gave automatic entitlement for residential visits only to legal spouses. With future visits at risk, Olya explained, she and her partner had decided to join the queue for a prison wedding: Why do I need to do this? We lived together for three years and have lived through another two years [whilst her partner has been in jail], all without a stamp in our passports. I really don’t need it. Who dreams of a zone wedding? [. . .] It has been decided that it is required, so it has to be done. It’s nonsense. Nobody has had to drag me to see him. I go there according to my own free will. So why stop me now? Olya met Ivan in the provincial town where she was born. She was caring for her son from a previous liaison and working in a warehouse as a stock-taker when she ‘caught the eye’ of a welder. He was two years her senior, a Crimean Tatar who had migrated to Russia from Central Asia to live with his sister when he was fifteen.6 Ivan had been married before and had a daughter, but he was now divorced. Olya and Ivan started dating, fell in love and moved in together. Olya tells us that the three of them were very happy before ‘fate tore

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us apart.’ It was, Olya explains, a ‘typical male incident’ (muzhskaya razborka) that was responsible. Ivan was having a beer with friends at a local bar and got into a fight with a man. The man died three days after this encounter. As Olya tells it, there were no weapons involved and the victim was ‘still standing’ when the fight ended. Furthermore, the reason for the fight was that Ivan was defending a woman from his victim’s abuse. It was only two weeks after the incident when the police came to arrest Ivan, that Olya realised the seriousness of their situation. She was not to see him again until his court appearance months later. Olya was convinced of her partner’s innocence of the crime for which he was being indicted (grievous bodily harm leading to death) and believed that the court would dismiss the case. She describes her profound shock at the guilty verdict and the sentence of eight years deprivation of freedom.7 Olya had expended energy mobilising all the contacts and resources she had at her disposal in a quest to help Ivan. This had involved hiring the best lawyer they could afford, making her own investigations into the causes of death in alcoholics, writing letters and petitions to anyone in authority who might listen. The moment when the sentence was handed down, she says, was when she lost all faith in the criminal-justice system: The disillusionment is awful, when you are expecting some sort of understanding from people, but it turns out it’s just a machine that destroys, destroys, destroys. Nobody listens or has any intention of listening. This was, for me, the worst blow. You might expect this of the Investigators [. . .] but the Procurator, he was sitting on a whole pile of complaints from us against various parties [and did nothing]. Olya’s shock was compounded when she learned that the sentence was to be served in the regional capital, nearly a hundred kilometres away. The problem, it transpired, was that Ivan was still registered as living in the regional capital and in sentencing him to that city, the prison authorities were fulfilling a requirement in the correctional code.8 Nothing has happened since the trial to moderate the views Olya formed then of the criminal-justice system. In her interview she returns repeatedly to the injustices she and Ivan suffer at the hands of the ‘penal machine’. Her principal anxieties now are about that machine’s negative impacts on Ivan’s health. These began with the transportation to the correctional colony that took place in mid-winter and have not subsided since. Olya has had to make adjustments in her own life since Ivan’s incarceration. The couple was not well off before the arrest but with two wages coming in, they were able to rent a flat. Now, struggling to support herself, she has moved with her son to live with her mother. Olya described how she has changed jobs several

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times in the past two years. The initial move was because the firm she was working for fired her when it learned about Ivan’s imprisonment. Her subsequent moves she explains as an attempt to avoid people prying into her private life: There were other opportunities, but after what had happened, my hands were tied. There are those collectives where people show off about how much they know and give advice, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. I feel a second grade person; all the prison stuff comes to the surface, they all know about it and I just find it unpleasant. When she was interviewed, Olya was working in a taxi firm on a wage way below what she could expect given her skill level. As she explains, her current boss is an ex-army man and the ‘girls’ that work there are simpler folk so there is more acceptance of her situation. She has negotiated permission to be away occasionally for a few days at a time to visit Ivan. Olya’s job changes have exacerbated her financial difficulties. The only other sources of money on which she can call are the alimony from her former husband for her son which is sufficient to cover school expenses, and the limited help her pensioner mother can give her. Ivan’s mother in Central Asia sends ‘a few kopecks’ for her son when she knows Olya is off on a visit. Ivan’s earnings from work in the colony amount to a few roubles a day, sufficient for him to buy a packet of cigarettes in the colony shop. Olya has friends who would like to help but ‘they all have their own financial problems.’ Olya spends much of the interview talking about how difficult it is keeping in touch. The couple’s most regular means of contact is by post, although letters take a long time and are often censored (Olya says she has become expert in reading round the redacted sentences). She sends parcels but they are limited to the bare essentials of cigarettes, tea and soap and the couple rarely talk on the telephone because of the cost of inter-city calls. At the time of the interview and two years into the sentence, Olya had visited Ivan just three times, for one short and two long visits, well below his entitlement. Olya explains that even though his colony is only 100 kilometres away (‘nearby’ in Russian terms) the logistics associated with visiting hours and train timetables means that she cannot make the round trip for a short visit without having to stay overnight in the capital, which is beyond her means. Long visits are even more financially challenging. Olya calculates that the total cost of the train fare, purchasing provisions for three days and paying for the rent of the room in the colony hostel adds up to 10,000 roubles, which she can only afford once a year. But it is the regulation about the legal status of partners that had caused the most trouble. The two long visits that they had been allowed had required the special permission of the colony governor, who had granted them two rather than the normal three days. As the couple had no legal entitlement to a

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long visit, they had no recourse against this reduction. At the time of interview the problem had worsened: This year we worked out that we should be able to have a residential visit in January so he wrote an application. But it was refused on the grounds that they are only permitted for legal wives. So now we’ve decided to get married, that’s why I’ve come here today to sort all this out, so that we can get married by April. The treatment Olya has received as a result of her unmarried status underlines her quasi-prisoner status. She experiences the restriction she faces visiting the man with whom she has lived for three years as punishment. This feeling she insists is universal among prisoners’ relatives. Olya tells us that she has never questioned the wisdom of waiting for Ivan: Olya:

Interviewer: Olya:

He hit him – so he was guilty. That was it. But I saw in his eyes in the courtroom that he was afraid, afraid that everything would fall apart [. . .] that I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him. When we heard the sentence of eight years he said, ‘I think that if it was shorter, well, then it would be alright, but eight years – it’s just too much of a burden.’ He felt sorry for me. Yes, it’s not a short time, of course Yes. But for me there wasn’t a question. The man was worth waiting for [. . .] How could I do anything else? It’s simple. I don’t know, I ask myself this question what would I say? ‘That’s it my dear, I’m sorry, I’m tired of this.’ No. What would happen to him then? How could I live with the responsibility of abandoning a human being like that? I’d be sad to do that to a dog. In such a situation, it seems to me, there’s no alternative but to stick by him.

Olya and Ivan have discussed the future. She explains that Ivan has avoided any involvement with the prison sub-culture (as he had a previous custodial sentence he could have laid claim to a leadership position in his colony) and that he volunteers for work in the industrial zone in order to improve his chances for parole. They have discussed having child together and made plans for house repairs when he is released. Despite these attempts to remain positive, Olya describes her overwhelming feeling of emptiness when she considers the future: ‘emptiness, all the time it is just waiting, waiting, waiting’. But she has taken steps to empower herself. Like other wives and family members we will meet in

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subsequent chapters, Olya has become a member of a support group and is the monitor of a chat room it has set up. This group’s organisation has been able to give her free legal advice in her continuing battle to get Ivan’s case reviewed and, she, in her turn, has offered advice to newcomers to the site about visiting colonies. Before she joined she was ‘in a dark forest’ but the group has helped her to feel less isolated. In many respects Olya’s story is like those that feature in the popular TV programme Before it is Too Late, where real-life stories of criminals are presented. The theme of the ‘relative as victim’ surfaces quite often in the show. Two recent productions are typical of the genre; the wives stand loyally by their men, even though their life has been turned upside down. One story is almost a replica of Olya’s: the woman’s husband, defending his friend, kills a man and is given a sentence of six-and-a-half years. The wife is plunged into poverty, her mother dies and she is left absolutely alone, but knowing her husband to be innocent, (or, at least partially innocent, because he was carrying a knife at the time), she stands by him through all the adversity. In the second programme the wife’s steadfastness is put to an even sterner test, as the murder victim is her own father, killed by her husband. The woman accepts her husband’s explanation that he was trying to calm down the father, who was in a drunken rage. But her support is given at the expense of her relationship with her mother. The latter rejects her daughter, leaving her destitute. In both cases, the aim of the programme is to encourage audience sympathy. The message of the show is that both wives’ victimhood is the necessary consequence of the fulfilment of their societalassigned wifely role. They are, in essence, Decembrist wives. The striking similarity of these narratives with Olya’s interview is less the choreographed representation of the women’s suffering than the way that the husbands’ offenses are discursively neutralised. Excuses are presented for the men’s offending (the need to defend another person and to control a potentially dangerous situation) that show them in a favourable light. As in Olya’s story, the miscarriage of justice is compounded by disproportionate sentencing and actions on the part of the penal authorities that prevent the women fulfilling their wifely duty. In these circumstances the women’s support of their husbands is understandable and, viewers are told, perhaps even worthy of admiration. But not all the offenders who end up in Russian prisons can be represented as having suffered miscarriages of justice or as victims of an overly punitive criminal-justice system. There are plenty of men in Russian correctional colonies who have committed premeditated crimes in full knowledge that they were violating the criminal code. Many come from disadvantaged socio-economic groups in Russian society and from ethnic minorities, are unemployed and lead chaotic lives. The women who partner these men generally share their disadvantaged backgrounds and may find themselves being drawn into the

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same chaotic or criminal lifestyles. Our second example is one such woman and her story-telling is altogether different from Olya’s.

Saima’s Story Saima was more reticent than Olya in telling her story. As our conversation progressed, we discovered the reason was that Saima had recently come to the decision to break with her husband, Marat, who was four years into a nine-year sentence for organised drug dealing. She had met another man whom she planned to marry and she was pregnant with his child. Saima, a Tatar, did not have a happy childhood. Her parents divorced and Saima was brought up in a household with her step father, with whom she had a poor relationship. After school she had worked as a clerk in various organisations but a recent application to work in a local factory was rejected because of her relationship with a prisoner. When interviewed, Saima was working for a stall holder in the town market on a flat rate wage of 200 roubles a day (equivalent to about four to five pounds sterling in 2010). In addition to her wage, she was receiving 800 roubles a month child allowance which paid for his place in a nursery. She has no other means of support and tells us that she struggles to make ends meet. The story of Saima’s married life is complicated and chaotic. She met her husband at work. At the time, he was living with another woman with whom he had had a son, but he left her to marry Saima. As a married couple they qualified for a room in the dormitory at the depot where they both worked. Saima tells us that the relationship with Marat became difficult and violent. She had known that her husband had a drug habit before they got married but his addiction became progressively worse and he went from smoking to injecting heroin. Matters became worse on the birth of their child. Marat began spending nights and weeks away from home, returning drunk when he would physically abuse her. Saima realised that he was involved in drug dealing. It was this that led to his arrest: Saima:

It was in 2006 I think. We were out with the baby at a friend’s flat when there was a knock at the door and the police rushed in and it all happened. They made us all lie on the floor and searched us. Interviewer: Were you in shock? Saima: Yes, I was in shock. They searched me as well. All of us. Marat was taken into custody but freed on bail, pending trial. Saima’s telling of what happened next is confusing, but what is certain is that during the course of the year he was on bail, Marat moved back with his former girlfriend and divorced Saima. In Saima’s version of events, the precipitant was her refusal to

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help Marat arrange a bank loan of 300,000 roubles to ‘pay off’ the judge. Within three months of the divorce and following the court judgement, her former husband was on his way to prison a long way away in northern Siberia. At the time of the interview and despite the divorce Saima had taken steps to revive the relationship with Marat during the three years that he had been incarcerated. Via a friend, she discovered the address of his colony and she initiated a correspondence. The couple had been corresponding for a year when Saima was contacted by Marat’s mother who asked her to visit Marat to take him supplies, all expenses paid. Saima understood her former mother-in-law’s motive as entirely self-interested; that she did not herself want to make the long trek to the colony. During the course of the next two years Saima visited Marat four times and on each occasion she was given a suitcase to take by her former mother-in-law. The round trip she had to make to the colony was, without question, the most challenging faced by any of the women we interviewed. It took a week inclusive of the three-nights in the colony, and involved a 27-hour train journey, several bus trips, and ‘whole days’ waiting for transport: Saima:

The first time I went was probably 2008, it was August and very hot. I think to myself, ‘where on earth am I going? I really don’t know, where I am going’ [. . .] I had to stay one night in a hotel, then take a bus, then trolleybus, then another bus. Then it was on foot right to the zone. But I got there somehow or other. Interviewer: So the colony was out of town Saima: Yes, in a village. Saima tells us that she did not gain financially from the visits. Marat’s mother would give her money for the outward journey and she had to collect the return fare, which was sent by money transfer, from the colony cashier. Saima does not tell us why she agreed to run this time-consuming and exhausting errand, but she confirmed that she wanted to go. The visits, she said, went well. Marat was affectionate, she prepared food for him and they ‘talked about life’. Although she does not elaborate, Saima evidently believed that her relationship with Marat had been re-established. She talks of her sadness when the time came to leave after her visits, of missing him and of writing to the authorities to ask them to transfer him to a colony nearer home. She did this, moreover, in the face of advice from her friends that she should walk away from the relationship: ‘They said why wait? He’ll not change. Why are you waiting?’ Saima does not disclose what eventually made her change her mind about Marat but there came a point, she said, when ‘I just got tired of it. It’s just not worth it, I think to myself [. . .] he’ll never change’, though she does say that on visits she began to detect a familiar ‘nervous tension’ and ‘kind of malice’ in him.

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Were she to have her time over again, she says she would not have had anything to do with a man like Marat. Saima is anxious that her former husband’s malice will now be directed at her and she fears his release. She has told him that she has begun a new relationship. His response was to send his mother round to clear Saima’s flat of any of his belongings. The mother has already taken a fridge, cupboards, side tables, plates, a casserole dish and utensils. All Saima wants to do now is to lead a quiet life with her new lover, her son and expected new baby. When interviewed in 2010, she was still working out her feelings about her life with Marat: Interviewer:

Saima: Interviewer: Saima: Interviewer: Saima: Interviewer: Saima: Interviewer: Saima: Interviewer: Saima:

Interviewer: Saima:

So you stopped having anything to do with him? I understand that. But those first two years, you said, you felt sorry for him and wanted to help him? I felt very sorry for him, yes. Can you tell me what it was like? It was very difficult, depressing, that he was there and I was alone, without him. So you missed him. Yes. Being without him, yes. Even though he hit you and so forth? Yes. You forgave him? I forgave him, yes You wrote to him? He also wrote to me, things like ‘I love you, everything is going to be alright for us’, back-and-forth, that sort of thing. Then when I found another lover, it was ‘you’re worthless’. He wrote that to you? He told his mother that I was worthless. That’s it. So I’m worthless. If he’d loved me he wouldn’t have said that.

To Stay or to Walk Away One reaction to Saima’s story might reasonably be that it is surprising that she persisted so long in an abusive relationship that appeared to be offering her very little. Yet, as the Western research we discussed in the previous chapter has found, imprisonment of a partner can offer respite to a dysfunctional relationship and an opportunity for it to be repaired. While Saima understood she was being exploited by her former mother-in-law, she evidently welcomed the opportunity to heal the relationship with her husband and father of her child. An unlikely candidate for the dekabristka label, for a time she was able to

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fulfil the cultural expectation of the Russian prisoner’s wife, undertaking long and painful journeys to Siberia to support her husband. And for time, Saima was able to enjoy the exclusive company of her former husband in a safe environment. Saima’s story is instructive also in demonstrating that whether to stay or to walk away from a relationship is not a one-off, once-and-for-all decision, but is a process. Most of the women we interviewed echoed Olya in their insistence that they were not going to abandon their husband, justifying their decision either by employing classic neutralisation strategies in their storytelling or by referring to the stereotypes of the good wife and mother. But Western research also suggests that, typically, the record for sustaining relationships is not encouraging.9 In Russia, there is no systematic research on the impact of incarceration on relationships and available statistics are unhelpful as they do not include common-law partnerships.10 However, there is anecdotal evidence. Postings on relatives’ websites confirm findings in other jurisdictions that sentence length is of decisive importance. Up to two to three years, there are good prospects of a marriage surviving one of the party’s imprisonment, but from five years the frequency of break-ups increases and few marriages survive ten-year sentences. Prison personnel report that after four to five years there is normally a growing apart of couples often leading to divorce and separation.11 Long prison sentences and Russia’s penal geography constitute formidable obstacles to be overcome for even the most determined dekabristka. The women’s talk we reproduce below shows the dekabristka trope clashing with the practicalities associated with being a prisoner’s wife in twenty-first-century Russia. Of the nine wives we interviewed who were in a relationship with their prisoner partner or husband that pre-dated his current incarceration, all insisted that they had taken the decision not to walk away from the relationship. Had we interviewed her a year earlier, no doubt Saima would also have said the same. In constructing their stand-by-my-man narrative, love, religion and duty figure prominently in these women’s talk. Valya, 42-year-old wife of a man serving a ten-year sentence for murder, draws most heavily on traditional discourses circulating in Russian society about the dutiful wife. She has already sustained her marriage for eight years. She describes her decision to support her husband as a declaration that once uttered, had to be binding: It was there [in the colony], on a short visit that I said to him, ‘Victor, don’t worry, I will not abandon you, I will not cast you aside.’ Let us say that these words for me were decisive. I took a decision at that moment and have stuck to it ever since. In a classic appeal to a higher moral authority for her decision, Valya says that she draws her strength from religion. In standing by Victor she is obeying the

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Bible’s command: ‘The Bible is clear “Until death us do part” [. . .] divorce is not an option. “In sickness and in health, in sadness and joy” It’s true isn’t it? There are no alternatives’. We do not know if Valya was religious before her husband’s imprisonment, but her faith provides the justification and, indeed, the imperative, for her sharing her husband’s suffering. In talking about her experiences Valya makes constant reference to the indignities and humiliations she has had to endure. She talks about being made to feel ‘a third class citizen’, ‘a complete shit’, ‘a nobody with no name’, but she comments on how fortunate she and other wives of today’s prisoners are compared with the 1930s: Sometimes I think we have it easy. We can talk on the phone, write letters. I can go and see him, talk to him, even three times a week. But think of all the people who were sent away for ten years ‘without the right of correspondence’.12 Still they waited. If someone has already walked this path, then why not me too? Conditions are far better now. So why not wait? Valya’s comments contain a veiled criticism of the women who complain about their suffering. Larisa, whose husband died of tuberculosis in prison serving a fifteen-year sentence, insists that it is ‘un-Christian’ and ‘inhuman’ to abandon a prisoner. She admits that her view is shaped by the fact that she knew her husband was already ‘a professional criminal’ when she married him and that she recognises that it would have been inconsistent to drop him simply because he was caught. But her point is a more general one: I don’t understand those women who fall at the first hurdle. When he was free he was the dearest thing to her, the most loved. Well if he’s the best, then she should share his fate. And if when he falls, she drops him, then that means that she never really loved him. For the majority of our respondent-wives, declaration of the strength of their love is sufficient explanation for their decision not to walk away: ‘I simply love this man’, ‘he was the only one for me, and he has stayed the only one’, ‘he is just everything to me.’ But this appeal to love with a capital ‘L’ is often associated in their talk with other justifications for not walking away. In their talk, the wives also draw on the redemption narrative in the story of the dekabristki and, even more so, of Sonya Marmeladova. Valya, says that she still has much work to do with Victor: ‘I have to cure him, put him back on his feet, rehabilitate him’, whilst Antonina’s support of her husband is conditional upon his acceptance of the venality of the crime he had committed: ‘I would not have stayed with him if he hadn’t understood this. For me it is very important that the man understand that it is dreadful to have killed another man who had a family, a mother’. Such statements, of course are music to the

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ears of the Russian Prison Service which aims to recruit wives to the task of rehabilitating their husbands. But there are also women who evidently decide there are limits to wifely duty. Gulya, having waited at the time of the interview twelve years for her husband, acknowledges that feelings can change and couples grow apart. She believes in a ‘natural division’ of women between those who can survive separation and those for whom it proves to be too difficult. She is not prepared to pass judgement on the latter and views it as normal that as people age, ‘new emotions develop. A person’s tastes change, their worldview changes.’ Her own feelings for her husband have not changed, but by reserving this right for others she is implicitly questioning the basic tenets of the stereotypes that society has constructed for women in her position. But Gulya is adamant that the woman must always be honest about her feelings in these cases and not string the husband along: I don’t judge such a woman. I am not going to judge her because, say, she meets another man, someone who accepts her even with all this baggage [. . .] No I am not going to judge the woman. It works for some people but not for others. If tomorrow someone comes along who is better then I’d be off. But I know this won’t happen. There might be a lot negative about him but no-one can see inside him. But I am not going to judge others. That is, so long as it is done honestly. You mustn’t say that everything is alright and then when he’s released he goes home and finds someone else’s slippers in the hall. Klara, another widow of a man who died in prison, goes further than Gulya, and argues the case for ‘permitting’ wives to have casual affairs whilst their husbands are away to meet their physical needs. She admits to having had an affair herself that she did not disclose to her husband. Klara’s attitude underlines the obvious fact that a challenge all couples face is the changes in their relationship that imprisonment brings about. Even Valya expresses doubts that her dedication will lead to a happy ending because of an inevitable growing apart: I admit that I am not sure that my life will have a happy ending. God knows whether we will survive this pressure or not [. . .] Eight years have passed for me and eight years have passed for him. It’s as if they have passed in different universes. The distance she has begun to feel in the past two years has come about because of changes in her husband’s personality which she attributes to the brutalising effect of the colony. She might also have been referring to the physical distance that separates them, the more than a thousand kilometres of

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physical space they have to overcome to communicate with one another. It is to such more practical difficulties wives of prisoners face to which we now turn.

Performing the Decembrist Wife A typical joke among the girls, ‘My professional anniversary is the Communication Workers’ Day, because this is the eighth year that I am the sole contact my husband has with the outside world’.13 We have already observed that in Western research visitation occupies a central place in the discussion of the quotidian life of prisoners’ wives. The visiting room has been revealed as a site where women endeavour to perform their sociallyconstructed role as home maker. In doing so, they reproduce the gendered division of labour of the traditional family; by involving the prisoner in decision-making, deferring to him in disciplining children and consulting him about repairs and financial management. In Western jurisdictions this reproduction of traditional gender roles is facilitated by provisions made for frequent visitation; face-to-face contact reinforces the woman’s subservient position vis-a`-vis her husband.14 Megan Comfort has come to different conclusions, arguing against the received wisdom that women are necessarily oppressed and victims of their husband’s incarceration; she sees the controlled environment of visitation rooms as sites where women can exercise a measure of leverage and control in their dealings with men, while enacting their gendered roles of nurturer and care giver.15 The provisions for frequent visitation in US and British prisons mean that face-to-face interaction can become part of the everyday life of prisoner and non-prisoner alike.16 In Russia, by contrast, exceptionality is the norm. The opportunities, therefore, for a woman to involve her husband in family decisionmaking or to enact her role as caregiver and nurturer are reduced. The visit, nevertheless, occupies a prominent place in the women’s narratives which is indicative of the deep symbolic meaning vested in it. Women describe in detail the arduous journeys they have to make to colonies, even though they might make only one a year and in describing their experiences visiting correctional colonies, our interviewees pay attention to their efforts to bring domesticity into penal space. The ‘visiting room narrative’ provides an opportunity for the wives and partners of prisoners to present evidence of their entitlement to the dekabristka label. But their stories are often multi-layered and as well as reproducing gender stereotypes can include re-imaginings of masculinities, as husbands are described as preparing meals, reading poetry and engaging in renewed courtship and ‘fantasy play’. Visitation also occupies a place in the narratives of women who do not, in fact, visit. There are practical reasons for the low rates of visitation to Russian

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correctional colonies, including distance, cost, the difficulties of arranging for childcare, ill-health and loss of earnings, but it is striking how insistent women are to avoid censure. A common justification they give for failing to take up their full entitlement of visits is that the prisoner has told them not to come citing his concern about their health, the impact on them of the prison environment and the impact on the family budget. Meanwhile, telephone conversations, letter writing and, above all, the preparation and dispatch of parcels are elevated in women’s talk to a position of equivalence to the visit as evidence of their commitment to the relationship.

Parcels, Letters and Phone-Calls Parcel-sending is a well-established ritual in the Russian prison system. At various times in the history of Russian penality, the parcel has been essential to prisoners’ physical survival. One such recent time was in the 1990s when there was a crisis in the prison economy and having someone who was prepared to send food parcels could make the difference between life and death for some prisoners.17 Parcels remain important, providing prisoners with favourite food items, necessary medicines and hygiene products and articles that can be used in intra-colony trade and for ‘compulsory’ contributions to the criminal sub-culture’s ‘social fund’, the obshchak.18 The gathering of items for the parcel, often involving all family members, and its delivery is an important identity marker of all prisoners’ relatives. Whether it is standing at the post office counter dedicated to weighing and dispatching twenty kilogram parcels, lining up at the parcel reception hatch of city remand prisons or struggling along rural roads in Russia’s penal peripheries laden with bags and cases, the prisoner’s relative is an instantly recognisable figure. Recently, the Federal Prison Service has made much of the opening of commissary supermarkets where online orders can be placed for delivery to named prisoners. These mostly are available for remand prisons in regional capitals.19 Among our interviewees, the traditional parcel was still the principal means of provisioning prisoners. Some wives, like Olya and Saima, could not afford to send regular parcels, but others, like Valya, dispatched them regularly. Yet others, such as the ‘bandits’ wives’ we meet in the next chapter, had been told by their husbands that this is not necessary but nevertheless they might assemble a parcel as evidence of their commitment to the relationship. The 2009 prisoner census shows that parcel sending is, in fact, the most common form of contact between prisoners and the outside world, 81.6 per cent of male prisoners and 66.9 per cent of women had received at least one parcel in the previous twelve months.20 If parcels are the objectification of a wife’s commitment to her husband’s physical well-being, the telephone is the most common vehicle for giving emotional support. The telephone has taken over from letter writing, until the very recent past, the principal means of keeping in touch. Today, letter writing tends to be confined to the older generation and to those, like Saima, who

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Figure 3.1 Information hatch in a Moscow remand prison. This is the place to which relatives have to come to confirm the location of a prisoner and for information about all aspects of staying in touch. cannot afford long-distant calls. Telecommunication has, in fact, been responsible for a revolution in how relationships are conducted across the colony fence. Just ten years ago a minority of correctional colonies and remand prisons had telephones for inmates to use. Today, if the Federal Prison Service is to be believed, not only do all colonies have pay phones but facilities for communicating by Skype and E-mail are also available in the most remote and difficult-to-access colonies. The 2009 census shows an improvement in the frequency of telephone use among prisoners, but the figures underreport the

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Figure 3.2 Talking on the intercom phone during a short visit at a correctional colony in Krasnoyarsk krai. frequency of conversations because they fail to record calls made on illicit mobile devices, which are in widespread use in colonies. The prison authorities are fully aware of the phenomenon of the ‘telephone business’, but are unable to control it. The business is organised by high-ranking members of the criminal subculture. From our interviews, it seems that in some colonies they are widely available to all levels of prison society, so long as a prisoner has the money, goods or services to exchange for a phone. Katya, who was our principal informant on the prison shadow economy, explained how the business of organised: Katya:

To import a mobile phone [the prisoner] has to negotiate with a member of staff and pay him money. I calculated the other day that so far we’ve had 25 mobiles (laughs)! Interviewer: So you needed a new one for each conversation? Katya: Not really. For the two years he’s been in, it works out about one a month. But recently they’ve [the administration] stopped bothering us; they used to confiscate the phone every couple of weeks. But now they’ve decided to leave us be. You won’t believe it but there have been times when I’ve phoned him on his number and I’ve got an officer who’s gone to him and said ‘San’ your wife’s on the phone’!

Figure 3.3 Notice in a remand prison informing relatives what clothes they can hand in for a prisoner. It reads: ‘Citizen Relatives. Permitted Summer Clothes: base ball cap; wind jammer; polo neck jumper or sweater; tracksuit; shirt; shorts; summer shoes without arch supports; slippers or flip-flops; jeans or trousers; sweatshirts T-shirts. No winter clothes permitted.’

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Valya, who as a private entrepreneur is better off than either Olya or Saima, makes money transfers to her husband in his Siberian correctional colony. Whereas previously she sent money orders to be paid into his official colony account, now she does it by bank transfer to the mobile phones of men operating the illicit phone market. Using this means her husband has been able to buy his own mobile phone, a winter coat and cigarettes. But phones are always vulnerable to being confiscated and their use means that calls cannot be planned. In order not to miss a call, we were told by our interviewees that they needed to be near a phone at all times. Calls could take place at odd times and not according to a predictable timetable: Interviewer: So if you don’t immediately pick up he doesn’t always get the opportunity to try again? Valya: Yes, it’s a lost moment. The point is that he’s managed somehow or other to sneak a call, and if I don’t pick up the receiver, there might be no other calls possible that day. Or the next day or the next. So that’s why it’s better always to be there to pick up the receiver. When I go to the bathroom, I always take the phone and put it nearby. My phone has a screen that tells you whose phoning. If it’s not him then I say, to hell with it, and go on washing. Others confirmed that they leave the phone in a prominent place where it can be reached immediately it rings. But the unpredictability of calls can be a source of stress. The wife can assume that her partner is being punished, sick or worse if calls cease, while the failure of his wife to pick up can be cause of jealousy and suspicion in the prisoner. Galya explains that she and her husband have agreed on ground rules; she switches off her phone if she is going out but contacts her husband when she returns home. This, she explains, stops him re-dialling ‘every five minutes’. But mobile phones can be used by prisoners to try to control their wives. We discuss this aspect of illicit communications in the next chapter about bandit wives. Against the disadvantages, the majority of women we interviewed valued the ability that mobile telephones gave them to be in unmonitored contact with their partner. One woman described how she switches her phone onto loudspeaker and gets on with her housework whilst chatting to her husband and others reported marathon telephone conversations ‘lasting hours’. These conversations allow them to keep their husbands involved in their day-to-day lives; one woman even described how she used her mobile phone to send a picture of shoes she was contemplating buying to her husband to let him help make the choice for her. This use of illicit phones may be a passing phenomenon; the authorities periodically announce that they are planning a serious assault on the market in

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correctional colonies in illicit phones. Much depends upon success in the ongoing campaign against corruption in the forces of law and order. As Natal’ya reminds us, the use of illicit mobile phones depends upon the balance of power between prisoners and penal authority in any particular colony: At first we probably used to speak for fifteen hours a day (laughs) so we were permanently on the phone. Now we don’t so much, it’s a lot less, so it’s no longer a case of being in constant contact. One reason is that they’ve become much stricter about the phones and so everything has to be done in secret and it’s not so easy anymore.

Visiting Prisons and Colonies All correctional colonies have visiting rooms for short visits and many, but not all, have a hostel for long visits. The pattern of visiting among our respondents confirmed their overall low frequency but they also showed the unpopularity of short visits compared with long. As we learned from Olya, the low level of uptake of short visits is because of logistical problems; a short visit can be poor value for money if it cannot be accomplished in a day. Better, Olya’s example tells us, to save money for a long visit. But there is also a problem of the quality of contact possible on a short visit. While some colonies have provided modern facilities for short visits, others are long overdue upgrading. Our interviewees complained about having to conduct conversations in competition with other families through scratched Perspex divides, using faulty speakers. Natal’ya tells us she and her husband cut short such a meeting before their four hours was up: He simply said, ‘go home, it’s wrecking my nerves, I can’t sit and talk with you so distant.’ Well, it’s difficult, of course, very difficult. You have to hang around, waiting for two or three hours before they even let you in. Then they take you to the booth and it’s all dark so you can’t see him properly. Then there’s the intercom, I don’t get on with it at all. You want to talk, of course, but not in those conditions. With the exception of the political prisoners we discuss in Chapter 9, none of the women we interviewed took up the full entitlement for long visits with their husband. Valya, who unlike the majority of wives has the financial means to visit frequently, came closest to four long visits a year since her husband’s transportation to his colony. Women like Olya, who have more limited financial resources and have to ask for time off work, have to ration long visits. Olya told us that she starts saving for the next visit as soon as she is home from the last. The costs are the return journey including any overnight stays in hotels this might involve, room rental in the colony, the purchase of provisions sufficient for two people for three days and for a parcel to leave with the prisoner. Olya calculated

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that a long visit costs 10,000 roubles and this is to a relatively close colony. Colonies vary in the amount they charge for rooms. Our interviewees quoted prices of anything between 400 and 3,000 roubles for three nights. Some women spent large amounts of money on the provisions they take to colonies. Lyuba, one of the ‘new wives’, told us that on her last visit she spent 6,000 –8,000 roubles and admitted that to do this she pawned a gold necklace left her by her mother, her engagement ring and other gold items. Few women go to the same lengths as Lyuba but typically they plan visits carefully in the attempt to make them a special occasion. The visit is a moment when the wife is able to realise the role of sexual partner, carer and redeemer; in other words, to perform the dekabristka role. But it is also a moment when she most directly shares her husband’s carceral experience. After what in many cases is a long and exhausting journey laden with parcels, she is locked up for three days with no way of contacting the outside world and can be subjected to humiliating treatment by prison personnel.

The Journey The journeys that the wives of prisoners have to undertake to visit their husbands are a far cry from the overland trek lasting months to which their nineteenth-century forebears were subject. But no less than then, the journeyto-the-colony today is a transformative experience when women are repeatedly reminded of their quasi-prisoner status.21 A visit is not just a case of deciding to go, grabbing an overnight case and heading off to the station; it is an expedition that requires planning and preparation and that can be beset by hazards. In their narratives, women assigned significant time to describing the precise details of journeys they undertake. Valya who can afford to make the 1,000 kilometre journey to her husband’s colony as comfortable as possible, nevertheless, takes time in the interview to spell out the various logistical challenges she has to overcome to see her husband. Trains to the nearest town to his colony in the European north, she tells us, only run on alternate days and often not to timetable. If she misses the train she has a wait of 48 hours for the next. She arrives at 2.30 am in the morning when ‘the station and town are shut’. On her first few visits, all she could do was to get a taxi to the airport where, for 100 roubles, she could spend the night in the arrivals hall before continuing her journey next morning. Subsequently, she discovered a dormitory in the same village as the colony, so now takes a taxi straight there and grabs a few hours sleep before going, first thing, to the colony to put her name on the list for a visit. Then it’s ‘forward and backward’ between the hostel and colony, lugging the bags she has brought with her for the three nights. Valya’s journey-to-colony narrative recalls the postings on prisoner-support websites where women explain in detail to others how to get to particular colonies. Here is one woman who set out from Moscow on the 800 kilometre

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journey to Yangory in Arkhangel’sk oblast’ in the European north to visit her husband-to-be. She describes the last leg of the journey: To get there was complicated, actually unrealistic. First, you have to take the train and bus [. . .] to the settlement of Severo-Onezhsk [. . .] Arriving there you have to find your way to the main administration and get a pass for the ‘train’ to the regime zone. [If] you are given a pass you can go to the station to await the ‘train’ to the colonies. The station is a small room without glass in the windows, no heating and one bench.The train is supposed to set off at 8.40 pm, but sometimes it doesn’t come until 9.30 or 10pm [. . .] It isn’t really a train at all, just a single wagon of the old prison design, but with the internal cells removed. The track isn’t the ordinary sort. It’s narrow gauge, so that you feel like you’re on an American rollercoaster. Sometimes, the train comes off its tracks [and] comes to a stop in the grass [. . .] The journey takes four to five hours [. . .] A prison vehicle waits at the destination to take you to the visiting room in the colony [. . .] On maps this place is shown as uninhabited.22 Compared with 2004 when this was posted, the Russian Prison Service now makes some efforts to help visitors navigate penal Russia. Regional authorities give details of visiting hours and public transport from the nearest large town but without the graphic details of where to buy pies, what to wear and what to bring that can be found on support websites. In their descriptions of their journeys to the colonies, women comment on the construction of their quasi-prisoner identity. Here is one internet posting commenting on the attitude of local inhabitants in northern Perm’ krai: So you don’t miss your stop, after about two hours ask the driver to drop you at the turning for Zone 38. And now the difficult bit begins. You’ve got about five kilometres to walk along an asphalted road with no pavement [. . .] If you thumb a lift they will put up the price because they know you are the relative of a prisoner. Lots of military vehicles go past but they never pick you up. They are not allowed to mix with families of prisoners.23 Our interviewees, similarly, had stories to tell of the unhelpfulness of passersby who identified them as prisoners’ wives: ‘I had a lot of bags and the weather was bad, slushy and personnel kept passing but nobody offered any help’; ‘Nobody stops to help. It seems to me they should help after all there are women with young children or babes-in-arms.’ But Lyuba has a contrary example when a local man did help her with her bags. She explains that the two passport control points she has to pass through in the zone where her husband is imprisoned are about a kilometre apart:

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Lyuba:

I have to carry the lot. So what I do is I grab one bag carry it ten metres and then put it down and go back for the other and put that down, then I go back for the packets. And so step-by-step I cover the kilometre (smiles). Sometimes there’s help from the locals; true, that’s happened to me only once. Interviewer: Someone helped you? Lyuba: Yes. He said ‘come one, love, I’ll carry those for you.’ I was so grateful to him, because it was in August, hot, and I was sweating buckets. It was madness. All the women complained of having to struggle with the bags they have to take to the colonies. Here is Olya: Olya:

First time, I took everything with me from home so I could cook there: frozen meat so it keeps longer, everything we’d need, a heap of things [. . .] a bag of potatoes; in word, everything (smiles) [. . .] a stew, various conserves, coffee, tea. Bags of stuff. They were very heavy [. . .] and I had to carry them all the way from home, by metro and train. Interviewer: Yes, of course, you had to make a lot of connections. Olya: My arms were falling off. When I arrived that first time, I simply hadn’t the strength to prepare the meals.

At the Gate Like any travellers in a foreign country, visitors to penal Russia need to have the correct travel documents to secure entry to the prison zones and their husband’s colony.24 Waiting to be admitted can be stressful as permission for a visit can be revoked or subject to modification. Postings on prisoner support websites tell of women who turn up at colonies only to discover that their husband has been transferred to another colony or is confined to the punishment cell and the visit denied.25 The drawn out process of proving their legitimacy is experienced as demeaning by many women: ‘They exasperate you, and you have to go through all this humiliating will-they-won’t-they give permission.’ The humiliation is intensified by the fact that colonies do not provide visitors with a comfortable place to wait away from the gaze of passers-by. Women told us about how they are often left to queue on the street or in draughty corridors. Here is Olya again: Interviewer: You just stand and wait from 9 to 1? Olya: I stand Interviewer: And where do you stand? Olya: Out on the street

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Figure 3.4 Visiting a correctional colony. In this colony wives are allowed on open days into the dormitory where the prisoners sleep. Interviewer: Olya: Interviewer: Olya:

You just stand in the street? Yes. In the snow, the rain, the hot sun Well, that follows You have to protect your parcels and bags, so you can’t go off somewhere (smiles). It doesn’t matter whether you arrive early or late because they let the short-visit people in first and you have to wait until they have all left before they deal with the long family visits.

Once admitted, visitors have to surrender up their parcels for inspection. Items that are not permitted are confiscated and the women’s valuables have to be handed in. Zona, the TV serial set in a remand prison had many scenes in the room where parcels’ content is checked. The rudeness and arbitrariness shown in this fictional account is, according to our interviewees’ experiences, a replica of what happens in real life. Valya describes the lack of respect, indifference and insensitivity of personnel on visits, relating an incident when she had taken a pineapple to share with her husband; it was rejected by the guard checking bags with the words ‘we don’t accept flowers in pots.’ The women’s descriptions of their reception at the colonies confirm the immense variability in how regulations are administered in different colonies and by individual prison officers. Visitors can be subject to a form of old-style Soviet ‘voluntarism’ whereby outcomes depend upon the whim of

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the person in charge; ‘who can give their word today, but change it half an hour later.’ As Olya’s case demonstrates, common law partners are particularly vulnerable. Unmarried women are required to bring evidence (which includes the birth certificate of any children of the union and evidence of co-habitation in the form of letters from the local housing committee, police and neighbours) that they are in a long-term relationship with the prisoner whom they wish to visit. They also have to provide a medical certificate proving that they have no sexually transmitted diseases and may be subject to a medical examination at the correctional colony. All women are at risk of body searches for concealed drugs and other forbidden items. This happened to Lyuba on her first visit: When I arrived for our first residential visit, they searched me all over. They really humiliated me, making me remove my underwear and squat [. . .] When they examined me, they groped about, manhandled me and they examined every photograph I had brought with me, sniffed every cosmetic cream and I had a lot of cosmetics. So they took a long time over me. Visitors and prisoners can register complaints if they believe their rights have been violated and they have access to various websites offering free legal advice. But many women fear retribution against the prisoner and ‘complications’ next time they visit. Valya told us that she is a persistent complainer, but that her husband had been warned by the colony administration that his wife is a troublemaker. She is now afraid that her outspokenness will affect Victor’s application for parole. Most women prefer to follow the warning of one prisoner’s wife posted online: Don’t be concerned when the guards are polite to you, especially if you have experienced rudeness in other colonies. They will smile at you and ask how the journey was and whether you have any complaints. Don’t complain – remember that your loved one will be blamed for telling tales and as soon as you leave, he’ll be punished.26

Domesticating Penal Space Once they are admitted for a long visit, women are shown by a prison officer to the room in the visitors’ hostel where they will spend the next three days with their husband. The hostels normally occupy one floor of the general staff block which is located between the outer and inner security fences of a colony. It is here that they can perform the role of homemaker and loving partner. In their talk about residential visits, women describe in detail the meals they prepare and hint at the loving intimate relations they have with husbands. Often, the visit is

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(re)imagined as a time when the wife welcomes her husband home from the spoiled place of the prison. Rarely, we were told, does conversation touch on the difficulties of the partner’s life as prisoner or the woman’s burden living the singleton’s life. Rather, the couples create a ‘capsule’ of visual, verbal and other sensual reminders of a life left behind. The stress on domesticity in the women’s narratives shows the acceptance by them of their traditional gender role. But it also can be read as an attempt to redress the visitor’s feeling of powerlessness in the face of the penal regime. The small corner of domesticity inserted into the militarised, male space of the correctional colony is also a place of women’s empowerment. In the visiting room, women can assert their vision of the ideal male/female relationship which challenges the highly machismo and brutalised construction of masculinities produced in the penal environment. The space of the residential visit, seen from this perspective, is a space of female fantasy. Here is Valya describing her visits with her husband: How can I explain it? The first day is like a celebration. Tea and cake, love, cooking something, non-stop tactile contact. It’s not, as you probably think, naked, unadorned sex, but simply a person, you understand, who wants all the time to touch you, to take your hand, to blow on your neck, to caress your hair, to touch your face with his fingers [. . .] You know, all the time trying to get a little closer. So I sit down and he sits next to me. I go

Figure 3.5 Recently refurbished room for three-day family and conjugal visits in a correctional colony in Tatarstan (http://kazan24.ru/news/160243.html, accessed 27 June 2016).

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into the kitchen and he follows me. That’s what it’s like, just like when we first got to know one another [. . .] So he looks at me, notices what I’m wearing, how I move. And I look to see what’s new about him, whether he’s any new scars, a new hairstyle. We won’t have seen each other for such a long time. So we’ll talk, I’ll tell him some snippet of news I haven’t managed to tell him on the phone, what the trip was like, what I ate. Valya’s description recalls the ‘renewed courtship’ and ‘fantasy play’ observed by researchers in American penitentiaries.27 The space in which these domestic fantasies are acted out is the small room in the visitors’ hostel, typically one of a dozen or so off a common corridor. Judging from the pictures uploaded onto official prison service websites, under recent reforms visitors’ rooms are being re-equipped with their own television, fridges and microwave ovens, double beds and curtains. But reports still abound of primitive conditions, with no hot water, poor levels of cleanliness, cold and damp. Communal kitchens for meal preparation and a single shared bathroom for all visiting families are the norm. Natal’ya spoke of her shock when she entered the visiting hostel for the first time: (Sighing) Oh my, the first three days, those first 24 hours, were very difficult, of course. I didn’t understand where they’d brought me, through god-knows how many doors. It’s difficult to express politely, but the doors close behind you and you’re not allowed out. Rooms, a communal toilet. I couldn’t imagine it, a communal toilet [. . .] the first night I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there wide awake thinking, ‘Oh God’, and looking at the bars on the window. I think I almost had a nervous breakdown, everything was so primitive. I was really worried and wondered where on earth I’d come to. In the morning I had bags under my eyes and said to my husband, ‘I probably won’t come again (laughs), I just can’t, I just can’t cope.’ By the third day, I had already got used to it and now when I go it’s like going home (laughs). In order to create a homely and romantic atmosphere, women bring ‘props’. These can include their own bed linen, DVDs and videos, photographs and candles. Sveta tells us how she tries to improve the otherwise unpromising ambiance: Once we had a visit and it so happened that it was our second wedding anniversary. Second or third, I don’t remember which exactly. I was given permission to bring candles. Many people do that, those small ones you can buy in a packet. Yes, and they allowed us a digital camera for an hour. So we had candles and we cut up some fruit and that’s how

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The infrequency of visits means that they never become part of a routine for either prisoner or visitor. Inevitably, this means that they have the quality of special event or ‘celebration’ and, as such, they can also cause stress if they do not ‘go to script’. The wives we interviewed identified the presence of other prisoners and their visiting families a common source of annoyance (dirty pans left in the kitchen, noisy children, young women ‘inappropriately’ dressed in shorts) but none of our respondent-wives admitted to the meeting with her husband ever having fallen short of expectations. All, rather, commented on the pain they experienced when the visit was over. Earlier research with women prisoners in Russian correctional colonies revealed that both relatives and prisoners can find visit so emotionally intense that it is not unusual for one or both parties to make excuses to put off future visits.28 Valya’s words convey some of the despair that resurfaces when the visit ends: When you come on a visit for those three days, you put worrying behind you and you forget about the bad side of the business. But then suddenly you remember it all. Can you imagine what you feel like when you leave that place? [. . .] After visits, you feel that they have torn away a bit of your flesh, you understand? It leaves a huge hole which nothing can fill.

Colony Weddings In official discourse the correctional colony wedding is evidence of the prison service’s commitment to the ‘family’s ties benefit’ and vindication of the efforts it now puts into supporting prisoners’ social ties across the colony fence. In reality, women’s motivation for consenting to marry a prisoner partner may be more prosaic. As we learned from Olya, her marriage has been prompted by the tightening of regulations on residential visits to confine them to legally married couples. It can also be a question of logistics and ‘value for money’ as it makes little sense for anyone to travel a long distance for a four-hour conversation, when there is the possibility, for the same fare, to have three whole days together. Among our nine respondents who had established a relationship with a prisoner before his incarceration, three were unmarried and another five met their partners after the latter had been imprisoned. Of the eight unmarried respondents three were planning a colony wedding and one had already been through a zone wedding. All these women had managed to secure at least one long visit as an unmarried partner but getting permission had been complicated and had been an occasion for the prison authorities to remind them of their ‘illegal status’. Web forums strongly advise women to get married if they want to

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avoid problems with visitation and comment on the veritable ‘boom’ in applications to marry that has resulted from the authorities’ tightening up of the rules. One woman told us that there had been thirteen weddings in just one month in her husband’s colony. Some colonies put effort into creating an appropriate atmosphere and may relax rules to allow guests to attend. But others frustrate attempts of the parties involved to make the day ‘special’ by a strict application of regime rules. Wedding ceremonies in prisons and correctional colonies have to be conducted by a civilian registrar. Religious ceremonies can also be held but a secular wedding is necessary for the union to be legal. None of our interview partners was planning a religious ceremony, as the consensus was that it was best to postpone that until the prisoner’s release. Embarking on a wedding is not for the feint hearted as numerous bureaucratic hurdles have to be overcome preparing necessary documentation. Furthermore, colony weddings are not cheap; the couple has to pay for the services of the notary and registrar, for the hire of the room in the colony and to buy costumes, cake and any other of the trappings that are permitted. The women interviewees told us of their attempts to make their wedding day as close to ‘normal wedding’ as possible. But Natal’ya, who wanted to make the day special, told us of how the deputy governor of her future husband’s colony reneged on the eve of the wedding on his promise to allow her to bring two rings to exchange in the ceremony, a camera and to invite the bridegroom’s mother as a guest. She prefers to forget the day: We were told that sometimes they allowed couples to be married in the governor’s office. But in our case it was horrid, we did it in the corridor where you go for short visits, right there in the corridor. It took two minutes then we were done. So it meant that our mood wasn’t good. In her autobiography, the dekabristka Paulina Gue`ble describes her wedding in terms that would be understood by today’s prisoners’ wives.29 Ivan’s leg irons were removed for the ceremony, which took place in the small wooden church in the Siberian village where he was imprisoned and after the ceremony Ivan was taken back to prison: The ceremony was short, the priest was in a hurry and there was no choir. As soon as the ceremony was over the three of them; that is, my husband and the two guards, went back to the fortress, my husband in legs irons [. . .] Only the next day did they let us have some time to sit together. They brought him to me for two hours and this was thanks to the great kindness of the commander.30

CHAPTER 4 THE BANDIT’S WIFE

Mother, mummy, please forgive me, your born daughter, she’s a thief! Fell for one and did what he did, a midnight job that came to grief. The two of us got nicked together, – then he scarpered, on his own. Off they hauled me to the station, he had scarpered – me, I couldn’t, there I was, left all alone. A lousy copper grilled me, scumbag, ‘Tell us who he was, you tart!’ Proud, straight out I gave my answer, ‘He’s the wound here in my heart!’ Proud, straight out I gave my answer, ‘He’s the wound here in my heart!’ Mummy, if you see that thief, say I died in jail, poor me! Went with him, I did, I loved him, good luck to him, I’ll never rat! Teamed up with a thief and loved him, I won’t shop you, bonny lad! You’re a thief, and I’m another!’ (Prison chanson, early 1930s)1 Anyone with a passing familiarity of the literature on Russian prisons will know that, traditionally, the group of prisoners who occupy the top positions in the society of prisoners’ sub-cultures are forbidden to marry. Prison sub-cultures have been a subject of fascination in Russian popular culture and for criminologists and historians of Russian penality from Imperial Russia via the Soviet gulag to the

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present time.2 Scholarly investigations and cultural productions tell of their exceptional nature. And it is true that the specifics of sub-cultural rules, rituals and rites of passage and the relationship with the world beyond the prison and with prison administrations has marked out Russian prison sub-cultures historically from their counterparts elsewhere. The rule against marriage prevailed in the Stalinist labour camps when the Thieves-in-Law (Vory-v-Zakone) so-called, dominated prison gang culture. The prohibition was not a call to celibacy; ‘thieves’ were allowed sexual relations with women prisoners (gulag testimonies tell of mass rapes by criminals and of prostitutes brought in from ‘campside’).3 It was, rather, that wives and families were thought to be a distraction from the business of controlling the society of captives and a weak link to be exploited by prison administrations. Bachelorhood was the order of the day. The requirement was finally ended when the Georgian Thieves rebelled, although prisoners occupying the highest authority positions may still avoid family commitments outside the prison.4 The rebellion of the Georgian Thieves signalled the beginning of a process of fragmentation in the prevailing penal subculture that has continued to the present day.5 The gangs and hierarchies that exist in today’s correctional colonies bear only a distant relationship to the original Thieves-in-Law, but many still lay claim to the title.

Dekabristka or Gangster’s Moll? If historical stereotypes inform society’s understanding of the members of today’s prison sub-cultures, they are also present in popular understandings of their wives and partners. From internet forums, we learn that these women ‘live just fine’ benefiting from their husband’s criminality or that they are themselves criminals who will go with their husband ‘to rob a dacha’ and the husband and wife together ‘make one Satan’. In a discussion on one website, participants considered whether Carmen, who was brought to attention of Russians in a poem by Alexander Blok, is the appropriate model for the Russian bandit wife.6 The gypsy Carmen was a stereotype of the selfish, unfaithful, deceitful and unreliable partner, definitely not a committed wife who is prepared to follow her husband to Siberia or, laden with bags, visit him in prison. Russia, in fact, has its own gangster heroine. She is ‘Son’ka the-Golden-Hand’, queen of the nineteenth-century criminal world who ran the ‘Chervonnye valety’ or the Jacks-of-Hearts, a club for swindlers.7 An opinion poll of viewers of a TV serial in which Son’ka the-Golden-Hand figures, showed her to be a popular figure whom women secretly admire.8 The twenty-first-century versions of Carmen and Son’ka are the entrepreneurial women who use the ill-gotten gains of her husband’s life of crime to start a legal business. One website tells the ‘true life story’ of a bandit who terrorised the small town and dressed his wife in ‘silks and diamonds like a Christmas tree’. When he was murdered, his wife

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disappeared from view only to resurface some time later, heading up a legitimate business founded with the bandit’s money.9 However intriguing the image of the gangster moll is for women in Russia today, the dekabristka is never far below the surface. Despite being abandoned to prison by her bandit husband, the woman in the epigraph above remains loyal to him in her adversity. Seventy years later, she is the subject of a sensationalist book written by lawyer Valerii Karyshev entitled Bandits’ Wives: The Advocate’s Version.10 The description of the book’s content on its cover, entices readers with the prospect of an expose´ of the thrilling realities of the life of the Russian equivalent to the gangster’s moll: [T]hey always walk on a knife edge. To be a permanent companion of the thief-in-law, bandit, killer is a deadly risk. But while [the men] fulfil their ‘professional duties’, at home they are awaited by ‘life companions’, women whose destinies at times are no less breathtaking and intricate than the fates of their chosen men. Inside, though, we learn that these women undergo a transformation once the gangster husband is captured and imprisoned: I was surprised by the changes that came over her. The wife of a ‘new Russian’, who used to wake up no earlier than 1 p.m. and from whom you could not expect a cup of coffee, suddenly turned into the Decembrist wife, and began visiting her Alik every day, going shopping and buying food, passing him letters.11 Similarly, in a television programme, the notorious gangster Alexander Sever, described his wife, who had had to endure fifteen years of their marriage with him in jail, as a ‘godsend’.12 Invoking the dekabristka trope, Sever described how Galina followed him ‘through Russia’s whole prison geography’. Commenting on the interview, one woman posted her appreciation of how being a bandit’s wife can bring emotional dividends: I also saw the Sever interview. It was an interesting programme, so meaningful [. . .] especially for our forum [. . .] she was a naive 21-year-old student who chose to tie herself to a prisoner and swindler. But then even after so many years they love each other like a newly wedded couple.13 Visitors to prisoner-dating websites ask how to become a bandit’s wife, whether you are ‘born into it’ or learn to be a bandit’s wife ‘in combat’.14 Historical stereotypes surface in the talk of the women we interviewed. Aware of the negative stereotypes, these women were intent on drawing a clear line between

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themselves and women who fall prey to ‘bandit romantics’ (the romanatisation of an entanglement with a professional criminal). Where the population of prisoners’ wives is concerned, these are often zaochnitsy, women who use internet prisonerdating sites to find a professional criminal partner and may end up marrying him. Here, for example, is one new bandit’s wife, Rita, whom we meet in the next chapter, talking about why she likes the criminals’ lexicon: The zone lexicon differs [. . .] you immediately understand where the man is from and who he was on the inside. It stays with them [. . .] Of course, you can’t understand it all, but you can recognise it. They have such words that really have a nice sound. I personally really like it, even though, as a woman, I have never been in such places. Such infatuation with elements of criminal sub-culture is greeted with scepticism by long-term wives. Antonina, who says her husband doesn’t swear, gives her analysis of women who adopt the prison argot: There are women with little education and who let the urki complete their education for them.15 They learn a whole new lexicon. And their swearing is ‘cooler’ than the men’s in the zone. They have such a turn of phrase. It’s partly bravado and partly because they want to ‘belong’. They will take it as far as claiming, ‘We have this way of life.’ Antonina has no time for aspiring bandits’ wives. The ‘genuine’ wife of a bandit, we learn from her, is someone who had a relationship with the prisoner long before he was incarcerated, who understands the criminal world and has no illusions about the risks of being entangled in it. In what follows, we direct our attention to these women. The men they are involved with typically have long sentences, earned either because they committed a particularly serious offence, are involved in organised crime or are recidivists. In the case of two of the women we interviewed their husbands are now dead (Larisa’s husband died of TB twelve years into a fourteen-year sentence and Klara’s was murdered in a ‘business-related’ dispute after his release). The husbands and partners of the four other bandits’ wives (Antonina, Gulya, Katya and Sveta) were still serving sentences from six to fourteen years. Among the women there are those who herald from the criminal milieu or who admit to having been involved in crime themselves. Larisa tells us that she barely knew her father having seen him only twice in her life when she was taken on a visit to prison. She has served a sentence herself for drug dealing. Katya, who is from a respectable military family, confesses to having been involved in selling black market cigarettes in her early twenties when she and her husband-to-be frequented the same health club. She managed to avoid detection. Antonina’s

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twin brother is serving a sentence for murder in the same colony as her husband, but Antonina denies ever having been involved in crime herself, as do the remainder of the bandit’s wife interviewees. What they all have in common is that their lives as prisoners’ wives are affected by their husbands’ membership of the sub-culture in their correctional colonies and their status within that community. It is necessary, therefore, to begin with a brief discussion of Russia’s prison criminal sub-cultures.

The Prison Sub-Cultural Inheritance The Thieves-in-Law, the starting point for any discussion of prison sub-cultures in Russia, was a highly structured criminal society that was a dominant feature of the gulag. Its roots lay in pre-Revolution Russia in the ‘lynch laws’ (samosud) of the peasant community and slums that developed in Russian cities as a consequence of rapid urban-in migration in the late nineteenth century. In the barracks and drinking dens of the slums a ‘criminal ecosystem’ was born that was immortalised in the descriptions of underworld culture in works of Dostoevsky, Krestovskii, Kuprin and Gor’kii.16 This underworld culture of the ‘thieves’ world’ had its own values system, argot and visual language of tattoos. In the prisons and camps through which the criminal members circulated the cults of the daring thief and career criminals and of unquestioning loyalty to thieves’ honour were born. By the end of the nineteenth century, membership of the prison commune (tyuremnaya obshchina) took precedence over the family at home in the lives of prisoners.17 These elements of the thieves’ culture became entrenched and expanded after the 1917 Revolution. From the 1930s, the principal locus of thieves’ culture was the prison and labour camp. ‘Crowned thieves’, the leaders of the criminal elements in the camps, were widely respected for their experience and reputation and they became the guardians of an increasingly ritualised, hierarchically-ordered subculture that had strict requirements for entry and exit and rewards for loyalty. The rules by which members of the sub-culture had to live, the ‘understanding’ or ponyatiya, had to be obeyed on pain of trial in the thieves’ court and punishment, including death.18 Weighed against the prohibitions and obligations, thief-status secured an improved standard of living compared with other prisoners and a ‘social safety net’ in the form of the communal fund (the obshchak). The thieves were predatory on the general mass of prisoners, the politicals and those sent to the gulag for ‘ordinary’ crimes. The ever-increasing harshness of the Stalin repression that spilled prisoners out into isolated labour camps in the peripheries of the country was important to the reproduction of the thieves’ hold in the camps.19 The ‘antiworld’ (antimir) of Russia’s criminal sub-culture that took shape in the Stalinist camps has been carried forward to the present time. Nevertheless,

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this world has moved on from its original form, as traditions passed down from earlier generations have been challenged. Recent challenges have been associated with the transformations accompanying the USSR’s dissolution, which have relocated the locus of criminal activity from the prison back into society.20 In what Mark Galeotti observes is one of the ‘tragic and unexpected’ by-products of Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s, the nascent and rather weak organised crime groups that had emerged in the late Soviet Union were able to capitalise on the anarchy and marketisation of the 1990s and grow in power to form today’s ‘mafia’.21 In this way the later decades of the twentieth century saw the criminal sub-cultures that had taken hold of Soviet places of confinement spreading into society at large, inserting into society at large the bespredel, or lawlessness and mayhem, of the prison camp.22 This development has been mirrored by the proliferation of criminal groupings within penal institutions each bringing their own interpretation to the thieves’ code. Today, it is normal for members of the penal sub-culture to have a family-life, to cooperate in various ways with the prison authorities and to use the obshchak to enhance the standard of living of the leading prisoners rather than being reserved for ‘thieves in need’. Whereas in the past, the highest status thief’s life was focused exclusively on the prison, today he is likely to be running a business on the outside and to own cars and fine houses and to be sending his children to prestigious private schools in the UK.23 Despite these changes, certain of the practices of the traditional prison subcultures continue to structure the everyday life of the society of captives. The existence of hierarchically-ordered sub-cultures is universal in Russian correctional colonies, their members making up about 10 per cent of the prison population. They are distinguished from other social groupings among the prisoners by the privileges they are able to command and the power they have to shape the lives of non-members. The upper echelons of the hierarchy are occupied the ‘authority-figures’ or avtoritety.24 These can be hardened repeat offenders whose power in based on their position in the criminal world (Alexander Sever whom we mentioned above is an example of such a high status or ‘crowned’, leader). These crowned leaders exercise authority over a whole complex of regional penitentiaries. Men who held a leadership position during a previous sentence will automatically gain leadership status again on subsequent sentences and newcomers can earn high status on the basis of their physical strength, length of sentence or their crime. These men would normally head up the sub-culture of an individual colony or detachment within. Lower status avtoritety are prisoners who might be in charge of a sub-section of a barracks or carry out a particular function for higher status leaders. They are important cogs in a prison’s social hierarchy wielding considerable power over rank-and-file prisoners, but they do not have the right to contradict the leader or displace him.25 Below the avtoritety are the foot-soldiers, or shesterki, of the criminal

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sub-culture who carry out the decisions of their superiors, but are not decisionmakers themselves. The members of the criminal sub-culture constitute a closed caste that is parasitic on other prisoners. Their principal aim is, and always has been, to achieve for themselves better living conditions than other prisoners.26 To achieve this, they use illegal and anti-social methods, including violence (beatings, rape and murder, extortion, ostracism). Where the sub-culture rules it is not possible for a rank-and-file prisoner just to keep his head down and serve out his sentence; he has to obey the hierarchy’s instructions. Shortly after his release, one ex-prisoner described to us life in his detachment thus: ‘It is constant fear that is habitual, so eventually you stop thinking about it. It is a very dangerous place it is like walking on thin ice.’27 Similarly, Valerii Anisimkov who has made a detailed study of today’s prison sub-cultures reminds us that the leaders are: [T]the most dangerous, repeat law breakers, who with their illegal/criminal and amoral activities attempt to bring under their control the main mass of prisoners in order to secure for themselves privilege conditions of life during their period in prison. They constitute a self-contained group who are distinguished from leaders on the outside by not only wanting to survive incarceration but to dominate the prison and colony.28 It is important to keep these comments in mind when reading the words of our respondents who have to respond to the accusation their husbands strike terror into the lives of other prisoners.

Organised Sportive-ness The women we interviewed were all married to one of the authority-figures in their correctional colony. None was of the status of Alexander Sever, so they are not among Russia’s super-rich, but they all enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle compared with the majority of other prisoners’ wives. Katya’s husband occupies the highest position; he is the leading authority-figure in his detachment, a position he acquired as of right, since he is serving a third prison sentence. Katya has been able to move her family, including children and pensioner parents, to the provincial town near where her husband is incarcerated, which indicates access to substantial resources. Sveta’s partner, by contrast, occupies the position of watcher or smotryashchii, assistant to his barrack’s leader. He is serving his first custodial sentence and will have been given that position by demonstrating his reliability and worth to other members of the sub-culture. Sveta lives in a modest one-room flat in a small town, which puts her in an advantageous position compared with the young wives of most other prisoners. Her partner’s status is

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such that the couple would qualify for assistance from the obshchak were they to experience financial difficulties. All six interviewees acknowledged that their partners had difficult characters (‘he fights with everyone’, ‘he tends to be insolent’, ‘he doesn’t get on with authority’) but, in a classic neutralisation device, they are at pains to represent this character flaw as separate from the person. The partner’s physical strength and commanding stature was a matter for comment and pride. Klara, Antonina and Katya’s partners were originally sportsmen and body-builders which, it turns out, is typical for the new generation of ‘thieves’. Sports and health clubs proliferated in the 1990s in Russia, often becoming the offices and meeting places for mafia bosses. They were fertile ground for recruitment into the criminal underworld of well-muscled competitively-inclined and unemployed young men. At the time of the USSR’s collapse, there were tens of thousands of ‘masters of sport’ in the army who found their Olympian ambitions abruptly ended. Becoming foot soldiers for organised criminal gangs provided an outlet for their competitiveness and physical prowess. So widespread was the postSoviet phenomenon of professional sportsmen turned to a life of crime it was dubbed ‘organised sportive-ness’ (organizovannaya sportivnost’) by a prominent ‘organised crime’ boss.29 The most talented of the sportsmen rose quickly up the ranks of the criminal underworld. Katya’s husband was a master of sport and she insists that in any other decade than the ‘evil 1990s’, her husband would have joined the army and pursued a career as a sportsman ‘by legitimate means’. These men were at the top of their game in boxing, judo and combat sports and, according to Katya, ‘didn’t know who they were anymore.’ They were easily mobilised into the criminal world which offered an outlet for their talent. This is how she explains it: You mustn’t forget that sportsmen are strong and are not going to go with the flow. They are used to being high achievers and to taking what they need from their sport and so it is likely that they will transfer this to the rest of their life [. . .] It’s a question of the psychological moment. One person will stay silent, but the achievers will want to do something more. This is most likely what it was all about. It’s true that not all of them gave enough thought to which path to take. But when there aren’t any other paths, then they might have to go down the one leading to crime.

Sveta’s Story When we interviewed Sveta she was 22 years old and the common law partner of Alesha who was four-and-a-half years into a fourteen-year sentence for gangrelated murder. They have a baby daughter, conceived during a visit. The couple met as teenagers in the small district centre where they both lived. Soon after

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their meeting, Alesha was conscripted into the army and sent to serve on the Western borderlands, an example, as Sveta comments, of Russia’s liking for sending people to ‘far away places’. When Alesha was demobilised their relationship took a romantic turn. They had been living together for a year when Sveta’s life was changed dramatically by Alesha’s arrest. Sveta comes from a typical Soviet-era working-class family. Her parents were among the many skilled workers who settled in the north in the late Soviet period, attracted by higher wages. After the USSR’s collapse, with Sveta still a babe-in-arms, the couple moved to the Volga region, this time as part of the mass exodus out of the northern settlements when subsidies that had previously sustained their economies dried up and unemployment levels soared. Sveta spent all her youth in this small provincial town, which she has never left. Sveta lives alone with her daughter in an apartment, but her mother lives nearby. At the weekends Sveta hands over the child to her mother in order to have some time for herself and to visit her new friends, also prisoners’ wives, in the regional capital. Sveta has never worked and she turned down a place in theatre school to live with Alesha. She has no regrets about these decisions as she enjoyed the lifestyle Alesha gave her: [Our life] here was already a whirlwind and spinning; that is, for that year he taught me what it’s like to have a full fridge at home and I was like his doll, he dressed me up and bought me nice shoes. On the eve of Alesha’s arrest, the couple were planning to marry and Sveta was looking forward to a month-long honeymoon in Siberia. But neither was to happen. On returning from a visit to her ailing grandmother in the country, Sveta found the door to her apartment open, food and a vodka bottle on the table and Alesha’s slippers gone, but no one there. She learned from her mother-in-law that Alesha had been arrested, taken off to the police lock-up in the neighbouring oblast’ in his slippers, T-shirt and shorts. Sveta tells us that Alesha’s arrest came as a profound shock. That day and its immediate aftermath figures prominently in Sveta’s story and the couple’s experiences then frame her attitude to the criminal justice system. In this respect Sveta’s story-telling is similar to that of all the other prisoners’ relatives we interviewed. Sveta does not explain how Alesha rose to become watcher in his barrack. She describes him as strong in character, beliefs and physique, just the attributes that are necessary to carve out a career in the criminal sub-culture of a correctional colony. As a general rule, the job of smotryashchii is multi-faceted. He is responsible for organising the foot-soldiers, collecting money from other prisoners, creating disturbances if directed to do so and for overseeing compliance with criminal leaders’ directives. There are also specialised jobs allocated to smotryashchie: they might be responsible for looking after the

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obshchak, managing access to and support for the higher authority figures in the colony and supervising card games. Sveta tells us that Alesha is responsible for eighty prisoners and that his position keeps him extremely busy, although she refrains from giving details. She confirms that because of his status, Alesha refuses to work in the prison industries and is constantly in trouble with the administration. He is frequently confined to the punishment cell and, as a ‘repeat violator’ of the regime, he has been put on ‘strict conditions’ (strogie usloviya) of confinement, which deprives him of normal privileges to which rule-abiding prisoners in strict regime colonies are entitled. The consequence for Sveta is that she cannot plan for Alesha’s early release or expect to be allowed the normal complement of visits a year. When she was interviewed she knew she had nineand-a-half years yet to wait before his release. In the nearly five years that Alesha had been in prison Sveta has made few visits. The couple were not given permission to contact one another when Alesha was on remand. They first spoke by telephone eight months after he was sentenced, when he had already arrived at his colony and it was a further year before the couple was allowed a residential visit. Sveta, facing being alone for a long time, adopted a pragmatic approach to the future of their relationship: We discussed it together and it seemed that that was it. I didn’t say to him that I swear or promise to wait for you. ‘Well’ I said, ‘let nature take its course. Let’s give it a go. Come on, let’s try. I know that it is going to be a long hard year or year-and-a-half, and if I can’t manage it, then that’s how it’s meant to be.’ Sveta says that the past four years have, indeed, been hard. She has adapted to Alesha’s enforced absence by adopting what would be recognised by psychologists as an avoidance coping strategy: I got used to everything very quickly. Especially where sending parcels and newspapers is concerned, I just don’t do it so that doesn’t stress me out. And I don’t go on short visits. I did go on a couple but then I put a stop to that. There are those moments when it’s just better not to think about it. It’s so far away, so far. So, I don’t let myself remember that he’s in prison. Rather, I think of him as a sailor, out to sea. It’s just that I don’t see him, but he’s here alongside me in spirit. [B]ut there are those moments when I just need to see him, to embrace him, lean on him and hold him to me, those moments when my empty hands drop to my sides. And I think, ‘enough already, I can’t take any more.’ In refusing to become involved in preparing and dispatching the monthly parcel that is the lot of other wives, Sveta is not compromising Alesha’s ability to

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survive imprisonment. She knows that his status in the colony allows him to access the material goods and food products he needs. Typically for a bandit’s wife, the flow of resources is in the opposite direction. Sveta is reluctant to give details but she explains that she receives frequent visits from ‘friends’ sent by Alesha who bring money and material goods: ‘Yes, they bring us food, fruit and sweetmeats. However much money I need at any time, so I’m OK.’ Alesha meets the monthly rent payments on the flat she and her daughter now occupy but his material support is not just for essentials. On New Year’s Eve, the friends arrived bearing gifts, shoes and a ‘beautiful dress’. Sveta smiles as she describes the most recent present, a fur coat that ‘wasn’t anything special, but it wasn’t a cheap one.’ The friends also take care of the logistics involved in the few occasions when she has visited Alesha. All she has to do is pack her own clothes, toiletries and clean linen and wait for a car to come to drive her the four-hour journey to the colony. In the car she will always find ready prepared parcels containing the food and other items the couple will need for a residential visit. But Sveta’s exceptional situation ceases as soon as she reaches the colony gate, where, like other wives, she has to ‘stand in the street’ waiting to be admitted. She recounts how on the occasions she visited, the colony had dragged its feet, only granting permission for a visit ‘at the eleventh hour’. She attributes this to the fact that the couple is not married and to the colony administration punishing her for Alesha’s position in the criminal sub-culture. When she was interviewed in 2010, Sveta was considering how to respond to Alesha’s campaign for them to have a colony wedding. She was unable to make up her mind. During the course of the interview, she kept returning to the marriage question, each time giving a different explanation for her hesitation: weddings in prison were miserable occasions all over in ten minutes; marriage would give people an excuse to discriminate against their daughter; there is still a lot of Alesha’s sentence left and the future is uncertain and so on. She had been ambivalent about her daughter’s conception and had she realised in time that she was pregnant, she says she would have had an abortion: I had to tell him and he said ‘If that is God’s wish, then we will give birth.’ Yes, he said we’d manage. I thought about it and thought some more. Part of me was happy because I had always wanted a child from the man I love, but not this way. My daughter’s the spitting image of him, his nose, his eyes, even his character. Alesha has never seen his child, knowing her only from photographs. Sveta does not intend to bring her to see her father, as she is convinced that it would be dangerous for the child’s health. Nor does she intend to give into Alesha’s suggestion that they have a second child. She is not enjoying life as a single mother and fears that if she were to have a second child she would be even more

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confined to home than she is already. She longs for Friday nights when she can escape her isolation: Mum lives nearby and she can see when I am about to snap or when I am tired and start to have dark thoughts, surrounded by these four walls of my flat. There are so many years ahead. That’s why I long for Fridays. In addition to the constraints of motherhood keeping her at home, Sveta’s mobility is also subject to the watchful eye of Alesha, whose network of contacts outside prison allow him to monitor her behaviour. Sveta insists that compared with some other husbands, Alesha is not ‘the controlling type’. She gives as evidence his attitude to her going out: ‘He immediately said to me, “If you’re having a tea party or doing something else like that, you don’t need to ask my permission.” ’ Sveta says that he always knows, ‘where I am and who I’m with’ but insists that she does not experience this as being controlled. But she admits that such pressures are putting their relationship at risk: I can phone him but only occasionally. It’s become hellishly difficult, even like now when it’s the New Year celebrations. Yesterday evening we managed a call and he said ‘We’re becoming so distant from one another and everything.’ I replied, ‘Don’t be silly. I understand that you’ve become very involved in there, especially as the smotryashchii in the barracks.’ It means he has to think about 80 men. He just doesn’t have a spare moment. When he does have time, I know he thinks about me. But when [in the punishment cell] there are men and four walls with a little window high up, I know against his will other thoughts can rush into his head. Dark bad thoughts, not good at all. . . . Alesha’s dark thoughts, Sveta tells us, are about whether he can trust her. She sees her role as being to reassure him of her faithfulness, but admits to her own despair: I understand how stressful it is for him. I try not to show my feelings, not to cry. But there have been a couple of times when it has got to me and I have found it difficult to leave [after a visit]. Our situation is that when we part we never know when we will see each other again. I try not to show it. As soon as I am through those gates at the end of a visit, I sit down and straightaway cry. It’s all so difficult psychologically. Psychologically it bears down on you. As she looked to the future when we interviewed her, Sveta’s greatest fear was that Alesha would be moved to another colony, as part of a reform to break up

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prison gangs and separate serious offenders and recidivist from other prisoners. As an authority-figure in the prison sub-culture, Alesha is vulnerable to transferral. This would put him at physical risk as he attempts to be accepted into a new prisoner community. As for herself, Sveta is worried that a move would end the new friendships she has made with the other women with husbands in Alesha’s colony. But true to her self-proclaimed ‘get on with it’ approach to life she says, ‘I’m not going to complain about anything that happens, even if it causes all sorts of difficulties. What will be, will be. But there’s no point regretting. I have understood this from the moment I heard his sentence.’30

The Bandits’ Reach In the American film Blue Jasmin, Kate Blanchett’s character loses access to the extravagant lifestyle she used to lead before her husband’s arrest and finds this difficult to come to terms with. This is not the fate of the wives and partners of Russia’s criminal community whose lifestyles are supported by their partners in jail. So long, that is, that the prisoner is accepted into the prison sub-culture. The reach of members of prison sub-cultures beyond the colony fence is not unique to Russia but compared with other jurisdictions, it is probably more systematic and widespread. It has come about because of the porosity of Russian penal institutions and widespread corruption among prison officers. Our interviewees were all reluctant to disclose the channels through which they receive support, although, like Sveta, they all referred to ‘friends.’ Sometimes these friends just bring money: ‘Yes, he has friends. But still I get him some things, like medicines mainly. They bring me the money and I buy what he needs.’ Other times they are sent to fulfil the husband’s household responsibilities. Here is Klara: Say we need a repair, he’ll ask what needs to be done and, if he can arrange it then somebody will come to help; one of his friends. So it’s these domestic problems, ‘Don’t you do anything yourself. I’ll give it some thought and give you a ring.’ There are lots of things he phones me about. He’ll say ‘I’ve fixed it all, you just need to give them a call and they’ll come along.’ And I say, ‘What do I need to tell them?’ and he says ‘You don’t need to tell them anything, I’ve already explained it all and I’ve fixed it for you.’ All I have to do is be there. That’s the sort of thing that happens. Compared with the families of the bosses of organised crime, East and West, the lifestyle of the women we interviewed is modest. But what passes for an extravagant standard of living is, of course, subjective and time and place specific. In the first decade after the collapse of communism in the 1990s, almost any Western import in the cultural, social and material sphere in Russia

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counted as ‘fast living’ and this perception continues among some to the present time. The life Sveta describes (her own apartment, fashionable clothes, not having to work and membership of a health and fitness club) in the context of the experience of many Russian women counts as very comfortable. Katya’s words contain the suggestion that the material advantages derived from a husband’s status in prison provides a strong motivation for keeping the relationship alive. I have never worked. Nowhere. Always it was my husband who worked. This is his third time in prison which he probably deserves as he belongs to that 2 per cent of prisoners who really do lead a criminal life. Yes that’s how it is. There are quite a few of us, so-called bandits’ wives. Rarely do these marriages break down, because we like to live this life, with few of us having to work. But there are costs associated with the bandits’ reach across the colony fences already hinted at in Sveta’s acceptance of Alesha’s right to know where she is at any time. She admits that postings on her web forum reveal that the problem of control is serious for some bandits’ wives who complain that their husbands would like them to ‘buy a burka’ and to be the ones who decide exactly when they go out. The ubiquitous ‘friends’ and the mobile phones to which the members of sub-cultures have access allow them to keep a check of their partners’ whereabouts at any time of day or night. The role of the telephone in controlling women from within prison was observed by Laura Fishman in her study of prisoners’ wives in Vermont, USA.31 Women in Vermont, she found, had to reorientate their activities around satisfying their husband’s desires and needs and suffered from increased social isolation. Helen Codd makes the same observation about telephones in UK prisons, where their use has allowed prisoners to subject their partners to ‘remote surveillance’.32 Whilst none of the bandits’ wives we interviewed admitted to it being a problem in their case, the exceptional reach that some prisoners have makes all women vulnerable to such remote surveillance and to the reproduction of threatening and abusive relationships.

The Sacrifices of a Bandit’s Wife A relative newcomer to the role of bandit’s wife, Sveta learned quickly that there are costs associated with her husband’s status in prison sub-culture. In return for by-passing many of the material difficulties of an ‘ordinary’ prisoner’s wife, she has to make sacrifices that other women do not necessarily suffer. Apart from knowing that a visit might be cancelled at the last minute and that there is no hope of Alesha getting parole, she has the constant anxiety about the additional harms her husband can suffer as a result of his status

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(being confined to punishment cells, involvement in internecine conflicts with other criminal groupings and inter-colony transfers). Then, among her peers on the outside, she may have to run the gauntlet of hostile societal attitudes towards the perpetrators of organised crime and criticisms from other relatives who hold her husband responsible for their own husbands’ misery. A bandit’s wife has to bear these costs, moreover, in the knowledge that the person for whom she has put her life on hold has consciously chosen a path that elevates the ‘prison family’ over his family at home. More, therefore, than other prisoners’ wives, the wives of members of prison sub-cultures face huge challenges in telling their story in a way that does not reflect badly on themselves. All our interviewees found ways of countering the view that they were ‘in it for the money’, while acknowledging its dubious provenance. Sveta’s was the common approach: So, yes, he helps us a lot. We are clothed and fed and he pays for the roof over our heads. The girls on the internet have discussed this: it’s all, ‘he doesn’t work’, ‘the money’s dirty’, ‘it’s better not to take it’! But I just say to them all that this doesn’t bother me. The money goes to the family. I don’t use it to buy drugs or to gamble. A more deeply troublesome aspect of the bandit’s wife’s identity construction is the implication that her husband’s choices in prison cast doubt upon how deeply valued is the marital relationship to him. This is because membership of the sub-culture sacrifices the possibility of an early return home. Bandits’ wives we interviewed had all accepted as a fact of life that their husbands would not qualify for parole. Here are Klara and Gulya respectively rationalising their acceptance of this in different ways: Interviewer: So he takes part in riots? Gulya: Yes. He is perpetually in the lock up. He has his principles. That is, you understand, it’s all about his principles and I accept this. Even though it means that it isn’t appropriate for him to apply for early release. ‘Not appropriate’, that’s how he explained it to me once. He said ‘it’s just not for me.’ If it’s not for him, then that’s the end of it. We never discussed parole [. . .] If he had wanted to try for parole he would have needed someone above him, one of the thief leaders, to give permission. If he was needed in the criminal world outside, it would have been possible but to try to leave wasn’t on [. . .] Interviewer: I understand. It was a type of service. Klara:

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Just so. They say that he who lives ‘according to the code’ of the criminal world cannot leave by parole because if you want parole you have to earn it. And how do you do that? By cooperating with the administration; that is, you have to become a stoolpigeon. If you see something going on you have to report it to the administration. Or you have to join some special [self-organisation] section and go and work for three kopecks. Those prisoners aren’t in a lunatic asylum that they’d work for three kopeks. You wouldn’t be let out of the asylum if you were prepared to work for three kopecks.

Living According to the Code In Chapter 2 we discussed the discursive strategies typically used to justify a person’s attachment to a socially deviant partner. Bandits’ wives have to justify their attachment to some of Russia’s worst criminal offenders. The interviews with women attached to more minor players in Russia’s criminal culture, indicate that one way to do this is by internalising the code by which their husbands live. This allows the wife simultaneously to neutralise their husband’s offending (by showing him to be better than society’s judgement of him) and to explain their own support of him, by reference to their own belief in the superiority of the code by which he lives. A striking feature of the bandits’ wives’ talk is their use of the plural when they describe their partners’ experiences; ‘we are locked up. . . .’, we managed to survive this.., ‘they moved us to a new colony. . .’, ‘in our prison. . .’ and so on. Rather than seeking to distance themselves from the world their husbands inhabit, they lay claim to be part of it. The interviewees were keen to explain to us the rules of prisoner sub-culture by which their husbands and, by extension, they live (this took up a particularly large part of Katya’s interview). They present living ‘according to the understanding’ as being honourable and as guaranteeing the stability of the social order in penal institutions and they elevate these qualities above its ability to satisfy their own and their husbands’ material wants. The society of captives, we learned, was protected from the dangers of chaos (or bespredel) and the brutality of the ‘regime’ by the existence of the thieves’ sub-culture. Here is Gulya on the subject: [T]hey have their groupings there [in prison], it is an organisation. In theory, it means there’s more order there than here. You shouldn’t criticise the thieves rules; they are vital to keep things orderly. They complement the other things that go on there. You can hear two men in the street and one calls the other a ‘goat’, then they laugh [. . .] you realise that they are living according to the understanding and they have this

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She goes on to insist that in addition to the public good aspect of the thieves’ law, following it enriches the individual: Here’s a thing [. . .] he chose it himself, it wasn’t my choice. Having decided to live according to the [thieves] law, he now can look the other prisoners in the eye and so it’s worth something from that point of view. But what I say is that it is also better spiritually, for the soul, for his relationships with people, his emotions and all those sorts of things. Klara inverts the more normal view that prisons are universities-of-crime, to argue that wider societal benefits spill out from the prison sub-cultures: As a matter of fact I don’t idealise this criminal world and criminals, not at all. Simply, I can honestly say that it is good for society [. . .] that is, many people in there have a [better] understanding of life. People outside can just go through life without understanding. But for society and for the family, such people [the vory ] I can say are not dangerous. On the contrary, they understand more. Because of the laws of the criminal world, they see the family, children and all the others as sacred. In her reference to the sacredness of family life, Klara is contradicting one of the original tenets of the thieves’ code. Her argument is also contradicted by her husband’s elevation of the prison family above family life with her. But the message she is seeking to convey contains a deeper, and more problematic, moral justification for the thieves order. It is that the rigid social ordering that the illicit hierarchies impose upon the whole prison body, delivers a more just punishment to transgressors against the broader social order than does the criminal-justice system. She is referring to the treatment meted out in the barracks to homosexuals, paedophiles, the homeless, wife beaters, the mentally-retarded and HIV-sufferers (invariably these categories are lumped together). The treatment of these prisoners includes both their symbolic and physical marginalisation. Katya explains that there is a prohibition on other prisoners touching anything handled by a ‘marginal’, a prohibition that is also practised by prison officers and guards. Her tacit approval of this treatment, and by extension the thieves’ enforcement of it, surfaces in some of her observations: And of course they [the marginals] have no choice, they are chased away by the other prisoners, they work more than anyone else and their conditions

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are worse than any other prisoners. But on the other hand, they have committed dreadful crimes. It seems that there is greater justice among the prisoners than in the courts. This approval of an order that inflicts additional harms on people who transgress social norms would probably garner approval from a majority of the population of the Russian Federation. Trickier to explain away, at least to others who have had experience of the Russian prison system, are the privileges that bandits’ wives claim for their partners that undermine the human rights of the rank-and-file prisoners. Below we see Katya, who runs a support group actively campaigning for prisoner rights, struggling with this problem. The issue relates to a complaint made by some prisoners in her husband’s colony against the appropriation by avtoritety, among them her husband, of places in the colony hospital so they can sit out their sentences in relative comfort. The occupation of hospital wings by the elite of the criminal sub-culture in a common phenomenon in correctional colonies where the power relation between administration and criminals is in the latter’s favour. Rather than censure this practice which deprives the genuinely ill of a hospital place, Katya shifts the blame onto the inhumane conditions of Russian correctional colonies: What is the zone? It’s a barracks of 120 people. And who are these people? Fifty per cent of them are from the railway stations [. . .] the homeless in other words. Then there are the mentally-retarded, 30 per cent who can only understand about eating and shitting. They do it by instinct. Fools. Complete fools. And you have to spend years in the same section as these people. It’s just not realistic. We have 80 to 120 people living in the barracks or sections. How can you sleep when there are 120 of you? [. . .] In the hospital, if you can get in there, there are just four or five people [per room]. But then they chased us out of the hospital and now my loved one lives in a ten-person dormitory in the adjacent cooperative. But then they expelled us from there too, because the prisoners started posting complaints on the internet: In our colony the elite (blatnye) are the only people who live in the hospital. By challenging the privileges of the sub-culture, Katya maintains, the other prisoners are disrupting the social order of the colony. Complaints bring in the procurator or human rights monitors (many of them ex-prison bosses, in her view, and on the administration’s side). The effect of inviting in human rights monitors she maintains is the enforcement of the regime, which is in nobody’s interests. But in making this point she reveals her underlying belief in the thieves’ superiority over the mass of prisoners. The bandits’ wives hold views that are challenged by other prisoners’ wives. Ol’ga Romanova, wife of a political prisoner whom we meet in the final chapter

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comments on how the bandits’ wives used to sit apart from other prisoners’ wives in the waiting room of Butyrka prison, obvious by their clothes and expensive bags. But for Katya and Klara criticism of the thieves betrays a lack of understanding on the part of rank-and-file prisoners of what is in their best interests. Their valorisation of the ‘thieves law’ does involve them in negotiating some tricky ethical territory and to take up positions that are difficult to defend, but how far they are conscious of this remains doubtful. However, reflecting on her late husband’s life in prison and having exhausted all her justifications for the decisions he took, Klara concludes that ignorance is sometimes the best strategy for the bandit’s wife: As I said we were pretty well-off. I had my own life, although he was interested in it. And I was interested in his life. But I didn’t know much about it, especially about that hierarchy and what happened there [in prison]. He said that I didn’t need to know. And maybe he was right that it’s sometimes better not to know.

The Relationship with the Administration We have seen that partners of prisoners in any jurisdiction find that they share their partners’ punishment; hence, their identification in the Western literature as quasi-prisoners or ‘prisoners-once-removed’. Visits are a moment when this quasi-prisoner status is most openly experienced, when women become directly subject to prison regime rules. Bandits’ wives can find that their experiences are shaped by the balance of power between the administration and the illicit prisoner hierarchies of which their husbands are members. The relationship can play out in different ways; a bandit’s wife can find herself on the receiving end of vengeful treatment or, alternatively, shielded by the influence her husband wields. The two extracts from women’s talk below illustrate the two ‘extremes’. The first is Katya’s description of an early non-contact visit to her husband: So they tried to put me in my place. They gave me an intercom that wasn’t working. Then, when I complained they moved me the seat right next to the guard. This was all done intentionally. After all, my husband wasn’t an ordinary prisoner at all. They moved us closer to them so that they could monitor us. When I held up a photograph, they told me at least ten times not to interfere with the glass petition. But I continued to hold up the picture. Generally, it was really awful that first time. They took Artur away because I kept putting up photos on the glass. [. . .] but actually what had I done? I didn’t punch the glass. But they can do what they like. They just want to chase you away. That’s the power they have. It’s absurd. They order you about and are so demeaning in their treatment of you.

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While Klara concurs that bandits’ wives can be treated with contempt by the officers behaving towards them ‘as if it’s you who has committed the crime’ but their economic power can also cast them in a powerful position. Once her husband became an authority-figure in the sub-culture, she says she was treated ‘like a normal human being’. By giving the relevant officer a bribe she was allowed a long visit: Klara:

Yes, the second time we decided to pay for the visit, because it was unscheduled [i.e. he was not entitled to it]. Unscheduled visits cost 8,000 [roubles] Interviewer: That’s in addition to the normal cost of a visit? Klara: Above the normal cost? Yes, as simple as that. Interviewer: As simple as that? Klara: Yes, it’s just a bribe Interviewer: But does this have something to do with his status? Klara: But, of course. That goes without saying. Not everyone can get what they want, even for money. Bribes are not always destined for pockets of prison personnel. Governors of cash-strapped correctional colonies notoriously expect their better off incarcerees to help defray the cost of repairs and to resource new initiatives. Whilst any prisoner with access to appropriate resources might be susceptible to an approach from the prison authority (Khodorkovsky is understood to have paid for a dentist surgery in his remand prison), the members of prison sub-cultures are especially vulnerable to such requests in lieu of being locked up for their latest regime violation. Bandits’ wives understand that failure to reach a deal can impact upon how their partner is treated. The bribery is not always about money. Gulya describes how security personnel in her husband’s colony attempted to get her to pass to them information about the criminal activities of her husband and his associate, in return for granting a long visit. This was, she said, normal behaviour on their part but she refused to cooperate, even though she understood her refusal could have negative repercussions on her husband: Gulya:

You have to have dealings with them if you want to ask for a favour. But then, you know all about him and his way of life. They always will try it on. They’ll say: “Ok we’ll give you this or that” but in return I have to ask him something. As soon as I hear the words “We’re ready to. . .” I say, “goodbye, I’ll make do with a short visit.” To go behind his back, even for some trifle, I won’t do that. Interviewer: So they want something in return.

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Yes. But to do that, even if, to put it crudely, it would give me three hours of pleasure [. . .] I can’t do it, betray him, betray his principles.

In the power play with prison administrations, the principal advantage bandits’ wives have compared with other prisoners’ wives has less to do with being able to use bribes to achieve some extra privilege, than in their being able to deploy extra resources to hold the administrations to account. Bandits’ wives, in turns out, are the unlikely allies of human rights activists in campaigning for Russia to abide by the rules of its own correction code. It is true that, as we saw with Katya’s justification of her husband’s right to occupy a hospital bed, they are selective in their choice of which rights to defend, when they hire lawyers to argue a case, they can achieve significant results. Katya has founded an organisation for the families of the men held in her husband’s colony which provides free legal advice to prisoners and their relatives, arranges for volunteers to accompany newcomers to colonies to show them the ropes and a courier service for medicines and parcels, and it produces a monthly newsletter for the prisoners. Much of Katya’s narrative is devoted to the frequent occasions that she has made appointments with the colony boss to discuss problems that have been brought to her organisation’s attention. At the time of the interview she had taken up the campaign to give automatic access for residential visits to civil partners, writing personally to the Minister of Justice. One personal consequence of her activism is that she and her husband now have everything ‘under control’ in their relationship with the colony so that personnel, ‘don’t tough us up any more’. But Gulya disagrees with taking an aggressive approach to personnel. She advocates avoiding confrontation, remaining polite and avoiding dealings with bad or corrupt officers for the sake of her husband’s safety. Klara would agree. She observes that taking on the administration always carries the risk that your husband will be returned to you in a coffin with a note attached to say he’d died of TB.

A Bandit’s Wife for Life? We were told by many of our interview partners that the position a prisoner occupies in the social hierarchy in prison stays with him for life. The bandit’s wife identity can also be difficult to shake off. With the exception of one, the four women we interviewed whose husbands were still living were reticent to talk about their expectations about the future. Unlike other prisoners’ relatives, their talk was not punctuated by speculation about their husbands’ release or declarations of confidence that their men, once home, would lead a crime-free life. Katya’s mother, Larisa Petrovna whom we meet in a later chapter, talked of emigrating to Spain once her son-in-law was released and

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Katya confirmed this intention, though she didn’t say what the family was going to do there. Antonina said she expected her husband to sever his ties to criminal networks and to take a regular job. She is alone among the bandits’ wives we interviewed to criticise the sub-culture. She insists that the ten years he had spent in prison had brought home to her husband the need to turn his life around: He has already understood what sense there is in leading the elite (blatnye) life. No Sense. Such people, such intrigues, such rottenness. There is no sense in living that sort of life. This is even more so when he is already preparing himself for freedom. He knows very well that he will work; that is, that there is no way he will lead a life of crime. I’ve already told him that there will be nobody waiting for him if he does a second term. He knows very well and understands that psychologically he could not cope with that. Antonina is able to make this threat of abandoning her husband (whose own views of the future we cannot know) if he offends again because, unlike the other women we interviewed, she runs her own business and can easily support herself. Gulya whose husband was due to be released shortly after a thirteen-year sentence also lays down conditions for his post-prison behaviour, but she recognises that he will find it difficult to leave elements of the life in the colony behind him: I explained to him that I fully understand everything, that every community creates ties among people, friendships. That they can be like family-ties and that, as a rule, this makes them [. . .] I said to him that I can put up with hearing prison slang once every three months, but if the children are about it has to be confined to the kitchen, say if any of his friends come round. I understand that I can’t ban these friendships, which would be just stupid, after all it was the life he led. She goes on to say that she is confident that if situations arise that are difficult, they will discuss what to do together. In talking about the likelihood that her husband will bring home some of behaviours of the colony, Gulya neither derides nor romanticises the thieves’ life and code. She is simply stating the fact, as she understands it, that an extended period of confinement in the pressurised society of the correctional colony is bound to leave an indelible mark on her husband that she will be powerless to change.

CHAPTER 5 THE SOCIAL MEDIA WIFE

Last night in correctional colony number 2 in Kazan’ they showed a documentary film entitled Zaochnitsa. The subject of the film was the phenomenon of the so-called ‘correspondence wives’, women who date and get married to prisoners. The nick-name is connected to the fact that they get to know their future husbands exclusively through written correspondence or the phone. They first meet their future husband in person on a prison visit or the most desperate only on their wedding day. (Publicity for the film Zaochnitsa)1 Please help me understand all the nuances of the term ‘zaochnitsa’. I know that a zaochnitsa is a pen pal. But I would like to know all the meanings and nuances of the word. For example, from the viewpoint of someone convicted, does the name apply if he wasn’t in prison when he got to know her? Is it demeaning and degrading for a woman to be called this? I am interested specifically in the meaning of the word.2 Lyuba, Rita, Galya, Natal’ya and Anfisa are women who have a relationship with a man whom they met when he was already in prison. In Russia, such women are given the specific name of ‘zaochnitsy’ (singular, zaochnitsa). We have translated this name as ‘social media wives’, rather than ‘pen pals’ or ‘correspondence wives’ because in the twenty-first century these relationships are largely contracted and sustained online or by (typically illicit) mobile phone. In this chapter we discuss the response of women who belong to this category, and those who do not, to the implications in the extracts above that such women are driven by desperation and that they are demeaned by the appellation. And we speculate about why such women have become a common presence on Russia’s penal landscape.

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What’s in a Name? We begin with a brief etymological excursion because more than any of the other women relatives we consider in this book, the label attached to women who start relationships with men in jail is multifaceted, with multi-layered and contradictory meanings embedded in it. The zaochnitsa appellation can be a term of abuse and a source of pride. The starting point is the etymological dictionary of Vladimir Dal’ the nineteenth-century lexicographer and geographer.3 He records the use of the term and its derivatives in the nineteenth century as something that happens outside of what can be seen ‘with your own eyes’. Applied to love, a word play on the double meaning of za glaza was popularly used to signify a man loving a woman ‘for her eyes’ and ‘without seeing her’ (lit. ‘behind her eyes’). From the end of the century another meaning was added as Imperial Russia, and then the Soviet Union developed distant-learning when the zaochnik or zaochnitsa (male and female, respectively) was someone who gained their education by correspondence (zaochnoe obuchenie). The lesser value that attached to distance-learning compared with full-time courses, resonates today with the attitudes of ‘genuine’ prisoners’ wives toward their ‘by correspondence’ counterparts. Gulya, the bandit’s wife whom we met in the previous chapter, uses the comparison with distance-learning to critique women who court men in prison whom they do not know. Not all more modern usages of the term are negative, however. Vera Pavlova, contemporary Russian poet (1963 – ), uses the distance-learning course as a metaphor for romantic love between a man and a woman in her poem ‘Ne znayu, kto ya, esli ne znayu, ch’ya ya’ (‘I do not know who I am, if I do not know whose I am’)4 and the historian Marius Broekmeyer has noted that during World War II many ordinary soldiers on the front acquired zaochnitsy or pen pals, who sent them packages and sometimes were recipients of a ‘monetary attestation’ (part of his salary the soldier could opt to be paid to someone else).5 Women would write to soldiers not knowing who they were, typically using a standard template. In so doing they created a new genre of anecdotes satirising the ‘letter to the happy soldier’ ( pis’mo schastlivomu soldatu): Dear Happy Soldier, It is a milkmaid of the first category writing to you, Masha Vasil’eva. My village is nice. The weather’s also nice. The cows are also nice and milk well. The only problem is that it’s boring. Please write to me happy soldier.6 Historically, relationships made by correspondence have not necessarily been associated exclusively with prisoners. The application of the term to the singlewoman/prisoner relationship began in the twentieth century and had become firmly attached to it by the end of the Soviet period. In the post-Soviet era the

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association has continued, although latterly its exclusivity has been under threat by the use of internet-dating by the population at large. Visitors to internet chat rooms have discussed whether the term should be restricted to describing the method by which the initial contact with a prospective partner is made regardless of who or where he is, in which case anyone who meets a man on line is a zaochnitsa. But the popular linking of the term with prisoner dating will be difficult to dislodge entirely since its continuation is encouraged by popular cultural productions. Though the zaochnitsa label for women who have a relationship with a prisoner appeared relatively recently, the phenomenon of the ‘mail bride’ existed long before it acquired this name. In nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia women who wrote to prisoners included Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife. This is the account of the courtship given in a recent biography of the future Soviet leader: To use the modern term, Krupskaya was a zaochnitsa, a wife ‘on the outside’, to whom zeki [coll. for prisoners] write mournful letters. Lenin corresponded with her whilst jailed in St Petersburg. As is the accepted practice among convicts, he began to call her his fiance´e. Normally, the prisoner promises to marry the correspondent when he is released, but Krupskaya was herself arrested and sentenced to three-years’ exile. She asked to spend them in Shushenskoe, Minusinskii uezd with her betrothed [. . .] Apparently, they wanted to have some sort of fake marriage but got bound forever [. . .]7 If there were women who emulated Krupskaya in the years after the first Soviet leader’s death, they are likely to have been small in number since the years of the Stalin repression were not conducive to people seeking out convicts with whom to make a relationship. In the decades following Stalin’s death, conditions for the development of single woman/prisoner relationships were more propitious. The USSR emerged from war and repression with a deficit of young men so that if not ‘husbands of first choice’ prisoners constituted a, literally, captive pool of potential suitors (so long, that is, that they were not politicals with whom corresponding still carried dangers). In the course of a relatively short period of time, correctional labour colonies generated their own industry of letter-writing. Sergei Dovlatov’s novel The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story (1982) contains an ironic template from this time for a prisoner’s letter to an unknown woman: Dear Unknown Woman (or maybe – girl) Lyuda, It is a former stubborn housebreaker, but now qualified timber truck driver, Grigorii, who addresses you. I am holding the pencil in my left hand, as my right one is rotting from excessive hard labour[. . .]8

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Figure 5.1

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By the 1970s, the single woman/prisoner theme appeared for the first time in the cinema in Vasilii Shukshin’s 1974 film Kalina Krasnaya. The film contains an early cautionary tale for the woman who would become a zaochnitsa that anticipated today’s warnings in internet forums that these relationships rarely have a good outcome. In the film, the hero, Egor Prokudin, arrives at a village where Lyuba, the woman with whom he was corresponding whilst in prison, lives. The life the couple make together is brought to an untimely end when Egor’s past catches up with him and he is murdered by a former partner from the criminal world. Happy endings remain elusive in cultural productions that followed Kalina Krasnaya. A recent example is Glukhar’, a popular serial set

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in a police station launched on Russian television in 2008. The third season introduced the figure of Vera, a zaochnitsa, who was feeling threatened when an ex-prisoner with whom she had been corresponding came to live with her after thirty years in prison. Vera’s fears are only overcome when the prisoner who, in fact, wants to be returned to the ‘zone’, involves himself in a fracas in a cafe that results in the death of a waitress. The message of the drama is that prisoners have difficulty adapting to life on the outside. The same message is contained in the popular prison ‘anecdote’ about a long term wag who goes to live with his zaochnitsa: A recidivist comes to the end of his twenty-year sentence. Having made the acquaintance of a zaochnitsa, he decamps from prison and goes to live with her. He lives with her one month, then another [. . .] the old girl gets much joy from him: he works on her tractor, brings money home, doesn’t drink anything but chifir, does everything around the house. The only grief is that he doesn’t have sex with her. She says to him ‘Vanya, why don’t you f*** me?’ He replies: ‘What for? We eat grub from the same bowl!’9 The message of Elina Nasibullina’s documentary film in the epigraph also is that relationships between zaochnitsy and prisoners rarely end well: The women who journey en masse to the colonies, often marry a prisoner. But very often it turns out to be a sorry sight. The prisoners once freed, ditch their wives, rob them, and beat them up, if not worse.10

Lyuba’s Story Lyuba may have been familiar with the many warnings about women who get into relationships with men in prison but if she was, they did not deter her from following the zaochnitsa path. Lyuba is married to Daniel, a prisoner four years into a fifteen-year sentence for violence endangering another person’s life, robbery and drug dealing. Lyuba insists that the meeting with her future husband was ‘accidental’ and, in this respect, her story is similar to other women narrating the zaochnitsa experience. It all began when she was twentytwo living with her mother, brother and her baby son from a failed marriage. As she explains it, she was bored and so decided to call a telephone number given out on a television dating programme. This led to her receiving a call from a man called Andrei. It turned out that he was a prisoner serving a sentence for armed robbery. Lyuba, acknowledges that many people discovering this would ‘immediately take fright and put the phone down’ but she explains that because a serious relationship was not on her mind she decided to continue talking to him. The man whom Lyuba tells us she was

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‘destined’ to marry, her ‘golden man’, occupied the neighbouring bunk to Andrei’s in the correctional colony where they were both serving sentences. She got to know him when she called back an unidentified number for a mobile phone that, it turned out, Daniel had temporarily lent to Andrei to use to check on Lyuba’s whereabouts. She got into conversation with Daniel and from that point on their relationship began to develop and gain momentum. She found herself increasingly drawn to Daniel, whilst continuing her relationship with Andrei. She describes this double relationship as playful and flirtatious but her words hint at a darker side: We’d talk and joke for hours on end, first it would be with Andrei and then with Daniel. It was all crazy, of course. I veered from side-to-side between the two of them; between two flames and between heaven and hell, as each one pulled me towards him. Lyuba is a survivor of violent relationships with men. When she was eighteen, she moved in with a man nine years her senior whom she had met in college. She married him three years later when pregnant with his child. Lyuba does not say when her husband started beating her, but says that from the start he was jealous and very controlling. He made her quit her university course and successive jobs she had taken and in the home she had to respond to his every beck-and-call. Lyuba, fled the relationship when her husband’s violence threatened their three-month old baby. Her next relationship was with Andrei. He was the ‘fire of hell’ in her double courtship game. The omens were not good. When they first met over the phone he had only six months left to serve, but during that short time was able to impose his will on her. As she tells it, it was fear for herself and for Daniel that prompted her to agree to let Andrei move in with her, when he was released: Well, I chose Andrei at that moment only because I was afraid of his threats, because he threatened me and he threatened my family [. . .] they were horrible threats and I said I would wait for him, if you can call it that, just because (pauses) so that he’d not going on bullying. You see Daniel and I were still in touch. Andrei did not stay with her for long. The relationship failed and he moved out, taking with him her life savings. Lyuba remembers thinking, ‘Well, that’s enough of being tormented. I no longer fear him, I’m not frightened. He can’t do anything more than he’s already done to me.’ She now felt herself free to pursue the relationship with Daniel. Lyuba recalls that her first visit to Daniel took place on a sunny day that contrasted with the gloom of the cramped visiting room in the correctional

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colony. She had his picture on her mobile phone but had to ask the officer in charge which of the men on the other side of the glass screen was Daniel: The woman officer called out ‘Kuznetsov’. ‘That’s me!’ I approach, I sit down, but what to say? Telephone calls are one thing, letters are another but (voice trails off). I sit down. I just look at him; I don’t even pick up the phone handle. I didn’t know what to say. It was awful. I tried to look hard to see what he was like while my eyes were getting used to the dim light. Then everyone else had grabbed the phone handles: ‘Hello’, ‘Hi there.’ But, you know, we just sat for ten minutes, in silence and looked each another straight in the eye. You know the majority of zeks have empty eyes. I know that because I’ve seen lots of them on visits now. But Daniel’s eyes were deep blue. I don’t know, they were the eyes of a reliable man. I don’t know what I had been hoping for but it was obvious that he loved me. His eyes were burning with love. I don’t know how to describe them; somehow disturbing, beautiful. He looks at me with love and it sends a shiver down my spine [. . .] we spoke for four hours but it seemed like ten minutes and the next we know it’s ‘time, everyone!’ I remember how all the time he talked about how much he loved me. I wasn’t able to say I loved him back. I’d not seen him before, I didn’t know him. But there was something there. I wouldn’t call it love but there was a connection. But still he talked of love and all the time I protested saying ‘What?’ ‘Come on let’s leave love for the future’, those sort of phrases. But then by the end it was ‘Daniel, I love you.’ That first meeting which Lyuba tells us ended with them both in tears was followed by two residential visits before they married and there have been many since. Their first physical encounter passed off well and was marked by the continuation of Daniel’s romantic courtship (he brought flowers for Lyuba to the visitor’s dormitory and a photograph frame he had made in one of the colony workshops). Lyuba’s description of his behaviour now they are married portray him as a ‘new man’ and romantic lover thereby elevating the prison visiting room into an unlikely site for the enactment of many women’s fantasy of the perfect husband: He prepares food for me, he does the washing up. I can wake up in the morning, for example, and he’ll have breakfast ready on the table and bring me a coffee in bed. He wants in these three days to demonstrate his love for me [. . .] There are different ways to show love, not just in bed. It’s part of being a human being. My husband is a housewife (laughs). He’s a gem, honestly. I am so happy and I thank God that he brought us together, even though the sentence is long, I understand it myself. I know

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that some may doubt that I will wait nine years but I am ready to wait. Seriously ready to wait. She recalls at the end of their first long visit looking at Daniel and asking herself why she had not realised sooner that he was the ‘one for her’. But then, making a comparison with her first marriage, she concluded that the enforced delay in the relationship’s consummation had been for the better because their relationship had had the chance to become, ‘closer and more battle-hardened’. Lyuba talks frankly about the importance of sex on the long visits, though she says that she is more interested in their conversations: (laughing) Well, I am more interested in everything but that has to wait for the second day. The first twenty-four hours we give ourselves entirely to our animal instincts, if you can call them that, and then the second day I begin to ask him how things are and he tells me any problems he is having in the colony, what’s troubling him, what he’s pleased about [. . .] if I know what the problem is, I can try to fix it from the outside. Lyuba’s ability to fix things ‘from the outside’ has come from familiarising herself with the provisions of the Russian Prison Service’s correctional code and internal colony rules. She has recently joined a prisoner-relative support group that has empowered her. She relates with pride the various occasions when she has made complaints, including to the colony governor, about violations. She has a strong sense of the injustice in the colony’s treatment of prisoners, in general, and of Daniel, in particular, and insists that she will go on complaining to the highest authorities until they take notice. After all, she comments, the colonies exist on the taxpayers’ money, so why, she asks, ‘does my husband live in f*** knows what conditions? And why can’t he be treated like a human being when I visit him?’ It was on a visit to Daniel’s home village to meet his remaining relatives (his mother is dead and he never knew his father) that Lyuba tells us that she became convinced of Daniel’s innocence (the villagers describe him as a peaceful lad who was ‘set up’ by others). She has not followed up on this by hiring a lawyer to look into Daniel’s case, as do other prisoners’ wives, but does not explain why. Nor does she say whether Daniel is in the prison sub-culture. The fact that he is not employed in the prison industries, that he has been ‘experiencing some difficulties’ with the colony authorities and that talk of the possibility of early release is absent from Lyuba’s talk, hints at another side to Daniel that, if she is aware of, she chooses not to reveal. Lyuba says that she prefers not to think too deeply about the years that lie ahead. She and Daniel shy away from making plans because there is so much of his sentence left, although they have chosen the name of the child they will have

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together when he is released. For Lyuba, the immediate problem is to try to secure good employment that will help overcome the financial challenges she faces in bringing up her son as a single parent. Her first husband only intermittently pays the alimony she is due and she is limited in the jobs she can apply for because she cannot afford childcare. ‘Out of desperation’ she approached her first husband, now living with his parents and a new partner, to help with childcare but, at the time of the interview, the arrangements she had put in place were on the verge of collapse because she had discovered he had hit the child. This was one of many bad moments, Lyuba admits, when she finds it difficult to go on. As she says, she has no one to help her if the child is taken ill, she can’t find a job, she has no money and, on top of all this, is married to a zek. The shadow of her previous violent relationship often surfaces in her narrative. She is delighted that Daniel and her son have bonded over the telephone and marvels at how someone who has been in prison since the age of 18 can ‘understand a child’s psyche’ so well. But Lyuba has not told her son that she has married Daniel and is anxious that the boy should not reveal to his biological father that he calls Daniel ‘Papa’.

‘Half of Our Country is in Prison, There Aren’t Any Young Men Left on the Outside’11 There are no statistics to confirm that the number of women who, like Lyuba, have become involved with prisoners has been on the rise in Russia in the past two decades. Judging by frequency of comments about zaochnitsy on prisonersupport web sites and that surface in conversations with prisoners and their relatives, there is no doubting the intense interest that there is in the subject. In the USA and UK the evidence from the small number of studies is that women who become involved with prisoners are mainly financially independent, in blue and white-collar jobs and in their thirties and forties (the average age in Angela Devlin’s UK study is forty-two).12 The apparent expansion in the number of women pursuing relationships with prisoners in the Russian Federation, in contrast, is being spearheaded by younger women who belong to lower socio-economic groups and are unemployed or in low status jobs. Lyuba, as we have seen, was twenty-two when she met Andrei and Daniel and she has never had stable employment. Two of the other women we interviewed were in their early twenties when they became zaochnitsy and, similarly, do not have permanent employment. Only Rita, who is thirty-eight years, has completed higher education. She was a teacher but lost her job when it was discovered that she had married a prisoner. Warder-prisoner romances are not unknown in Russian colonies, but the figure of the volunteer or welfare worker who falls for a prisoner she meets in the course of her work in a prison is rare in Russia. This reflects the fact that the number of outsiders who have access to prisons is

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limited, as the Prison Service still performs tasks that have been transferred to the voluntary sector or involve outside agencies in the West.13 The evidence from our study is that Russian zaochnitsy are further distinguished from their Western counterparts by the relative speed with which they establish a relationship that can lead to marriage within weeks or months of the first contact. There are aspects of how Russian penality operates that encourage this. Firstly, thanks to widespread corruption that allows the circulation of electronic communications devices in correctional colonies, prisoners are able not only to enter dating websites but to do so in disguise. This allows them to initiate relationships without the other party knowing their identity. Secondly, the geographical spread of colonies, which makes short visits difficult, elevates the role of telephone and online conversations in courtship allowing the man to set the agenda for a couple’s interactions and, as we have seen in relation to the bandits’ wives, to control the woman partner’s social life. Thirdly, the facilities for residential visits that present the opportunity for intimate relations puts pressure on couples to marry. These, though, are all enabling conditions. Leaving aside the fact that these conditions make women vulnerable to grooming to which we will return below, they do not explain why prisoners are the partner of choice for some women. This is the question posed by Kirill Nabutov host of the popular documentary Russian Television series, ‘Poka eshche ne pozdno’ (‘Before it is Too Late’). Nabutov’s question is, ‘why do suitors in prisoners’ uniforms have such success with women on the outside?’14 It is a question that invariably surfaces whenever the subject of zaochnitsy is discussed in the media. It arises because this choice of partner is perceived as a deviant form of behaviour on the part of women and, as such, demands explanation. The most common answer is demographic; that it is a consequence of an unfavourable demographic balance between the number of women and men in Russia that leaves the former with ‘no alternative’ but to search in Russia’s correctional colonies for a partner. The observations of one of the participants on Nabutov’s programme that the situation is not helped by the fact that half the country’s young men are in prison, is an exaggeration, but Russians do not need reminding that revolution, wars, the Stalin repression, alcoholism, industrial accidents, poor diet, economic collapse and social instability and a harsh criminal-justice system have laid waste to the male population of the country. On the face of it this explanation for the rise in the number of zaochnitsy is reasonable assuming, that is, that the gendered assumption underpinning it (that for the majority of young women finding a husband trumps alternative life choices) is accepted. But there is a problem in that the figures do not today stack up in the way that they did in the periods immediately after the War and Stalin repression. The imbalance between men and women in Russia’s population pyramid is in the over fifty-five age group, where the ratio of women to men is nearly 2:1, but in

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younger age groups the ratio is either more or less even or in favour of men.15 Even with Russia’s high rate of incarceration and the fact that of the three-quarters of million men in prison at any time the majority are in the eighteen to thirty year agegroup, there is still not a major imbalance between men and women of marriage age in the country. Exceptions emerge when the geographical distribution is factored in. Rural districts generally have a surplus of women in all age groups, as young men are the first to migrate out. In rural districts where there is a large concentration of correctional colonies this has led, according to one of our interview partners, to a flourishing local business in match-making across colony fences: I really don’t understand a lot of them. I don’t know what they expect from it. You get a group of them [zaochnitsy ] attached to one colony, especially in some village or other out there in the sticks. It even happens in a [less provincial] oblast’ like one where a friend of mine was imprisoned [. . .] So one of them would have a connection with a particular colony, both because she works there or for some other reason, and she [puts the girls in touch with prisoners]. So there would be the same zaochnitsa for five men who’d go to one, two, three . . . What does she expect from this I really don’t know. These exceptions, notwithstanding, the pertinent question is not whether there are sufficient men on the outside for women in Russia to choose from but why, in making their choice, the pool of men in prison is viewed by some women as a preferred source of eligible suitors. As Lyuba’s story shows where relationships with men are concerned women draw on previous life experiences and hopes for the future that can take them on trajectory that makes a prisoner a rational choice for emotional and social reasons. Structural explanations of the zaochnitsa phenomenon are more comfortable for society than the questions about prevailing masculinities raised by women’s partnership choices.

Women Who ‘Fall in Love with their Ears’ A strong element in Lyuba’s story is that Daniel’s behaviour answers a need in her for a non-abusive relationship. Her hyper-romanticised ‘love-at-first-sight’ narrative from the moment their first meeting to the intense three-days they share in the correctional colony visiting dormitory, is in sharp contrast to the description of her violent previous relationships. Lyuba’s narrative is consistent with the findings of American research on prison pen pals which has shown that one of the driving forces behind women seeking partners behind bars is their negative attitudes towards, and experiences of, free men. Particularly, but not exclusively, among Afro-American communities, women’s rejection of machismo and violent masculinities that are associated with anti-social and criminal behaviours has led them to search for partners who manifest

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different, less threatening behaviours.16 Women in Russia have for long been silent, and silenced, about male violence towards them, even though 14,000– 15,000 women are murdered annually by partners and other family members and thousands more, hospitalised. In her examination of contemporary masculinities in Russia, Rebecca Kay has identified the stereotypical perceptions in society of the Russian male as a uniform failure. He is an emasculated heavy drinker, violent towards women, an irresponsible parent and unable to cope with change, to which the response has been a resurgence of patriarchal values and traditional ideas about appropriate gender roles.17 Critiquing male violence towards women has been absent from the frequent discussion in Russia of the crisis in masculinity. The Russian parliament has considered and rejected fifty draft versions of a law on domestic violence since the early 1990s. A high percentage of women serving in Russia’s forty-six correctional colonies for women have murdered abusive husbands and partners in self-defence.18 The cultural embeddedness of wife beating as expressed in the saying ‘if he beats you, he loves you’ (esli b’et, znachit lyubit) is still given as the explanation and excuse for domestic violence remaining a taboo subject. Reporting of domestic violence and rape within marriage remains low and violence against women goes unpunished. There are some women activists who have spoken out about domestic violence. Among the better known is Marina Pisklakova who founded a hot line for women in distress in 1993 and later expanded her work to establish the first women’s crisis centre in the country. Today her organisation ‘ANNA’ (National Centre for the Prevention of Violence) operates a network of 170 crisis centres across Russia and the former Soviet Union.19 In June 2015 an article by a journalist, Anna Zhavnerovich, that described her boyfriend’s physical abuse and police inaction when she reported it, caused a stir for its ‘revelation’ that violence against women is not just a problem of the lower classes and may represent a significant step in changing societal attitudes.20 In the meantime, women like Lyuba from disadvantaged background have good reason to follow the path of their North American counterparts and look beyond their immediate circle for loving relationships with men. The paradox that needs explaining is why they believe that a fruitful place to look is among the population of men who are languishing in jail for having been found guilty of the behaviours that women are hoping to escape. We observed in Chapter 2 that Megan Comfort in her research on prisoners’ wives in San Quentin, USA noted that the women she interviewed compared men on the outside unfavourably with those in prison. Lyuba’s description of Daniel’s behaviour could not contrast more sharply with her descriptions of the other violent and inadequate men in her life. So too, Natal’ya, who had been abandoned by the father of her child. She ‘thanks God’ for saving her from this man who, after a spell in the army, has been in and out of work and would have been unable to support her and her child. For these women, the environment of the prison

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promises physical safety and also has the advantage of preventing unexplained absences of a partner. Furthermore, in the controlled environment of the prison, men are prevented from manifesting their usual courtship behaviours, such as showing off their physical strength and material possessions, and are forced to exhibit their feminine side.21 Craving a loving relationship with a woman, the prisoner understands that in order to achieve this they have to moderate their behaviour, performing the role of attentive, thoughtful suitor. It is worth recalling that the majority of prisoners in correctional colonies in Russia have been incarcerated at a young age, in their late teens and early twenties and that average length of sentence is long. Katya could have been describing Daniel, who was imprisoned when he was eighteen when she comments: How can he have a wife? He’s been given twelve years. There’s just no possibility. He sits in jail one year, two, three, growing used to it and, of course, he wants to have a wife and a family and so on. But how can he have a legal wife? For men who crave a loving relationship with a woman, moderating behaviour to perform the role of thoughtful, attentive suitor is a small price to pay to meet this need. Men in prison have plenty of time to talk and to listen, courtship rituals that are welcomed by many women. In Russia, the method of conversation that prisoners use to court women is referred to as razvody, meaning the creation of a ‘dreamland’ in which the couple is made for one another and the man’s qualities match the expectations of the woman being wooed.22 When Lyuba told us that women ‘fall in love with their ears’, she is highlighting the way that men in prison have developed the art of telephone courtship. Anfisa tells us that she was immediately captivated by the voice of the man whom she had contacted by text: To tell the truth, the first time we spoke I was caught by the timbre of his voice, it was absolutely deep and calm like the sound of a tank. Since that time, it’s impossible even to argue [. . .] not, of course, that we don’t have our disagreements. But, in principle, that voice. So slow and soft, ever so slow and soft, word naturally following word. Similarly, Natal’ya: [P]eople around here, that is people on the outside, (sighing) they (pause) well I don’t know how to explain it, it’s as if they are on edge and their speech is crude, incomprehensible and aggressive. But the men who are there, in prison, they are good psychologists and they talk calmly.

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It is easy to understand why men should propose marriage so soon after finding a woman who meets their needs, whether as an escape from the hyper-maschismo environment of the prison, to secure food parcels or for sex (or for a combination of these). The alacrity with which women agree to marriage would be more difficult to understand were it not for the attraction of the ‘dream world’. Natal’ya tells us that she hesitated about agreeing to marriage because she had to consider the impact on her young child but still the time between the first meeting and engagement was short by most standards: He said to me in the first week [after they had met via the internet], ‘come on let’s get married.’ I categorically refused because the first time I had dated a prisoner that had come to nothing and so I was more cautious with him. I think to myself I don’t know you at all and you propose marriage. So the answer is ‘No’. But then we chatted and chatted and I began to be drawn to him and to understand that I will agree to it. So, literally after three months getting to know each other we agreed to get married, which we did in October the following year. The dream world the women conjure in their narratives, in fact, has another meaning embedded in it. Razvod also means a practical joke or ‘con’. For critics of zaochnitsy, this is precisely what young women like Lyuba have fallen prey to. The way they talk about the men they have found in jail, for critics, is evidence of the women’s desperation and gullibility. The women interviewed are all aware of the discourses that construct them as being duped by the prisoners. None of them would consider that they were the victims of grooming. Yet, the possibility of a much darker side to prisoners’ courtship of women is indicated by the fact that the methods described typically are used by men to groom vulnerable women for the purpose of sex.23 The use of the internet allows the men’s initial contacts to be made in disguise. The women we interviewed went to considerable lengths to counter the suggestion that their prisoner had any but honourable intentions in striking up the relationship with them. They stressed that even though they were not aware they were talking to a prisoner on the first contact, the man ‘very soon’ revealed his identity (although how soon was not always disclosed). It is true, they admitted, that many prisoners have mercenary or sexual motives for pursuing relationships with zaochnitsy. Anfisa’s view, for example, is that the majority of prisoners in the country’s correctional colonies have ‘lost all semblance of humanity’, they lie to women about their reason for being in prison, are exploitative and cruel. But she insists, as do the other zaochnitsy, that her husband is an exception. Galya, though, does admit to having been troubled by the intentions of the prisoner with whom she had developed a relationship:

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Yes, I know that just to secure a date some prisoners write poems to women, when it’s all a lie. I tried for the two whole years to work it out [in our case]. But it is impossible to know the truth. I was thinking to myself that he might be in the relationship with me only for some mercenary aim. So for the two years, I didn’t once bring him a parcel. The failure of the Russian Prison Service to provide prisoners with access to reliable means of communicating with their relatives and to bring under control the use of illicit telecommunications devices has shifted the balance of power between prisoners and the outside world in the former’s favour. It is not only bandits’ wives who are forced into adjust their social life because they are being monitored by their men behind the colony fences. The same applies to all prisoners including new friends made on the internet. Natal’ya who makes much of the fact that prisoners are less ‘pushy’ and ‘rude’ than free men, also describes how she no longer goes out but stays at home ‘within four walls’. We learn that a reason for this that her husband can phone her at any time to discover where she is. Natal’ya’s explains this away as the result of the fact that theirs is a new relationship: Of course, the prisoners have links [with the outside] even though they are forbidden, they nonetheless exist, so that any moment he can phone. Of course it’s tough; he seems not to trust me at all. Even when I went to visit his mother, I knew that every five minutes he would phone. He’ll want to know where I am and what I am doing. His Mama even got cross with him about it and she is always saying to me ‘I am sorry for you. This won’t do.’ That’s what his mother said to me. Natal’ya attributes her husband’s jealousy to a previous bad experience with a woman with whom he had developed a relationship during an earlier custodial sentence.

‘Maybe I Would Have Been Able to Do It Out of Pity, Pure Human Pity’ The negative opinion of zaochnitsy is nowhere felt more strongly than among other prisoners’ wives. The women who had been in a relationship with a prisoner before he was incarcerated generally could not find a good word to say about the zaochnitsy. An exception was Larisa Petrovna, the mother-in-law of one prisoner, who believed that the women who are prepared to take on a prisoner should be admired: There is one thing that makes me proud and brings me pleasure; that there are women who write to prisoners, whether they know them or not, who

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marry and help them. I know that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it myself, although I have seen the work they have done with prisoners, I have seen it with my own eyes. Maybe I would have been able to do it out of pity, out of pure human pity; if I had been single [. . .] probably I would have been able to help also. Klara, a bandit’s wife we encountered in the previous chapter repeated the familiar argument that zaochnitsy are ‘victims of their own gullibility’ but finds something peculiarly and commendably Russian in their behaviour: Russians in particular, I mean people with our mentality, it seems to me, as distinct from others, are more merciful. So I think this explains the zaochnitsy, and everything indeed. Most probably, those men in prison are very lucky. If you look at these women from the spiritual point of view it is obvious that they are not driven much by mercantilist motives because they get nothing from the men. No doubt without being aware of it, both Larisa Petrovna and Klara are placing their explanations for zaochnitsy firmly in the discourse we discussed in Chapter 2 about how deviant behaviours can be neutralised by the appeal to socially-recognised higher loyalties.24 The Russian case does not, in fact, fit easily into this model because in a majority of cases the awareness of the prisoner’s identity is revealed to the woman only after the relationship has been initiated. It would be difficult to sustain an argument, for example, that religious conviction was the motivating force behind a relationship, when it came about as a result of surfing the internet for a date. This does not mean that women who meet their prisoner on line do not appeal to higher loyalties, but this justification for choosing a prisoner has to fit into a narrative of an accidental, unintended, encounter, which, against the odds, leads onto true love, sometimes very rapidly. There are some exceptions or modification to this narrative. Among our interviewees Galya admitted that she had given herself the pseudonym Blatnaya Vika (Vika-the-Bandit Boss) on the dating-site she signed on to, positioning herself in the bandit romantics we described in the previous chapter. She also explains her initial fascination with the prisoner who contacted her as being stirred by the ‘psychologically-interesting’ stories he told her about fighting in Chechnya including his account of executing three prisoners-of-war. Natasha who was the only woman among the interviewees who knew in advance that she was entering into a relationship with a prisoner explains that she fell in love with her eyes, not ears, when she was shown a picture of him by a girlfriend, whose brother he was. Buying into a larger honourable narrative might not help zaochnitsy to tell their story of how they came to have a relationship with a prisoner in the first

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Figure 5.2 Newlyweds. Correctional Colony Governors differ in how prepared they are to meet couples’ preferences for the ceremony. Not all permit wedding cakes, as here, and the time the newly wed couple is allowed together after the ceremony varies widely. place, but it can provide them with a justification for their preparedness to endure the humiliations and degradations to which they are subjected. Zaochnitsy, like other wives, appeal to the higher ideal of romantic love and self-sacrifice for a man who, though a law breaker, they believe to be have been unfairly and disproportionately punished. The sacrificial act of the zaochnitsa literally saves the prisoner who, had it not been for the woman’s preparedness to take him on, would have been left to rot in Russia’s prisons. Rita points out that this sacrifice is all the more commendable because it is often made by economically poor women: [S]urely all these zaochnitsy-girls who cater for their prisoners without meeting or seeing them until their release [are to be admired]. And those young men when they come out are on bended knees thanking these girls, who really have provided them with normal, decent life so they did not need anything, and by bringing parcels and medicines. Rita insists on recognition of the women’s bravery in supporting a man in prison. It is only a special kind of woman with strong nerves and courage who

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can give consistent support to men in prison. The women who marry prisoners are to be admired, not derided. Rita concludes by pointing out the zaochnitsy’s superiority to ‘ordinary wives’, who, she says, turn up at colonies with drugs and alcohol and perpetuate the anti-social behaviours of the prisoners.

‘It is Happiness to Feel I Am a Legitimate Wife Now’ (Anfisa) No research exists in Russia into whether the marriages contracted with prisoners endure the latter’s release. The Western evidence is mixed.25 According to the UK marriage counselling service Relate the average marriage with a prisoner lasts ten years, which is less than the thirty-two year average for marriages in general according to the Office of National Statistics.26 Of nineteen couples investigated by Angela Devlin in UK prisons, the majority were still together six years on from her research, although she noted that the longest marriages were those where one party was still in prison. There are no comparable data for Russia but it would be no surprise if marriages contracted when one partner is in prison run into difficulty on the prisoner’s release. Above we have presented myriad reasons why this should be the case; the women’s motivations (which, among others, may be that she is looking for a safe relationship in a controlled environment), the speed with which marriages are contracted and the hostile social and economic environment any such couple has to navigate. We have noted that in telling their stories the five women we interviewed stressed that at the beginning of their relationship with a prisoner they were interested only in friendship and did not take him seriously as a partner-to-be. This explains their decision to continue their telephone conversations despite their interlocutor being a prisoner. That a serious relationship then developed, leading in four cases to a correctional colony wedding and, in one, to the decision to marry after release, was described by the women as being beyond their ability to control; it was not so much feelings of mercy and pity that intervened to perpetuate the relationship, as cupid. The women’s talk revealed that all but one had been friends with prisoners met in a variety of different ways before the happy accident that led them to their current partner. Galya tells us that she was in contact with approximately thirty men met through internet dating sites when the relationship started with her ex-soldier prisoner. Social network sites reveal, in fact, that women can simultaneously maintain relationships with several prisoners and that prisoners also can ‘run’ several zaochnitsy. The claim in the popular press that there is a whole industry procuring new wives and sexual partners for prisoners is exaggerated but it does return us to the question of the dangers of the pivotal role played in it of electronic communication, which allows players to disguise their identities and generates a false sense of security. Against the interpretation that zaochnitsy women are either delusional or the victims of grooming, there is the alternative

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analysis to consider; that they are the embodiment of protest against Russian masculinities. But a (post-) feminist reading of the zaochnitsa phenomenon remains elusive, unless, following Saba Mahmood’s cue, the women’s choice of a path is understood as representing a different form of agency and ethic than is found in mainstream Russian society.27 Even though visitors to social networking sites repeatedly make the point that women who date prisoners are not necessarily looking for a marriage partner, the indicator of success is a wedding. The women we interviewed expressed different degrees of confidence in the future of their marriage. Rita was convinced that she and her husband had laid ‘a massive and firm foundation for their future together’ through being honest with one another. She is confident in her new husband’s future behaviour because, she explains, he is dependent on her for somewhere to live and there is no one else to support him. Both Galya and Anfisa’s partners had already been released when the women were interviewed. Galya had set up a business with her fiance´ who had moved in with her, but he frequently disappears for long periods, which Galya attributes to him hiding from creditors. Anfisa says that her husband remains calm and she has no regrets at the path she has chosen. Lyuba insists that her love for Daniel remains firm but she was considering moving to St Petersburg where her new friends tell her she has a good chance of finding work. Natal’ya was most open about her doubts. She confesses that she does not discuss the future with her husband because she is afraid that they might not find a ‘common language’ about his previous offending behaviours and recidivism (he is serving a second sentence for robbery) and she continues to worry about how the relationship between her son and her new husband will develop. She had taken her son on a visit to the colony but this had left him so traumatised that she will not repeat it, despite her husband’s urgings.

Peer Support and Peer Rejection The popular fascination with zaochnitsy is for the most part unremittingly negative and in this respect their situation is different from that of the bandits’ wives for whom there is a sneaking admiration among some sections of the population. Nor is there the same understanding of the sacrifices of the prisoner’s wife that typically informs society’s views of women who have long been married to a prisoner and has a family by him. In their encounters with the prison authorities the perceptions of zaochnitsy as gullible at best, and as little better than prostitutes at worst, is brought home to them. They are not the only women visitors to colonies who have to undergo strip searches or who have to bring medical evidence that they are free of communicable diseases but they are particularly vulnerable to such attention from the authorities. Rita tells of the sort of treatment our respondents could expect on their visits to correctional colonies:

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So when I first went they said, ‘Well, what are you here for, bitch? You’ve come for a f***?’ I just stood there blankly and said nothing. Now, if it was on the street somewhere, at the bus stop, forgive my language, I would give them the finger. I wouldn’t let somebody talk to me like that, but there I stood and remained silent. Even when they looked in my underwear, I still stood silently. I just kept thinking that I would soon see my loved one. It is so demeaning to be forced to endure that hell. Small wonder that the zaochnitsy tended to be particularly active in support groups, including those involved in challenging the system. In her story Lyuba tells of her involvement with a group of women who, like her, have married men behind bars. She recounts how she has used her membership of this group to help her obtain better conditions for Daniel and to secure her rights to visit; with the group behind her she has had the courage to go right ‘to the top’ of the colony’s administration and this has furnished her with a good understanding of her husband’s rights. The other four women interviewed are also involved in support groups. Natal’ya belongs to a web group exclusively for zaochnitsy, which she set up herself. She explains how it helps her: If, for example, you have a row with your husband, you argue as it were, I can’t go to one of my girlfriends to talk about it. The only support I can count on is on the internet where there is the site called ‘Odnoklassniki’ and there’s a group within that I, in fact, formed myself called ‘forbidden love’. We invite prisoners to join it as well, wives, and other relatives. It’s a social networking site. On it we all understand each other and support one another. That’s my only source of support. Natal’ya keeps in touch with the women she meets on line by telephone and has a local network of supporters who are all linked to men in one of the seven correctional colonies in her town. Lyuba was recruited to an NGO fighting for prisoners’ rights by another woman whom she met on a colony visit and says she joined willingly. She is now its president. She is convinced that the NGO has helped empower young women by educating them in their rights. Lyuba’s aim is to protect others from the indignities she suffered on her first visit to Daniel. She explains that when she first started visiting she had no idea of her rights but that now when she encounters violations, she knows to take the name and number of the officer concerned and to make a formal complaint. She comments of the colonies: ‘You have to understand, here on the outside we have our freedom, we have laws, but there they have their own laws and different life [. . .] completely different.’ Like the other women, Lyuba benefits from the personal support of members of the group she directs and they have been a source of new friendships. This is often necessary, because despite the

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women’s framing of their stories in higher loyalty discourses and their attempts to neutralise their partners’ offending behaviours, they often fail to bring family and friends on side. Lyuba is in a minority in that her friendships and family relationships seem not to have been affected very much by her marriage to Daniel. The more common experience is for the women to encounter opposition. Rita was sacked from her job as a school teacher and Natal’ya, faced systematic opposition from her family, especially from her mother from whom she concealed her plan to marry for fear that the latter would hide her passport to prevent her marriage. Natal’ya gave up going out with her previous circle of friends because there was none among them with whom she could now find a common language. The opposition of their immediate circle of family and acquaintances is compounded by the rejection the zaochnitsy can suffer from the other wives of prisoners who were in a long term relationship with the prisoner before he was imprisoned. Zaochnitsy encounter the other wives of prisoners in visiting rooms, in family support groups and in the virtual reality of the internet. In the virtual world of social networking sites, they encounter the full force of other wives’ and partners’ disapproval. If they were not already aware of the prevailing societal views about zaochnitsy, they soon learn. The objections to zaochnitsy, in fact, often convey as much about how long-term partners of prisoners understand their own situation, as providing new insights on the motivations of zaochnitsy. Many wives, of course, have had their loyalty tested by their partners’ cycle of repeated offending and imprisonment and can be wearied by years of conducting a relationship at a distance and trying to get by as a singleparent. The enthusiasm and energy of the ‘new wives’, it is easy to understand, can appear as a critique of the longer-term partner’s ‘conditional’ commitment to her husband, raising the question of which ‘type’ of wife is the better dekabristka: zaochnitsa or ochnitsa (new or full-time wife)? Gulya one of the bandits’ wives we met in the previous chapter feels so strongly about zaochnitsy that she is gathering information about them to use in a book devoted to the subject. She declares zaochnitsy who call themselves Decembrist wives ‘farcical’, saying that whatever they bring to their men in colonies, they ‘leave their brains behind’. She has no patience for women who use the social media sites for prisoners’ relatives to complain about being wronged by a prisoner they have met on line: [Y]ou read how these girls write ‘I got to know him and then he. . .’ and you read the whole history and that ‘he’s an animal, he took me and then dropped me.’ You feel like asking them ‘if you’d met him on the street somewhere or other and the same thing happened; he went out with you then dropped you, would you think him any better?’ But now just because you spent a hundred roubles on telephone calls you think he should love

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you to the grave and should be eternally grateful to you. [I just say] ‘Stop. What did you want? You didn’t know him. He was able to tell you anything he liked on the phone. You don’t know him; what sort of human being he is, what sort of personality he has. It’s quite possible that he’s some sort of dirt, he’ll tell you he’s a good man, even if he’s not after anything from you in particular.’ So why the surprise? This naivete´ of zaochnitsy is contrasted in Gulya’s narrative with the experiences of the long-suffering wives who know all the pluses and minus of their men, have to get on with their lives looking after children and sharing their husbands’ punishment. Above all they have insight into what imprisonment does to the men on the inside. Klara’s words below sum up the prevailing view among other wives of the zaochnitsy: How can they really get to know them? They met them on a website, by telephone of some other way. He tells her he’s in prison and serving a sentence but she can’t possibly understand what this means. He can say to her that he’s in for theft, when actually he’s done something else that he’s being punished for. There in the prison he’s lost any semblance of being a human being, a person and everything that goes with that. She goes and visits him, taking parcels with her and goodness knows what else. Everything that this man needs, it’s that easy. ‘As they are able, so they live’, as the saying goes. Anyone who serves a sentence has to find some way of surviving, a means to get food, smokes, and everything else [. . .] and this is why they find those idiot girls (durochki) who are ready to. . . and these girls they just don’t think. You should at least find out for sure what sort of man it is. How he lives, what he is. One aspect of the relationship between the wives of prisoners and the ‘upstart’ zaochnitsy that is peculiar to Russia is that because of the permeability of correctional colonies, zaochnitsy can appear as a threat to existing relationships. Among other wives’ criticisms of zaochnitsy is the claim that they undermine the family, by coming between husband and wife. The accusation is that these women are little better than prostitutes taking part in drunken orgies in colonies in return for money and a ‘paid holiday in Turkey’. But equally reprehensible are the ‘durochki’ (little idiots), who turn up at colonies ‘with one small bag of produce and one large bag of sexy underwear’. Gulya insists that she is not afraid of a zaochnitsa taking her husband, but it is evident that there are some longstanding wives who believe their marriage is vulnerable to being undermined by young women seeking a relationship with a man behind bars. The gendered construction of these ‘threats’ to established relationships undermines solidarity among women who for myriad different reasons link

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their lives to those of men behind the colony fences in Russia. The critical storm surrounding zaochnitsy in internet forums populated by the families of prisoners is one of the consequences of the way that the prison system in Russia fragments and divides the women it has recruited to the task of rehabilitating men prisoners. In so doing it constructs identities for women that mask deepseated problems in Russian society surrounding the relationships between men and women.

CHAPTER 6 MOTHERS

Today Marina Filippovna Khodorkovskaya died – a golden mother, who waited for her only son. (Announcement on the day Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s mother died, 3 August, 2014)1 Mother and son, is it really true that the mother’s love for her child is always blind? (Discussion topic on a prison forum)2 The imprisonment of a relative radically changes the role and status of all family members, creating sociological ambivalence that is revealed in their interactions with the prison system, the prisoner, other family members and society at large. Certainly, ambivalence is the hallmark of how the offender’s mother is represented in Western popular culture, where she is often held responsible for the deviant behaviours of her offspring but at the same time is identified as the person, above all others, who will stand by a child, however heinous the crime. Western audiences are uncomfortable with mothers who abandon their children so the deathbed request of Peggy Brady, mother of the Moor’s murderer Ian Brady, for her son to be brought to see her (a visit that was granted) and the frequent visits made by mothers of Jon Venables and Roger Thompson, the child murderers of James Bulger, to see their sons are not thought strange. The message of the actions of these mothers is of the enduring nature of maternal love, though, of course, we do not know what passed between mothers and sons on any of these occasions. But acceptance of the enduring nature of maternal love sits alongside a media discourse that is quick to attribute blame for the offences of the son on their mother. Despite knowledge of his schizophrenia, Brady’s murderous spree, for example, was blamed in the press on his mother’s neglect, while it was over-mothering that turned ‘mummy’s boy’ Harold Shipman into one of the UK’s most prolific serial murderers.

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Across the Atlantic in the USA there is the same contradictory reporting; on the one hand, the parents of Columbine shooter are applauded for the profound meanings they have found in parenthood as they consider their son’s crime but, on the other defective parenting is also put in the dock, as in the UK.3 ‘True crime’ books that describe the details of serial killings also include contradictory images of the mother figure, as in the representation of Carolyn Nagoletano, the mother of a wife-murderer who is simultaneously condemned for both giving her son too little and too much love (hers was a dysfunctional household but she interfered with police evidence to protect her son).4 The representation of the prisoner’s mother as a problematic figure in popular culture is not new to the twenty-first century. In the book on which the iconic 1960s film, The Birdman of Alcatraz, was based Robert Stroud is represented as suffering the double imprisonment of Alcatraz and the psychological chains of his mother’s love. Stroud gains the space he needs to grow within the prison when he banishes his mother from his life and takes, instead, to caring for birds.5 The Russian Federation is not short of its own serial killers. Indeed, there is a website that compares the number in pre-revolutionary Russia (three), with the number during the seventy-five years of Soviet power (40) and since 1991 (over 60).6 The website, one of many, caters to the extraordinary current interest in the Russian Federation in crime and punishment. Books, journals, films and TV documentaries (like the immensely popular Kriminal’naya Rossiya [Criminal Russia] running since 1995 on a succession of TV channels) of the ‘true crime’ genre have proliferated.7 Inevitably, among the concerns and themes explored is the role of women and of the mother, in particular.8 Despite a traditional veneration of the mother that we discuss below, mothers do not escape blame for the sins of their sons. Rather as in the USA and UK, there is voyeuristic interest in the worst of the worst offenders. From the Soviet era, the serial killing of Andrei Chikatillo, the subject of numerous cultural productions after 1991, is popularly put down to his mother telling him that his elder brother was eaten by neighbours during the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s thus awakening in him a cannibalistic curiosity. Dysfunctional families often headed by alcoholic, cruel, inadequate mothers are held responsible for producing postSoviet murderers like Alexander Spesivtsev, whose mother brought victims to their flat and helped him dispose of the bodies.9 Women murderers attract interest, especially those who murder their own babies.10 Russia has yet to progress to understanding that this violence can be associated with post-natal depression. These representations of women stand in contrast to traditional imaginings of the mother figure as the all-encompassing nurturer. It is an image to which all our interviewees to some degree subscribe and in relation to which the mothers among them, position themselves. But it surfaces in their talk in different ways. Alongside stories of mothers who fulfil their role supporting

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their miscreant sons by visiting them, sending them parcels, looking after their children and being there for them when they are released, are stories of those who try to wriggle out of the reasonability or who have long since severed their ties with their child. There is a strong narrative about the need to protect the mother from the consequences of their child’s offending that remind the offender that his guilt in breaking the law is compounded by the impact of his actions on his mother. Whilst the wife must be strong, like a dekabristka, the mother is allowed to talk about the damage of her child’s actions to her own health. She is the relative who is allowed to weep and wring her hands ‘at the gate’ waiting for the prodigal son’s return. A recurring theme in women’s talk is whether the aged mother or grandmother will live to see her son or grandchild again and in this way the discourses about the prisoner’s mother are also discourses about old age. Women in their fifties and sixties who are regularly encountered on railway journeys in Russia are constructed as being ‘too old’ to travel, once they become a prisoner’s mother. No less interesting in women’s talk are the absences. Fathers are noticeably absent or are relegated to the position of bit-part players. In this chapter we focus attention on the figure of the family matriarch, exploring the various nuances in their own understanding of their role and society’s construction of it. We begin with a discussion of the mother trope in Russian culture and how it accommodates the absent or deviant son.

Matreshka or Dekabristka? In the Russian mind, women are perceived of as having special feminine powers of virtue that find their ultimate expression in motherhood. The name of the country is historically feminine, Rus’ and later Rossiya. The maternal metaphor of nationhood goes back to the worship by early Slavs of Mat’ Syra Zemlya (Moist Mother Earth) and the country’s fertile soil is viewed as a trope of the female body in cultural mythology. The image of Mother Russia (or as Russians lovingly call it Matushka Rus’, Rodina-mat’, Mat’ Rossiya) is materialised in its folkloric emblem from the nineteenth-century, the nested matreshka doll. The doll signifies an allenveloping nature that is the feminine and nurturing life-giving world of a mother. Cultural historians emphasise Russians’ remarkable loyalty to tradition, so that it is ‘optimistically reaffirmed’ in the self-replicating matreshka with its symbolism of the ever ‘mysterious vitality of Mother Russia’ and continuity of generations.11 These concepts have spiritual roots in the concept of sobornnost’ which have lead one historian to argue that ‘the secret of Russian identity’ lies in ‘the simple representation of mother and child’ on the first wooden matreshka doll at the end of the nineteenth century. Central to the matreshka ethos is the idea of self-denial and this is where the matreshka metaphor meets with the dekabristka but with the difference that by

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sacrificing herself at the altar of conjugal love, the latter also sacrifices her children. As we observed in the first chapter, the Decembrist wives were not permitted to take their children with them when they followed their husbands to Siberia. The story of the two women in the life of Decembrist Ivan Aleksandrovich Annenkov both of whom abandoned their child, illustrates the challenge the aftermath of the Decembrist uprising mounted to the core maternal myth in Russian culture. Annenkov’s mother, Countess Anna Ivanovna, rejected her son for his part in the Decembrist uprising because of the disgrace it brought on the family and Paulina Gue`ble abandoned her daughter to follow Ivan to exile in Siberia. The Countess’s apparent deviation from her maternal role was absolved by the transferral of maternal love to her grand-daughter and by making her heir to Annenkov estate, while Paulina was absolved by bearing further children by Annenkov when they were together in Siberia. But the absolution was only partial and has left a gulf between the two myths governing Russian women’s identity. For all the identification of Russia with the feminine, Russian cultural tradition is intrinsically patriarchal and has continuously reasserted itself through the country’s history of turmoil, bloody wars and revolutions. The man in Russia is understood as a fixated fighter for ideas, while the woman’s domain is to uphold the continuity of generations. The matreshka is the embodiment of the caring and protective mother who gathers her children ‘under her skirts’. It is from the woman’s feminine world, from under the skirts, that the Russian male hero attempts first to break out, then conquer the world and control it. But as Joanna Hubbs has observed, he returns, sometimes as prodigal son, to the mother for rebirth, empowerment and release.12 The dedicated mother waiting for a son’s return is, therefore, deeply ingrained in Russian historical consciousness. A centuries-long tradition glorifies the mother of the soldier, as in the nineteenth-century poem, Orina mat’ soldatskaya, by Nikolai Nekrasov, that narrates the story of a dedicated mother who waited eight long years for her son’s return, only for him to die ten days after he arrives home.13 There are parallels to be drawn between the representations of soldiers’ and of prisoners’ mothers, but with the difference that the men in Russia’s prisons have turned their energies to malevolent ends when they ‘break out’ from the feminine world. The relationship between mother and son, therefore, takes on particular forms. It is a relationship that figures frequently in poems, letters, songs, documentaries, diaries, notebooks and albums about prison. In these, son and mother are united in grief as they try to manage the tragic circumstances in which they find themselves. Prison lyrical texts posit the mother as the skorbyashchaya mat’, the sorrowful mother, who is permanently inconsolable in her grief for her son. In this image, the mother is always there for her son, her symbolic place at the door or allotment gate awaiting his return, which will give her absolute

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happiness. Ekaterina Efimova, in her anthropological study of prison mythology, traditions and folklore gives countless examples of the representations of the mother waiting for her son’s return.14 In these, the waiting mother is represented as a figure of higher authority who has the power to exonerate her son’s sins. As her son deviated from the ‘true path’ (istinnyi put’), so his return home, as to matreshka’s skirts, is symbolic of his return to the ‘true path in life’. There are specific prison penitence texts where the prisoner confesses his sins to his mother and is confident that no matter what his sin, he will be forgiven. The figure of the prodigal son is, therefore, dominant in representations of the mother/prisoner son relationship. He kneels at his mother’s feet asking for forgiveness.15 But prison ‘chansons’ also tell us the prodigal son is anxious that his mother will not recognise him when he arrives home. This is the subject of one of the more celebrated songs performed by ‘king of chanson’, Mikhail Krug in his song ‘Hello Mother’ in which the prisoner doubts that his mother will recognise the old man returning home from the Pechora camp. In another prison song we learn that the mother is the only one who will understand why her returning son’s hair is grey.16 Though prison chansons and poems reference the time of the gulag, they also inform the understandings and meanings attached to the motherimprisoned son relationship today. The theme of incarceration and expulsion to the peripheries that surfaces in popular cultural productions is one of permanent separation as either mother or son will not survive the period of incarceration. This is found, for example, in the poem of former prisoner Yulii Kim entitled ‘Do not send a parcel, Mama’.17 It also is the subject of the famous chanson ‘Wait Train, Don’t Clatter Wheels!’ about penal transportation to Karelia, where ‘the train flies through the valleys and over the hills’, composed in 1946 by Nikolai Ivanovskii. The narrator tells his mother not to wait for him as he will die in his prison cot.18 The fear that imprisonment in the gulag would mean that mother and son will never be reunited was particularly relevant in the middle of the last century, as many sent to the gulag did not return. The mother’s grief is both for a son who has lost his way and for one who may, in fact, be lost to her forever. It continues to have relevance today as incarceration in Russia’s colonies can be a death sentence even for a healthy young man (one of our respondents tells us that two of the five young men arrested and incarcerated with her son, died within two years of the transportation to the correctional colony). The various complementary themes come together in the lyric poet Sergei Esenin’s poem, ‘Letter to Mother’. Widely interpreted as a peon to mother Russia, in it a reprobate son declares his love for his mother who is to be seen out on the road waiting in her old padded jacket for her son’s return. The son longs to return to the maternal home and to the person capable of easing his heartache and of forgiving him, though he knows there can be no return for him to his former life.

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Esenin’s poem, rather like Nekrasov’s on the Decembrist wives, has been recited by successive generations of schoolchildren in Russia. The mothers of today’s prisoners, many of whom were born into and spent the greater part of their lives in the Soviet Union, will have learned the poem in school. They belonged to families that had had to live through as succession of crises that elevated the role of the matriarch. The accounts we have of how mothers responded to the disappearance of their family members at the hands of the secret police during the Stalin era and in renewed punitiveness of the Brezhnev regime have come down to us in the writings of memoirists. They tell a nuanced story about mothers. There are portrayals of strong women who held the family together when the men disappeared in the gulag and who sustained their sons by sending letters and parcels.19 Anna Larina, Bukharin’s wife, taking her cue from Nekrasov’s poem about the soldier, compared the mother of Mikhail Tukhachevskii to the stereotype of the Russian peasant woman who mourns the loss of her son to war. The message her narrative conveys is that the loss is the source of similar suffering for all mothers, intelligentsia and peasants alike, but with the difference that the illiterate and religious peasant takes the blame upon herself. Mariya Popova, the mother of the popular screenwriter, film director and actor Vasilii Shukshin, in this vein, is said to have cried ‘I did not pray for you enough’ over her dead son’s grave in 1974. Mothers may well have taken the blame upon themselves for the tragedies that befell their sons in the Soviet Union but the majority are unlikely to locate the shortcomings in their children’s upbringing to lack of prayer. By the postwar decades everyone in the USSR had been socialised into a system that had a materialistic view of life and, importantly, that located criminality in a failure of the individual properly to integrate into Soviet society. Conformity and loyalty to the state and to the higher ideals of socialism were the survival behaviours that the attentive mother knew she had to inculcate in her child. This all changed after 1991 when social transformations redrew the map of maternal responsibility. As we shall see below, the mothers we interviewed lay the blame of their son’s offending at the door of poverty, greed and corrupt law enforcement agencies. Nevertheless, the mother trope remains a reference point for the expectations society has of prisoners’ mothers in the Russian Federation today.

The Socialist Mother In Russia today, popular culture tends to come down to a large degree on the side of the redemptive role of the prisoner’s mother, notwithstanding the bad press about mothers of its serial killers. Typically, representations of the prisoner’s mother are articulated through the powerful images that connect motherhood to the idea of the nation and religious orthodoxy that, as we have demonstrated

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Figure 6.1 A mother arriving at a Moscow remand prison with bags of produce to hand in for onward passage to her son. above, are deeply embedded in Russian culture. But also important is the influence of Soviet communism on the meanings attached to family life and the mother’s place in it. When, in the twenty-first century the situation and attitudes of prisoners’ mothers are considered, it is important to remember that we are mainly concerned with a generation of women born and lived the formative years of their adult life under Soviet communism. This circumstance deepens intergenerational difference in the attitudes, expectations and the identity construction of the prisoner’s mother in Russia (more so than we might expect to observe in Western jurisdictions). For their part, these women’s

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Figure 6.2 Unpacking cigarettes for inspection by the prison authorities in the parcel reception point in a Moscow sizo.

self-identification is informed by the role their mothers and grandmothers played in their own upbringing. Soviet history certainly can account for the prominence that surfaces in women’s talk of the mother’s role in sending food parcels to the son or daughter. Feeding the family is a universal signifier of the nurturer, but it had special significance in the Soviet shortage economy when putting food on the table for the family was the woman’s main domestic task. The Soviet woman was the bottler of berries, dryer of mushrooms, maker of pies, pancakes and pel’meni and the family member who managed the network of contacts needed to keep a supply of food products flowing to keep her family healthy. Every mother knows that when her son is sent to prison he will be badly fed and that her son or daughter will be sharing a dormitory with a hundred other men or women, some of whom will be suffering from life-threatening infectious diseases. Hence the crucial importance to prisoner survival of the regular food and medicine parcel. In providing this, the prisoner’s mother may be understood as providing a more important service, than if she were to visit. In the Soviet Union the mobilisation of women of working age into the work force put pressure on the work/life balance. One result was that the maternal role in child rearing was shared with other people. There were multiple mother figures in a Soviet child’s life; the biological mother, grandmother, aunts and siblings. Child rearing was also shared with a variety of institutions; the state

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nursery and school, party organisations like the ‘pioneers’ and private childcarers inhabiting the shadow economy. The prison chansons and poems in which the mother figures so prominently were composed by men who were as likely to have spent the greater part of their childhood with their grandmother, as with their biological mother. In this chapter we are focusing on the women of this ‘older generation’ who were socialised into the Soviet system but whose children and grandchildren make up a significant portion of the population inhabiting the penal institutions of post-Soviet Russia. We meet Fatima, a Tatar woman in her sixties whose son was serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence for drug-related offences when she was interviewed. Ethnically not Russian and coming from a culture with its own strongly embedded understandings about women’s role, she understands herself as a Soviet woman as much as a Tatarka. Today with her son in jail in a society with attitudes antithetical to those into which she was socialised, she is tormented by the possibility that her devotion to socialist labour is responsible for her son taking the wrong path. We begin, however, with the maternal figure that played so great a role in the rearing of generations of Soviet children. Tat’yana Stepanovna was in her seventies when interviewed. Her grandson is serving an eleven-year sentence for aggravated burglary.

Tat’yana Stepanovna’s Story Tat’yana Stepanovna was born in 1938, three years before the USSR’s entry into the war with Nazi Germany. The fifty years she spent as a Soviet citizen structures her understanding of the world, providing her with the lens through which she views the misfortunes that have befallen her family. These include two failed marriages, the death from alcoholism of her youngest son and now, the incarceration of her grandson. Andrei was sentenced when he was eighteen years old to eleven years in a correctional colony. Tat’yana Stepanovna is emotional when talking about him and tells us that her greatest fear is that she will not live long enough ever to see her beloved grandson again. In common with the majority of women born in the middle of the twentieth century, Tat’yana had a hard life. Her earliest memories are of being evacuated from L’vov in Galicia with her heavily pregnant mother when she was four and journeying to a town deep in European Russia east of the Volga River. She has remained in this town for her whole life. She entered the workforce as soon as she left school and spent the decades from the mid 1950s to her retirement in a variety of low status employments, latterly in the service sector as a hotel dezhurnaya (floor concierge) and cleaner. She married soon after she left school and had a son and daughter, but her husband was violent and they divorced within four years. Almost immediately she married again, but this husband ‘turned out to be a lazy’ and she divorced him after eighteen months and having

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had another son. From this point on, she tells us, her three children were the focus of her life. In bringing them up she was able to rely upon Soviet welfare provision and, as the mother of three children, she was entitled to the full range of benefits. Her children were automatically placed in state nurseries. She was allocated a two bedroom flat and was entitled to an annual vacation in a state rest home. She commends the trade unions in the Soviet Union for working hard to develop the rights of people such as her. Tat’yana kept her family close to her and looking back she believes that she made a good job of bringing her children up. This involved her in the daily round of ensuring they were well fed and healthy. She is proud that when the Soviet Union broke up the children were all married, employed, living not too far from her and that they had started to produce the next generation. But the ‘transition’ from communism challenged the family’s coherence. Tat’yana recounts how her daughter lost her job and moved away and her youngest son began to drink heavily and was found dead on the balcony of his flat. Through these challenges Tat’yana Stepanovna retained her focus on her family which involved her having an active role in bringing up the next generation of her family. She says that her grandchildren are as her own children to her: ‘They are very important to me, as if I had borne them myself. It’s as if I had three of my own and then another three.’ She has a strong relationship with her firstborn son whom she ‘fears’ she ‘loved too much’. This love has been passed onto his children who include Andrei, now in jail. Her greatest desire in life is to see her son’s family reconstituted: We might not make it to the end; my poor health will take me to the grave. If only we had him beside us. For him to be back with his mother, his father and grandmother before I die. Tat’yana has little to say in her narrative about Andrei’s mother. Theirs is not a close relationship; her daughter-in-law does not call her ‘mother’ but Tat’yana says she tries not to be offended by this departure from traditional practice: [I] don’t take offence. I think to myself, ‘Well, alright then, dear God, maybe it’s better that way. Why should I force it? It’s not necessary.’ All the same, in practice I am like an older mother to all three of them. She is critical of her daughter-in-law for the way she brought up Andrei, accusing her of spoiling him and loosing track of his whereabouts and who his friends were. When talking about the support that the family gives to her grandson in prison, the daughter-in-law does not figure at all; it is the boy’s father, Tat’yana’s beloved son, who coordinates all the visiting, parcel sending, telephone calls.

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As is common in all the prisoner-relative narratives, Tat’yana Stepanovna devotes much of her interview to describing the drama surrounding her grandson’s arrest, court appearance and sentencing. She acknowledges that he committed an offence (he wounded a driver in an argument about the fare on a journey home from a party) but she accuses the authorities of over-reaction since the wounding was not fatal. Tat’yana also directs her indignation at the victim who, she notes, was a Tatar and appeared in court with ‘not a scratch on him’: When I was in court I saw my grandson. He was sitting there so pale, shaking like an aspen leaf and like a dog in that cage. And the other one [the victim] sat next to me. Tat’yana reacted strongly to the judge’s announcement of the sentence: Tat’yana Stepanovna:

Interviewer: Tat’yana Stepanovna: Interviewer: Tat’yana Stepanovna:

When he said eleven years, I exclaimed ‘But what for?’ Everyone tried to shush me up. So I remained silent but when we got up to go I tried to hold his hand [through the bars] and he held out his hand to me and we held each other. The guard . . . (voice trails off) pushed you away I say to him ‘Go away, I am only holding his hand!’ It was just a terrible scene. We should expect better. Indeed, but why do things have to be done like this? Why aren’t we fighting for our young people, so that our young people can live normal lives? Why are we destroying them? If someone falls on hard times, you should do the opposite. You should pick them up and help them to change so they don’t do wrong anymore.

Tat’yana is convinced that her grandson is the victim of a miscarriage of justice and uses the same arguments to neutralise his offence as other prisoners’ relatives by comparing the harsh treatment he has received with the leniency the state shows to the ‘real offenders’. But in making her case Tat’yana also references elements of the matreshka ethos; Andrei’s love for her is evidence of his love for the motherland and of his essential goodness: Once I heard it [the sentence] I nearly collapsed. What is this all about? It is very easy to break a life; it takes only one spit. If they are going to break someone like Andrei, who then is going to be left? They bury them alive.

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He has the soul of a patriot, he’s (pauses) I don’t know, and say there was a war or something. He’d fight for the country. At heart he is not evil, not yet anyway. She lays the blame for what has happened to the young at the door of the transformations since 1991 that deprive them of the sort of happy youth her generation enjoyed. Her nostalgia is for a better past when her grandson would not have offended. I do not see in our young people the same happiness. A feast day was a feast day then, but there’s no return to that now. Inside me there is still the hope that I will live long enough to wait for him. As everyone says of this trauma, ‘Those in prison have been imprisoned for nothing’ but you can’t generalise, you can’t generalise. I am as frightened as anyone of hooligans and thugs, but speaking now not as his grandmother, he shouldn’t have been locked up. Grandmother and grandson are in regular correspondence and Tat’yana makes sure that Andrei’s favourite pel’meni, pirozhki and bliny are in the parcels his father takes him on visits. In her letters, Tat’yana reminds her grandson to stay out of trouble and not to mix with bad people in the colony in order to maximise his chances of release, so that they will see each other again before she dies. Andrei, for his part, writes reassuring letters to his grandmother telling her that he is well and that she is not to worry about him. He urges her, Tat’yana tells us, to concentrate on keeping herself well for his return. Firmly in line with the representations in the prison chansons and poems of mother and son united in grief, Tat’yana explains how the two of them share the trauma done to them: ‘The worst thing is that the injury caused both me and him is the same. But for me it’s not so bad as I have lived my life, but what of his? Ten more years. He’s been away for one year.’

Mother and Son: Is It Always True that a Mother’s Love for her Son is Blind?20 The producer of the television programme ‘Before it’s too Late’ is committed to examining the collateral damage of incarceration. As such, mothers frequently figure in the broadcasts, typically describing the agonies they experience waiting for their child’s return. Thus, the mother of Alexander, the subject of one programme, reassures him on air that ‘I will be standing by you’ but she also describes how she returns unwell from every visit she makes to his correctional colony. Visitation has, in fact, become a criterion against which love and commitment to an offender can be judged and, as such, it can be used as a tool for criticism. We saw in an earlier chapter how Lyuba is disappointed Daniel’s

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relatives have not visited him in prison and Rita is shocked that members of her ‘new family’, relatives of her husband, do not visit him. Visiting is one of the issues that exposes fault lines in the relationships between the different women involved in supporting prisoners. Just as Paulina Gueble´ criticised her lover’s mother for putting social standing above loyalty for the Decembrist Annenkov, today’s visitors to prison chat rooms contain adverse comment about mothers who fail to take an active role in supporting the prisoner. The reality is that in many cases mothers’ involvement in their sons’ and daughters’ carceral experiences goes well beyond hand wringing and standing at the gate, as it did during the Soviet period when mothers were expected by the Stalinist state to send parcels to their children in the gulag.21 We saw above that Tat’yana Stepanovna attended her grandson’s court appearance and that she was not afraid to make her view of the proceedings known. Her age allows her to vent anger at the system that has taken her grandson from her in a way that a younger woman, with more to lose, might be cautious about doing. Reports of mothers lobbying to right wrongs their sons are suffering in prison appear on the web including copies of letters complaining about ‘slave labour’ and the denial of medicines, many addressed to human rights ombudsmen. But there are also letters, most often appearing on official websites, thanking the prison authorities for their interventions, such as the one below reported by Prison Service press bureau: The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation has received this communication from a resident of Kursk oblast’ in which she, as the mother of a prisoner, thanks the administration of correctional colony number three of the Kursk regional penal authority. ’I want to thank the administration of IK 3 in Kursk region. I took away the most favourable impression from a visit to my son. The living conditions were very good and everywhere was clean, neat and warm. It pleased me that the relationship of the authorities with the prisoners and their relatives was very good. Special thanks are needed for the fact that my son has work to do: it is always better for someone to be occupied than to be idle. He has the possibility to continue his education: my son has received an electrician’s qualification. At the present time he is training to be a crane operator. Even greater thanks are due for having given my son the possibility to add to his higher education and to obtain a Masters degree in economics. Thank you for the attention you give to convicts and their relatives. Tamara Petrovna Shukova, mother of a prisoner.22 The history of the use and abuse of such public endorsements in the USSR might, understandably, result in such reports being regarded with scepticism, but

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like their counterparts in the West, prisoners’ relatives in Russia can look to the interventions of prison authorities to help them solve problematic behaviours on the part of a family member. We have discussed this already in Chapter 2. These stories of grateful mothers are outnumbered, however, by the reports that appear on prisoner-support web sites that describe mothers’ experiences of the harsher side of penal power as in the posting we reproduce below: What’s most humiliating for mothers is to have to carry these heavy bags and stand in these dreadful queues. Horrific. And if a mother goes on a long visit, I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but one friend told me how his mother had to provide the authorities with a gynaecological certificate [that she was free of sexually communicable diseases]. Of course, in our country everything is possible, that a son and mother (pause) this is just beyond the pale.23 Fatima, the mother of Khalil serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence for drugrelated offences, in many respects embodies the complexities that the twentyfirst-century prisoner’s mother faces as she struggles to come to terms with her son’s offending, a corrupt criminal-justice system and the changing expectations society has of her role.

Fatima’s Story Fatima was one of the Soviet workers who responded to the recruitment drive under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s to provide labour and settlers in the North. This drive, which came in the wake of the ‘dismantling’ of the gulag and the restoration of the civil rights of exiles, sought to replace convict by free labour in order to continue the economic development and settlement of resource rich peripheries. Fatima had been born in the Volga region where there are large enclaves of Muslim Tatar and Bashkir populations. She married when she was young and soon after gave birth to her only child, a son. Together, the family moved to the north of the Komi republic in sub-Arctic European Russia. Like other workers recruited to the North, Fatima’s family benefited from a variety of ‘Northern coefficients’ to encourage permanent settlement; long holidays, lower retirement ages than elsewhere in the USSR and wage supplements. In Soviet terms, the family lived quite comfortably. She worked for twenty-nine years in Komi, first on a building site then in a bread combine. She retired aged fifty and moved back to the Volga region where she now lives. Fatima believes herself to be well off compared with other pensioners and to be fortunate in her old age (though she was only 59 when interviewed). Like many who spent their working life in the Soviet system, Fatima is nostalgic about certain aspects of the past. She felt that her labour was always valued and she talks with pride about the

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contribution she made to northern development. Yet, at the same time she acknowledges that her commitment to socialist construction might be responsible for the current blot on what would otherwise be a contented old age. This is the fact that Khalil is serving a second sentence in a correctional colony on the Yamalo-Nenets peninsular in the West Siberian Arctic nearly three thousand kilometres from where Fatima lives. Khalil was in the first grade at school when his parents moved north. After finishing secondary school he acquired a range of different skills in local further education establishments training in turn as a cook, mechanic and driver before being conscripted into the navy, where he was set to work in the kitchens of one of the naval bases of the Northern Fleet. He was still a conscript when he was first arrested, for a seemingly trivial offence of breaking into the food store to help himself to food. He was given a suspended sentence for this offence. Fatima says the family did not take this as a warning of trouble ahead and interpreted the offence to be nothing more than ‘four hungry lads wanting something to eat’. Ejected from the navy, Khalil returned home to his parents but was soon rearrested, this time for joy-riding. The violation of the conditions of his license and the new offence landed him a three-year sentence in a correctional colony. He served this in the Komi republic and though it was distant, it was not so remote that Fatima could not occasionally visit. Khalil was released in 2000. Now in his middle twenties with a wife and her child from a previous relationship, Khalil returned home to live in with his parents. Fatima welcomed her son and his family and made room for them in their two-bedroom flat. Her husband, however, did not approve of Khalil’s wife and when Fatima refused to turn them away, he left. Fatima does not comment about her husband’s desertion, but it clearly surprised her. The birth of a girl to the young couple sealed her decision to put the young family first. Henceforth, she saw her role as assisting Khalil and Valya to make a life for themselves and the two children. She says she was determined to suppress the reservations she had about her daughter-in-law. Everything seemed to Fatima to be going well at this point, son and daughter-in-law were working and she had a granddaughter to love. Then the appearance of an older relative disturbed the equilibrium. In a classic example of blaming ‘external forces’ for initiating socially deviant behaviours that we discuss in Chapter 2, Fatima describes how this relative persuaded Khalil to work with him as an ‘undercover informant’ in Narkokontrol’.24 This is the Russian Federation’s drugs control agency charged with the task of routing out drugs dealers but with a reputation for corruption and links with organised crime. Fatima says that she did not have suspicions about this invitation or what the job would involve and encouraged Khalil to accept. As Fatima’s narrative progress it becomes clear that if he was not already, in the months that followed joining the drugs squad Khalil was pulled ever deeper into the murky world of police corruption, drug dealing, addiction and informing. This

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Figure 6.3 Set lunches. This is a notice encouraging relatives to order meals for their relative within. It reads: ‘Order set and supplementary meals in this remand prison. Healthy and good quality food. Good eating keeps people healthy: grilled chicken, baked products; pelmeni, pilaf, hallal. Your prisoners receive the order by lunchtime. Pay by credit card via the internet.’

is the world that in the twenty-five years since the Soviet Union’s collapse has circulated ever increasing numbers of young men and women through the carceral system for drugs-related offences. Fatima did not understand this world or if she did initially closed her eyes to danger signs in her son and his wife’s behaviour. For example, she says that she noticed that Valya had puncture marks on her arms but accepted Khalil’s reassurance that his wife did not do drugs and she did not read anything troubling into Khalil’s frequent absences. The truth that her own son was a heroin addict and that she had long since ‘lost him’ in Fatima’s narrative account, came quite suddenly when one night she found him in her apartment’s stairwell suffering from a drugs overdose. She talks movingly of the trauma of holding her ‘dying’ son in her arms. Khalil, in fact, did not die but from this point events spiralled out of control. Khalil told Fatima that he was being pursued, alternately, by ‘colleagues’ in Narkokontrol, the police and drug bandits. It was the police that caught up with him when he was involved in an attempted break in of an apartment. He was taken into custody for three months, whilst his case was investigated. He was finally charged with drugs offences when Fatima knowing that Khalil had hidden psychedelic drugs in the apartment, took the step of taking these to the police.

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Reflecting on this action now, she excuses herself by saying that she did not understand the law and what the consequences would be for her son. But she blames herself for sentencing her son to prison: ‘None of us know the law. Well, I didn’t. So with my own hands I condemned my son to prison.’ Khalil was given a five-and-a-half-year suspended sentence, a surprisingly mild punishment for a drug related offence, but as on the previous occasion, the suspension did not last long. Accused by a neighbour of stealing his mobile phone (which Fatima insists was a set up), Khalil was immediately taken into custody. He served the first eighteen months of his sentence in the Volga region but then at his own request (because he claimed to be under threat from local drugs barons) he was sent further afield. He was transferred to an ‘open prison’ in the Arctic. Fatima has thus had experience of her son being in jail twice. She interprets her maternal duty as ensuring his physical survival and supporting his young family. Where the first is concerned, Fatima tells us that she keeps a monthly flow of parcels to Khalil in his colony. She acknowledges that parcel-sending would be a great burden on her as a pensioner, were it not that she had been befriended by Azeri women in the local market who make up parcels to send to her son. They do this in return for her helping them with all the paper work they need to live and work in Russia. She is vague about the precise nature of the deal she has negotiated with them: And then they said to me, ‘Fatima don’t be silly, we are just frightened for you, you have a child [granddaughter] to take care of.’ So I’ve never had to buy anything. Each time they give me six to seven thousand roubles-worth [of produce]. And I help them, with registration documents. But you have to understand these people, how I as a woman have to keep them at a distance, a metre away. It’s best not to allow them to get too close and it’s important not to offend them by swearing. You know they won’t even drink a spoonful of wine, and vodka is absolutely forbidden and they really respect women. I am a respected woman to them. Fatima has faced challenges in keeping her son’s family intact because of the increasingly erratic behaviour, as she describes it, of her daughter-in-law. From the time of Khalil’s arrest Valya began to have bouts of drunkenness, long absences and to neglect her two children, but she could not be persuaded to visit her husband. Fatima found herself taking on full-time childcare duties. All the while, she says, she kept these problems from her son as she tried to fulfil her role of mater familias: I tried to persuade her, I was almost on my knees begging. ‘Look’ I said, ‘come with me just once to see him.’ And she says, ‘I don’t want to, I’m not

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going. It’s not necessary. I’m too ashamed.’ And now her own brother has been sent down. And she said, ‘Mama, I now understand how difficult it’s been for you, I have to phone, my brother’s been imprisoned for murder.’ After eighteen months when Khalil was transferred to Siberia, Valya moved out of the apartment leaving behind her second daughter, Fatima’s grandchild. Fatima, ever good with paper work, applied successfully to become the child’s guardian. Fatima’s guardianship means that in her mind the balance of her care responsibilities has shifted from her son to her grandchild: ‘I have calmed down and made my peace with the situation because of the child. I only think about the child now.’ Whereas when Khalil was serving his first sentence, Fatima visited him frequently, both mother and son have decided that she should not attempt the forty-seven hours journey to his colony in the Arctic. With the help of her Azeri friends she intends to continue sending survival parcels but she confesses that she believes her son will resume his previous life of drugs and criminality when he is released. Because of this, she says, she would prefer him not return to live in her town: I am frightened of everything now. What will he be like? The police are always checking up on anyone who has been in jail. I don’t know if I’ll be able to set him on the right path; I just don’t know, I can’t say. I’m really afraid of it. My only thought now is my grand-daughter’s education, that she finishes school. In her story-telling Fatima reveals how her own identity has been challenged by the choices her son has made: I was a very good worker, and I am not going to pretend I wasn’t a ‘labour veteran.’ All my life I toiled either on a building site or in the bread combine. It was a very hard, hellish labour. But I loved my work. If I was told the work needed to be done and there was nobody to do it, I always volunteered and worked day and night. [but it meant that] I didn’t pay attention to the child. That is my guilt. Though Fatima attributes Khalil’s life choices to deficiencies in her mothering asserting now that ‘a mother should always be alongside her child’, she does not criticise the Soviet state for the double-burden it imposed upon women. Rather, like Tat’yana Stepanovna, she places blame at the door of the post-Soviet changes which, in her view, have created a corrupt criminal-justice system and has neglected its welfare role. During the Soviet period, she insists, the state helped to put offenders back on their feet by providing them with an education, skills and the money needed to survive their re-entry into society. This contrasts with

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today when, she complains, there is no support for the released prisoner. Her encounters with the criminal justice system have left her disillusioned, sickened and angry: It is very difficult, because the child will grow up knowing that more than half the people in the zone with [sentences of] three or four years are there for stealing a bucket of potatoes. But that nothing has happened to those who have stolen millions and [that] if they are punished, they get a suspended sentence or sit like a Baron with a cell to themselves. All these rooms for the privileged have television, all of them. And they can even order in women. I’ve personally been told that by a Chechen. With these words Fatima articulates a thought that runs through the narratives of all the relatives of prisoners regardless of family position. It is one of the common strategies employed in prisoners’ relatives’ story-telling to neutralise the offending behaviour of their loved one. But in both Fatima’s and Tat’yana’s telling of the prisoner’s mother story, there is palpable anger at the injustices that have accompanied the extraordinary pace of social change since 1991. Khalil’s offending, in Fatima’s narrative, came about as a result of his exploitation by the agencies of law enforcement that, as a loyal Soviet citizen, she believed were supposed to protect, not to corrupt. Her anger at prison personnel provides her with an additional defence against outsiders who would accuse her of falling down on her maternal role: Fatima:

I don’t have the possibility [of visiting] and anyway I don’t want to look at all these screws and military personnel. Interviewer: And if he were in a nearer colony, would you visit him? Fatima: No. Because I just can’t stay calm when I see them. If I see any of them here in my town and if they look at me, I just want to swear at them and do something to them. Even though she does not want her son to return for fear that he has been irreversibly changed by his experiences in prison, in this final extract from her story-telling, we hear Fatima reminding the people who are tormenting her son of the recurring tragedy of Russia’s mothers: Fatima:

I was walking along and crying and a young policeman said, ‘Auntie Fatima what’s the matter?’ And I say, ‘they have sent my son to prison.’ There were two of them and they just laughed and said, ‘Ha Ha, he’s of no use to anyone now. He’s a zek.’ That’s the police for you.

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Interviewer: How dreadful. Fatima: Yes. That’s exactly what he said. So I replied, ‘Yes, my son is a zek and I am going to wait, crying, for three years and wonder whether he comes out still a human being. The woman who gave birth to you, yes, you screw, policeman, you young man standing before me, she will spend her life crying for you too. Or you for her.’ That’s what I said.

Mothers and their Daughters-In-Law As is the case with prisoners’ wives, there are mothers who walk away from their imprisoned children. Visitors to prisoner websites and women we interviewed had harsh words for women who in their view fall short fulfilling the maternal role. The expectations wives have of their husband’s mother can be high; they are expected to attend court appearances, to visit, send parcels, look after grandchildren and support the daughter-in-law. These expectations owe less to internalisation of the mother of the matreshka ethos whose suffering is stoically and privately endured while she waits for the return of the prodigal son, as to the twenty-first-century practicalities wives face as they struggle to manage the triple burden of work, domestic life and supporting the prisoner. Tat’yana Stepanovna’s son is unusual in the degree of active involvement he has with his own son in prison, but were he not to visit his son or to organise parcel– sending and phone calls, he would not be censured. By contrast, mothers who fail to support to their children have to explain themselves. Old age, infirmity, poverty or the need to look after the offender’s young children are acceptable excuses for failing to visit a son in prison or to despatch the monthly parcel. A prior rupture of family relationships, disapproval of offending behaviours and inability to cope with a wayward offspring, are not. In fact with mothers, just as is the case with prisoners’ partners and wives, the quantity and quality of contacts maintained with an incarcerated child depends, in large measure, on the nature of the relationship that existed before. Factors which inhibit the development of active mother-prisoner interactions include the absence of any meaningful interaction over a period of years prior to imprisonment, an existing fragile family relationship (where arrest and imprisonment precipitate a final split), a history of physical abuse and a chaotic lifestyle where the mother might herself be involved in crime and substance abuse. These factors surfaced in the story-telling of the women we interviewed for this project as explanations for mothers abandoning an imprisoned son. Katya and Gulya reported that their mothers-in-law had lost contact with their sons long before the latter’s incarceration while Valya attributed her mother-in-law’s neglect of the maternal role to selfishness and alcoholism. Wives’ talk and chatter on the internet also contains an undercurrent of blame for the original offending (the mother has over-indulged the son or,

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Figure 6.4 Making an order. In the major cities the Prison Service has set up an online system that relatives can use to order food for their family member within. These two women are placing orders in a Moscow remand prison.

alternatively, neglected him) and of competitiveness (a wife insisting that it is she, not her mother-in-law who gives most support to the man inside). The mother can also be accused of grasping the opportunity of a son’s imprisonment to drive a wedge between the prisoner and his partner. Some sense of the complexity of the relationship between mother and her son’s partner is conveyed in the extracts below from the interviews. Valya, for example, accuses her mother-in-law of trying to get money off her:

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Then what really annoyed me was that she said, ‘You know Sergei sent me 4000 roubles so I could visit him, but Oleg hasn’t sent me any money. It seems he doesn’t need his mother.’ I got really cross and said, ‘What do you want? That I give him money so he can send it to you? So, you want to tear bread from the hand of wives and give it to the mothers to enjoy. Looked at another way, if you want to visit your children, if you really want to do that and bearing in mind that you don’t earn much, how about every month putting 100 roubles aside so you save up enough to visit?’ The point is she only lives seventy kilometres away from the colony. But I have to go 1,300 kilometres [. . .] All she’d have to spend on the journey is 150 roubles on the f***ing minibus. Gulya uses the stereotype of the mother grieving for her imprisoned son to contrast the role of the wife who has to remain grounded in her relationship with the prisoner with the mother figure who has little of practical value to contribute. Here she addresses her comments to a hypothetical prisoner pitying his mother in the typical prison chanson: You can understand her sadness. It’s instinct, normal, something quite different [from what wives’ experience]. But for us, we can’t be sad. Only the mothers can pity you: ‘Poor boy, unfortunate’. Stop, I am not your mother. I am not your mother, however much I love you. For their part, mothers of prisoners do not hold back on their criticisms of their daughters-in-law. We saw Fatima had a difficult relationship with her daughter-in-law and Tat’yana Stepanovna blamed her son’s wife for Andrei going off the rails. The difficulties of the prisoner’s mother/daughter-in-law relationship surface in some of our women’s narratives. There are stories of harmonious relationships where mother and daughter-in-law pull together to support the prisoner but, as we have already observed, the architecture of punishment in Russia has great potential to divide and to cause tension to surface where previously there was none. One source of tension is if both mother and wife want to make a long visit to see the prisoner. The limited entitlement to residential visits and availability of rooms means that the women have to negotiate how to manage the different expectations. We learned of different strategies that can be employed; visits can be rotated between mother and wife, the two can start the visit together but the mother leave after the first night to give the couple an opportunity for intimacy, or a mother can accompany her daughter-in-law on the train or by car to the colony to help out with all the bags but not take part herself in the visit. Then there is the decision of who should accompany children if the family decides that they should visit. According to Lyuba some prisoners ask their mothers not to

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visit, so their wives can take up all the visiting entitlements, which can be experienced as hurtful by mothers. The relationship between a mother and her son’s zaochnitsa is especially fraught with potential difficulties as it can involve a realignment of the tasks and established patterns of support in a family. There are elements of frustration in Natal’ya’s description of her future mother-in-law’s involvement in the development of her relationship with a prisoner. Her first face-to-face meeting with the man who had been courting her on the telephone took place in the presence of his mother. She gives some sense of the complex emotions both women must have felt on this occasion: Was she [his mother] pleased? I wouldn’t say that she was overjoyed that her son was marrying. She said to me ‘Think about it carefully, do you really need this? He’s still got a long time to serve.’ I answer ‘Yeah, it seems like that.’ He had another six years to do as he’d only completed one so far. She came with me to the registry office to fill in the forms to marry and then a week, or maybe two, later we went together to an open day in the colony. This was the first time I’d seen him. But, of course, with his mother there and the two of us, it wasn’t very comfortable. None of us was comfortable; nobody really could properly speak to one another. But, of course, he paid more attention to me than to his mother. She noticed this and didn’t like it but it was understandable. Then a month later there was another event, his detachment day, there in his barracks [. . .] and again I went with his mother. The third time I saw him (laughing) was when we got married. We do not, unfortunately, have Natal’ya’s mother-in-law’s view of these triangular meetings but it is possible to imagine a counter discourse that would stress the legitimate right of a mother to monitor a potentially unstable relationship that might end in hurt for her son. The fact is, of course, that every family is different and this is reflected in presences and absences in the queues that line up outside the passport control point at correctional colonies. When talking about prisoners’ mothers the dominant picture to emerge from the talk of all the interviewed women was of the heavily laden middle-aged and old women lining up to visit their sons or daughters at the colony gates. Lena, whom we shall meet in the next chapter, describes the ‘distraught’ mothers visiting their daughters in the correctional colony in Mordoviya: So distraught mothers come; it’s become a way of life for them, that’s how it’s turned out. Some are already very old. Last time I went, there was a 70-year old who’d brought a child with her to see her daughter.

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Katya asked which parent visited children in colonies most often, elaborated her response that it is mothers by reference to their special qualities: Katya:

Well, Yes, mothers, it’s mainly mothers. Who helps their children here more, mothers or fathers? Like in life generally. So it’s the mothers who journey there, not the fathers, which is understandable [. . .] Especially Russian mothers, I mean to say that it is in our mentality. It seems to me that unlike others, we Russians are much kinder.

CHAPTER 7 DAUGHTERS

The children of prisoners, for some reason, is a question that nobody wants to acknowledge, understand, talk about or solve. (Larisa Petrovna, the grandmother of prisoner’s child, 2012) One of the popular topics that concern the people who contribute to prisonerrelatives’ chat rooms is whether it is right for a woman whose partner is serving a prison sentence to have a child by him. Opinions are sharply divided. Some contributors insist that it is a selfish act; bringing a child into the world whose father is a zek is to cast ‘a cloud over its childhood’ and condemn it to a life of poverty, discrimination and the absence of paternal love. The counter arguments turn on the woman’s right to motherhood and the beneficial role a child can play in rehabilitation by cementing the prisoner’s relationship with the mother. These differences in opinion about the arrival of a new baby raise more general questions about how children fit into the transformations that imprisonment forces upon families. The issues are different according to whether the child is a minor (in Russia, under the age of fourteen), a teenager or an adult and whether it is the mother or father who is incarcerated or both parents. There is an abundance of research in Western jurisdictions which demonstrates the negative impact and long term consequences on a child’s physical and psychological development of a parent’s incarceration. Much of this literature focuses on the appropriate policy responses.1 There is little research that examines the imprisonment of a parent through the child’s eyes, because of the ethical issues that interviewing minors involve. Nonetheless there have been some studies, largely of teenagers.2 There is almost no literature on adults with incarcerated parents. In contrast to the Western scholarship, prisoners’ children have not been systematically studied in Russia and they tend to be treated in the more general literature on the policy and practices surrounding children taken into care.3 Questions about the impact of a parent’s incarceration on children, teenagers and young adults who are not institutionalised appears to have been

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ignored as a topic of academic research and it has been left up to NGOS and foreign researchers to raise the issue.4 The majority of the women interviewed for this project were mothers. They include those whose babies had already been born when the father was incarcerated and those who conceived and bore a child when the father was already in prison. There are also mothers of teenagers and adult children fathered by another partner; paternal grandmothers (like Fatima and Tat’yana Stepanovna whom we met in the previous chapter) and maternal grandmothers and stepmothers. We were unable for ethical reasons to interview minors, so we are relying on the views of their carers to tell us about the impact on young children of the parent’s imprisonment. This has all the disadvantages of being a second hand account given by an interested party, but the mothers’ talk about their children can give valuable insight into the reasoning behind decisions made about the child’s care and the degree and nature of involvement with the imprisoned parent. Among the women there are also those who have personal experience of being the child of a prisoner. Below we meet Anna, whose father’s imprisonment spanned the greater part of her childhood and the transition to her teenage years and Lena who was already in her late teens when her mother was arrested and imprisoned. Like all the children of prisoners, Anna and Larisa can be understood as ‘collateral damage’ of their parents’ offending and the state’s punitive response to this. More than others, prisoners’ children in Russia culture are constructed as innocent victims and, as such, they also are stripped of agency. We will see how in neither Anna’s nor Lena’s case is the latter an apt description of how they responded to their parent’s incarceration. As with the other women we have considered in this book, we begin the story of prisoners’ children in the nineteenth century with the Decembrists.

The Tragedy of the Decembrist Children and their Soviet Successors We have already observed that one of the conditions imposed on the women who wished to follow their husbands to Siberia after the Decembrist uprising was that they had to leave their children behind. For some, the price was too high. Of the twenty-three officers’ wives, half did not follow their husbands, but their stories have yet to be told. We know that Anastasiya Vasil’evna Yakushkina did not go, apparently on her husband’s urging, because of their two young sons. She joined him some years later. The explanation for leaving their children of those who went was that their husband’s need was greater than their child’s and had they been allowed to take them, none in any case would have wanted to subject a child to the hazardous journey into exile and the rigours of life in Nerchinsk or Chita. In total, thirteen children were left behind in St Petersburg and Moscow. Some died. Mariya Volkonskaya’s son was neglected by the family with which he

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was left and died aged two. Those who survived to adulthood knew their parents only from history books. An exception was Evgenii Yakushkin, Anastasiya’s son, who, aged twenty-seven, met his father for the first time on a work trip to Siberia. The children born in exile did not fare well, twenty-two dying in childhood. The parents of survivors had to face the decision, some for the second time in their marriage, about whether to part with their children by sending them back to European Russia for an education. This became possible because of the intervention of the future tsar, Alexander II, who following a meeting with the Decembrists in Siberia, persuaded his father to allow the children to be educated in the prestigious Imperial College at Tsarskoe Selo or the Smol’nyi Institute in St Petersburg. Only one family took up this offer. Mariya Volkonskaya’s husband quoted extreme distance and the suffering the separation would cause his wife as his reason for declining the offer for his seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter.5 The condition that was attached to the invitation was that the children would have to relinquish their father’s name. Nikita Murav’ev in keeping his daughter with him pointed to the slur on his wife’s memory the renunciation of the family name would cause: Fully recognizing the kindness of heart of His Imperial Majesty and the thoughtful memory of the Heir Apparent,’ wrote Murav’ev, ‘I must in the name of my young daughter decline the favour. Accepting it would cast an aspersion on the memory of a wonderful mother and devoted wife.6 In fact, Murav’ev’s daughter did eventually enter the Smol’nyi institute after her father’s death and became a favourite of the Empress Alexandra. Despite being deprived of her father’s name her parentage was well-known. When the Empress urged the girl to think of her as her mother, ‘Nonushka’ is said to have replied, ‘I am sorry, I only have one mother, and she is buried by the prison stockade in Siberia.’7 There are elements of what happened to the children of the Decembrists that pre-vision the fate of prisoners’ children in the two centuries that followed. Collectivisation, the Stalin Terror, the gulag, the Second World War and postStalin repression and the demographic and economic crisis that followed the USSR’s collapse created orphans in abundance. The Stalin years, in particular, began the close relationship of Soviet children with the prison system. It also bequeathed to the Russian Federation a network of hundreds of thousands of children’s homes and a discourse that the state knows more about child-rearing than parents. Historians of the gulag have written of the fate of children who were taken into state care homes when their parents were arrested or who, born to women in the gulag, were destined to spend their childhood in a succession of penal and state institutions.8 The fortunate children were those who had relatives prepared to take them on and to give them a family life when their

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parents were repressed, but it was often a precarious existence. Soviet ideology produced a contrary image. The USSR was a ‘country of happy childhood’ (strana schastlivogo detstva). This was celebrated in the 1935 ‘Song of Soviet School Children’ which contained the lines composed by V. M. Gusev, ‘for our happy children, we thank our mother country’. The words were adapted in the following year’s Red Square Parade in a slogan: ‘Thank you comrade Stalin for our happy childhood’, which then was reproduced in countless pictures and cultural productions. Historians have drawn attention to the discrepancy between the thrillingly captivating image of childhood in the 1930s and the real needs of the children often neglected or victimised by the state.9 The mobilisation of female labour in the name of women’s emancipation and to ensure the fulfilment of the state’s industrial ambitions suppressed the emergence in the USSR of the gendered division of labour that was characteristic, for the middle classes at least, in post-War Europe and the USA. The ‘full-time mother’ who stayed at home and reared children with a breadwinner husband was a rarity in the USSR where wage levels were based on both parents working. Much child-rearing was transferred to state nurseries (detskie yasli) and kindergartens (detskie sady) or, in the absence of sufficient places, to other family members. During the Soviet period, child-rearing was shared between family members and the state. The appellation of tetya (auntie) to any adult woman in Russia indicates the broad societal view that all women belong to a child’s extended family; a child was not the exclusive responsibility of the biological parents, or more accurately, the biological mother. Grandmothers played a particularly large role in child rearing, enabled by the early retirement age for woman. A normal pattern was for pre-school children to spend the greater part of their time with their grandmothers and/or in a state nursery, the mother’s input limited by her work, domestic and collective commitments. The oppressive double burden was immortalised in Yuliya Voznesenskaya’s, The Women’s Decameron, which describes the round of work and domestic tasks that, without the benefit of a well-developed service sector, bore down on Soviet women.10 The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s and the subsequent demise of the USSR re-set the expectations that state and society had of women. Woman’s role as worker was downgraded, her domestic role elevated and the stay-at-home mother made an appearance among the Russian ‘new rich’. Most women still work in post-Soviet Russia but a widening wage gap between women and men has steadily reduced the contribution, proportionally, women make to the household budget. This, combined with cutbacks in social expenditure resulting in the closure of nurseries and the substitution of universal by targeted and means-tested family support, has reinforced the traditional reliance of Russian mothers, especially at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, on help in child rearing from their relatives.

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It is against the backdrop of these changes that decisions about how to manage the children of men and women taken into custody are made. The default position is for family networks to be called upon to provide support. Women whose husbands have been given a prison sentence may find that they have to give up their autonomy and move in with their mother or mother-in-law in order to work the longer hours they need to support their family. Prisoners who are the registered fathers of minors are required to pay towards the up keep of their children under fourteen years of age from their earnings in prison production, but net earnings for prison labour are low after various deductions are made by colony and recovery rates are notoriously poor. In any event, the lack of available work means that the contribution incarcerated men can make is usually insignificant. The financial support available from the state to a woman bringing up a child on her own is also limited, which can discourage a prisoner’s family from subjecting itself to the burden of the bureaucracy, inspections from the social services and degrading treatment associated with applying for welfare payments. Single-parent families make up a large section of the 30 per cent of the population of the Russian Federation under the poverty line. As a marginal group, many prisoners’ families must be included. Among the women we interviewed who had young children, most were determined that the child maintain some degree of contact with the incarcerated parent, but this rarely translated into regular patterns of visiting. Rather, the caregiver whoever she was, acted as the conduit for, and censor of, information passing between the absent parent and the child. As in other jurisdictions, there are multiple explanations for why women in Russia are reluctant to take children to visit an imprisoned parent. These include protecting the child from the prison environment, a desire to conceal the fate of the parent to avoid playground bullying, logistical difficulties accessing penal facilities, previous bad experiences of visiting and a history of abuse.11 The management of the children by prisoners’ families is underpinned by the deeply embedded cultural convictions about parental roles. Involvement in childrearing has traditionally not been a part of the construction of masculinity in Russia, although men have begun to emerge who take a more active role in childrearing. Most, though, are content to leave day-to-day childcare to women.12 Fatherhood is still understood as conditional upon the man performing a protective and supportive role. In the twenty-first century this mainly casts men as the main breadwinner, although the ‘fallen heroes’ of Rebecca Kay’s study of masculinities, have relinquished this role to women. Imprisonment, as we have observed, undermines the ability of most men to fulfil the role of breadwinner (the exception being the sub-cultural elite) but its affect ¨ jdestrand found in a study of homelessness in is even more pernicious. Tova Ho Russia that the men living at railway stations and in apartment block stairwells feel able to ‘let go’ of their children, even though the abandonment of the child

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can fill him with sadness.13 So, too, geographical distance and the spoiled place of the prison conspire to encourage men prisoners also to ‘let go’. This did not happen in Anna’s case, but her story shows that maintaining contact between prisoner and child requires an exceptional degree of dedication and determination on the part of both parties.

Anna’s Story Anna’s family belongs to Russia’s emergent middle class of the late 1990s. Her father, a professional, worked to support the family and her mother stayed at home to rear their two daughters who were born either side of the cusp separating the Russia of the Soviet Union from the Russia of the ‘transition’. Until the age of nine, Anna lived the typical life of a member of the intelligentsia; she attended the local school, where she was top of her class, and at weekends she enjoyed going on expeditions with her father. Her memories of her father when she was very young are of idyllic weekends when he would set a treasure hunt or take his two daughters to an historic site where he would tell them all about Russia’s history: [B]efore this moment, our life was very interesting. Our father tried to show us interesting things, take us to different places, historical places for example. He gave us a lot of information about Russian history, about different objects, simple fairy tales. Then he invented games for us, like treasure hunts when we had to find something he had hidden in the town. This idyll came to an end when Anna returned from school one day to find the door of their apartment opened by a man she did not know, who told her to go and sit in the kitchen. Her mother reassured her that everything was alright and asked Anna to sit quietly and read. Telling her story twelve years later, Anna recalls that she sensed that something was badly wrong, although she could not guess what. Her father, who should have left for a business trip that day, wasn’t in the flat but the suitcase he had packed was still there. All his papers had been pulled off the shelves and were on the floor. What agitated Anna most was that she was prevented from going to her weekly sports class. It was late into the evening before the men left. It was then that she learned that father had been taken to the police station but her mother reassured her that he would soon be back. Anna accepted this reassurance and went off to bed. Defending herself now against the possible charge of naivete´ (though she was only nine at the time), she says the whole family initially assumed that everything would soon be sorted out: My father himself [told my mother] ‘It’s a mistake, it’ll soon be sorted out.’ And, at first, we believed that it would, indeed, be sorted out. I remember that the first night I even asked Mum to wake me when Papa comes home.

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Her father’s imprisonment spanned the whole period of Anna’s late childhood and teenage years. At the time we interviewed her, she was taking a year out of her studies for a biology degree at Moscow State University. Our talk roamed over what Anna remembered about the days, months and years after her father’s arrest, how she experienced returning to school, the visits she made to her father in the remand prison and correctional colonies in a remote part of Russia and his release. Inevitably, Anna’s childhood recollections are the interpretations she has brought to them as she has grown older. In her talk, she is keen that we understand her agency in adapting to her father’s imprisonment, though she acknowledges that there were moments of unwelcome intrusion of events connected with her father that upset the equilibrium she worked hard to achieve. The early years when her father was undergoing investigation and trials were particularly difficult; ‘I thought that it isn’t my real life. It was a half-life. As if what was happening was not real. So, I was just waiting all the time for this period to end so that real life could start again.’ Initially, not very many changed in Anna’s normal routine. She and her sister were kept at home for the week but when she returned to school after a week she did not encounter any problems. It was only later as she moved up through her school and there was publicity about the trial, that she recalls being the target of name-calling and finger-pointing. She also believes that one teacher, with whom she didn’t get on, gave her low marks because of her father. But Anna is determined to show that she had the resources to fight back. She observes that both classmates and teachers ‘needed’ her; the former to do their homework for them and the latter because she was a star pupil who represented her school in regional ‘Olympiads’. Nevertheless, by the time she reached the fifth or sixth grade she moved class so that she could be among children who did not know her history. Anna does not tell at whose instigation this was or whether it was prompted by a particular event but she says it led to an improvement, as her new classmates though ‘not friends, were kind’. Anna does not say much about what home life was like during these early school years. She recalls that her mother and grandparents were very preoccupied with the course of the police investigation into her father’s ‘crime’ and that her mother was very sad most of the time and often in tears: It was dreadful, of course, because she started fainting. Without any reason. So that’s when I realised that I was the first line of support. I had all the time to do work about the house; we had two dogs that needed walking [. . .] because Mum was unable to. According to Anna, her mother’s life stopped when Anna’s father was arrested. Her mother, Anna tells us, lived only ‘from letter to letter’. Anna believes that she personally was less affected by her father’s imprisonment than her mother and grandparents because she was determined to keep busy:

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At first, I went in for sports, then I was a pupil of art school, I learned English, then I started taking part in different scientific conferences. I started my scientific work; it was a really serious scientific work about the human heart, in a real scientific institute. She admits that at time she felt a little guilty about having fun but believes it was the better ‘to go on living’. Anna successfully graduated from school and, after some false starts which she does not elaborate upon, she entered higher education gaining a place at the prestigious Moscow State University. This involved her moving away from her home town and put distance between her and the community that knew about her father. At university, she continued to pursue her strategy of filling her life with studying and various extra-curricular activities and kept her father’s imprisonment secret. In talking about her life as school pupil and university student Anna’s narrative is about keeping busy, developing educational capital and self-reliance. Some of the same themes surface in how she describes the ‘other half’ of her life. This is the life with her father that she kept secret from her peers. For over a decade, father and daughter kept up a correspondence that, in Anna’s way of telling it, was a continuation of those idyllic weekend outings she had been on as a young child: He’d write to us a lot. He’d send us stories. As we were very small girls, he’d choose the things that would interest us. We called them Pashkino, papina shkola interesnogo obucheniya [Daddy’s school of interesting things to study]. In these letters he told us all about ships, about flags, the streets of his city and so on. Anna’s parallel ‘schooling’ continued through her teenage years, and as she grew older, she increasingly got to set the agenda for what to discuss. The narrative she constructs is of a very special relationship, based on an on-going dialogue about ‘matters of importance’. But it was a relationship that she found she had to defend from intrusions of the outside world. Never was this more the case than on the visits she made to her father in prison. In total, Anna was taken on four visits to her father; two short (when he was on remand and Anna was still a child) and two long visits (when she was already a teenager). On the long visits she was accompanied sequentially by her mother and grandmother. Anna’s talk reveals that these longer visits did not live up to her expectations: I was very glad to see him. The first time I went with my mother and we tried to talk [. . .] we didn’t want to talk about practical matters but about books, life, and other things. But my grandmother with whom I went the

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second time only talked about practicalities and my father’s problems. I thought that it wasn’t very helpful for him and any way, they could explain and discuss all those sort of things in letters. And, yes, when I went with my mother, we [also] spent an hour talking about all his problems and practical questions and we had to write down everything he needed so we didn’t forget. But then, after that, we tried to make it more like it used to be at home. She is convinced that intellectual diversion was of greater value to her father than the everyday problems that preoccupied the adults close to him: ‘I think that a prisoner is very tired of this grey life and he needs a little distraction, something like a little ray of sunshine, I think. It’s better than talking about problems all the time.’ Her irritation with the adult preoccupation with the material; with medicines, food parcels and administrative practicalities, surfaces recurrently in her narrative. If Anna goes to lengths to demonstrate the exceptional nature of the relationship with her imprisoned father compared with other family members, she also makes a point of distancing her family from those of other prisoners. She explains how the guards when checking their belongings were surprised by what the family had brought for their visit: We were different because all the people visiting other prisoners would turn up with a lot of food. Food, food and only food. Although I visited only twice, my mother went many times and the guards looking through our bags were always very surprised by what we’d bring. Things to make the place like home for three days; toys, my sister’s bear, pictures my sister and I had painted, table-cloths, napkins, things like pillows little pillows. All the things that would make the place like home. But everyone else just brought a lot of food. It is not surprising, perhaps, that Anna’s talk only peripherally deals with the practicalities of visitation but she certainly noticed her surroundings and comments on the oppression she felt when she visited. She comments on the fact that the view from the visiting room was blocked by another building and the guards were rude. She insists that she felt sympathy for the guards because they were compelled to do such demeaning work. Anna describes herself as private and self-contained. She has never had close friends and says she does not like unexpected changes in her life. She does not attribute these traits to the experiences she has had as a prisoner’s daughter. However, she admits that her decision not to share her experiences with her peers meant that she has not had a confidante with whom she could share the stress that her ‘double-life’ caused her. But in Anna’s narrative, her mother is too

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distressed to provide support and reassurance, her grandparents overpreoccupied with fighting their son’s case and making sure he had what he needed in jail and her sister too young and angry to be of help. She believes that the experience of her father’s incarceration changed her and has made her a stronger and a more self-reliant person. Her task now, as she tells us, is to persuade her father that she is no longer a little girl. By now also she has provided herself with an analytic frame for understanding the events that cast a shadow over her growing up. It is the familiar one of Russia’s troubled history of political repression, of a country spoiled by corrupt leaders and of a toxic criminal-justice system.

Protecting the Young Child She might be out on a walk with me and see a woman, man and child. She looks, turns and says ‘look grandma that must be the happiest family.’ I ask, ‘Why do you say that?’ and she replies, ‘Well that girl has a mummy and daddy. But my daddy works somewhere a long way away, and my mummy has left me.’ (Fatima, talking about her granddaughter) Anna’s story hints at the loss that children experience when a parent is imprisoned. Another daughter, Lena, whose story we discuss later in the chapter, also make efforts to recreate the mother-daughter relationship across the prison fence. In both cases the prisoners’ daughters were old enough to make their own decisions about the nature and frequency of contact they wished to maintain with their parent. In the case of very young children, agency is much reduced and decision-making lies instead with carers and guardians. It is these children to whom we now turn. The degree of involvement of Anna in her father’s detention when she was young is, in fact, unusual for minors of a parent or parents in custody. The reasons for this are familiar from other jurisdictions; there can be fallings out between carers and the incarcerated parent, over-protection of the child, financial and time constraints and anger.14 Whether an attachment between a child and a parent is actively pursued may also be affected other factors such as the length of sentence, how far away the parent is imprisoned, the nature of the offence, whether it is the child’s father or mother who is in prison and what relation the carer has to the prisoner. Among our respondents who were caring for a prisoner’s child, attitudes and practices varied; at one end of the spectrum, there were women who made exceptional efforts to support the child-parent relationship and, at the other, those who were unable or reluctant to do so. Russia is not unusual in the ‘conspiracy of silence’ that often surrounds a parent in prison. Sometimes this can simply be a question of putting off revealing the truth. One mother explains:

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A child needs to know the difference between right and wrong. It’s too difficult to explain to a child that everything depends on the individual whether he’s imprisoned or not. A criminal, he’s bad. Someone else is good [. . .] how can you explain to a child that his father is in jail, he committed a crime, but that he’s a good man? So for that reason I think it’s best not to take a child there. When he’s older and he can understand then that’s OK. But concealment of the reason for a parent’s absence from home can involve carers in deception. Young children, we learned, can be told that the parent is away on an expedition, doing ‘secret work’, in the armed forces or in hospital. Fatima, whose granddaughter is struck by the happiness of other families, explains that she has concealed the whereabouts of the child’s father: I told her that Daddy works a long way away. There are snowstorms there, you know in the North it’s cold. There are snowstorms, there are no roads. And he lives way up there, where it’s winter all year round. Of course, she’s only little, just in the second class. Later, I suppose she’ll guess. Concealment of the true reason for a parent’s absence from the home can involve carers and parents in elaborate performances. Below a prisoner’s motherin-law explains how her grandson has been told his father is a fighter pilot and has to live on a military base. She describes how the family tries to keep up this deception, even when taking the child to visit the father in prison: And now he’s seven and I am afraid. I don’t know how to explain it to him, how to stop him reading the notices, where we’ve come to. We take toys to play with, books to read, models to make, just to keep him occupied so he doesn’t see the notices and all the uniforms. There are many servicemen there, we say this is a military post, we try so hard [. . .] She goes on to explain that they take clothes so that her son-in-law can change out of his prison uniform before his son sees him but that: He comes in those prison shoes. Everything about him speaks of where he is; if only he [the child] were a bit older. When he grows up he’ll find out all about it, everything will be explained why we live like this. It’s wrong to lie, but whilst he’s young, we protect him from this. There is a lot of anxiety about the possibility of children experiencing bullying. To protect a child, many prefer to tell kindergarten and school that they don’t know who the child’s father is than reveal that he is in prison. More than one of our interview partners commented on their child having been at the receiving end

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of derisive comments, such as, ‘like father, like son’ (raz muzh sidit, kakoi tam dolzhen rebenok byt’’: lit. ‘if the father’s serving time, the offspring’s going to be the same). But the risks associated with the ‘conspiracy of silence’ are also potentially great, as children gradually come to realise that they have been subject to a deception involving all the significant adults in their life. It is not surprising that the evidence we have from our interviews is that children struggle to adapt to the absence of a parent. The women caring for children whose father or mother is in prison reported the characteristic range of behaviours indicative of poor adaptation to the loss. These include angry outbursts, withdrawal, recurrent nightmares (one woman told us that both her granddaughters were frightened of moustachioed because the man who arrested their father had a moustache), difficulty making school friends and intense transferrals of affection to other adult. Larisa Petrovna a retired teacher, whom we shall meet in the next chapter, had encountered many prisoners’ children during her career. She describes how mothers often failed to support their child’s relationship with the father in prison, whilst teachers would respond to a child’s irascible behaviour with aggression and threats such as ‘you wait until your father is released, he’ll sort you out.’ The Russian Federation has a long way to go in putting in place the support networks that are needed to help prisoners’ families develop strategies for dealing with the extraordinarily sensitive question of what, when and how to tell children about the punishment of a parent for wrongdoing. As it is, they are prey to a set of societal prejudices and received-wisdoms about best practice in this regard. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the question of whether to take a child to visit a parent in prison.

‘Prison is No Place for a Child’ There is no consensus in Western research about the impact of prison visitation on the child-parent relationship. Helen Codd has observed that prison visits can provide ‘joy and unhappiness in equal measure’ for both sides.15 Children’s experiences of visiting can be traumatic or frightening because of the environment and security checks, with facilities inadequate to meet their needs. We have already seen that prison visiting is not part of an established routine for prisoners’ families in Russia, which applies even more for children. Visits are not always allowed when prisoners are held on remand and so it can be many months, even a year or two, before a child sees her parent again. The person they now encounter is dressed in a strange uniform, in an unfamiliar place with watch towers, guards in uniforms and barking dogs that may have taken a journey of several days to reach. It is small wonder that prisoners and carers approach the idea of children’s visitation cautiously. In the UK and USA efforts are put into making visiting arrangements childfriendly; prisons have put resources into developing cre`che facilities and play

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areas and there are also extended visits, more flexible scheduling, special housing and activities.16 In all these areas the Russian Federation lags seriously behind. The physical arrangements for visitation very obviously prioritise security and are designed to reflect the needs of the majority adult visitors. Some colonies have experimented with family-centred visiting spaces which have a ‘cafe type’ ambiance for short visits where contact between parent and child may be allowed, but these are the exception. Certainly, the room for short visits one of the authors visited in IK2 Mordoviya, a correctional colony for women prisoners, in 2007 was uncomfortable, cramped and inhospitable; it consisted of four chairs each with a single phone and scratched Perspex screen separating visitor and prisoner. It was difficult to imagine how there could be any quality in the contact small children would have with their parent. The majority of the women we interviewed either ruled the idea of taking a young child on a visit out of court altogether or took them extremely infrequently. One notable exception was Larisa, the widow of a repeat offender, who herself had served a sentence for drug dealing. She believes strongly in children visiting: Let them go and learn a lesson so they never themselves end up in the same bog. When my children were brought to visit me, I said ‘You see where your Mother is? Dear God that you don’t end up in such a place’ [. . .] I also took the children to see my husband. In our family we call a spade a spade. I don’t consider it shameful to do so. If a man makes a mistake, that shouldn’t stick to him for his whole life. You need to help him. Lots of people say you shouldn’t take children with you on a visit because it’s traumatic. I disagree. It’s not traumatic. Lots of young girls say, ‘young children, you shouldn’t take them.’ I disagree; let them know where their Dad or Mum is. I think it’s bad to hide things from children [. . .] in my family we’ve not hidden anything from anyone. The pictures the women we interviewed wove of visiting with children highlighted multiple problems. Children taken on residential visits have to endure long periods of inactivity while documents are checked and searches made, and when they move from controlled space to controlled space they are accompanied by a uniformed officer. For three days they are confined to the visiting hostel with limited possibility of outside play or likelihood of encountering another child. The requirement of relatives on a residential visit to cook for themselves means that a child’s particular dietary requirements can be catered for, but this where the advantages for a child end. In Russia it is rare to encounter playrooms or toy boxes; the best that is on offer is normally a television in a common room shared with other prisoners and their visitors.17

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In the most progressive prisons in the UK, supervised cre`ches have been organised which keep children occupied for the first part of a visit whilst their parent talk and the facilities for conjugal visits in the USA provide separate bedrooms for accompanying children. In Russia, alternative solutions have to be found by parents if they want privacy. The various strategies deployed by parents are the subject of debate, humour and comment on prisoner support websites.18 Most commonly, children are sent to play in the corridor or to the kitchen. Valya describes the problem: Children forget what their father looks like because most mothers, given the choice, will not take them [on a visit] for the simple reason that she needs affection and love too. If she takes them, what’s she to do? Leave them out in the corridor? In that small room it’s fine if the child is one, two or three, but older. What’s she to do, then? Rita describes one solution: If you say that the father needs to connect with the child, bring a child to visit and let them connect. And if you want sex, put the child down to sleep and go into the shower room to do what’s necessary. You are first and foremost parents [. . .] What you mustn’t do is say, ‘run along son into the kitchen, talk to the aunties, maybe someone will give you a chocolate.’ Apart from these specific problems associated with visiting facilities, parents have justifiable concerns about Russia’s penal institutions being unhealthy and dangerous places for children. Olya, who has a 12-year-old son, explains how her partner urged her to leave their child at home: He said, ‘No, don’t, it’s dirty here, you don’t know who’s been in those rooms, he’s a child, impossible to watch over him. He’ll put his dirty hands in his mouth or something like that. Similarly, Gulya’s husband with whom she has two children, both born since he was incarcerated, gave the same advice: No. He’s against it. He says ‘it’s just filth here. You’ll open the door for them [kids] to see all this filth and it’s not good for you either, no way!’ He says this is the sort of place which you should never let children see. In other cases it is the carer, herself, who refuses to bring the child. Natal’ya took her seven-year-old son to visit her new husband but refused to repeat the visit:

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He was in shock because we had to give away our documents, our passports, birth certificates and had to stand for goodness how long outside some building or other, then there were the dogs, the armed guards. Where had I taken him? Yes, through countless numbers of doors and all the time accompanied by a guard. No, of course my child was in shock that first time. Well, I told him [the child] that this is the prison where I brought him to. He hadn’t imagined it would be like that (she laughs). After that he didn’t ask to come with me on a long visit. My husband asked for him to come, but I refused. It is not only the very young who find visits traumatising. The grandmother who accompanied one teenage girl on a 800-kilometre visit to her father described the train journey home, thus: Interviewer: Respondent: Interviewer: Respondent:

So you took her just the once. Was it difficult? Yes it was a very difficult time. And of the return trip did you talk about it? Practically not at all. Because it had been so traumatic for her, she just closed in on herself. But then later she recovered, because for her [. . .] after all, she was with her father. She talks about him, but talking about her visit to prison it was very hard for her. It affected her a lot.

In order to encourage visits, colonies nowadays promote open-days when prisoners can be reunited with their whole family together. Some regional authorities offer these quarterly. The format is the same everywhere; there is a welcoming lecture from the colony head or his deputy in which the regime rules applying for the day are explained, a tour of the correctional facility, the Church, sports hall and canteen which may include an opportunity ‘to taste the food the prisoners eat’, a programme of light entertainment and then, finally, a meeting with the parent over tea. These open days may well demystify the visit for children and reduce tension (although personnel are still in uniforms, all visitors are searched and the lectures and tours are fashioned for adults, not children) but it seems doubtful that such one-off open day visits make much contribution to strengthening the bond with the parent.

Avoiding the Care Organs If the majority of children whose father is taken into prison remain with their mother and/or grandmother, the children of women prisoners are more vulnerable to being taken into state care. In Russia, as elsewhere, women who are given prison sentences frequently are abandoned by their male partners, even if

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Figure 7.1 The fences enclosing the prisoners’ dormitories in a correctional colony in the Republic of Mordoviya. they have children from the union.19 Under the Russian Federation Family Code no distinction is made between children of prisoners and other children where one or both parents are absent and a child is left without a formal guardian.20 In all cases the Organs of Guardianship and Care (OOP: Organ Opeki i Popechitel’stva) that exist in all local authorities are required within thirty days to put in place arrangements for a child’s care by appointing a legal guardian or if there isn’t a suitable person, to take the child into local authority care.21 Although there are fines for local authorities that fail to fulfil their duty in this respect, the evidence is that care organs tend to be re-active where prisoners’ children are concerned, rather than pro-active; they rely on a problem being ¨ jdestrand brought to their attention by an interested party or institution. As Ho observes ‘abandoning a child to an orphanage is regarded in Russia as a serious violation of maternal virtues.’22 Fostering is relatively rare for prisoners’ children, even though the family code recognises the right of every child to family life. There is a common ‘received wisdom’ among care workers that being deprived of family life does not begin to damage a child for the first two years of parental absence, which is a disincentive for the organs to place children with foster parents.23 As the Family Code is clear that being sentenced to prison does not deprive someone of his or her parental rights, adoption of a prisoner’s child is confined to cases when parental rights have been voluntarily surrendered or when these rights were removed prior to

Figure 7.2 The signpost at the entrance to the village of Leplei, the site of three penal colonies in the Republic of Mordoviya founded in the 1930s at the time of the gulag.

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sentencing.24 With a prevailing, but often mistaken view, that the parent’s absence is only temporary, transfer to a state orphanage is the fate of a majority of the children of women prisoners where there are no other family members able or prepared to take on their care. For children taken into care, the issue, as with those who are looked after by relatives, is the frequency and quality of contact with the absent parent. Here the record is bad. A common consequence of a child being taken into state care is that it loses contact with its parent in prison.25 This can be because the child is moved between institutions and the parent loses track of where he or she is or because care homes do not have time to encourage letter writing or taking a child on a visit. Here, geography comes into play again: children are put into orphanages, which can be a long distance from where the parent is imprisoned. Personnel in women’s correctional colonies confirm that a real problem exists in coordination between correctional colonies and the state guardianship and care organs. Given the absence of contact between parent and child, failure of the imprisoned mother to claim a child after release is a self-fulfilling prophecy.26 The threshold for a parent being able to reclaim a child is high; they have to have a place to live and a job and to prove to the Organs over a three to six months period their suitability to resume parenting. The outcome of the assessment can be a prolongation of the period the child is kept in care or the initiation of proceedings to remove parental rights. It is partly because of the fear of losing a child forever most prisoners who have actively been involved with their children prior to their arrest take all possible steps to avoid them being taken into care. For those who have to surrender their child to care organs, the prospects of being reunited with her after release are extremely poor: once a child is taken into care, the likelihood is that it will ¨ jdestrand, the remain in care for the rest of its childhood. Again quoting Ho orphanage system functions a giant recycling unit for homelessness.27 Homeless mothers (many ex-convicts) deposit their children in children’s homes and once out of state care, the teenagers themselves are at risk of becoming homeless.

Lena’s Story Lena was already a young woman of nineteen when her mother was arrested for fraud (moshennichestvo) and sentenced to 6.6 years which she was serving in a correctional colony in Mordoviya. Lena’s story is instructive in relation to the discussion above because it shows her struggling to keep the family intact for her mother’s return. Her story is also interesting for what it shows about the disruption prison causes to the child-parent relationship and the efforts both make to moderate the effects, even when the child is already an adult. Before her mother was arrested, Lena’s life, like Anna’s, had been typical for a member of Russia’s emerging middle class in a small regional capital. The family,

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consisting of four-generations (three children, Lena’s parents, a grandmother and great grandmother and ‘two large dogs’) lived in a house that Lena recalls had an open door to a constant stream of relatives and friends. Her childhood was full of a noise, activity and companionship. She had a close relationship with her mother, who often worked from home and ‘filled the house with song’. The first interruption to this charmed childhood came when Lena was thirteen and her parents split up. She and her two siblings, a boy of seven and girl of three, moved out of the family home with their mother into a rented apartment. It was there four years later, when she was in the first year of law course at the local technical college, that Lena’s life ‘exploded’. The arrest made the front page of the local newspaper and brought to Lena and her siblings an unwelcome notoriety that intensified the trauma of their mother’s absence. The drama of the arrest and of its immediate consequences occupies a prominent place in Lena’s narrative. She was first alerted to the fact that something unusual was happening by a friend who witnessed her mother being bundled into a car by two men. She assumed a kidnap but when the car arrived at the family’s apartment it disgorged policemen who had come to make a search. Lena was forced to wait outside and forbidden to speak to her mother. She describes herself as being in shock, but she had sufficient presence of mind to phone a lawyer. She also arranged for a relative to pick up her young sister from school and to take her to their house in a village. The full implication of her mother’s arrest, she says, hit her the following morning when bail was refused and her mother was transferred to the local remand prison. Lena guessed from the beginning that nothing would be resolved quickly. She was right. Two years on remand and the sentence to a custodial sentence meant that the family was deprived of the mater familias for a period that would span the greater part of Lena’s younger siblings’ school years. Lena’s story is largely a narrative of the battle to keep the ‘sibling’ family intact, to preserve her autonomy and to reproduce the close relationship she had with her mother. The actions she took to achieve these goals, she explains, were contingent responses to the changing situation she found herself in: Any person lives in hope. So at that moment you think, ‘Ok we’ll get a lawyer, he’ll sort it out and she’ll be released.’ Then, when that doesn’t happen and they keep her in prison, you think, ‘we must find another lawyer.’ And then you find [her detention on remand] is extended every two months. Now, they have to eventually release her. They’ve got to, haven’t they? Maybe she’ll get parole, she’s applying for it and so I’m thinking ‘right, what I must do now (pause)’. So what you do all the time is you set up your own time frame, surely she’s not really going to be kept for the whole six years. No. When she’s released our day will come (laughs).

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In Lena’s story of ‘my war’, as she describes it, she has to overcome myriad forces opposing her. These are her father, state institutions, the prison service and society at large. It consists of a series of battles that she says she had to undertake alone because she was deserted by the people from whom she might have expected help, such as her relatives and her mother’s friends and colleagues. In her narrative the three siblings became ‘a little island surrounded only by enemies’ to which she added another member by falling pregnant and giving birth to a son during the first year of her mother’s imprisonment. She explains that having the child was the realisation of a dream that she had shared with her mother who always wanted to a grandson called Ivan. Lena’s war ‘for my little bit of autonomy’ began the day after the mother’s arrest when her father turned up to take away the two younger children. When the two children refused to go with him, Lena’s father alerted the Organs of Guardianship and Care. Lena sums up the actions of the inspectors from the ‘organs’ as checking ‘what was in the fridge’, whether the young ones were attending school and the state of their ‘moral development’. The authorities agreed to let Lena care for her siblings, although formal guardianship was with their father. The three had to move to a smaller, cheaper flat and Lena gave up her course at technical college to work in a supermarket to earn the money, which together with ‘savings’, gave her what was needed to support the family. According to Lena, her father gave little support, agreeing only to give help ‘in kind’, taking the two younger children to buy clothes or bringing food if Lena telephoned him to say they have nothing to eat. Since the birth of her son, Lena has begun working from home for the lawyer who defended her mother. In 2012, her brother, now seventeen, moved out to live with his girlfriend and Lena’s boyfriend moved in. Were she able to get a place in a state nursery for her son, Lena says, she would be able to return to full-time work. As a single-parent mother (her boyfriend is not the father of her child), she has priority for any vacancy (although, when interviewed, she held out little hope that she would secure a place soon) and she is entitled to enhanced welfare payments if her total income falls below the poverty line. The isolation Lena and her siblings experienced after her mother’s arrest was made public is striking in Lena’s narrative: [It was] an absurd situation. I was left in the flat with these two children but nobody was offering to help [. . .] that was the most interesting thing, everyone had fallen away immediately. There had been friends and acquaintances but now they disappeared. She also experienced broader societal prejudice observing that, ‘Nobody is able to keep silent and they see it as their duty to say horrid things straight to your face’. One significant incident concerned her sister, Yuliya, who was the butt of

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comments about her mother at her school. Lena’s raising of the issue with the headmaster was met with the response that what was happening was only to be expected given her mother’s crime. So Lena moved Yuliya to another school with the help of a teacher from her own former school with whom she had had a good relationship. Lena’s brother also encountered prejudice when he entered the local further education college leading him to abandon his course. Lena has personal experience of prejudice. Plans to marry her new boyfriend were cancelled when his parents said they would sever all contact with him if he married Lena. The couple split up, although they had just got back together again when Lena was interviewed. The stories in Lena’s narrative about her relationship with her mother are no less a demonstration of her agency than the story of how she defended the embattled ‘little island’ of her family. The interactions with her mother after the latter’s arrest that she describes have been formal (visits, letters, delivering parcels and talking on the penal institution telephones) and informal (illicit calls on mobile phones, unscheduled meetings and verbal and visual greetings across the physical boundaries separating them). Lena is one of the few women we interviewed who made maximum use of the convicted prisoner’s entitlement to visits. During the two years that her mother was held on remand, Lena was denied visits by the prison authorities and so had to find other means to communicate with her mother. She achieved this by ‘using contacts’ (friends-offriends-of-old-school-friends who worked in the prison system) to smuggle in mobile phones to her mother. Like others, Lena tells of regular conversations lasting over an hour that were interrupted only when one phone was confiscated and the replacement had not yet been delivered. Lena also achieved face-to-face meetings with her mother on remand by becoming an expert in the court timetable so she could trail the prison transports to court. She describes how she and her mother would wave to each other at traffic lights and how she sometimes could persuade guards escorting her mother to let them talk and hug when the prison van arrived at court. Whenever they were not at school, Lena would take her brother and sister along. She also found a place on the street outside the prison where she could wave to her mother in her cell and she speaks with pride of the firework display she once put on in the street to celebrate her mother’s birthday. The scope for such interactions came to an end when the phase of investigation, court proceedings and appeals ended. Lena was alerted by a phone call that she was to be transported the following day. She guessed that her mother would be taken to Mordoviya and so consulted railway timetables in order to give her a send off. Windowless Stolypin carriages, in which prisoners are transported, generally stand in a separate siding from the main platforms of railway stations and avtozaks (prison motor transports) back up to carriage door to transfer their cargo of prisoners. The prisoners either have to jump across the gap or run between a line of

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convoy guards. This is a security measure to prevent escapes, as are the dogs and armed guards that patrol the sidings. Lena describes her mother’s send off thus: We saw her silhouette. They didn’t allow us to come near, so we were only able to shout, we stood there the three of us, like idiots (laughs). But we wanted to do something nice for her, so she wouldn’t leave with an empty heart. We shouted ‘Mum! Mum!’ We ran round the Stolypin shouting at the top of our voices so she could hear that we were there. She reports that her mother later told her that she had heard them. Lena did not wait for the official notification giving information about her mother’s destination colony (the correctional code gives a ten-day interval for this to be done) but set out for Mordoviya with her brother and his friend in a ‘beaten up’ motorcycle and sidecar. The journey was extremely cold and she recalls her brother shouting above the wind, ‘we are like Decembrists, we don’t know where the carriage is taking us’. There are three women’s colonies in Mordoviya; Lena tracked the one her mother had been taken to, was denied a visit but handed a parcel in. Thereafter, Lena visited her mother regularly, in the first eighteen months making six or seven visits. She tells affecting stories about these visits, how she and her mother lie on the iron beds in the visitors’ dormitory singing favourite childhood songs. She has not taken her son to see his grandmother for fear of infectious diseases, but he knows of his grandmother’s existence and hears her voice on the phone. Lena continues to ply her mother with parcels containing food, ‘trade’ goods such as cigarettes and ‘treats’. She also makes videos of her son and siblings to help her mother feel involved in family life. At the time she was interviewed, Lena’s latest task was to collect together the various papers and documents her mother needed to apply for early release. Lena’s narrative is one of lone struggle against the forces ranged against her, but for all she says about doing it alone, people who came forward to help her appear in the margins of her story. They are a motley collection of old school and college friends, a variety of professionals including her old school teacher and the lawyer working on her mother’s case, and new acquaintances, including other relatives of prisoners she has met queuing at the prison gates. Some of these contacts give her access to the networks she needs to penetrate the prison wall and that enable her to make a difference to the material condition of her mother’s life. The varied means that Lena uses to stay in touch with her mother are not untypical of the sort of strategies commonly used in Russia to circumvent official procedures and defy prohibitive regulations. Trailing prison vans in the hope of a snatched moment with a prisoner, smuggling mobile phones into prisons, bribing guards and cross town or inter-regional journeys undertaken in an

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attempt to track down the whereabouts of a loved one are all part of the repertoire prisoners’ relatives routinely use to maintain contact with people in prison. But the intensity of Lena’s effort is striking and speaks of the child’s need for emotional support and parental approval, whatever her age. This is true also of Anna in the dialogue she kept going with her father on ‘matters of importance’. Both these young women’s narratives convey their determination to preserve the childhood relationship with the parent. Lena tells us that she still depends on her mother for advice about all sorts of large and trivial things going on in her life. Her description of the gap her mother’s imprisonment has left in her life should be read as a more general comment for those who continue to think that prison is an appropriate solution to problems that arise in society: The most difficult things for me are not finished. The most difficult is when there isn’t a person close to you and the most unpleasant of all is that suddenly you realise when you look around there isn’t someone standing behind you (she laughs), you know, no support. The mother is a rock who, I don’t know (pause) who is always there whether you are ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. I’ve noticed there are women [in the colony] who are forty-five and their mothers are sixty-five and everything is OK if the mother’s there, but if that link is broken, then there’s a ‘wall’ missing. It’s like a house with only three walls. When times are good or bad, you always go to your mother; you drink tea with her, tell her things, cry, and tell her what’s gone wrong. Then you go and feel relieved. But if she’s not here. It’s not about material help. It’s all about the need for moral support.

CHAPTER 8 THE OUTER CIRCLE

As soon as I was sent down my older sister went silent [. . .] I’d order a telephone conversation but she was never home. And then one day I got Maksim and it turns out that my sister was at home. But she spoke to me, without any explanation, in a really cold voice. She says, ‘I can’t get the children to write, and I don’t have time.’ But that’s not a reason for staying so completely silent, is it? I am guilty, I admit that, but I’ve never blamed anyone else. What happened, happened. I don’t know, would it be better for them if I did away with myself here? [. . .] I think she’s betrayed me. (Woman prisoner talking about her sister who is caring for her children, 2009)1 I have a child who is two years two months old. He was two when I was sent here. I think a child needs to be with his mum but not in here [. . .] my baby is with my parents, aunts and uncles. (Woman prisoner, 2009)2 The Western literature on prisoners’ families is heavily weighted towards prisoners’ wives and children. Thanks to the dekabristka legacy, this preoccupation is found also in the Russian legal literature such as it exists, but with an added interest being shown in the prisoner’s mother courtesy of the great reverence for the mother figure in popular culture. Mothers were among the women who followed the Decembrist officers to Siberia, but there were some sisters, although we learn little about them.3 The ripple-effects of prison can extend beyond the women who figure most often in the popular discourses about prisoners’ relatives and who are most often seen at the prison gate. A wide circle of people are drawn into the nexus of the prison. It includes relatives and friends who willingly come forward to offer material, emotional and practical support for the inner circle of family members most immediately affected. It also includes those who keep their distance but who may,

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nevertheless, find that they cannot escape the prison’s shadow. From our interviewees we learned of aunts who visit their nephews in prison, uncles who drive family members to colonies for visits and cousins who contribute to food parcels. We also learned that childcare responsibilities can be taken up by sisters and more distant relatives of incarcerated men and women, either permanently to prevent a child being taken into care or temporarily to allow a wife to make the journey to the colony for a visit. The two extracts above, from interviews taken with women prisoners, offer contrasting images of these other relatives’ reactions to their enforced engagement with the prison. In one, a sibling has agreed to take on her sister’s children to avoid them being taken into care, but wants no involvement with the prison system. In the other, the whole family rallies round to do the caring, aunts and uncles included. Again from our interviews, we learned of plenty of cases of outright rejection of the prisoner and/or his close relatives, parents who refuse to help the struggling family of their son in prison and mothers-in-law who try to persuade their daughters to cut their losses with a prisoner husband and find a new man. In this chapter we meet some members of what we have labelled as the outer circle of relatives. Our labelling of them in this way is not to be read as a comment on how we understand their family position in a biological or anthropological sense, but because of their marginalisation in the literature and from programmes designed to support family ties. Yet, as we will learn below, they too can struggle to adapt to the imprisonment of a relative because no less than the ‘inner circle’ of wives, children and mothers, they can come under pressure to justify to themselves and to society at large the decisions they make with respect to the prisoner. Among the women we interviewed, there were three who belong to the outer circle. Nuriya the sister of a juvenile offender serving a sentence for murder and Larisa Petrovna, mother-in-law of Egor, a recidivist offender both understand their role as being to support the prisoner’s main caretaker, his mother and his wife respectively. Watching the pain of a mother or daughter as they cope with the grief of what has happened to the person closest to them is one of the little recognised types of collateral damage of imprisonment. We also meet Liza, the same-sex partner of Olya whose son, at the time of the interview, was eleven months into a four-year sentence for theft. Liza is interesting because despite her entanglement with a prisoner, her sexual orientation means that in both the court of public opinion and in law she has no rights in relation to the incarcerated prisoner and his mother. More than any of the other family members relatives of prisoners she is unencumbered by any societal expectations of her behaviour. Nevertheless, she feels bound to justify the life-course decisions she makes. Like Saima whom we met in Chapter 3, she has chosen to ‘break loose’ from the assemblage of ties connecting her to a prisoner. In her narrative, as, indeed, in Saima’s, the prisoner’s bad nature and deeds assume a pivotal role in

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her justificatory account of walking away. In this way her story-telling is the mirror image of the other women’s we interviewed.

Nuriya: A Sister’s Story Nuriya was at home in her family’s apartment when the police came to arrest her brother, Petr, and take him into custody. Her parents were both at work at the time and it fell to her to alert them about what had happened, before hurrying to the police station to try to find out the reason for Petr’s detention. Overhearing her brother’s interrogation, she understood that he and a friend were accused of beating a man to death in a car park in the town where they lived. At the time Nuriya was seventeen and her brother, fifteen. The victim, as the family later learned, was a vagrant and he fell victim to the boys as a result of a trivial dispute. The seven-and-a-half-year sentence Petr received, to be served in a juvenile colony until he reached 18, was less than is normal for such an offence because he admitted his guilt. Still, Nuriya knew that with under a year served, she would not see her brother free for some time yet, even if he were successfully to apply for parole. Listening to Nuriya’s story it was striking that even though she insisted that, after the initial shock, she had come to terms with what had happened and ‘got on with her life’ (she finished a college course and secured a job as a waitress), her brother’s offence and his punishment affected her. A year into Petr’s sentence she is still struggling to make sense of what had happened. She described how the two of them had been very close, until Petr was about fourteen when he ‘underwent a change’; he closed up, his grades tumbled at school and he started staying out all night. She suspected that he had fallen in with a bad crowd. This suspicion was confirmed in court when his membership of a street gang called the ‘Snots’, named so because of the youth of its members, was revealed.4 Reporting her conversations with Petr on her first visit to the juvenile colony, Nuriya says he told her that he did not understand why he had committed the crime and that he was desperate to come home. But she also revealed that from the moment Petr was locked up in the remand prison he had behaved badly, shouting, breaking plates, fighting with other prisoners and swearing at guards, which continued when he was transferred to the juvenile colony. He had been confined in the lock-up on numerous occasions. However, in what might be labelled a journey-to-redemption narrative, she insisted that Petr had recently turned himself around; he was behaving better, was doing well in the colony school and was ‘no longer the person’ who committed the crime: Yes. He told me on the visit. He said, ‘I’m here and I look at the others who get probation’ and he says to me, ‘I also would like to get out, I’ve caught on

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to the idea.’ He says, ‘I’ve change my attitude.’ So he’s changed his attitude and his behaviour’s improved. Nuriya is wary of the stigma attaching to being related to a prisoner and so has only told her closest friends about Petr’s fate. She has good reason to worry; her younger siblings have suffered name-calling in the playground and neighbours have forbidden their children from mixing with them. At work, she has been particularly careful not to let slip that her brother is in jail. She has already decided that if she needs to take time off work to visit Petr, she’ll tell her manager that she is sick or that her grandmother is ill. She explains: You know what people who haven’t themselves been in this situation are like, they can say all sorts of things: ‘your brother’s a murderer’, ‘how can you have anything to do with him?’ ‘How can you forgive him?’ I don’t know. Not everyone understands. A recurrent theme in Nuriya’s narrative is the impact of her brother’s imprisonment on family dynamics. Both her parents are Tatar. The family marks religious holidays and customs, but they are not devout Muslims. Her mother worked all her life in a factory and her father was a crane driver. Nuriya is the second of six children. The extended family has been supportive, helping to make up parcels for her brother and driving Nuriya and her mother to visit the juvenile colony in a town some distance away. In describing her parents’ reaction to the brother’s arrest, Nuriya reveals the supporting role that she has been called upon to play in the family. She explains how badly her mother has been affected by the events; initially she was taken ill and stopped eating. Now, Nuriya says, her mother puts a brave face on things but can be heard crying as night: It’s difficult, of course. And Mum tries to keep everything to herself. She’s a private person and she won’t show her tears to anyone. She waits until everyone has gone to sleep at night, and then she quietly cries, alone to herself. That is, she doesn’t show it. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t want us to worry too much. Dad’s much weaker in this respect. Asked why she is the one to accompany her mother on visits, Nuriya explains: Of course, Mum has to visit, everyone understands she needs it more than anyone else. And why me? Because I spend more time with Mum than anyone else, we’re like friends, we share everything. And her father? Nuriya, explains that he began drinking very heavily when Petr was arrested with the result that he lost his job. She does not condemn her father

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and accepts without question that he cannot be expected to make any contribution to the adjustment the family has had to make to Petr’s imprisonment: It [his loss of job] also had an impact on our material situation [. . .] But he came to and now he’s been working again for the past three months. So it seems that he’s calmed down and come to terms with it. But all the same, he still drinks, and when he does he wails ‘my son, how can you survive without us . . .’ The two visits Nuriya has made to Petr’s colony clearly unsettled her. She describes how on the first visit she and her mother found Petr sitting on a stool. There was a ‘hailstorm of tears and embraces’ but by the third day conversation stalled, as they ran out of things to say. The three ended sitting in ‘depressed silence’. In striking contrast the fantasy-descriptions of wives, Nuriya’s prisonvisit narrative is all about isolation and the remoteness of the experience from ordinary life. She was surprised that she was subject to the penal regime, returning several times during the interview to the intrusive searches and removal of personal items. She felt the deprivation of her mobile phone strongly as she wanted to continue her usual exchanges with friends: The most complicated thing for me was not to have my mobile in my hand, because I wanted to phone home, have a chat, I don’t know. By the third day it turned out that we have nothing left to say, all the obvious questions had been asked, he’d asked us questions and we’d asked him. And so on the last day we all just sat and were sad. In Nuriya’s telling of the visitation story, there are no descriptions of making the prison space place ‘homely’ and bringing favourite food, photographs and favourite videos.5 Instead, she conveys the colony’s bleakness and oppression. The visits she says leave her ‘feeling empty’. It is possible to sense Nuriya’s relief when she tells us that her brother has said that he does not want any more residential visits because of the torment that it leaves him in afterwards. Her preference would be for Petr to be in a closer colony so that she could make more frequent short visits, rather than residential. Nuriya says little about her own feelings in the interview and she is, generally, more reticent talking about herself than the other women we interviewed. Nor does she have much to say about her relationship with her brother. She does, though, express her anxiety about what is going to happen to him in the future. Her worry at the time of interview was his safety in the juvenile colony as a result of his having fallen foul of the gang leaders; ‘those boys, the hooligans that he’d fallen in with before, now they don’t like him and are bullying him.’ She describes his attempt to get himself moved to a prison hospital by swallowing

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metal shards. This has intensified Nuriya’s fears for him. Petr wants to be moved ahead of time to an adult colony to escape the prison gang but Nuriya sees nothing good coming from this. All these fears combine to make Nuriya fearful about her brother’s future. She has no confidence in his successful re-entry since, as a former convict, she is sure he will face discrimination in the labour market. But the confusion and contradictions in her talk indicate that her anxieties run deeper than possible discrimination when he is released. Nuriya has not yet been able fully to convince herself that her little brother really has turned a corner and become a different person from the one who committed the crime: ‘it seems he’s still just a child, and doesn’t understand anything’. Nuriya’s story is of someone who is unsupported in the challenges and new responsibilities that her brother’s incarceration have laid before her. She says that she has not before thought about how she has personally been affected by Petr’s imprisonment but, after a pause, comments, ‘now I think about it, it’s true that after all this I just have started praying before I go to sleep. It’s possible to say that’.

Larisa Petrovna: A Mother-In-Law’s Story There is another figure that can play a crucial role in the drama surrounding a family member’s incarceration. This is the prisoner’s mother-in-law. The meanings and understandings society attaches to the prisoner’s mother-in-law are inevitably more complex than of the prisoner’s mother, and they are also less visible. The mother-in-law does not often appear in cultural productions dealing with imprisonment and punishment. Yet, through the influence she can exert on her daughter’s decision-making her impact on the prisoner’s family can be considerable; whether this is in the direction of supporting her daughter in fulfilling the dekabristka role or, on the contrary, persuading her to make a fresh start with a new mate. In the cult film from the 1970s, Kalina Krasnaya, the parents of the central character, Lyuba, reluctantly support her when they discover that the man she has brought home is a former prisoner. Various strategies are employed by the mother-in-law to play out the role of guardian of the family. In reality, of course, much depends upon the woman’s perception of her daughter’s relationship with the prisoner prior to incarceration, her attitudes to the particular offending behaviours for which he has been convicted and her own relationship with him. Larisa Petrovna stands at one end of a spectrum. She is the mother of Katya, one of the bandits’ wives we met in Chapter 4. Katya is married to Egor who is a high status member of the criminal hierarchy in his colony and whose position allows him to secure a bed in the prison hospital, rather than barracks. At the time of the interview with his mother-in-law, Egor was serving a third prison sentence, of six years for gang-based robbery. Larisa Petrovna has known Egor

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since he was a child: he and Katya attended the same school and began dating when they were already teenagers. They married soon after leaving school and have a 7-year-old son, Larisa Petrovna’s grandson. Larisa Petrovna has been witness to all the drama in her daughter and son-in-law’s encounters with the criminal-justice system over the two decades that followed the USSR’s collapse and has had to position herself in relation to it. Her story, which we re-tell below, shows her struggling to produce a coherent narrative about a role that, as a welleducated, comfortably-off wife of a member of the Soviet armed forces, she never imagined she would be called upon to play. Larisa Petrovna was born at the end of the Stalin era in Russia and was retired from her job as a teacher and in her sixties when interviewed. Most of her working life spanned the Brezhnev years of ‘advanced socialism’ (a period of political stability and improving living standards) but also the changes of the Gorbachev period, the collapse of the USSR and its immediate aftermath. As the wife of an army officer, she was shielded from the consequences of economic stagnation and mixed in a social milieu consisting of people who were the loyal and patriotic bedrock of the Soviet state. She never lived in one place for a long time, moving with her husband as he was re-deployed between garrisons, often to remote parts of the USSR. One story she tells is about when her husband was rapidly deployed to the Far East in the aftermath of the shooting down by the Soviet air force of the South Korean Airlines flight 902 in 1978 that had strayed from its flight path, killing all passengers. Forced to live in a ‘regular apartment block’ because of the size of the deployment (the Soviet Union feared retaliation in the Far East), Larisa Petrovna observed for the first time how ‘ordinary people’ lived and their everyday struggles. Larisa Petrovna has recently become religiously observant and regrets that the Soviet state’s official atheism meant that her mother could not rear her in the Russian Orthodox Church. Her conversion coincided, as we see below, with her son-in-law’s imprisonment: Well, it was about five to six years ago that I converted; yes from that time [when Egor was sentenced] but I was never far from God. But I do regret that I wasn’t brought up in the Christian faith even though my mother was a believer. Previously that had to be secret. My sister and I weren’t even christened. I generally feel very at home among believers. Both her early encounter with social deprivation and her recently acquired religious conviction provide Larisa Petrovna with a narrative resource to frame her current identity as someone deeply concerned with the lot of prisoners’ families. These higher ideals also provide her with an answer to critics who would argue that the truer maternal role would have been to help her daughter take her family to safety and stability separate from the recidivist husband. In her storytelling, Larisa Petrovna, on the contrary, describes the extraordinary steps she has

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taken to support her daughter’s decision to stand by Egor, which include moving together with her husband from their comfortable apartment in St Petersburg to a provincial city close to her son-in-law’s place of incarceration. In her storytelling, Larisa Petrovna is careful not to criticise her son-in-law. Indeed, she uses standard neutralisation rhetoric to minimise his offending. Thus, she explains that latterly she has begun to believe him to have been the subject of a miscarriage of justice and explains his re-offending as the result of parental neglect when he was a child. However, very occasionally, as she talks the wish that her daughter had chosen a different partner surfaces, as when she lets slip that had her grandson had a different father he would not have to go through the trauma of visiting a prison colony or when, reflecting on whether she would have supported her own husband, she observes that he (her husband) is ‘a patriot who never would have broken the law’. Larisa Petrovna sees her primary role as ensuring that her grandson’s childhood is not ‘clouded over’ by the disaster that has befallen the family and in this respect she is similar to Tat’yana Stepanovna and Fatima whose stories we told in Chapter 6. There is a practical element to this as we shall see below, but for Larisa Petrovna, her primary goal in securing an unclouded childhood for her grandson is to give him the Christian upbringing that she was denied. Christian values, she insists, are necessary to divert him from following his father’s path and to provide him with the resources he may need ‘to forgive and not to judge’. Larisa Petrovna speaks at length about the nature of her faith. The small extract below from her talk shows how it informs her approach to the decisions she has made to support her family through its current crisis. It is a particularly clear example of the ‘appeal to higher loyalties’ justificatory narrative: [K]indness, human kindness, is most important of all, however cruel or harsh the laws, there should be kindness everywhere. Without this, the people who write the laws will themselves suffer because nobody is an island. Of course, it is difficult to come to God and it can take a long time, maybe a whole lifetime [. . .] What you should do is think ‘how can I help?’ and that will help you and you will become stronger. That is why I think I must become interested in the problem of the children of prisoners. I don’t know how yet, but I think I’ll know when I make contact with others [. . .] it’ll turn into some sort of helpful action, I don’t know what just yet. But something has to be done. What has happened to us will not go away and we cannot just ignore it. There are some things we would prefer to forget, but we can help other people with their problems because of the experience we have gained. Beyond the spiritual, the main practical help Larisa Petrovna gives Katya is by being the one to take her grandson to visit his father on three-day visits. For Larisa

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Petrovna the three days she spends with grandson and son-in-law in the confined space of the visiting dormitory are deeply troubling. We already learned in the previous chapter that Larisa Petrovna is party to a web of lies the family has constructed to conceal from her grandson that his father is a prisoner (‘his father is a military officer’ and ‘the place they live is a military base’). In an otherwise controlled and professional narration of how she sees her role as the mother-in-law of a prisoner, Larisa Petrovna breaks down as she talks of the time that is approaching when her grandson will have to be told the true identity of his father or, her worst fear, will discover the truth for himself from a casual stranger. Respect for her daughter surfaces at various points in Larisa Petrovna’s narrative; she admires the sacrifices Katya has made, describing her as a dekabristka, and the energy she has put into developing her network to support other prisoners’ wives. Larisa Petrovna is, herself, severely critical of the conditions in which prisoners are kept in Russia and the lack of support that exists for their relatives and, unlike many others of her generation, she appears not to be nostalgic for the Soviet past (we have already learned that her principal regret is that Soviet ideology prevented her from discovering a superior belief system). Larisa Petrovna’s narrative reveals her still struggling to give meaning to the events that have changed her life. In attempting to do this, as well as her faith, she draws heavily on the familiar dekabristka and matreshka stereotypes to justify the decisions she and her daughter have made. And consistent also with these stereotypes, there is little in her talk about her husband, even though they have been together for approaching fifty years. She does not disclose the role he played in the decision to support their daughter, but we do learn that the Prison Service’s treatment of relatives ‘as if they were in prison themselves’ has been especially hard for his ‘moral state of mind’. She shares her husband’s patriotism, but this is tinged also with criticism of the current regime. She says that plans are afoot for the whole family to leave Russia as soon as her son-in-law is released.6

Daughters on their Mothers Larisa Petrovna’s story shows that one area of potential collateral damage of mass incarceration is the relationship between mother and daughter. Katya’s determination to stand by Egor effectively left Larisa Petrovna with no choice but to lend her support if she wanted to continue to be part of her daughter’s and grandson’s life. Among the wives of prisoners we interviewed, a majority acknowledged the practical and moral support that their mothers give them. This might be in the form of childcare, shared accommodation, material goods or money and a shoulder to cry on or a source of advice. Larisa Petrovna has invested heavily in maintaining a good relationship with her daughter and the interview with Katya does not contradict her mother’s account of their interactions. But other wives’ talk hints at the strains their husband’s offending

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behaviours could put on the mother-daughter relationship and of the limits of the practical support, as they see it, that a mother can give. Also not all mothers appear to have remained as guarded in their criticisms of sons-in-law as Larisa Petrovna. Valya is the forty-two-year-old wife of a recidivist eight years into an eleven-year sentence: My mother feels sorry for me. She considers that Oleg has spoilt my life. She never actually says that she pities me and she says she understands why I haven’t abandoned him. She always says ‘I understand you; it’s very difficult for you, very bad’. As is typical for women who suddenly become single-parents, Valya now lives with her mother so the latter could help with childcare. On balance, the move represented an additional burden on Valya’s housekeeping but she appreciates the attempts her mother made to help: At that moment when Oleg and I got to know each other Mum was already seventy. So I couldn’t expect much help from her; you can’t expect much from a 70-year-old woman. Well, she sits with the children, boils up some soup, but getting the ingredients to make the soup is my job, you understand? So she manages to save some money for her grandchildren. So, she’ll save some little sum and she’ll say ‘Gleb here’s something for you.’ And, ‘Oksanochka, here’s something to help you at school’. She’ll say ‘let me put some money by to buy a jumper’. As a matter of fact, she’s a very good mother, but you can’t ask too much of her. Gulya also is one of the wives who moved to live with her mother when her husband was imprisoned. Gulya is ethnically a Tatar and she attributes the support she gets from her mother to the strength of Muslim family tradition. According to Gulya’s narrative, her mother agrees with her own assessment that her husband is the victim of a miscarriage of justice (he is serving a thirteenyear sentence for murder, which Gulya believes should be manslaughter as he was acting in self-defence) and is prepared to use her position as a respected doctor in the town where they live to close off any adverse gossip about her son-in-law. But many mothers urge their daughters to leave their husband. They may have been warning their daughters for some time that the man is question was bad (the ‘I told you so’ reaction), they may believe that their grandchildren are at risk or they may simply find the choices their daughter has made difficult to understand. Among the last are the mothers of zaochnitsy, of the women who meet their partners after the latter have been convicted. The five ‘social media brides’ we interviewed describe a wide range of, mostly negative, reactions to their choice of husband from their mothers. At one extreme are

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Galya and Natal’ya who describe their mothers as being categorical in their opposition to the choices their daughters have made. So long as Galya was merely friends with her prisoner-correspondent her mother did not react, but once he was released and the couple became engaged, Galya’s mother refused to meet him: Galya:

My father [met him], but my mother refuses. My mother is against it [the engagement] but, then, she’s generally critical of anything I do. Interviewer: Maybe she’s frightened, she’s worried. Galya: Yes, probably. But I’m not happy about what she says. That nothing will come of it. That’s what she said straight away; ‘This isn’t for us. We’re not cut out for this’. Galya’s criticisms of her mother allow her to deflect discussion of the genuine anxieties her mother may have about the liaison, not least that the prospective husband is HIV-positive. Similarly, Natal’ya describes how her mother has not been able to come to terms with the fact that she has married a prisoner: Natal’ya:

My mother hasn’t met him. When she learned about it [that they had got married] she was in shock. Right up to today she won’t accept my choice. For her, she has no son-in-law; I’m not married. She hasn’t told anyone about it. Interviewer: Maybe with time..? Natal’ya: I don’t know. At first I tried to find a common language with her, I tried to talk about it and explain it. But she wouldn’t have it. And she still isn’t prepared to compromise. She doesn’t send him greetings like she used to before; and he doesn’t send greetings to her now either; there’s no point. He says ‘Wait till I am released.’ Interviewer: Why is she so opposed? Natal’ya: Generally, she can’t respect such people Despite the opposition to their daughters’ choice of husbands, prisoners’ mothers-in-law seldom want to rupture their relationship with their daughter. Natal’ya’s mother helps by paying Natal’ya’s rent, even though the relationship between mother and daughter remains strained. In Anfisa’s case, her mother was initially extremely opposed to her marrying a convict but she eventually came round to it. She moved in with the couple when her new son-in-law was released at the end of ten-and-half-year sentence. At 80 years old, and with care options limited in Russia, she had few alternatives but to make peace with her daughter’s choice of husband.

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Liza’s Story: The Entangled Lives of Non-Traditional Families Preservation of the family is a strong motivating factor for the women who take the decision to maintain links with a family member in jail. As our study has shown, this tends to be the case regardless of a woman’s family position. We have encountered a daughter trying to help her mother fulfil her maternal role from prison, wives acting as the family caretaker until their husbands are released and mothers who support a daughter or daughter-in-law married to a prisoner by caring for and protecting children. Although not necessarily on their minds when they embarked upon a relationship with a prisoner, marriage and family formation appears to be the driving force for zaochnitsy in finding the ‘right man’. But Russia also has non-traditional families, including same-sex partnerships, but they exist in a harsh legal and social environment.7 In the prison context same sex relationships between prisoners are a violation of regime rules and are punished severely. There is no research that systematically examines gay relationships in the society of Russia’s prisoners today, but anecdotal evidence from former inmates tells of discrimination and violence against homosexuals in prisons and correctional colonies and the use of sexual violence by criminal sub-cultures. But there are also relationships between prisoners that are loving, supportive and help them to assert their identity against the enforced gender stereotypes promoted by penal authorities.8 Inevitably, the Russian Prison service in its provisions for family visiting excludes same-sex partners and, indeed, increasingly is excluding any partnerships that are not supported by legal documentation. We learned, for example, in Chapter 3 that proof of civil partnership is no longer sufficient to ensure a couple’s right to residential visitation, regardless of how long a couple have lived together and whether there are children. The prohibition inevitably extends to any same-sex partners of prisoners’ close relatives. It is not surprising, therefore, that Liza the lesbian partner of Olya whose son Volodya is serving a four-year sentence would not have been able to visit him, even had she been inclined to do so. Liza lived a chaotic life before she met Olya. The beginning of the relationship and its end which coincided with the imprisonment of Olya’s son, as Liza tells it, are two critical landmarks in her journey towards self-knowledge. Today, aged thirty-four, Liza has no permanent job but makes money working as a free-lance personal trainer. She lives alone and, she says, is happiest this way. From puberty Liza realised that she was attracted to women but in 1998, when she was twentytwo, she did ‘what every young woman is supposed to do’ and got married. She admits that she was a bad wife, leaving her husband alone at night as she went to sleep with her latest lover. Within a year she was divorced. In the years that followed, Liza launched herself into a period of ‘fast living’ when she experimented with different sexual partners, tried to change her sexual orientation, became involved in a very alternative ‘consciousness raising’ sect,

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took to drinking heavily, was thrown out of home by her mother and fell into a four-year depression. She met Olya when, one day, she was visiting a friend in hospital. She says she had already decided that she must change her life but the relationship she and Olya struck up gave her the stability and emotional support she needed to do this. Olya was a good listener and Liza could go to her with her problems. The relationship began as friendship but soon became deeper and sexual. Olya’s life was no less chaotic than Liza’s. She was a single mother with two boys. Her husband had been murdered in prison, when the children were small. Olya was poor and as she was classified as an invalid (she has severe cirrhosis and TB and is HIV and hepatitis C positive) she did not have to work. The family lived on state welfare but this only delivered a very modest standard of living. For four years after they met, Liza and Olya lived as a family unit, although Liza retained a room in the hostel where she had been living previously. Liza contributed her earnings to the joint household budget and this was sufficient for the four of them, Liza, Olya and her two sons Volodya and Mark, to have a period of financial stability. Liza developed a good relationship with the younger son, who called her ‘Mama’, but her relationship with the older son was less close because by the time that Liza moved in he was already a young conscript, attending a training school for the army medical corps in a neighbouring town. Liza’s retrospective narrative of the four years she lived with Olya is one of her subordinating her own material and emotional needs to Olya’s. As she tells it, her life with Olya soon became stressful as she found herself drawn ever deeper into the family’s problems. In what might be described as her ‘disengagement narrative’, Volodya’s arrest was a crucial tipping point that made her reappraise the direction she wished her life to take. This may well explain Liza’s response to the news of Volodya’s arrest for mobile phone theft. Olya was away visiting Petr in the neighbouring town so Liza sought out old friends with whom she could get drunk to ‘dull the pain’: I was so entangled with [Olya’s family] that I lived their tragedy as if it were my own. I was really upset but didn’t know what to do, so I went out and bought some beer. My traditional way. I needed to drink away the stress. But I knew I couldn’t drink alone and suddenly remembered my friend Regina who I had met once with Olya. I phoned her and told her what had happened and she was also very upset and we decided to meet to support each another. So I went round to her place picking up some beer and spirits on the way. At Regina’s, Liza met another woman with whom she ‘made a connection’. This ‘connection’ marked the beginning of a new relationship for Liza and the beginning of the end of the relationship with Olya. Liza travelled to the

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neighbouring town to support Olya and stayed for two weeks before returning home. In her talk, Liza is keen to rebuff any suggestion that she had abandoned the family in its hour of need, describing how in the months that followed she continued to give Olya support, even though by then she had entered a new relationship. Her support consisted of ‘discussing what to do next, worrying and making phone calls’, driving Olya to Volodya’s correctional colony for visits, paying for the accommodation and talking to Volodya on the phone. But a permanent break came. In Liza’s narrative, this was brought upon by Volodya’s behaviour: I understood that he was an idiot. At first, of course, it was painful and shameful, but then I understood that he is simply guilty for what had happened to him. Nobody was persecuting him. It’s just that he has this character flaw. He’s a troublemaker and he’s always enjoyed making an impression [. . .] this in the end is why he ended up in prison. In the army and at the Academy he always was the first among the hooligans and men who got into fights [. . .] he was a clever lad but had this side to him. She repeats this position several times in her conversation. She lost what residual sympathy she had for him when she learned that he had joined the criminal sub-culture in his colony: Now he is a blatnoi, one of the leaders. I don’t really know what they’re called. What it means is that he’s not chosen the role of an ‘ordinary prisoner’, but has chosen instead to be one of the ‘thieves’ as they are known. In other words he has gone to the wrong side, so that now nobody knows what the future’s going to hold for him. Just no way of knowing. Liza muses that no doubt he’ll leave prison as some sort of criminal leader ‘with stars on his knees’.9 He still telephones her but she doesn’t return the calls. She became irritated by the requests he made for her to do things for him or to send money, which she has always refused. She feels no remorse about refusing to have anything to do with him now: I don’t want anything more to do with him, because I don’t know what I’d have to say. No doubt that’s my fault, it’s my problem not his. But it’s true that I do sometimes think that he’s doing the right thing: why be the bottom of the pile in prison when you can be at the top? But think about the consequence, it’s only alright if he wants to become a ‘thief’. And also it means that he’s become impudent and rude; in other words there’s nothing left of the lad he used to be.

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In her final comment Liza is echoing a view held by the majority of women interviewed and who use social media, that inmates are always vulnerable to being irreversibly changed for the worse by a prison sentence. But a broader criticism of the prison system is implied, not stated. Liza is not interested in making excuses for Volodya. There is no traditional discourse to serve as a guide for someone in Liza’s position; lesbians do not figure in the dekabristka or matreshka tropes. No doubt, compared with women in traditional families, this is liberating, but even so Liza feels compelled to imbue the story she tells with some meaning. The arrest and imprisonment of this young man with whom she had only a distant relationship, was the catalyst for her reviewing her own life: When I was with Olya I didn’t think; I was simply part of her family’s emotional and material life. But there was no obvious reason why. I was permanently drawn into their endless problems and never thought about myself. Basically, I lived their lives. It was when Olya went away [to be with Volodya after his arrest], that I began to understand, that I don’t need this, and that I could live a different life, the one that I needed. Liza’s story confirms what we are able to learn from Nuriya and Larisa Petrovna that people in the ‘outer circle’, who are not among the people society understands as having primary responsibly for supporting prisoner-relatives, nevertheless also feel compelled to offer a rationale for their decision-making and to defend themselves against possible criticism. In Liza’s case that criticism would be that she abandoned her partner at a particularly difficult time when the latter was suffering the trauma of a son’s arrest. Volodya ‘turning bad’ is crucial to Liza’s explanatory narrative. She has no need to neutralise Volodya’s offending, so her talk is free of the criticism of an unfair justice system that is a feature of other women’s narratives (even though Volodya’s four-year sentence for a first offence of mobile phone theft appears harsh) or of the number of more deserving of punishment being left in freedom. If she is no longer available to support him, that is his own responsibility, a consequence of the choices he has made. Discussions online indicate that there are plenty of relatives and friends who turn their backs on prisoners, so Liza is in good company; the only difference is that her justification for doing so is probably more self-reflective than most. The assumption in the literature on prisoners’ relatives that the challenge to their self-identification is to explain to themselves and society at large the reasons for standing by an offender imply that walking away is the easier option. Liza’s story indicates that this is not necessarily the case.

CHAPTER 9 POLITICALS’ FAMILIES

Silent flows the river Don A yellow moon looks quietly on Swanking about, with cap askew It sees through the window a shadow of you Gravely ill, all alone The moon sees a woman lying at home Her son is in jail, her husband is dead Say a prayer for her instead (Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, 1935 –40)1 Anna Akhmatova explains that she wrote her best known poem in response to a whispered question from a woman next to her in a queue at the prison gate: ‘could anyone ever describe this?’ ‘Requiem’ was her answer. Akhmatova’s husband, Nikolai Punin, a prominent scholar of fine art and advocate of constructivism, was convicted under article 58 of the 1934 RSFSR criminal code for counter-revolutionary crimes and, as such, was one of the many ‘politicals’ in the gulag. Akhmatova was also the mother of a political prisoner, Lev Gumilev, her son from her short-lived marriage to the Acmeist poet, Nikolai Gumilev who had been arrested and executed in 1921. The proportion of prisoners convicted under article 58 fluctuated between 18 per cent and a third of the total gulag population between 1938 and 1953 (excluding the war years when the share rose 60 per cent).2 In reality, of course, the boundary between political and criminal offenders in the gulag was blurred; many people with criminal convictions were innocent of any crime. Furthermore, carceral sentences were invariably disproportionately harsh in relation to any crime that may have been committed and were motivated by the state’s perceived need for revenge, for scapegoats for regime failures, as a disciplinary warning to anyone contemplating stepping out of line and to meet the demand for forced labour.

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Today, President Vladimir Putin insists that there are no political prisoners in the Russian Federation. Human Rights organisations in Russia disagree. Below we discuss the criteria that have lead to prisoners’ labelling as ‘politicals’, but our primary interest is in their families. More than the women we have considered in earlier chapters, the wives, partners, mothers and daughters of today’s political prisoners are the true heirs to the dekabristki. The majority are articulate, cultured women, members of the intelligentsia who are convinced of their family member’s innocence in the universal court of human rights. They have no need to explain to society or, indeed, to themselves, their decision to wait for their relative; on the contrary, not to wait would court opprobrium. This does not mean that today’s political prisoners’ relatives readily adopt the dekabristka appellation for themselves. Indeed, we saw in Chapter 1 that from the 1930s onwards women who were victims of the state’s uncompromising attitude towards the relatives of political and criminal offenders, found little relevance in comparing dekabristki experiences to their own. Today, being the relative of a political prisoner does not carry the same dangers as it did during the Soviet period (or not as yet, anyway) or the necessity of abandoning home to follow the convict to Siberian wastes. The calculations that relatives face today are different from in Imperial Russia and the USSR. In the twenty-first century supporting a political prisoner is as much about the costs and benefits of media involvement and whether to appeal to the European Court, as about whether to ‘follow’ or walk away.

The Soviet Inheritance There is little to be gained by attempting a comparison of where women at different periods of Russian and Soviet history stand in the hierarchy of suffering consequent on the state’s policies and practices towards relatives of political prisoners. But there is ‘a red thread’ that runs through the history of Russian penality from Imperial Russia to the present day that unites them all. This is that relatives are in some way complicit in their family member’s politically-deviant behaviour and so it is right that, at some level, they share the punishment. This was true of the nineteenth century. It was true most notoriously during the Stalinist repression. And it is true today (the sentencing of opposition leader Aleksei Naval’nyi’s brother Oleg to imprisonment is a recent example).3 How precisely this has played out in the experience of being a political prisoner’s wife is dependent upon policy and practices at any time, but the thread is always there. During the Stalinist repression the punishment of women for the crimes of their husbands reached its apotheosis with the arrest and sentencing to hard labour of women on grounds of their being married to ‘enemies-of-the-people’. All the relatives of prisoners suffered during the Stalinist repression, but the

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women who were married to men convicted under article 58 fared particularly badly. Anna Larina was twenty-three years old when her husband Nikolai Bukharin was arrested. Initially anxious that her husband’s arrest would mean her having difficulty finding work and providing for the family, what actually awaited her was twenty years of exile, prison and labour camps. She was released in 1959 and spent the rest of her life campaigning for her husband’s rehabilitation. Recent scholarship has begun to shed more light on the circumstances of women like Larina and the fate that awaited them in the camps.4 Not all wives of article 58 prisoners were imprisoned themselves, but all experienced the consequences of their husband’s ‘crime’. These consequences included eviction from their homes, dismissal from work, salary reductions, rent rises and expulsion from the Party or Komsomol.5 For a wife of an article 58 convict ‘standing by my man’ required great resilience and courage as the penalties for doing so were grave. But there were some possible rewards for standing firm in the form of permission to write and send parcels to the incarcerated spouse or even to make a visit and, if the husband survived to his release, of being able to join him in his place of exile. The reports in gulag testimonies of visits to labour camps and to sharashki (the prisons where scientists worked on state projects) confirm that most visits were short, often heavily supervised and could involve exhausting journeys and long periods of waiting.6 Distant camps might have a ‘Meeting House’ (dom svidanii) for long visits and some women did relocate to live ‘campside’.7 Gulag testimonies and oral histories taken with gulag survivors have conveyed the strain on families of the arrest of a member under article 58. Families could be torn apart as each member reacted in different ways to the crisis and tried to find a meaning and rationale in what had happened. Children modelling themselves on Pavlik Morozov, the Pioneer ‘hero’ who denounced his father, were a particular challenge to family coherence. Under these pressures, many women divorced or denounced their husbands. There is, for example, the sad story of Yuliya, wife of Osip Pyanitskii a Bolshevik comrade-in-arms of Lenin who rose to a prominent position in Comintern but was arrested in 1930 and later executed. In her diary Yuliya describes how the family was fragmented by the arrest. Her youngest son declared his hatred for his father and she admits to having had her own doubts about his loyalty to the Party. She was reluctant to blame Osip but found herself questioning whether she had ever known him; was he an honourable man or a scoundrel? When in 1938 her eldest son was arrested, she took the decision to denounce her husband in the vain hope that this would help her son. Her son was sentenced to five years in the camps and Yuliya was herself arrested in 1938 and despatched to the camps. She died in northern Kazakhstan in the winter of 1938.8 The Stalin repression, therefore, provided images of the political’s wife that were far removed from the dekabristka trope. The range of strategies available to

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women whose husbands were accused of political crimes ranged from rejection, to denunciation, to ‘keeping a low profile’, to remaining loyal. Meanwhile, societal expectations of the ‘appropriate behaviour’ of the wives of men sent to their death or camps (or both) were confused and contradictory. The authors of gulag testimonies tend not to be judgemental. Solzhenitsyn in the novel The First Circle draws a sympathetic portrait of hero Illarion Gerasimovich’s wife’s decision to divorce him.9 Putting the family ahead of husband challenged a central tenet of the dekabristka trope, but it did meet the expectations of the, no less gendered, assumptions of the matreshka ethos. In the 1960s and 70s, the crackdown on dissent by the Brezhnev regime was a particular moment when traditional conceptions of the political prisoner as a declared critic of the state received a boost. Article 70, the modified version of article 58 of the Stalinist criminal code, perpetuated the criminalisation of ‘antiSoviet agitation and propaganda’ and provided an instrument for sending a new cohort of prisoners to labour camps or, in a new twist, to detention in psychiatric hospitals.10 A difference from many who had been sent to the camps under article 58, however, was that a large number of the victims of article 70 were, indeed, self-conscious opponents of the regime who bravely circulated their critique of Soviet communism in samizdat or entered Red Square with banners protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia in full knowledge of the consequences of their actions. They included writers, historians, generals, nationalists, religious observers, refuzniks (Jews who asked to emigrate to Israel), scientists and ordinary members of the working class who simply wished to leave the country.11 In 1986 on the eve of the USSR’s dissolution there were 280 ‘official’ political prisoners held in detention in correctional colonies in the different republics of the USSR.12 Then, in 1987 –8, as part of his reform of Soviet communism, Mikhail Gorbachev released the USSR’s political prisoners and closed the politicals’ colony, Perm’ 36. A modified article 70 remained in force until the publication of the Russian Federation’s new criminal code in 1997. In the Brezhnev period a new model of the political prisoner’s wife surfaced that went some way towards clarifying the confusions that had arisen during the repression. This was of the woman who is radicalised by her encounters with the criminal-justice system as she tries to defend her husband. The icon is Elena Bonner, the activist wife of Andrei Sakharov, who shared with her husband his exile in Gorkii (now Nizhnii Novogrod) but was also ‘in her own right’ engaged in the struggle for human rights. Her example deconstructs the very notion of the ‘political prisoner’s wife’ and is a reminder of the honourable history of women’s political activism in Russia. An example from today is Ol’ga Romanova, one of our interviewees, who as a result of her husband’s imprisonment has become a campaigner for prisoners’ rights and prominent critic of Vladimir Putin. Olga Romanova is also a reminder that political dissent in Soviet and postSoviet Russia has never been the exclusive territory of men.

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Political Prisoners in Twenty-First Century Russia When, today, Vladimir Putin declares that there are no political prisoners in Russia, the conceit that he expects us to share is that proof for this is the absence of a political article in the criminal code.13 This same reasoning informs the views of Irina Yarovaya member of the ruling party United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya) and chairwoman of the State Duma Committee on Safety when she insists that, ‘You mustn’t confuse the political with the criminal. I don’t want to discuss this silly issue. Any attempt to commit a crime is a criminal act and you can’t try to disguise this fact by calling it political. There is no political justification for avoiding criminal responsibility.’14 There is no internationally agreed definition of the political prisoner but in October 2012, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) became the first major intergovernmental organisation to approve concrete criteria for what defines a political prisoner. In its definition, it is the motivations and practices of the criminal-justice system more than the actions of the alleged offender that are decisive. Thus, a prisoner is political if he or she is detained for purely political reasons, the conditions of detention are out of proportion to the offense, the prisoner is treated in a discriminatory manner or the imprisonment is the result of judicial proceedings that are clearly unfair and connected with the political motives of the authorities.15 Amnesty International, similarly, uses the term ‘political prisoner’ to describe any prisoner whose case has a political element involved in it whether this is in the prisoner’s motivation, the act itself, or the motivation of the authorities in their response. Understood this way, the distinction between the political and criminal offender in the gulag disappears, and is certainly broader than cast by article 70 in the criminal code for the rest of the Soviet period. The Decembrist-inspired popular understanding of the political prisoner is much closer to international concepts of the ‘prisoner of conscience’, a narrower category than political prisoner. According to Amnesty International’s definition, prisoners of conscience are men and women who have been jailed or punished in some other way because of their political or religious beliefs, ethnic origin, gender, race, language, economic status, sexual orientation or other status. 16 Both PACE and Amnesty International exclude anyone who advocates or uses violence in defense of their beliefs.17 The Society for Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Russia (Soyuz solidarnosti s politzaklyuchennymi), a Russian human rights NGO, has listed 341 people who between 2008 and April 2014 received custodial sentences or house arrest for political reasons (data for 17 June 2016).18 After the Russian annexation of Crimea, observers noted an increase in the number of people in jail who satisfy the PACE criteria for being political prisoners. Memorial, another leading human rights non-governmental organisation, was by 2015 reporting numbers

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of political prisoners in its regular up-dates of around the fifty mark at any time. A smaller number are recognised by Amnesty International as ‘prisoners of conscience’. The first post-Soviet prisoner to be accorded this latter status was Igor Sutyagin, the scientist sentenced to fifteen years for spying for the USA.19 Others have followed him, including high profile cases that became known in the West such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Pussy Riot, and the lesser publicised in the West, such as an environmentalist Evgenii Vitishko and, latterly, critics of Russia’s policy in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, such as Rafis Kashapov and Oleg Sentsov.20 In the absence of a Soviet-era catch-all political article in the criminal code, the state has had to hunt down its opponents by using criminal articles to secure convictions. The preferred articles have varied over time, as the nature of the ‘targets’ has changed. In the late 1990s and early 2000s much use was made of laws relating to financial fraud and tax evasion.21 The trail blazer was the Yukos affair that sent Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev to prison. In that case, as in subsequent ones, it began with the law being used to settle personal scores and to reap the benefits of someone else’s business and only subsequently became political when the legal abuses in the prosecution of the accused became so obvious and extreme that they could no longer be dismissed as ‘local-level excesses’. The case against Aleksei Kozlov, partner of Ol’ga Romanova whose experiences we discuss below, ‘became political’ after new charges were brought against him following his and his wife’s participation in anti-Putin demonstrations. Also useful to the state are articles in the criminal code relating to espionage and treason. These have been used against a number of Russian academics and scientists to define the boundaries of acceptable cooperation and collaboration with the global academic, scientific and business community. To date the scholars who have been convicted of spying is small but there have been a series of changes in the law since 2012 that seek further to regulate contact with foreigners.22 These include the notorious ‘foreign agents’ and ‘undesirable organisations’ laws that criminalise NGO activities involving the input of foreign funders or organisations.23 The conviction of Igor Sutyagin is the prototype case. An arms control specialist in the Institute of US and Canadian Studies of the Academy of Sciences, Sutyagin was arrested in 1999 and faced trumped-up charges of passing classified information about Russian submarine capability to the USA under cover of working as a consultant for a London-based private firm. Sutyagin’s case was widely interpreted by the liberal media as a warning shot to the intelligentsia to limit their contacts with the global academic community which was, in fact, confirmed by the security spokesman after the trial: ‘[W]e are pleased with the outcome [. . .] This should serve as a warning to scientists, ecological organisations, journalists and others who often exchange information with foreigners.’24 In 2011, Sutyagin was freed in an exchange with ten Russian spies apprehended in the USA, but only after being forced to sign a confession.25

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When Russian citizens began taking to the public square to protest about anything from the loss of social benefits to the environment and foreign policy, the state responded with the use of a variety of public order offence articles. The street protests aimed mainly against Putin in the period 2011 –13 generated a large number of political prisoners in Russia’s jails who were charged under laws on extremism, hooliganism and mass riot. The charge of hooliganism has also been used in other public protest cases, such as against Pussy Riot. Finally, articles of the criminal code relating to terrorism have been used to send a message to ethnic minorities, especially in the North Caucasus, of the consequences of making claims on power. Several of the names on the Amnesty list of prisoners of conscience are Muslims who have been imprisoned on slender evidence of terrorist activities or for membership of outlawed organisations. An early notorious case of the use of terrorism articles was the prosecution of Zara Mourtazalieva, who as a single young woman migrating for work to Moscow aroused the security service’s suspicions. Even though months of surveillance did not reveal evidence of any planning for a terrorist act, she was convicted and sentenced to eight and a half years in a correctional colony.26 At the present time terrorism and espionage articles are being used against the new wave of political ‘offenders’ protesting the Russian annexation of the Crimea and military involvement in East Ukraine.

‘Becoming’ a Political’s Relative Just as prisoners ‘become political’ as a result of their interaction with the Russian criminal-justice system, so too is the identity change from ‘normal citizen’ to being the relative of a political prisoner a process of becoming.27 In what follows we use two contrasting case studies to discuss the distinctiveness of the experiences of the wives, mothers and children of political prisoners.

The Sutyagins The first case is, in fact, a whole family. Between 2012 and 2014, we were able to interview various members of Igor Sutyagin’s family as well as Igor, himself. Igor is in voluntary exile from the Russian Federation, unsure what the consequence would be of his return. His close family remains in Russia but visit him frequently. The espionage case against Igor Sutyagin has commonalities with the Soviet-era accusations that branded anyone who had contact with foreigners or who acted in ways that could be construed as not in the interests of the ruling Party, enemies-of-the-people and agents of foreign powers.28 Igor was arrested by the FSB (Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti) or Federal Security Bureau in 1998 and was held in a remand prison in Kaluga before being moved to Lefortovo prison in Moscow when his case was referred to the Supreme Court. He was found guilty in a secret trial in 2004 and sentenced to fifteen years in a strict regime correctional

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Figure 9.1 Svetlana with her son on a visit to the correctional colony in Sarapul, the Republic of Udmurtiya, early in Igor’s sentence. colony. Igor was moved between seven different remand prisons and labour colonies during the eleven years he served before he was released. Igor Sutyagin, his wife Irina, two children Oksana and Nastya and his parents, Svetlana and Vyacheslav, lived in two apartments not far from one another in the closed city of Obninsk, Kaluga oblast’. Obninsk was the site of the USSR’s first nuclear power plant and had a plethora of institutes concerned with nuclear research. During the Soviet period, the residents of Obninsk enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, although this was bought at the expense of certain restrictions over their freedom of movement and communications, and ever-present surveillance.

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Svetlana, Igor’s mother, was our principal informant for how Igor’s arrest and conviction affected the family. She is an astute, intelligent woman, whose parents ‘always spoke honestly’ to her about Soviet politics. Her husband’s uncle had been arrested and sent to a labour camp in the 1930s. Igor’s family was typical of the educated intelligentsia. Like the older generation of mothers we considered in Chapter 6, Svetlana uses an historical frame to interpret the events that overtook her family. She describes how she instantly recognised what was happening when she arrived at her son’s apartment the evening of his arrest: The first thing I understood was that the search hadn’t taken place according to proper procedures; they should have been making a record of everything they seized. They dumped some things, took others [. . .] I went home to tell my husband and second son and we went back to the flat. We couldn’t leave them [Irina and the children] alone [. . .] it just wasn’t possible, that’s what I said, just not possible. It was thirtyseven. Yes, how it’s etched in my mind from what I had read, seen and heard [. . .] 1937. The year to which Svetlana refers marked the beginning of the Stalinist Great Terror. A common reaction of people arrested during the Stalin era was that there had been a mistake; that once the suspect brought the mistake to the attention of the investigators they would be released. Many took this illusion with them to the camps. In a telling echo of that time, politically-motivated arrests today can also evoke the same response. Igor was convinced that once he explained to his investigators the error in their interpretation of his actions, he would be freed. Svetlana knew better: [I]n the first three days we did manage to persuade him [Igor] that he needed a lawyer, that he’ll get nowhere without one [. . .] He said that he wasn’t guilty, so why was one needed. But we, I, said to him ‘Igor do you know what you are doing?’ ‘Yes, the lads will sort it out’. I say ‘You know, don’t be naive. That’s all well and good but we shouldn’t depend on these friends.’ So we found a lawyer, with the help of his friend who suggested one. It turned out that it was only through the lawyer that we got any news about Igor during the next three months. Svetlana saw her role as being to support her grandchildren and daughter-inlaw, but she was also the public face of the family, speaking to the press and taking part in forums to discuss political prisoners. Irina, Igor’s wife, was one of the new generation of full-time mothers in Russia and, in contrast to her motherin-law, she avoided contact with the press. For her, her main job was providing a

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stable environment away from the public gaze for her two daughters, who were aged nine and twelve at the time of their father’s arrest.29 In this respect, Irina is similar to Inna Khodorkovskaya who also avoided the limelight, leaving her mother-in-law and son to front the family’s campaign against her husband’s incarceration. In one of Irina Sutyagina’s rare interviews with the media in 2011 she explained the action against her husband as a function of inter-institutional politics, the result of the Kaluga security services wanting to prove its worth to the centre. If their grandmother and mother had some analytical frame to make sense of what was happening to the family, Igor’s daughters had no ready explanation for the events that brought turmoil to their hitherto secure world. Both children were witnesses to the search of their apartment by men in black. According to Svetlana and Irina, the two children were deeply traumatised by the arrest and, among other things, they developed a fear of mustachioed men. It was over two years before Irina felt they were sufficiently settled for her to begin to look for work to support the family. But both girls successfully finished their education, Oksana proceeding to university and Nastya opting for employment in the commercial sector. But for the whole family, the story of the Russian state’s persecution of their father has not ended. Igor’s release was far from a moment of unalloyed joy, as it involved his having to live abroad.

Ol’ga Romanova Ol’ga Romanova, our other subject, is the partner of Aleksei Kozlov, a businessmen who fell victim to a colleague’s use of fraud and tax avoidance charges to secure a business advantage, in the way we describe above as becoming common in ‘free-market’ Russia. His case became political as a result of Ol’ga and his decision publically to fight the conviction, a struggle that soon assumed a broader oppositional character. Ol’ga was a financial journalist before Aleksei’s arrest and the author of critical articles about corruption in business and finance. Today, she is a prominent political oppositionist, a frequent participant on television discussion shows, a leading activist for prison reform and prospective politician.30 She is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Inna Khodorkovskaya and Irina Sutyagina, welcoming media attention and using her experiences of the criminal-justice system as a platform to mount her opposition of the current political regime. Ol’ga was born in the 1960s and raised in a small town outside Moscow. As a teenager in the last decade of Soviet power, her formative years were spent in the heady atmosphere of the 1990s and early 2000s when she grasped the opportunities for a career in journalism that opened up in the newly independent media. She rapidly made a name for herself in both print and broadcast media, hosting her own show on NTV.31 Ol’ga was married three times before she starting living with Aleksei, a millionaire businessman, in one of the

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elite houses in the fashionable Moscow suburb of Rublevka.32 She now admits that she had come to the conclusion by 2008 that she would have to separate from Aleksei because she found the fashionable lifestyle she was now leading incompatible with critical journalism, but his arrest led to a change of direction in their relationship. In her interview Ol’ga tells us how her journalistic instincts came into play in her responses to Aleksei’s arrest. She says that the Khodorkovsky affair had already sounded alarm bells in the Russian business community: Of course [. . .] I could see the direction things were going. I was already a journalist. In 2003 they imprisoned Khodorkovsky and from that moment on everything followed a set pattern. I saw it happening and I said to my husband ‘you’ll end up in prison. Unless you leave the country, they’ll imprison you.’ He said ‘what are you talking about? I’m not Khodorkovsky! There’s no smoke without fire! They have nothing on me! You know that my business is all above board!’ Even though Ol’ga had forebodings, she admits that her initial reaction to her husband’s arrest was the familiar one that the investigators would soon realise they had made a mistake: The children were already grown up. They didn’t understand immediately what was going on. It also took a long time to sink in with me, even though I thought myself clever. But, as a matter of fact, the feelings you have are complicated. Firstly, you just can’t believe that this is happening to you. It’s something that happens to other people, not you. Secondly, it’s like Evgeniya Ginzburg wrote in ‘Into the Whirlwind’. You sit and analyse the situation and say to yourself ‘the investigators will sort it out. They’ll sort it out, soon. We’ll hug and laugh at this ridiculous mistake and we’ll call each other on New Year’s Day. Of course, it’s a silly mistake! Good heavens, they’ll soon realise it’. That’s the second thing that comes into your mind. Aleksei was held on remand in Butyrka prison in Moscow from where, via Ol’ga, he posted a ‘Butyrka Blog’ about his experiences, which Ol’ga later turned into a book ‘Butyrka’.33 He was sentenced in 2009 to eight years, reduced to five on appeal, in a general regime colony. Ol’ga’s campaigning and the publicity surrounding the case resulted in a successful appeal to the Russian Supreme Court on the grounds of procedural irregularities. Aleksei was released on licence in September 2011 but was re-arrested a few months later, when he and Ol’ga took part in an oppositional rally. Re-tried in March 2012 he was sentenced to a further five years. Aleksei was finally released in June 2013 having

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Figure 9.2 Ol’ga Romanova at work for Rus’ Sidyashchaya, a website set up to support and defend Russia’s prisoners and their families. served a total of around four years, which had taken him to correctional colonies in Tambov and Ivanovo oblasts and Perm’ krai. Ol’ga clearly sees herself as one of a growing number of people drawn into the prison system as a result of the direction that Russian politics has taken under President Vladimir Putin. Her insights are framed by her understanding of the changing configurations of power in Russia and the functioning of the current political system. For her, the experiences that she has had as the wife of a political prisoner should be understood as a product of the great societal transformations through which the country has passed in the last twenty-five years: Yes, I’ve changed several times in my life, for different reasons, though none has been like the current ones. There were other reasons; I was an economist, then I decided to be a journalist. Then there were the barricades in 1991. Then the TV came along rather unexpectedly. So my life changed several times before. I believe it’s like that for everybody, only people don’t notice it. My mother lived through three major politico-economic changes never leaving the kitchen [. . .] There was the communist period, the beginning of the construction of capitalism, then the bandit period and kleptocracy we have now.

Managing the Media: ‘A Spy in Kaluga Province’34 During the Stalin era, control over the media and West–East communications meant that the state was able to control information about political repression.

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This control weakened somewhat during the post-Stalin period and the state found it was unable to prevent the underground circulation of the Chronicle of Current Events (Khronika tekushchikh sobytii) that gave bi-monthly updates to the USSR’s dissident community and observers in the West of the current status of victims of political repression.35 Today, in the era of mass communications, far less of what the security services do can be concealed. The days of the stagemanaged show trial followed by an information black-out with the condemned disappearing from view, are long since past. True, in Putin’s Russia, pressure on editors and the practice of sending inconvenient prisoners to particularly remote locations are still used to try to control information about political prisoners. But globalisation of communications media and web-based social networks mean that the authorities are fighting a battle they cannot win. The circumstances surrounding the detention, trial, sentencing and imprisonment of the people whose activities the state finds inconvenient are played out today in the view of the public. This new reality presents a challenge to relatives of prisoners of how to manage media involvement in their case. Although, arguably, publicity is integral to the process of becoming a political prisoner in twenty-first-century Russia, the benefits of the media storm that now accompanies the arrest and trial of a relative is not always clear to close family members. On the plus side, publicity for a case can provide an additional layer of monitoring of the activities of the criminal-justice system. It may help improve the conditions of detention, cause the law enforcement agencies to pause before falsifying evidence and the courts before accepting it and encourage moderation in sentencing. Alerted to a case, civil society organisations can provide moral, material and legal support to the detainee and family members. But there are also down sides. Too much critical publicity of the criminal-justice system carries the danger of negative repercussions on the prisoner. Despite being able to draw on a high quality team of defence lawyers and engaging the attention of world leaders in their plight, the defendants in the Yukos affair were all found guilty and given harsh sentences. The global press spot light on Khodorkovsky did not prevent his initial sentence being increased. Publicity can also increase the vulnerability of the prisoner to revenge attacks and bullying by other prisoners and prison personnel that undermine the health and welfare of the prisoner. The fate of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Butyrka prison, is an ever present warning to those who would try to take the system on.36 Equally concerning is the potential impact of ‘celebrity status’ on family members of political prisoners. Inna Khodorkovskaya was hunted down by the press when she visited her husband in Chita. Both she and Irina Sutyagina felt the need to shield their young children from this sort of attention. In 1998 when Igor was arrested all of this was still to come. Svetlana describes how the family discussed the question of involving outside organisations and the press in Igor’s case. The first discussions took place when the family was ‘still in

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shock’ at Igor’s arrest. The FSB agents who had conducted the search of Igor and Irina’s apartment warned that nobody was to be told what had occurred. Svetlana’s instinct told her to ignore this warning and to mobilise support: The point was that they told us that we weren’t to tell anyone. Under no circumstances were we to say anything to anybody. But the next day, in order to avoid any misunderstandings, when I went to work I went immediately to the director [of her institute] and told him. I fully understood what this was all about and what it could lead to. We are a ‘regime’ institute so we knew (pause). For two days the television and newspapers were full of it. So they’d said to us ‘don’t tell anyone’ to give themselves time to write the headlines ‘A Spy in Kaluga oblast’. So I said to Irina, ‘You see what it’s like? So you can feel now that we shouldn’t be silent about it’. She began to convince me that he was guilty of nothing. I say to her, ‘I knew that already, I have no doubt at all about that’. So we decided. And Slava also went and talked about it at work. The initial newspaper coverage of the affair was, indeed, negative. Local and national newspapers, Znamya, Vesti RTR and Trud, all ran articles within three days of Igor’s arrest which assumed his guilt and, incorrectly, reported that he had confessed. Almost immediately the family had to fend off hostile reporters and Svetlana and Slava were caught out when an interview they gave misreported their words. It has to be remembered that in 1998 much of the press was still relatively free in Russia and the family’s assumption that they would be reported sympathetically for the time was not unreasonable. Thereafter, the family interacted with the media cautiously. Alexander Nikitin, an ecologist and environmental campaigner who had himself been arrested for passing information about the dangers to the Arctic posed by Russia’s decaying nuclear submarine fleet, put the family in touch with a trusted journalist who had campaigned for him. As Svetlana explains, He was sent by Nikitin, but this was already three months after the arrest when Igor had realised that it was impossible to stay silent. So we started to engage with the press, give interviews here and there and began to understand which was to be trusted and which not and who generally falsifies or muddles the information to the extreme. In time, in fact, the family learned to use the press to their advantage. During the four years after Igor’s arrest when he was held on remand in different prisons and made several court appearances, much press comment was favourable and pointed out the flaws in the prosecution’s case.37 The contact they made with the liberal press, Svetlana explains, also helped them in practical ways:

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I don’t know maybe you know about Ernst Chernyi. He is the secretary of the Public Committee for the Defence of Scholars. Well, I went to see him. In those days we didn’t have mobile phones so I made the journey to see him and I say, ‘Ernst Isaakovich, help us. I don’t know where he [Igor] is. He has disappeared again, where I don’t know. And our lawyers can’t find out either. No one can find him.’ So, he contacts Radio Svoboda and Echo of Moscow (Ekho Moskvy) and somewhere else and, literally, within an hour and a half the whole world knew that Igor Sutyagin had disappeared from Lefortovo prison. The phone calls started. Finally, he phoned and told us that Igor had been moved to Matrosskaya Tishina [one of Moscow’s remand prisons]. The committee to which Svetlana refers was founded in 2002, stimulated in part by Igor’s case. It was a source of material and moral support for the family and helped to keep discussion of Igor alive in the scientific community during the long years when he was serving his sentence in remote correctional colonies. It was one of a large number of human rights organisations in Russia and abroad that took up the issue of academic freedom raised by his case.38 For the Sutyagins the circumstances of Igor’s release that sent him into foreign exile, led to a renewed, unwelcome, period of attention from the Russian press and to renewed pain for the family. The most egregious example was an article by Yuliya Latina in Echo of Moscow which argued that even though it was never proven that Igor was in communication with foreign spy organisations, the fact that he passed even open-source information to ‘suspicious people’ (aka foreigners) had to be punished.39 There was speculation about whether he would return to Russia and the suggestion that he would stand as a candidate in upcoming election in Kaluga region for the liberal Yabloko party. Oksana the older of the two daughters had kept quiet about her family-identity during her father’s long years of imprisonment, for the first time now felt pressurised into sharing her secret with her peers: I decided to tell when my father went to the UK, because we were afraid that the story would be very big again like when he was arrested. So, I decided it would be better if they hear the story from me rather than on the TV or from newspaper journalists. So, I decided to explain it myself and to answer their questions all at once. And when I told my story, to Masha, one student I knew, she was very surprised and shocked but then she tried to help me [. . .] And, there was this one nice guy who found out by himself. [W]hen I said that I am going to spend some time in UK, he asked ‘with your father?’And I was very surprised and asked how he got this information. He told me that it hadn’t been difficult; he’d just put my surname in Google.

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The question the family asks itself today is to what extent the involvement of the press helped or hindered Igor’s case. On the face of it, it did not help as the charges against Igor were not dropped, his fifteen-year jail sentence was harsh (though less than the theoretical maximum of twenty) and when it came to his pardon, this was given on the cruellest of terms. There were people who kept their distance from the family and, at school, Oksana tells us both sisters experienced unwelcome name calling especially when the news of the arrest first broke. On the other hand, the supportive press coverage that they received in the late 1990s, which continued online through the whole period of Igor’s imprisonment, provided a platform for mobilising support. As Svetlana tells it: We believed that somehow, with joint effort, we would manage. And generally we can say we did, but we do need to thank people who gave us all sorts of different support. All sorts. Some money, for example, the Scholars’ Defence Committee found various ways to help, they organised donations. Shenderovich [a satirist and radio commentator] organised a concert for political prisoners [. . .] So we are grateful to people who gave us emotional support and when they could, material. Sometimes somebody would say ‘I am so sorry, I can’t give any more but. . .’ I felt uncomfortable taking help, it wasn’t something I was used to doing. I find it easier to give; I’m a giver. But I understood that the girls needed it; they are growing up, they need things. The hopes the family had had that Igor’s departure from Russia would signal the end to media speculation about his innocence or guilt have not been realised. They have had to face publicity associated with the finding of the European Court in Igor’s favour that the Russian Federation had violated his human rights. This judgement was answered by the Presidium of the Russian Supreme Court with a statement that acknowledged procedural errors but confirmed its earlier guilty verdict.

‘Keep Paddling’ Ol’ga Romanova’s initial reaction on the first arrest of her husband to publicising what had happened to him was similar to the Sutyagins’. She feared the consequences for Aleksei: Thank goodness that my husband proved to be quick-witted. He immediately said to me, ‘We must fight this, go for maximum publicity. I’ll start to write a blog and I’ll send you diary entries for you to publish.’ I said to him, ‘What? Are you crazy? They’ll tear you to pieces.’ ‘You know’ he says ‘that I am going to have a difficult couple of months.

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They will pressurise me but I will survive. It’ll be difficult for you too. But then it’ll get easier.’ Given the political activism with which her name is now linked and her journalistic experience, Ol’ga’s initial caution is indicative of just how deep is the suspicion in which the criminal-justice system is held in the Russian Federation. Stories of reprisals against prisoners, deaths in custody and the pressure applied to suspects in pre-trial facilities to sign confessions, it is not surprising that fear of what awaits an offender in remand prisons affects even the most ‘streetwise’ of the regime’s critics. Ol’ga is a very strong, energetic and capable woman but the drama of Aleksei’s arrest saw her admitted to hospital. When she ‘came to’, her approach, as she explains it, was to keep paddling, ‘like the frog in the milk’: I consider that the best method, the well-know method, is to paddle like a frog in the milk. You mustn’t stop moving. Keep moving. You have to do lots, lots and lots of things. You must [be able to explore all options], go to the barricades, go to a Deputy, speak to people in authority, be radical, be a centrist, be constructive, clever, prepared to negotiate. Do all of this straight away. You mustn’t stop, not for a second. You can’t only be radical or on the left or on the right. You have to try every method going, immediately. Don’t stop. Beat with your whole fist, over and over again. Not just your middle finger or your little finger, use all your fingers together, quickly, at once, hard and often. Aleksei’s arrest was in 2008 a decade after Igor Sutyagin’s, so Ol’ga could draw on the accumulated experience of high profile cases to guide her response. She employed top lawyers, pursued all available legal channels and made maximum use of the broadcast and print media to try to secure Aleksei’s release. What otherwise would have been a barely noticed example of the many fraud and tax avoidance case at the time forced its way into public consciousness by the publication of Aleksei’s blog from inside Butyrka prison. Ol’ga worked hard behind the scenes milking the contacts she had made as a journalist, although the responses she received were not always as she had expected. For example, having secured an interview with a deputy minister she knew in the Internal Ministry to ask him to intervene on Aleksei’s behalf, she was surprised to find herself being congratulated. Aleksei, the deputy minister told her, was sure to get an eight-year sentence, so Olga would be able to grab all his money and property. Ol’ga insists that this story is absolutely true. She also, notoriously, was prepared to offer bribes and blackmail. She was mostly out-maneuvered but did achieve some small victories, such as getting herself listed as a member of the Church Choir for Butyrka prison to obtain a visitor’s pass.

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‘Paddling like a frog’ did not prevent Aleksei from standing trial, being convicted and sentenced to a custodial sentence on two occasions, in 2008 and 2011, but it may well have contributed to his achieving parole in 2011 and to the withdrawal of one of the charges laid against him on his re-arrest and conviction a few months later. It is difficult to know what the configuration of forces was that achieved these ends, as there are plenty of other cases where ‘telephone justice’ overrules the legal process to secure a conviction wanted by a member of the political elite.40 Aleksei was finally released in 2013, having spent three and a half years in prison. Reflecting on her actions, Ol’ga now regrets her use of bribes. She is convinced that it is important to uphold the rule of law in order to hold the regime to account. When she was interviewed she was unrepentant about her threats to expose corrupt practices among judges: I enjoy talking about it all. People should know. I am unable to print it all now anywhere because I don’t have the written evidence (she laughs). I am really waiting for the moment, and I am sure it will come, when there will be full disclosure in relation to every judge, every procurator, every investigator. There’s a file on each of them. I know what there is on each [. . .] We need complete light on everybody, transparency about every one of them. Ol’ga has paid the price, quite literally, of her use of the media to try to get justice for her husband and to expose what she believes is the corruption of the Russian criminal-justice system. In an archetypal case of ‘libel tourism’ the businessman who first put Kozlov in jail won a libel case in a British court against Ol’ga Romanova, with an award of damages against her of £100,000.41

‘Wives of the Enemies of the People’ Twenty-First-Century Style A traditional rite of passage to becoming a political prisoner in Russia is the involvement of the Security Services. The monopoly of the FSB in investigating and bringing to the courts cases involving state security was potentially undermined by the establishment of the Federal Investigative Committee (Sledstvennyi Komitet Rossiiskoi Federatsii) in 2005.42 Today, both answer directly to the President and together they constitute the Kremlin’s main weapons in its struggle to neutralise opposition through threats of legal action, criminal investigations, charges of serving foreign powers, show trials and the doling out of long custodial sentences to be served in remote locations. The choreography of the FSB’s management of high profile political offenders resembles that of the Soviet era and, as before, it has a distinctive geographical component. The suspect is transferred to Lefortovo prison or sizo no.1 within the Matrosskaya Tishina in Moscow, is tried either in secret or a well-publicised show trial (often in

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the Basmannyi district court), found guilty and, if given a custodial sentence, transported to a colony far from the centre of power. No less than the KGB in the Soviet period, the methods used by the security forces in Russia today are designed to intimidate and strike fear into their victims. Khodorkovsky was arrested when he landed at Novosibirsk airport by masked men armed with machine guns, Platon Lebedev was seized from his hospital bed, Pussy Riot members were ‘roughed up’ during their ten-hour detention by the FSB in Sochi shortly after their release from prison and there are allegations of torture in relation the Oleg Sentsov and other activists arrested in Crimea in May 2014. Prominent suspects are taken to the FSB’s ‘own’ detention facilities for investigation where, despite attempts by reform minded-president Medvedev to bring them within its remit, the norms of the Russian Federation Criminal Procedure Code are often ignored and offer prisoners little protection.43 The involvement of the security forces also means that relatives of suspects are treated differently from those of ‘ordinary criminals’. Ol’ga Romanova was able to make a ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison. Aleksei’s first arrest and search of their house was made by the regular police and it took place according to a ‘mutually understood text’. On receiving the call from her husband that he had been detained, Ol’ga immediately swung into action to ‘clean’ the house. She had time before the police arrived (the road to Rublevka is often choked with traffic) to dispose of any potentially incriminating materials and ‘to lay up a table with vodka and sausage’. When the police arrived, according to Ol’ga’s narrative, they gratefully accepted the refreshments, made a perfunctory search and left emptyhanded. Ol’ga explains that everyone knew that they would find nothing. By September 2011 when the Supreme Court overturned Aleksei’s conviction, the ‘case’ had already been passed to the FSB. This meant that the security forces were ready to pounce with new charges as soon as Aleksei stepped out of line. Ol’ga and Aleksei knew that taking part in a demonstration would lead to Aleksei’s arrest: [N]ow we were under the FSB and I understood that it was the FSB that was sending him to prison. I already got to know the laws. I absolutely understood that it was them I had to work with now and I had to use their own methods. From the moment that she joined the opposition and began actively campaigning for the release of her husband, Ol’ga has been monitored by the FSB and subject to their interventions. She comments that it is necessary to have the hide of a hippopotamus to withstand the organisation’s attentions. In 2014 she became the subject of negative campaigning when she announced that she intended to run in the Moscow Duma elections. Posters appeared in Moscow claiming her to be a fascist and supporter of Ukrainian right-sector nationalists and her charity, Rus’ Sidyashchaya (‘Imprisoned Russia’) that campaigns for

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prison reform has been accused of diverting funds collected to support prisoners and their relatives to Ukraine.44 Representations of Ol’ga in official media are deeply gendered. She is portrayed as a stereotypically ‘difficult’ and ‘hysterical’ woman, rather than a strong-minded campaigner for prisoners’ rights and against corruption in the criminal-justice system. The treatment of Igor Sutyagin’s family also demonstrates classic FSB intimidation techniques: the ten-hour search of their apartment by three men ‘in civilian clothes’ during which Irina and her two children were held captive; limited permission for visits and telephone calls with Igor during the four years that he was held on remand; censorship and confiscation of correspondence; periods when Igor ‘disappeared’; covert monitoring and interrogations. Here, two years after the arrest, Irina describes the impact upon her and the two children: Of course it had a big effect on us. You can see that they [the children] are smiling, but it’s only been the last three months that they have started smiling again. Up till then it had all been very difficult [. . .] the word ‘spy’ was like a stone in our heads. Now we’ve started to get used to it. It seems that humans can get used to anything. Before that it was very difficult for us, of course. But we supported each other, the girls supported me and I supported them. They defended me with ‘special weapons’ which they hid under pillows and they put a barricade at the door every night to make sure, God forbid, that nobody got into the flat.45 Family members of suspects in ordinary criminal cases can expect to be questioned by the police or other investigators, including the FSB (for example, where organised crime bosses are concerned), if they are believed to have facts relevant to a case. Where politically-motivated arrests are concerned, the families can find themselves being drawn into the investigation in ways that appear especially designed to intimidate. Svetlana tells us how she, her husband and Irina were interviewed by the FSB and pressed on issues that went far beyond the facts of the case. The FSB questioned them about Igor’s patriotism, beliefs and his movements over a ten-year period and used dirty tricks to try to get them to incriminate Igor: The first interrogation [of Vyacheslav] took place in Obninsk. The investigator came to the town and conducted the interview there. They told my husband that Igor had confessed. But what had he got to confess? ‘Look’, they said, and showed him Igor’s confession. But was it Igor’s handwriting? There were ninety pages of densely covered paper. They said to Vyacheslav, ‘So, you talk now’. They wanted everything in detail; what he had done over the past ten years, where he’d been. That sort of thing. That became the basis of evidence.

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During the first three months, when Igor was held in Kaluga oblast’, Irina was allowed no contact of any sort with her husband. Svetlana and her husband were allowed a telephone call, but only after the FSB had done with questioning them. When visits were, finally, permitted the family knew that they were being monitored, not least because the subjects they spoke about would come up in subsequent interrogations. On one visit, Svetlana recalls with a smile, they were directed mistakenly to the ‘wrong’ cubicle that, evidently, was not wired up to monitor their conversation (Igor was held in the regular remand prison though in the FSB’s cell): Once it turned out that as a result of shift change a women officer led us in and showed us in through the door of the third cubicle and told us to sit down. We quickly followed her order and sat there. Then when Igor was brought in and taken to the first cubicle he said ‘no there they are’. It makes me laugh now: such confusion. Well, they let him, but the guard stood right behind his back listening for the whole visit. Svetlana describes how on various occasions when Igor was held on remand and the restrictions on contacting the family were lifted, hard-fought-for visits were cancelled at the last minute, sometimes without warning. Arriving for a visit at Kaluga remand prison, the family was told that the visit was cancelled because Igor had been moved to Moscow. The family and lawyers then had to embark on a search to find him: The lawyers hadn’t been told anything. Just that they had moved him to Moscow. Where? We didn’t know. Nothing. So the lawyers brain-stormed where he might be and reckoned that it would be Lefortovo. So I said, ‘Irina we will rest tomorrow and then the day after we will go to Moscow and we’ll try to find this prison and what is going on.’ It was like being in a trance, it played on our nerves and on our minds. In a narrative that could be taken from any gulag-era testimony, Svetlana describes how she and her daughter-in-law went to Lefortovo and after a perplexing search to find an entrance were able to wheedle out of an officer on duty that Igor was, indeed, in the prison. But they were told they were not permitted to see him or, even, to pass him a note in order to reassure him that his family knew where he now was. Then the two women hurriedly assembled a parcel of food which they handed in, as was their right under the criminal correction code, and in this way communicated to Igor that they had discovered his whereabouts. A similar story unfolded after Igor’s conviction was upheld by the appeal court and he was transferred to Matrosskaya Tishina prior to transportation. Turning up at Lefortovo with permission for a visit in hand, the

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women were told that he was no longer there: ‘He’s not here’. ‘Where is he? ‘We don’t know. They took him away.’ And again, when the time came for Igor to be transported to his colony, the women parcelled up the clothes and provisions he would need for the journey and winter in the colony. Here is Svetlana: Well, for the next [visit], they let us know we could see him [. . .]We hurried out to buy things; he needed some medicines so we rushed around to get these. We had the permission for the first of September for Irina and Oksana to visit. They waited and waited all day, then the prison said to them that he’d been transported to Mordoviya. He was already gone. It later transpired that Igor had not, in fact, been transported. This took place later and the destination was Udmurtiya, not Mordoviya: We found out afterwards that he was waiting just like they were to be called through [for the meeting]. The authorities just didn’t say straight away that he wasn’t there, but, instead, kept them waiting for the whole day. He also sat there waiting to be called. He was on the other side of the wall [. . .] Yes, it was abuse, however you look at it. It was psychological pressure, this way and that. They transported him ten days later. He was still in Matrosskaya Tishina for another ten days. He was sitting there, waiting. And they said to him, ‘Ah, so it seems nobody wants to come and see you’. When he was finally transported, the family entered the all-too-familiar information black hole. Back in Obninsk, they were not to learn his whereabouts for the next two months. The most regular form of contact that the family had with Igor was by letter. But letters were subject to monitoring, redaction and confiscation. This monitoring was particularly intense during the investigatory period. As Irina recounted in her Echo of Moscow interview in 2001: [A]ll letters to us, telephone conversations are read or listened to; envelopes come to us already opened. We have also got used to that but, it’s true, we do sometimes think to ourselves ‘Won’t this end soon?’ We’ve already been to court, surely they don’t need anything else from us’? [At first] we didn’t realise about this, we were very naive; it’s just not in our nature to be suspicious. But when we found out what was really going on, we understood that they were listening to everything. Sometimes when we answered the phone we would hear a radio or someone’s voice, conversations. When, after his release, Igor and Oksana counted up the letters they had from one another, they realised that there were several missing. The monitoring of

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letters continued throughout Igor’s imprisonment and probably continues to the present day. The family was also disturbed to discover long after Irina had begun to work at Svetlana’s institute that a close colleague was reporting regularly on her to the FSB. Given what we have learned from our interviews with the relatives of other prisoners, the customary practices of the Russian criminal-justice system are a source of terrible anxieties; poor information flows and cancelled visits are not the exclusive affliction of the relatives of political prisoners. These practices may be understood as the product of an uncaring penal administration that puts its operational priorities ahead of the rights of the people in its care or simply as a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. But in Svetlana’s narrative the humiliations that the family experienced during the four years of investigation and trial of her son, were experienced as an orchestrated policy designed to victimise and humiliate. The family felt itself to be an integral part of the FSB’s process of building a case for the show trial to come. The consequence was that they could never settle. Oksana tells us of the relief the family felt once they knew what the outcome was to be. But for Svetlana who knew something about life in Russian penal colonies, there could be no peace: I did not allow myself to believe the worst. That he’d [pauses] but I knew they could abuse him. Where he was . . . I . . . But generally, it wasn’t a life, it was simple torment. Everyday, every minute, even every second. I would smile, but deep down I was wondering where is he, how is he, what is happening to him? Permanently. The trope of the prisoner-once-removed, of the family member who shares the fate of the suspect or convict, is particularly apposite in the case of the relatives of prisoners of conscience. Not quite ‘wives-of-enemies-of-the-people’, but uncomfortably close.

The Aftermath It is one of the truisms about the life of prisoners’ families that the real problems begin when the prisoner is released. For the families of political prisoners the reentry challenges are distinctive. A constellation of contradictory expectations that comes with their near ‘celebrity status’ can surround the prisoner on release: they can become the focus of the hopes of oppositional forces, sought-after commentators in the global media, and on political circuits and icons for people suffering political oppression all over the world. Whilst trying to reconnect, the ex-prisoner and his or her family have the added burden of being subject to public scrutiny. At the same time, they can continue to attract the attention of the forces that put them in jail in the first place. Political prisoners

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may go into voluntary or, as in Igor Sutyagin’s case, involuntary exile in a foreign country, which can perpetuate separation from family and friends and be a source of tension and sorrow. Hopes that families might have of a quiet period to allow everyone to readjust to the new reality and to understand how they have been changed by their experiences are more often than not frustrated. This has certainly be denied both the Sutyagin family and Ol’ga Romanova. The circumstances of Igor Sutyagin’s release followed the familiar script; the family had to react rapidly to unfolding events whilst remaining ignorant about the true nature of what was taking place. It began with a telephone call from a contact in Kholmogory in Arkhangel’sk region where Igor was in prison, to say that Igor had been taken away from the colony. Svetlana and Irina had been due to travel there the following day for a three-day visit. Eventually, after many telephone calls, they learned that Igor had been taken back to Lefortovo prison in Moscow and that the family had permission to visit him the next day. Only Svetlana and Igor’s brother were able to travel from Obninsk to the capital. Irina could not get time off work, Oksana was on a university field trip outside Moscow and Nastya was revising for exams. Arriving at Lefortovo Svetlana and her second son were taken to an unfamiliar inner room. Svetlana takes up the story: Igor is brought in and left with us and I see before me such a diminished, thin, face. No not a face, the man was expressionless. And he tells us that he signed a confession, that he didn’t know what else to do. This was such a reversal that when he told his brother and me this, tears just coursed down my face. I, well [voice trails off]. They gave us forty-five minutes, he told us what had happened. What Igor had told them was that he was due to be deported to the UK the very next day. Since that time, Igor has been living in Oxford. He has worked to publicise the conditions in Russian prisons, their continuity with the Soviet past and is a vocal critic of the current regime. Irina decided that she must stay in Russia to see the children through their education. As Oksana comments, her father has gained his freedom but only ‘by half’ as the family is still not united in one place. The difficult task of getting to know one another again has to take place by telephone and during vacation visits. Hopes that Igor would be able to return have faded with Putin’s consolidation of power. Oksana tells of the family’s dashed hopes: I think it’s very difficult for him live without us. Because all the time we were waiting for his imprisonment to come to an end, we thought after his release we would live like one family again, in one flat together. Now he has his freedom, but he can’t return to Russia.

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Ol’ga and Aleksei, by contrast, were able to re-establish a life together. Still having to withstand regular criticism in the official media, Ol’ga has continued her work for penal reform that she began when Aleksei was first imprisoned. The publicity that Aleksei’s case generated is something that she has welcomed and is able to exploit to further the causes that she believes in. She now sees the years since Aleksei’s arrest as a period of her own awakening: Those three and a half years when he was in prison, I saw and learned so much. For one thing I don’t know what sort of journalist I thought I was. I am ashamed now! I didn’t know anything about people, about my country, about law enforcement, about the courts, about prison. I didn’t understand what it was all actually like. And I will never forget what I’ve seen. Firstly, now I am not afraid, generally not afraid. Secondly, I will never forget what I have seen [. . .] I saw, I witnessed what happens to our people there, what they do with them, who does it. Ol’ga’s response to what she has seen is to enter politics and to try to change the system from within. Her husband’s imprisonment has made her reassess her set of values, attitudes and worldviews and defined her self-esteem with new parameters of relating to others. She embarked on the mission to challenge the regime’s major tenets and feels it is the only way to prove to herself and others that love for the country should unite everybody irrespective of their differences, ‘Greeks and Hebrews’ alike, as she puts it. Whether her efforts, and those of other political prisoners’ families, can make much difference to the current political regime in the country is doubtful in the short term but as the previous generations of regime critics has shown, in the long term, everything is possible.

EPILOGUE PRISON THE LEVELLER

One of the legacies of the Soviet gulag is that the Russian intelligentsia and popular opinion draw a clear distinction between political prisoners and ‘ordinary’ criminals. The binary originated with the Decembrist officers and applies also to the women who chose to follow the Decembrist officers into penal exile. Women had been following their husbands as the ‘accompanying persons’ of the exile system for a century before that (since Peter I’s introduction of the punishment of hard labour) but what made the treatment of the Decembrist women followers exceptional was that they were forced to share the symbolic punishment of the men they followed in the removal of their titles and the privileges that came with their aristocratic status. The punitive impact of this symbolic punishment has to be understood in the context of the penal order of the day which, as elsewhere in Europe, differentiated punishments according to social class or rank. For the Decembrist women to be treated like the family members of ‘common criminals’ was degrading and demeaning and it was a distinct and separate pain from the physical and economic hardships that living in Siberia entailed. The principle of using the law to punish the family members of political offenders turned out not to be a passing phenomenon in Russia but continued into the Soviet period when under Stalin it was extended to apply not just to the wives of enemies-of-the-people but to whole kinship groups.1 After Stalin’s death when the law ceased to be used in a formal sense against the families of the state’s enemies, the underground circulation of gulag testimonies reinforced the political/criminal binary by describing how political prisoners suffered at the hands of the criminal gangs in the camps, on top of the ‘official’ or formal disciplinary measures to which they were subject. Meanwhile, harassment of political prisoners’ relatives by the security forces continued in ways that it did not for the relatives of other convicted offenders. We have already in the previous chapter discussed the exceptionality of the situation of political prisoners in Russia today. We saw that the press spotlight,

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the involvement of legions of outsiders in their case, the sinister ever-presence of the FSB puts strains on the wives, mothers and children of political prisoners. Against this, there are also ways that political prisoners’ relatives can find the changes in their lives following a family member’s arrest and imprisonment easier to bear than other prisoners’ relatives, because, for example, of sympathisers’ donations and moral support. Svetlana told us that the Sutyagin family received letters of support from all over Russia. People would cross the street to offer sympathetic words: You know, generally, intelligent people understood, while it was impossible to explain anything to the fools. If you want to believe that Igor is a spy, it is up to you. But on the whole, you know, the atmosphere was that most people didn’t believe it. Complete strangers would come up to us and say ‘we don’t believe any of it. That business with Igor. We don’t believe it.’ In the town we were quite well-known [. . .] all the eleven years people used to come up to us even in the street and say ‘give our best wishes to Igor, tell him we don’t believe it’. Oksana, Igor’s daughter, drew a clear distinction between her family and those of other prisoners and her description of the people she met in the queue at the prison gate reveals her discomfort at having to associate with the relatives of common criminals: No. The point was that we would arrive [. . .] well, we’d talk to them. We’d see who was there. But you know they were mainly [relatives of] drug dealers, thieves. We’d talk to them but [. . .] well, we were in the same queue and so we’d have to. Oksana’s inclination to distance her experiences from others’ was challenged by her father. Here she is talking about how much she hated the fact that he was surrounded by serious criminal offenders: Oksana:

Interviewer: Oksana:

I disliked it very much, but he said they are humans, too. And he said that in a prison you can meet a lot of interesting people. And did it make you change your mind? Yes, I think what he wrote in letters about the people around him helped us to change our minds.

Still, this didn’t result in the family seeking out support from other prisoners’ families or joining any of the internet chat rooms.

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Igor’s reprimand to his daughter that the other prisoners ‘are humans too’ indicates the progress has been made in post-Soviet Russia to contest the binary between political and criminal prisoners. This, in turn, can be taken as a small piece of evidence of the development of legal consciousness in Russia following the country’s joining of the Council of Europe. It is reflected also in the commitment other high profile political prisoners, such as Pussy Riot members (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Mariya Alekhina) and Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Zara Mourtazalieva to campaign for the improvement of the conditions of detention for all prisoners, regardless of offence, incarcerated in Russia’s prisons. Here is Ol’ga Romanova talking about the rank-and-file prisoners who make up the majority population of Russia’s prisons: They do not attend rallies. They watch RenTV and ‘Crime News’ on NTV. We do not write for them. Nobody writes about them. Nobody makes films about them. It is as if they do not exist. Actually, half the people in Russia are like them. Owners of restaurants, shops and food stalls. These are the ones, for the most part, who are sent to jail [. . .] When we say ‘a high-profile case’ we do not say that the man who went to jail used to own a hundred mobile rotisseries. Is that a high-profile case? Who is he? My husband probably had an income that was equalled by that of the owner of several hundred stalls selling shawarma. The difference is that my husband is an intellectual, while a stall owner is neglected. Money-wise, they are practically the same. And the way that property has been taken away from them and the way they are treated in prison and the ordeal that their women experience, that is all the same. It is another matter that our husbands are ‘musketeers’ and theirs are just nothing.2 The boundary between the experiences of the women attached to political and criminal prisoners has blurred in post-Soviet Russia, not just discursively but in reality. Women attached to high profile members of prison sub-cultures, ‘bandits’ wives’, can attract the same sort of attention from the FSB and the President’s Investigative Committee as do the relatives of political prisoners. Nowadays also, the Russian media has as voracious an appetite for stories about mass murderers and business people guilty of white-collar crimes as the Western media. The press no longer focusses exclusively on the state’s supposed enemies as it did at the height of the Stalinist Terror. And while the wives, mothers and girlfriends of rank-and-file prisoners cannot expect Shenderovich to put on a fund-raising concert for them, among the new generation of legal professionals that took their law degrees in the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse, there is a sufficient number willing to offer free legal advice to prisoners and relatives on the internet and via NGOs for even the most ordinary of ordinary prisoners’ family to benefit.

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The rise of rights consciousness is one of the more promising changes in Russian legal culture and one consequence is a growing awareness that the human rights of all prisoners matter. Gradually, a commitment to prisoners’ human rights across the board is chipping away at the discourse of the exceptionality of the political prisoner and of their families. This, obviously, is a welcome development but it does not mean that all are alike or their experiences identical. The women’s stories that we have presented in this book have revealed that the women who have a family member in prison belong to a highly differentiated group who have nuanced and complex relationships with the person in jail, other family members, society at large and the institution of the prison. Just as in the society of prisoners, there are social groupings and rivalries among prisoners’ relatives, as we have described between ‘traditional wives’ and zaochnitsy, and mothers and daughters-in-law. Oksana did not want much to do with criminals’ relatives, whilst as Ol’ga in the extract from her interview below describes, bandits’ wives hold themselves aloof: Of course, they are experienced, and that helped us. They, of course, look down on the others, because they had been there twenty times. They know everything, all the ways in and out. They were not always ready to help us. If we asked them a question, there were times when they didn’t answer. It was a type of snobbery. It was their house and we were merely visitors. Judging from the interviews and web postings, there are as many experiences of being a prisoner’s relative in Russia today as there are women telling their stories. Nevertheless, there are important commonalities that link all together and set them apart from other women in society. At no point in their narratives is this more apparent than when the women get onto the subject of ‘passing through the prison gate’. This is the moment when they are brought into direct contact with the institution that has changed their lives and transformed their identities. At this moment differences stemming from personal histories, psychological makeup, class, ethnicity and age disappear. In Ol’ga Romanova’s words, ‘prison is a leveller’: Ol’ga:

[W]hen I went to the prisons I was always laden with parcels and stood in the queues. I was exactly the same as 99 per cent of the other women there. At the beginning I, too, was a newcomer to prison. The first time, there was a crowd of people. I say ‘Good morning. So, what do we have here?’ The aunties showed me what was what; they told me everything I needed to know. Next time I come I am already an oldtimer. I can tell newcomers what to do, where to go. And every time there are new people and fewer of the old-timers.

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Interviewer: Ol’ga:

WAITING AT THE PRISON GATE You notice and make a bet who will come again and who will not. There are very few who visit regularly. You notice that. And how did they relate to you, did they know who you were? No, that means nothing there. Prison is a leveller. No Greeks, no Hebrews, there is only prison. I quickly understood that we are all sisters

Ol’ga is making the same point as her dekabristka forebear, Mariya Volkonskaya who in response to the suggestion that following her husband set her apart from other women retorted, ‘What is so surprising about it? Five thousand women voluntarily do the same every year.’3 The women we interviewed showed that they have at their disposal a variety of practical and discursive strategies that they can deploy to counter the practical difficulties and the spoiled identity that comes from their association with a prisoner. It was striking how creatively women modified the dekabristka story to legitimise their investment in men who have committed crimes that placed them at the opposite end of the spectrum of valour from the liberal heroes who stood up against autocracy in the nineteenth century. On the practical front, the evidence from our interviews is that women overcome the divisions at the prison gate to get together to offer each other mutual support. The twenty-first-century equivalents of the schools the original dekabristki set up in Siberia are the groups of women who have established websites and informal groups to give advice, educate each other in human rights law and share experiences. Historical models of women who were radicalised by their encounters with the criminaljustice system are paralleled today in the activism of some of the women we interviewed, who in myriad small ways fight back against the system. Much as the prison authorities might want to put the genie back into the bottle, prisoner support websites and networks of prisoners’ relatives that have proliferated in recent years constitute a space where women feel free to criticise Russia’s prison system and to argue for reform. Here is Ol’ga describing the origins of Rus’ Sidyashchaya: It was obvious that we needed to organise. ‘Imprisoned Russia’ was formed almost immediately. We began to meet in the Shchokoladnitsa cafe in the evenings and informally share news. We called each other ‘zechki’ (female prisoners). But then Ira Yasina said, ‘Girls, it doesn’t sound right to call yourselves prisoners. Use the name, ‘Imprisoned Russia’. We said ‘Oh, good idea! That’s what we’ll call ourselves.’ We have at various places in this book observed that two different images inhere in the dekabristka trope; the dutiful, submissive wife prepared to suffer for

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the sake of her man and the incipient revolutionary. The decision of Ol’ga Romanova’s group to abandon the name zechki, a Russian version of the ‘prisononce-removed’ label, for Rus’ Sidyashchaya hints at a political agenda with its implication that all of Russia is in prison. To date it is the first of these images that informs society’s expectations of prisoners’ relatives and, as we have seen, the expectations of the majority of women themselves. This interpretation is encouraged by the Russian Prison Service, which unapologetically reaps the benefits of women’s internalisation of the elements of dekabristka trope that reproduce women’s subordinate position. The treatment of the original Decembrist women was shocking. In the context of the twenty-first century, in a country that is a signatory to the European Human Rights Act the treatment of today’s ‘prisoners’ wives’ is no less shocking. The collateral consequences of having a family member sent to prison that we have described in this book are not what are to be expected of a humane prison service or state seriously interested in human rights. The dekabristka discourse, with its assumptions about self-sacrifice and the legitimisation of suffering and discomfort, allows the state to get away with ignoring the needs of prisoners’ relatives whilst transferring to them much of the responsibility for keeping prisoners well-fed, healthy and safe and for their moral rebirth. Meanwhile, the continuing celebration of the sacrificial Decembrist wife in society at large is no less than acquiescence to the inhumane and discriminatory treatment of some of society’s most vulnerable members. As of 2016, and despite the heroic efforts of women who are contesting this system through their support groups and individual acts of courage, the prospect of the situation of the women and families suffering from the full affects of ‘secondary prisonisation’ making it onto the policy-making agenda, sadly, is extremely remote.

APPENDIX 1 BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS OF WOMEN INTERVIEWED FOR THE PROJECT

Although we asked all respondents similar biographical information, not all were prepared to disclose the details of their family member’s offence or details of their income. We have not included information on ethnic origins of our informants, although we discuss ethnicity where it is relevant in the text. We use the generic term avtoritet (authority figure) in this table to denote that a prisoner occupies a position of rank in prison sub-culture. We have indicated whether women have children who are minors and indicate how many were fathered by the prisoner.

Higher education degrees in law and history Entrepreneur Middle income Secondary education Pensioner Poor

Higher education not completed Trying to set up her own business Lower income

Higher education Employed Lower income

Antonina, 25 yrs

Galya, 22 yrs

Gulya, 32 yrs Two children (with prisoner)

Fatima, 60 yrs

Anna, 22 yrs

Secondary education Employed Prison marriage Lower income Currently finishing a higher education degree

Education and socio-economic characteristics

Anfisa, 45 yrs One child

Name/age/children

Wife

Zaochnitsa Fiance´e

Mother

Bandit’s wife

Daughter

Zaochnitsa Married in prison

Status 47 yrs Served 10.5 years for murder Released 50 yrs Served 11 years Released 25 yrs 8 years into 10 year sentence for murder Avtoritet 35 yrs 5 years into 5.5 year sentence for drugs Recidivist 30 yrs old 2nd sentence of 4 years for robbery Released 32 yrs 8 years into sentence of 13 years for murder Avtoritet

About the prisoner

Higher education degree Entrepreneur Middle income Has served a prison sentence Higher education degree Pensioner Wealthy Moved with husband to prison location Higher education not completed. In casual employment Looking after siblings and her own daughter Previously high income, now poor

Larisa, 45 One child (with prisoner) and one adopted child Larisa Petrovna, 60 yrs Katya’s mother

Lena, 22 yrs One child

Higher education not completed Not in formal employment Wealthy Moved from Moscow to husband’s prison location Higher education not completed Entrepreneur Lower income

Education and socio-economic characteristics

Katya, 37 yrs One child (with prisoner) Daughter of Larisa Petrovna Klara, 39 yrs One child

Name/age/children

Continued

Daughter

Mother-in-law

Widow

40 yrs old 5.5 years into a sentence of 6 years for organised crime Avtoritet Recidivist Woman, 42 yrs old 3 years into 6.6 year sentence for fraud

40 yrs 5.5 years sentence of 6 years for organised crime Avtoritet Recidivist First sentence of 10 years for murder; Second sentence of 3 years for theft Murdered after release Died of TB in prison when 12 years into 15 year sentence Avtoritet

Bandit’s wife

Bandit’s wife Widow

About the prisoner

Status

Finished technical college Employed Small but regular income Secondary education Employed Poor

Lisa, 34 yrs

University student

Oksana, 21 yrs Grand-daughter of Svetlana

Nuriya, 19 yrs

Secondary education not complete Employed Lower income Finished College Employed Average income

Natal’ya, 26 yrs

Lyuba, 25 yrs One child

Degree in economics Employed Lower income

Olya, 32 yrs One child

34 yrs 6 years into 8 year sentence for grievous bodily harm Recidivist Lesbian partner of the 19 yrs prisoner’s mother 11 months into sentence of 4 years for robbery Zaochnitsa 25 yrs Prison wedding 4 years into 15 year sentence for grievous bodily harm and drugs Zaochnitsa Prison 28 yrs wedding Recidivist 3 years into his sentence of 7 year for robbery Sister 16 yrs 2 years into 7.5 year sentence for murder Avtoritet Daughter 49 yrs old Served 11 years of 15 years sentence for espionage Now released Living in UK Recognised as prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International Partner Prison wedding planned

Svetlana, in her 60s Grandmother of Oksana

50 yrs Served 11 years of 15 year sentence for espionage Released and deported to UK in exchange for Russian spies

26 yrs 4.5 years into 14 years for murder Avtoritet

33 yrs 11 years into 12 years sentence for gang related offences Avtoritet 31 yrs 3 years into the first sentence of 9 years for drugs

Zaochnita and bandit’s wife Married in prison

Divorced

40 yrs businessman Served 4 year sentence for fraud Released

About the prisoner

Wife

Status

Secondary professional and Civil wife incomplete higher education degree On maternity leave Fully provided materially by the prisoner’s illicit network Higher education degree Igor Sutyagin’s Pensioner mother

Finished an accountancy course Employed Lower income

Saima, 29 yrs One child (with prisoner) Now pregnant from another man Sveta, 22 yrs One child (with prisoner)

Rita, 38 yrs

Higher education Economist, Broadcaster, Journalist and political activist Originator of Rus’ Sidyashchaya Higher education Employed Lower income

Education and socio-economic characteristics

Ol’ga Romanova, 48 Two adult children

Name/age/children

Continued

Secondary education Pensioner Lower income

Higher education degree Entrepreneur Wealthy

Tat’yana Stepanovna, 70 yrs

Valya, 42 yrs

Wife

Grandmother

19 yrs 2 years into 11 year first sentence for grievous bodily harm resulting in death 8 years into 12 year sentence for murder Recidivist

APPENDIX 2 PRISONER-NETWORK WEBSITES

This is a list of the websites that were consulted during the course of the research for the study. They are all prisoner-related. We have not included in this list the human rights website which also were consulted and that are included in footnotes where appropriate. 1. http://vk.com/public51217036 Website’s motto: ‘for those who is waiting for the loved ones and relatives from prison ’. 2. http://zeki.su/ Manifesto of the website of Soyuz zaklyuchennykh (Prisoners’ Union) declares that they ‘fight for rights and freedoms of the individual in Russia’. 3. http://www.vturme.ru/ The website that states it being for law and its practical usage. Its motto: ‘what advocate you will choose that life you will live’. 4. http://www.tyurma.net/ The website advertises its motto as ‘everything about prison life – prison, zona, the thief’s law and code, blatnoi jargon, prison tatoos’. 5. http://vkapkane.net/ Website that opens with the ‘welcome those who wait’. The identity of the website is declared to be as a ‘forum of prisoners’ wives and those, whose loved ones and relatives turned out to be the other side of the law’. Motto there is ‘I will wait [get to the end of his prison sentence] in spite of everything’. 6. http://prisonlife.ru specialised legal website entitled as a ‘prison portal of Russia’ about ‘life and activities of FSIN correctional institutions’. 7. http://exzk.ru/tyurma/ Website set up by an ex-prisoner which declares itself to be ‘about Life, People, Prison’ offering ‘useful information about life behind bars’. 8. http://www.prison.org/napravlenie-deyatelnosti/znay-svoi-prava Website of the oldest human rights NGO (organised in 1988 by an ex-political prisoner Valerii Abramkin). The Centre’s activities is aimed to implement in Russia international and European standards in the treatment of prisoners.

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9. http://zonaprava.com/ ‘The legal zone’ is engaged in legal and information support of prisoners and detainees. Its motto is to ‘unite people who want to work towards changing the prison system in Russia’ 10. http://www.zashita-zk.org/9F33175 The website of the human rights organisation ‘In Defense of Prisoners’ Rights’ is an attempt to unite the forces of people one way or another engaged in problems of the violation of prisoners’ rights. 11. http://gulagu.net/ Social network called Gulagu.net is a community of independent human rights activists and prisoners’ relatives, experts, journalists, bloggers, deputees, advocates and everybody who ‘in real sense wants and ready to contribute to prison reform and humanisation of punishment in Russia’. 12. http://arestant.msk.ru/ No longer accessible. The website used to run an analytico-information project ‘Arestant’ which provided practical information on prisons such as in accessing the colonies. 13. http://www.women-zekam.ru/ Website of the ‘Association of Wives and Relatives of Prisoners’. The opening statement reads: ‘Arrest, trial, prison, advocate, colony, zona, parcel, a visit, corrections to the Criminal Code, UDO – is this is familiar? Then you are in the right place’. 14. http://dekabristki.ru/ defines itself a forum of zaochnitsy and prisoners’ wives. Discusses various issues women encounter when trying to maintain ties with imprisoned relatives. 15. http://www.tyurem.net/ The website is defined as ‘everything about life in prison’ and offers practical advice to ‘how survive in prison and make your time useful there’. Variety of topics, even contains info with medical advice for prisoners http://lepila.tyurem.net/ 16. https://zekovnet.ru The website of the charitable foundation ‘Rus’ Sidyashchaya’ set up by Ol’ga Romanova, politically-wired and attempts to contest the system. The opening statement explains the organisation’s project to help prisoners and their families, in which ‘we assemble funds and help those who suffered from Russian justice system, inform about law and give legal advice, conduct professional expertise of criminal cases’. 17. http://bidla.net/ Website of ‘contemporary patsany (macho/real men)’. It advertises itself as an ‘entertaining resource for adequate and decent people with multi-faceted interests and sense of humour. An enormous collection of photo and video, soul-powered forum and life communication await you. Come in see for yourself’. 18. http://svidanok.net/ A dating website for prisoners. The statement explains that this is a project that is run to ‘help the social rehabilitation of prisoners and implementation of their right for communication’.

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19. http://nevolia.ru/ The website is defined as confinement.ru – the instinct of freedom’, offers various discussion topics – from prison-related to contemporary news inclusive of video clips (i.e. situation in Ukraine). 20. http://survive.kudin.org/ Website in Russian on Ukrainian prisons with the motto: ‘how to survive in prison’. It offers many cultural and historic parallels with the Soviet Gulag. 21. http://www.aferizm.ru/index.htm Website is promoted as a ‘website for those who does not want to become a victim of mugger’ and offers ‘short stories about history and hierarchy of the criminal world, thief’s profession’. 22. http://teleger.chat.ru/ The newspaper ‘Telegraf’ about the Russian prison. It is created with assistance of the Ministry of justice of Russian Federation. The basic direction of the edition – legal education of the population, preventive maintenance of criminality, illumination of a course of legal reforms, including reform of criminal executive system. 23. http://jails.chat.ru/ Practical advice on visiting Butyrka prison. Excerpt from the welcome page: ‘I want to relate what and how is happening in the Butyrka . . . I hope that the information will help and save stress in those whose loved ones are contained in Butyrka’. 24. http://kresty.chat.ru/ Unusual website in terms of not being similar to others. It gives a brief historic overview of the Kresty prison, guided tours information and guestbook. 25. http://www.bratok.com/tattoo/index.html Website about tatoos. 26. http://zeki.su/novosti/2010/1/18222628.html/2558 Website of the ‘Union of Prisoners’. Motto: ‘We are fighting for the rights and freedoms of the individual in Russia’. 27. http://www.zona.tv/ Website about popular prison drama ‘Zona’, contained visitors’ pages. The opening statement read: ‘Zona takes you into the world of the prisoners in an average Russian jail and is based on stories told by real inmates’. No longer accessible. 28. http://www.syzo.ru Website and forum for ‘zeks and inmates’. The welcome declaration invites not only prisoners and ex-prisoners but their friends, relatives, wives and zaochnitsy to take part in communication with each other.

NOTES

Preface 1. Vera A. Kazakova, Zhenshchiny otbyvayushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaya kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsya pod strazhei 12 – 18 noyabrya 2009, Vypusk 5 (Moscow, 2011), p. 53. The ranges are for the short and residential visits, the latter recording the higher percentage figure. 2. Natal’ya B. Khutorskaya, Soderzhanie osuzhdennykh k lisheniyu svobody s uchetom evropeiskikh standartov. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits soderzhashchikhsya pod strazhei 12 – 18 noyabrya 2009, edited by V.I. Seliverstov, Vypusk 9 (Moscow, 2009), pp 48 – 53. 3. Bill Bowring, ‘Introduction: The Russian judicial and penitentiary system’, The EURussia Centre Review 11, at http://www.eu-russiacentre.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2008/10/Review_XI.pdf (accessed 1 October 2015); Laura Piacentini and Elena Katz, Carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons, Punishment & Society (2016). Published online before print 22 August 2016, doi: 10.1177/1462474516665609. 4. http://fsin.su/structure/inspector/iao/statistika/Kratkaya%20har-ka%20UIS/ (accessed 29 September 2015), the figures are updated monthly. 5. These figures are from the official FSIN website: http://www.fsin.su/ (accessed 1 October 2015). 6. Andrei Reznikov, ‘From Mochit’ to Kosmarit’: Some observations about Russian language, 1999 – 2008’, in Kevin J. McKenna (ed.), Wolfgang Mieder, The Proverbial ‘Pied piper’: A Festschrift Volume of Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Mieder on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday (Berne and Pieterlin, Switzerland, 2009), pp. 87 – 94. 7. A visual image of the gestation and spread of the gulag is to be found on the website www.gulagmaps.org – video created by Judith Pallot. 8. Sending prisoners to remote place began with Lenin who commanded the Cheka to hold class enemies ‘outside the city’. Escapes of prisoners near to cities led from 1918 to prisoners being taken ever further away and to the founding of SLON, the Solovetskii camp organisation, in the remotest part of the European North. See Michael Jacobson, Origins of the GULAG: The Soviet Camp System, 1918 – 1934 (Lexington, KY, 1993), pp. 39 – 40. The reason why open prisons are often to be found in particularly remote places is because after the de-Stalinisation of the

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gulag, former exile villages, the trudposeleniya, were chosen to be the location of the colony-settlements. Even though prisoners in these colonies work outside the barracks in civilian jobs during the day, the settlements in which they are located are often part of a regional prison service ‘fiefdom’ and populated primarily by present and past employees of the prison service and ex-prisoners. 9. There were alternatives, of course, such as sending fewer people to prison and restructuring the prison estate to bring facilities into the metropolitan centres. 10. Judith Pallot and Laura Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia (Oxford, 2012).

Chapter 1

The Decembrist Wife

1. Quoted in Eleonora Pavlyuchenko, Zhenshchiny v russkom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii: ot Marii Volkonskoi do Very Figner (Moscow, 1988), p. 23. The quote was used when the wife of the Decembrist Vasilii Davydov returned from Siberia after her husband’s death there. He died in 1855 before the amnesty. The Decembrist honoured his wife as his saviour in exile without whom he wouldn’t have survived his punishment. 2. The poem is dedicated to the wives of the exiled Decembrists. All translations are from Nekrasov and Soskice (1929). 3. Chita is in the Russian Far East. Initially Volkonskii, condemned to hard labour (katorga), was put to work in the Blagodatsk (Bliss) silver mine in the Nerchinsk range, but later in the summer of 1827 he was moved with the other Decembrists to a fortress in Chita, which is where his wife caught up with him. 4. For a biography of Mariya Volkonsky see, Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia: The Story of Maria Volkonsky and the Decembrist Wives (London, 2001). 5. Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 and found guilty of tax evasion and fraud for which he received a nine-year prison sentence. It was when a further charge was laid against him in December 2010 that Amnesty International concluded that the state’s actions were politically-motivated so he was designated a prisoner-ofconscience. See http://sputniknews.com/russia/20110524/164210044.html (Accessed 1 October 2013). 6. For a discussion of the media application of the Decembrist trope to Khodorkovsky and his wife see Sergei Erlikh, Metafora myatezha: dekabristy v politicheskoi retorike putinskoi Rossii (SPb, 2009), pp. 42 – 113. 7. Laura Piacentini and Judith Pallot, ‘In exile imprisonment in Russia’, British Journal of Criminology 54(1) (2014), pp. 20 – 37. 8. The Foucauldian concepts of ‘excisionary violence’ and ‘regulation by exclusion’ have been applied by historians to the deportations and imprisonment associated with the gulag and also to the mass operations of the 1930s when it was used to clear cities of undesirable elements. See David Hoffman, ‘The conceptual and practical origins of Soviet state violence’ and David Shearer, ‘Stalinist repression, modernity and the social engineering argument’ which are Chapters 5 and 6 in Part III of James Harris’s edited volume, The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin (Oxford, 2013). For the relationship with other elements of Russian penal culture see Judith Pallot, ‘The gulag as the crucible of Russia’s 21st-century system of punishment’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16(3) (2015), pp. 619– 48.

NOTES TO PAGES 3 – 5

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9. The titles of many of the books on prisoners’ relatives in Western jurisdictions convey this understanding of prisoners’ relatives: for example, Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago & London, 2008); Jeremy Travis and Michelle Waul (eds), Prisoners Once Removed. The Impact of Incarceration and Re-entry on Children, Families, and Communities (Washington DC, 2003); Helen Codd, In the Shadow of Prison. Families, Imprisonment and Criminal Justice (Cullompton, 2008); Laura T. Fishman, Women at the Wall: A Study of Prisoners’ Wives Doing Time on the Outside (New York, 1990). 10. Recent important historical studies by Andrew Gentes and Daniel Beer address the issues of the Decembrists’ martyrdom in Siberian imprisonment and exile, see Gentes’ Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and his Exile, Murder and Madness in Siberia, 1823–61 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); see Beer’s ‘Decembrists, rebels, and martyrs in Siberian exile: The “Zerentui conspiracy” of 1828 and the fashioning of a revolutionary genealogy’, Slavic Review, Vol. 72, No. 3, 2013, pp. 528–51. Amongst earlier works on their exile that are based on the Decembrists’ memoirs see, Mikhail Zetlin, trans. G. Panin The Decembrists (New York, 1958). A recent comprehensive collection of documents on the Decembrists is by Gennadii Nevelev, Dekabristskii kontekst: documenty i opisaniya (SPb, 2012). 11. Hanging was the criminal punishment for lower classes in Imperial Russia. Its application to the Decembrist officers was symbolic of ‘stripping of noble status’. 12. Russian law gave the woman the right not to follow the husband to Siberian exile. The 1835 Digest of Laws declared that the wife’s main duty was ‘to submit to the will of her husband and to reside with him in all circumstances, unless he was exiled to Siberia’: see William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1994), p. 63. Only in 1883 were the etap parties ordered to keep exile groups with families separate from unaccompanied male exiles so as to prevent the abuse of women during the march to Siberia. 13. The Princess Dolgorukova became the first woman in Russian history to write her memoirs. Ryleev’s poem was emblematic of Russian romantic literature at the time. The literary stereotype of the heroic woman following her husband into Siberian exile was much influenced by literary models such as the parting of Hector and Andromache. 14. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London 2003), p. 95. 15. Andrei Rozen and Gennadii Nevelev, Zapiski dekabrista (Irkutsk, 1984), p. 228. 16. Ivan Yakushkin, Zapiski, stat’i, pis’ma dekabrista I.D. Yakushkina (Moscow, 1957), p. 119. 17. See Eleonora Pavlyuchenko, V dobrovol’nom izgnanii: o zhenakh i sestrakh dekabristov (Moscow, 1974) and her, Zhenshchiny v russkom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii; Anatole G. Mazour, Women in Exile: Wives of the Decembrists (Tallahassee, FL, 1975); Figes, Natasha’s Dance; Ludmilla Trigos, The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (New York & Basingstoke, 2009). 18. Yurii Lotman, Uspenskii et al., The Semiotics of Russian Culture (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984), pp. 93, 96. 19. Ibid., p. 96. 20. Mark Sergeev, Podvig lyubvi beskorystnoi: rasskazy, dokumenty (Moscow, 1976); Barbara Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia (Cambridge, 1983) and her, Women in Russia, 1700 –2000 (Cambridge, 2004).

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21. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian legislation had almost no requirements regarding naturalisation (ukorenenie) of foreigners: see Juliette Cadiot, ‘Searching for nationality: statistics and national categories at the end of the Russian empire (1897 – 1917)’, Russian Review 64/3 (July 2005), p. 440. Foreigners could be naturalised as Russian subjects ( poddannye) by the decision of the provincial government (gubernskoe pravlenie) without any special requirements. For the dilemmas in defining Russian citizenship historically see: Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship from Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA, 2012). Russian classical literature of the nineteenth century reflected society’s troublesome ongoing nationalist discourses in which writers explored ‘what it is to be Russian’ while answering ‘what is it to be the other’. For example, Dostoevsky’s experiences of the multi-ethnic prison environment in Siberia contributed to his growing xenophobia and glorifying the Russian nation as endowed with special spiritual qualities which enable it to save the non-Russian world. See, Elena Katz, Neither with Them, Nor without Them. The Russian Writer and the Jew in the Age of Realism (Syracuse NY, 2008). Similarly Nekrasov’s poem undoubtedly feeds into Russian national mythology glorifying the qualities which are inherent in ethnically Russian females. Nekrasov was not writing a poem about the French women who became the dekabristki but about born-andbred noble Russian princesses. He considered them the loftiest example of Russian womanhood but it can also be argued there is also the implication that the French dekabristki ‘became’ Russian by acquiring the essential qualities of the ‘Russian soul’. 22. Zinaida I Lebtseltern,‘Ekaterina Trubetskaya’, Zvezda, 12 (December 1975), pp. 179 – 94. 23. Harriet Murav, ‘‘‘Vo Glubine Sibirskikh Rud’: Siberia and the myth of exile’, in Galya Diment & Yuri Slezkine (eds) Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (New York, 1993), pp. 100 – 3. 24. Trigos, The Decembrist Myth, pp. 28 – 9. Anna Biel, ‘Nikolai Nekrasov’s representation of the Decembrist wives’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, 25/1– 2 (2011), pp. 39 – 59. For a detailed comparative analysis of Nekrasov’s poem with Mariya Volkonskaya’s memoirs, see Arkadii Gornfeld, O russkikh pisatelyakh (SPb, 1912), vol. 1, pp. 175 –226. 25. Adele Lindenmeyr, ‘Public life, private virtues: women in Russian charity, 1762 – 1914’, Signs 18/3 (Spring, 1993), p. 566. 26. M.M. Khin, ‘Zheny dekabristov’, Istoricheskii vestnik 18, pp. 651 – 83 and Pavel E. Shchegolev, ‘Podvig russkoi zhenshchiny’, Istoricheskii vestnik 96 (1904), pp. 530 – 50. Vasilii Pokrovskii (ed.), Zheny dekabristov: sbornik istoriko-bytovykh statei (Moscow, 1906). 27. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lantz et al., A Writer’s Diary, trans. K.A. Lance, G. S. Morton (ed.) (London, 1994), vol. 1, p. 130. 28. Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, p. 214. It was widely rumoured that the amnesty to the Decembrist exiles will be granted in 1850 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their uprising. Nothing happened, Nicholas likely changed his mind for clemency to the rebels after the revolution in France and the tsar’s fear of its spread to Russia. On 26 August 1856, with the ascent of Alexander II to the throne, the Decembrists received an amnesty. Not all chose to return from Siberia, however. Many were frail with old age, some could not afford it and others no longer had family to return to. To many, Siberia had become home.

NOTES TO PAGES 6 – 11

29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

217

Those who did return to European Russia greeted with enthusiasm the Emancipation Reforms of 1861. Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1987). Various Russian female revolutionaries were inspired by the Decembrist wives and claimed themselves as their heirs. See, for example, the female terrorist Vera Figner’s reverential view of the wives in her article ‘Zheny dekabristov’, Katorga i ssylka 21 (1925), pp. 227 –37 and Trigos’s discussion, The Decembrist Myth, pp. 90 – 2. A useful analysis is also given in Pavlyuchenko, Zhenshchiny v russkom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii. Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography (London, 2014). Lidiya Chukovskaya, The Deserted House (London, 1967) and Going Under (London, 1972); Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir; Akhmatova, Requiem and, Poem Without a Hero. Akhmatova used the term dekabristka for her friend Nadezhda Mandelstam who, though persecuted by the authorities, stood by her husband, poet Osip Mandelstam: see, Beth Holmgren, Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: on Lidiya Chukovskaya and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington, 1993), p. 108. Margaret Ziolkowski, Literary Exorcisms of Stalinism: Russian Writers and The Soviet Past (Columbia, SC.,1998), p. 166. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. M. Hayward, M. Harari and M. Glenny (London,1988), p. 214. Ibid., p. 214. Evgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York, 1967), p. 292. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off The Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005), p. 249. Fitzpatrick supposes that families of the prisoners were expected to keep in touch by correspondence and sending parcels. Cited from Golfo Alexopolous, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926 – 1936 (Ithaca, 2003), pp. 180– 1. Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, p. 205.The Stolypin coach in the quotation refers to the prison railway carriages named after the then prime minister Petr Stolypin that were introduced to transport convicts arrested in the 1905 revolution to Siberia. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, pp. 215 –16. In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn sarcastically explained the ideology behind the law as a call to abandon their incarcerated spouses ‘all the more speedily in misfortune [. . .] to forget about their marriages all the more thoroughly. Now it became not only silly and nonsocialist but also illicit for a woman to languish for a husband from whom she had been separated’ (The Gulag Archipelago 1918 – 1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. T.P. Whitney, in 3 vols (London, 1973), vol. 2, p. 238). Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow (Nottingham, 2010), p. 32. The Gulag dekabristki were keenly aware that reunion with their husbands would have been a nearly inconceivable miracle. While Ginzburg stated that ‘Mariya Volkonskaya had been very lucky when she met her Sergei in the mine’, she noted the willingness of her Soviet heiresses to follow their husbands to the grimmest destinations of the Stalinist gulag: ‘here was Tanya Stankovskaya sighing from her upper bunk “never mind, girls, I’d walk to Kolyma like a shot if I knew that my Kolya was there!”’ (Ginzburg, Journey into the

218

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

NOTES TO PAGES 11 – 16 Whirlwind, p. 292). See David Galloway’s insightful analysis of Soviet gulag autobiographical texts, in which he discusses their similarities to and differences from the earlier works on Russian prisons: ‘Polemical allusions in Russian gulag prose’, The Slavic and East European Journal 51/3 (2007), pp. 535– 52. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2007), p. 305. Anatolii Berger, Smert’ zhiv’em. Vospominaniya. Tyur’ma-lager’-ssylka. Leningrad – Mordoviya – Sibir’: 1969 – 1974 (Moscow, 1991), p. 82. Yuliya Voznesenskaya, Zhenskii dekameron (Tel-Aviv, 1986), pp. 26 – 7. Victor Astaf’ev, Veselyi soldat (SPb, 1999), p. 467. Ibid., p. 468. Elena Katz and Judith Pallot, ‘Prisoners’ wives in post-Soviet Russia: “For my husband I am pining!”’, Europe-Asia Studies 66/2 (2014), pp. 204 – 24. See also, Katerina Clark’s ‘Changing historical paradigms in Soviet culture’, in Lahusen, T. and G. Kuperman (eds), Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to Novostroika (Durham, 1993); and Robert Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington, 1989). www.rt.com/politics/putin-law-order-khodorkovsky/ (accessed 13 August 2015). See for example, E. V. Dobrovol’skii, 1825-i god: Zagovor: Risovannaya Kniga (Moscow, 1990); by a pseudonymous author Vasilii Staroi, Pierre and Natasha (Moscow, 1996); the mass-market novel by Dmitrii Bykov & Maksim Chertanov (the pseudonymous author ‘Brein Daun’), Kod Onegina (SPb, 2006); sensationalist popular histories by Aleksei Shcherbatov, Dekabristy: zagovor protiv Rossii (SPb, 2005) and Vladimir Bryukhanov’s Mify i pravda o vosstanii dekabristov (Moscow, 2005). This popular comedy programme is widely known as KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh – Club of the Witty and Inventive) KVN 2010/first half-final – The Decembrist wife follows her husband, available on http://www.youtube. com/watch?v¼O4h3tEMv-JI (accessed 11 February 2012). Director P. Shtein. Episode 19 (total 50 series). Available at: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v¼YLl4o5uBpG4 (accessed 7 November 2007). Zona began showing in January 2006. For information about the conference and its proceedings see http://www. dekabristy.narod.ru/ (accessed 30 August 2015). http://atkritka.com/123302/ (accessed 15 August 2015). http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/24299065, Boevaya vakhta 90, 1 December 2010 (accessed 14 July 2013). Druzhba narodov, 11 November 2007, pp. 158– 90 available on http://dlib.eastvi ew.com/browse/doc/13111839 (accessed 1 June 2012). Eniseisk is a small town in Krasnoyarsk krai Eastern Siberia. Flag Rodiny 238, 23 December 2005, pp. 12 – 23, available at: http://dlib.eastview. com/browse/doc/8840451 (accessed 1 October 2013). The Governor proclaims his pride in his wife, who left Moscow and a prestigious job there to join him, and is now the head of Baikal State University’s Faculty of Economics and Law, see Andrei Vandenko, ‘Vremya irkutskoe’, Itogi 30, 26 July 2010, pp. 20 – 2. Mariya, Mikeli, ‘Ispoved’ zheny deputata’, Profil’ 3, 31 January 2005, available http:// www.profile.ru/arkhiv/item/46059-items_10664 (accessed 1 November 2013). http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2011/044/00.html?print¼ 201103070927 (accessed 16 December 2014).

NOTES TO PAGES 16 – 19

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61. Ibid. 62. Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost (Ann Arbor, 1999), p. 32. 63. Mary Buckley, Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia (Cambridge, 1997); Natal’ya Pushkareva, ‘Gendernye issledovaniya: rozhdenie, stanovlenie, metody i perspektivy’, Voprosy istorii 6 (1998), pp. 76 – 86; Barbara E. Clements, Barbara A. Engel, & Cristine D., Worobec, Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley, CA, 1991); Anastasia Posadskaya (ed.), Women in Russia: A New Era in Russian Feminism (London, 1994); Lynne Attwood, ‘The post-Soviet woman in the move to the market: a return to domesticity and dependence?’, in R. J. Marsh (ed.) Women in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge, 1996); Sarah Ashwin, Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London, 2000); Rebecca Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-Soviet Change? (Aldershot, 2006). 64. Alexander Pushkin, ‘Message to Siberia’, trans. Max Eastman, New Masses 1/5 (New York, 1926), p. 9. 65. http://tass-ural.ru/lentanews/35813.html (accessed 15 December 2014).

Chapter 2

Listening to Women’s Voices

1. http://www.svidanok.net/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2503&start=40& quicktabs_1=0 (accessed 1 October 2013). 2. Klara was interviewed in 2010 for the project. She is a widow who was married to a ‘career criminal’ who died in custody. 3. http://www.dekabristki.2xn.ru/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=128&start=260 (accessed 1 September 2013). 4. See for example, Joyce Arditti, Jennifer Lambert-Shute and Karen Joest, ‘Saturday morning at the jail: implications of incarceration for families and children’, Family Relations 52 (2003), pp. 195–204. Elizabeth Beck, Sarah Britto & Arlene Andrews, In the Shadow of Death. Restorative Justice and Death Row Families. Foreword by Steve Earle (Oxford, 2007); Stacey M. Bouchet, ‘Children and families with incarcerated parents. Exploring development in the field and opportunities for growth’, A Report Prepared for the Annie E. Casey Foundation (January 2008), pp. 1–17; Bonnie Carlson & Neil Cervera, Inmates and their Wives: Incarceration and Family Life (Santa Barbara, 1992); Helen Codd, In the Shadow of Prison; Rachel Condry, Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders (Cullompton, 2007) and her, ‘Prisoners and their families’ in Crewe B. and Bennett J. (eds), The Prisoner (London, 2011); Richard Tewksbury and Matthew DeMichele, ‘Going to prison: a prison visitation program’, The Prison Journal, 85 (2005), pp. 292–310; Bruce Western, Incarceration, Marriage, and Family Life (Princeton, 2004). 5. See Donald Braman, Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America (Ann Arbor, 2004); Stanley L. Brodsky, Families and Friends of Men in Prison (Lexington, MA: 1975); Jeremy Travis and Michelle Waul (eds), Prisoners Once Removed; Bruce Western and Sara McClanahan, Fathers Behind Bars: The Impact of Incarceration on Family Formation (Princeton, 2000); Lori B. Girshick, Soledad Women: Wives of Prisoners Speak Out (Westport, 1996); Joseph Murray, ‘The effects of imprisonment on families and children of prisoners’, in Liebling, A. and Maruna, S. (eds), The Effects of Imprisonment (London, 2005), pp. 442 – 92.

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NOTES TO PAGES 19 – 22

6. Comfort, Doing Time Together, p. 26. See also her Home Sweep: The Social and Cultural Consequences of Mass Incarceration for Women with Imprisoned Partners (London, 2003). 7. During the Soviet period prison sociology was weakly developed and confined to the prison service academies that were responsible for training prison officers within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Much of their work remained unpublished and most that was, was policy-orientated. After the USSR’s collapse the situation improved and although research on the impact of penal management is still concentrated in institutes and academies attached, now, to the Ministry of Justice interest has begun to migrate out into other higher education and research institutions within the education ministry. NGOs concerned with prison reform have been at the forefront of research on the conditions in Russian prisons since the Soviet period, most prominent among which has been the Moscow Centre for Prison Reform (Tsentr sodeistviya reforme ugolovnogo pravosudiya) and the Russian branch of Prison Reform International. Their websites at http://www.prison.org/ and http://www.penalreform.org/where-we-work/russia-ukraine-and-belarus/ list the various publications arising from their research in prisons. Much contemporary prison-related research by Russian scholars and penal practitioners is channelled through judicial studies journals from a wide range of disciplines (criminology, law, sociology, socio-legal studies and psychology) and can be accessed through the website http://elibrary.ru/defaultx.asp. 8. Aleksandr S. Mikhlin, ‘Eksperiment v zhenskikh koloniyakh’, Sotsialisticheskoe zakonodatel’stvo 10 (1991), pp. 15 – 17. 9. Aleksandr S. Mikhlin, ‘Bez isolyatsii ot obshchestva’, Sovetskaya Yustitsiya, 16 (1990), pp. 14 – 15. 10. Codd, In the Shadow of Prison. 11. Ibid., pp. 5 – 6, although Codd cannot think of a non-cumbersome way of referring to them. 12. Ibid., p. 167 and Helen Codd, ‘Prisoners’ families and resettlement: A critical analysis’, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 46/3 (2007), pp. 255 – 63. 13. Comfort, Doing Time Together, p. 177. The concept of docile bodies is introduced in Michel Foucault’s exploration of the history of penality in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 135–69. 14. http://www.fsin.su/For_families/biblioteka-pervoy-pomoshchi/ (accessed 26 December 2013). 15. Judith Pallot and Laura Piacentini, Gender, Geography, and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia (Oxford, 2012), p. 168. 16. Ibid., Chapter 9. 17. Codd, In the Shadow of Prison, p. 166. 18. Paul Ricœur, Ya-sam kak drugoi, trans. from French (Moscow, 2008). Elena Yu. Rozhdestvenskaya, ‘Narrativnaya identichnost’ v avtobiograficheskom interv’yu’, Sotsiologiya 4/30 (2010), pp. 5 – 26. 19. Stephanie Taylor, Narratives of Identity and Place (London, 2009). 20. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959). 21. Girshick, Soledad Women, pp. 17 – 18. 22. Girshick, Soledad Women; Fishman, Women at the Wall; Comfort, Doing Time Together. 23. Interestingly, the authors pay little attention to the question of the ethics and the advantages and disadvantages of the insider role, but to be fair the debate

NOTES TO PAGES 22 – 29

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

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surrounding this issue whilst now extensive, is relatively recent in social research: see, Jodie Taylor, ‘The intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research’, Qualitative Research 11/1 (2011), pp. 3 – 22; Richard S. Jones, ‘Uncovering the hidden social world: Insider research in prison’, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 11/2 (1995), pp. 106– 18; Yvonne Jewkes, ‘Autoethnography and emotion as intellectual resources doing prison research differently’, Qualitative Inquiry 18/1 (2012), pp. 63 – 75. See the description in Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, pp. 21 – 5 for past difficulties involved in attempted collaboration with the Russian prison authorities. These types of variations spring from fundamental differences in the relationship between the administration and the prisoner sub-cultures in Russian correctional colonies. Popularly, correctional colonies are divided into ‘red’ and ‘black’, the former referring to those where the regime is strictly enforced by the administration and the latter where ‘the thieves’ are in control. This division is a gross over-simplification but it is true that the balance of power between prison sub-culture and the penal authorities is never exactly the same from one institution to the next. The recruitment of the majority of subjects was undertaken by Elena Omel’chenko’s social research group Region based in Ul’yanovsk which had also been involved in the earlier ESRC project reported in Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment. The recruitment method is described in Elena Omel’chenko and Judith Pallot (eds), Okolo Tyur’my: zhenskie seti podderzhki zaklyuchennykh (SPb, 2015), pp. 26 – 8. The political prisoners’ families were recruited by the authors through their personal contacts. Situational offenders are understood as a people who commit a serious but unpremeditated crime, such as murder, who were drawn into offending by particular circumstances. Up to the time that they committed the crime they adhered to the normative system of society and were indistinguishable from other people. See Martin Haskell and Lewis Yablonskii, Crime and Delinquency (Chicago, 1978). Linda McDowell, ‘Doing gender: feminism, feminists and research methods in human geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17/4 (1992), pp. 399 – 416; Ann Oakley, ‘Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms’, in Helen Roberts (ed.), Doing Feminist Research (London, 1981), pp. 30 – 61. Adjine Tjeenk Willink, Civil activity by prisoners’ relatives as a response to problems in the Russian penal system, MA Thesis (University of Amsterdam, 2012). http://www.women-zekam.ru/ (accessed 22 August 2015). There are more web platforms than the ones we listed in the Appendix 2. Our selection is representative of major online coverage of the topics we discuss in this study and of the websites we chose to monitor. Some other sites, we monitored, were for close readership and we did not want to enter these in disguise into the appendix because of the ethical question this would raise. We did not engage in any conversations on the open sites and were passive readers when visiting the forums. Girshick, Soledad Women, p. 120. The most useful source of quantitative data about Russia’s prison population is a series of special censuses carried out at more or less ten-yearly intervals since the 1970s and their results published. They record the socio-demographic and

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

NOTES TO PAGES 29 – 38 ‘criminal-correctional’ characteristics of a sample of prisoners incarcerated in a given time period in different types of penal institutions in the USSR. In the postSoviet period, there have been two censuses: one in 1999, published in two volumes under the editorship of the late Alexander S. Mikhlin, Kharakteristika osuzhdennykh k lisheniyu svobody. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi 1999, vols 1 and 2 (Moscow, 2001) and one in 2009. This recent census samples 10 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women prisoners, and the results have been published in a series of variously authored monographs concerned with different categories of prisoner under the general editorship of Yurii I. Kalinin, Osuzhdennye i soderzhashchiesya pod strazhei v Rossii: po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi, 12 – 18 November 2009 (Moscow, 2012). Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Cliffs, NJ, 1963). Codd, In the Shadow of Prison, p. 3 and Fishman, Women at the Wall, p. 1. Girshick, Soledad Women, p. 120. Comfort, Doing Time Together, pp. 266 – 8; Angela Devlin, Cell Mates/Soul Mates: Stories of Prison Relationships (Winchester, 2002). Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza, ‘Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency’, American Sociological Review 22/6 (Dec., 1957), pp. 664 –70. This attitude reflects the reality of Russian penal institutions which have a fully-deserved reputation for paying low regard for prisoners’ human rights and under-investigating in well-publicised cases of protests involving vein cutting and hunger-strikes and prison-on-prisoner violence and suspicious deaths in custody of high profile prisoners. Alena Ledeneva, ‘Telephone justice in Russia’, Post-Soviet Affairs 24/4 (2008), pp. 324 – 50. Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (New York, 1940; second edition 1958), p. 87. http://www.svidanok.net/forum/obshchenie/lichnye-istorii/povtornaya-otsidka (accessed 15/02/2015). Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington, 1988), pp. 231 – 7. http://www.forumtyurem.net/index.php?showtopic=86&pid=3488&mode= threaded&start (accessed 5 December 2013). http://forumtyurem.net/lofiversion/index.php/t86-100.html (accessed 18 August 2013).

Chapter 3

Prisoners’ Wives

1. Vlas Doroshevich, Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s Sakhalin by Andrew A. Gentes (London, 2011), p. 289. 2. It hardly needs observing that ‘partnership’ does not apply to same sex relationships in Russia given the state’s attitude to homosexuality. Western jurisdictions have different practices in this respect but where gay marriage is legal, rights to conjugal prison visits, for example, are now permitted: see, for example, http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/08/politics/holder-same-sex-marri age-rights/ (accessed 14 January 2015). 3. Valerii M. Anisimkov, Rossiya v zerkale ugolovnykh traditsii tyur’my (SPb, 2003), p. 56.

NOTES TO PAGES 38 – 50

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4. Anton Chekhov, Iz Sibiri. Ostrov Sakhalin 1889 – 1894, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, vol. 14 (Moscow, 1974), p. 259. Sakhalin Island was first published in Russian in 1895. 5. http://otvet.mail.ru/question/91340775 (accessed 15 February 2014). 6. The Stalinist state deported the Muslim population of the Crimea to Central Asia as part of the general deportation of almost 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities in the period 1943 to 1949. 7. Article 111.2 (grievous bodily harm leading to death) under which Ivan was convicted can carry a sentence of thirteen years so his eight year sentence represented leniency in Russian criminal-justice terms, not least because this was his second conviction. 8. Under the Russian Federation Correctional Code which contains the rules for punishing convicted offenders, the penal service is supposed to avoid sending convicted prisoners long distances to serve their sentences. The performance of the prison service in respect of this requirement is measured by location: a ‘near’ colony is recorded when the prisoner is sentenced to the place in which he or she is domiciled or stood trial (or if there is no colony in either place, in the oblast’ fulfilling the same criteria). That the prison authorities may be more concerned with ‘ticking the right boxes’ on the distance issue than in considering the domestic circumstances of individual cases is evidenced by the many complaints about relatives being sent far away to serve sentences. Another of our interviewees describes an analogous situation to Olya’s. Valya’s husband committed his crime in Murmansk oblast’ in the north of Russia far from where he was registered living with Valya. 9. Sources quote anything from a 50 to 85 per cent divorce rate among US and UK male prisoners serving sentences of over one year. See, Creasie F. Hairston, ‘Family ties during imprisonment: important to whom and for what’, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 18/1 (1991), p. 87 and http://marriage.about.com/cs/ prisonmarriage/a/prisonmarriage.htm (accessed 27 July 2015). 10. The censuses of prisoners do not give absolute numbers for any of the values it records. Marital status is given as the percentage of women and men prisoners unmarried, divorced post-incarceration and still married. In 2009 among men the percentage who remained married exceeded the number that had divorced by five percentage points (Of all prisoners 15.1 per cent compared with 10.7 who remained married). Among women the ratio was even better (16.6 per cent compared with 7.2 per cent). The results were an improvement on previous censuses when the ratio of failed to preserved marriages was approximately 50:50 for both men and women. See Vera A. Kazakova, Zhenshchiny otbyvayushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaya kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsya pod strazhei 12 – 18 noyabrya 2009, Vypusk 5 (Moscow, 2011), p. 12. 11. Ol’ga A. Malysheva, ‘Dlitel’nye sroki lisheniya svobody naznachayemye osuzhdennym zhenshchinam: sovremennye realii’, Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, 1 (2000), pp. 25 – 8; Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, pp. 174– 5. 12. ‘Bez prava perepiski’ was a clause in the sentences of convicts in the Stalin repression that was a euphemism for their having been executed. 13. This comes from the interview with Antonina, a zaochnitsa. Russia has public holidays commemorating certain events but, additionally, each profession can

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14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

NOTES TO PAGES 50 – 59 have its own Professional holiday to honour its workers. The Communication Worker’s Day is 7 May. It celebrates workers in radio and television and is timed to correspond with the day in 1895 when Alexander Popov demonstrated his invention of the radio (though the claim that he was the first to do so is disputed). Girshick, Soledad Women, pp. 117– 19. Comfort, Doing Time Together, p. 186. In the UK the entitlement for visits for the majority of prisoners is a minimum of three visits every four weeks when the prisoner is on remand and two one hour visits every four weeks for convicted prisoners: https://www.gov.uk/staying-intouch-with-someone-in-prison/visiting-someone-in-prison (accessed 10 May 2015). In the USA practice varies from state to state but it is normal for visits of differing lengths to be permitted Friday-Sunday every week: http://www.law.yale. edu/documents/pdf/Liman/Prison_Visitation_Policies_A_Fifty_State_Survey(1). pdf (accessed 19 June 2015). Stanislav K. Akimov and Oleg V. Lysyagin, Osnovnye prava osuzhdennykh, otbyvayushchikh nakazanie v vide lisheniya svobody: vidy, soderzhanie, realizatsiya i zashchita (vosstanovlenie) (Moscow, 2007) p. 52. The obshchak is an informal fund administered by prison sub-cultures that provides resources to buy off members of the administration or to provide support for the poorer members and their families. Rank-and-file prisoners have to make contributions to the fund which may be in cigarettes, food or money. Judith Pallot, ‘Interview: penitentiary systems in the era of internet services in Russia’, Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 5/3 (2013), pp. 119 – 24. Kazakova, Zhenshchiny, otbyvayushchie lishenie svobody, p. 51. The entitlement varies according to the colony regime and conditions of detention of individual prisoners. The entitlement for an adult man in a general regime colony with privileged conditions of detention is for twelve parcels and for an adult man in a strict regime colony on punitive conditions of detention is one per annum. The journey to colonies is a particularly popular theme on the prison related web sites. It is here that women share with each other the precise details of how to get there (which bus, when they go, where there are shops to load up with supplies and so on). These also contain comments about local residents’ attitudes towards them and how their status as prisoner’s relative is instantly recognisable. Amongst major web platforms are the following: Arestant (no longer available), dekabristki.ru, forumtyurem.net, nevolya.ru, gulagu.net, svidanok.net, tyurma.net, vkapkane. net, women-zekam.ru, zekov.net (see the Appendix 2 for more details). Arestant (now defunct website) Arkhangel’sk, KP-27, Tat’yana, 4 November 2004 (accessed June 2006). Ibid., Perm’, IK38 Mariya, 28 January 2005 (accessed 1 June 2006). The comment about prices for thumbing a lift refers to the practice in Russia of ordinary drivers acting as informal taxis. For a description of penal zones in Russia’s rural regions see, Judith Pallot, ‘Changing symbolic and geographical boundaries between penal zones and rural communities in the Russian Federation’, Journal of Rural Studies 28/2 (2012), pp. 118 – 29. See for example women’s exchanges about issues connected with visiting on http://www.tyurma.net/topic.php?forum¼138&topic¼5 (accessed 3 October 2013); http://vkapkane.net/forum/theme-kakie-sushchestvuyut-svidaniya-sosuzhdennym-i-kogda-mozhno-priehat-na-svidanie (accessed 5 July 2015).

NOTES TO PAGES 59 – 67

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Women have the opportunity to get in touch with the lawyer online to receive a free legal advice about visiting, for example see http://www.vturme.ru/asked/ 2010/12/kratkosrochnoe-svidanie-v-sizo/ (accessed 10 November 2014). This prison-related website is dedicated to ‘law and its practical application to people’ and advertises its legal services with the motto ‘what advocate you will choose – such life you will live’. Arestant website, Perm’, IK-5, Mariya, and 25 January 2005 (accessed 12 June 2006). Now defunct site. Comfort, Doing Time Together, pp. 113– 5; Fishman, Soledad Women, p. 162. Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, pp. 168– 72. Praskoviya Annenkova, Zapiski zheny dekabrista (SPb, 1915). Quoted from an electronic version, Chapter 15, http://az.lib.ru/a/annenkowa_p_e/ text_0010.shtml (accessed 23 June 2015).

Chapter 4

The Bandit’s Wife

1. Thanks to Gerry Smith for this translation. 2. Anisimkov, Rossiya v zerkale ugolovnykh traditsii tyur’my; Yurii M. Antonyan and Evgeniya N. Kolyshchnitsyna, Motivatsiya povedeniya osuzhdennykh: monografiya (Moscow, 2009); Ekaterina S. Efimova, Sovremennaya tyur’ma: byt, traditsii i fol’klor (Moscow, 2004); Mark Galeotti, Russian and Post-Soviet Organised Crime (Aldershot, c2002) and his ‘The world of the lower depths: crime and punishment in Russian history’, Global Crime 9, 1 – 2 (2008), pp. 84 – 107; Georgi Glonti and Givi Lobjanidze, Vory-v-zakone: professional’naya prestupnost’ v Gruzii (Tbilisi, 2004); Steven Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafia (New Haven and London, 1995); Sergei A. Kutyakin, Organizatsiya kriminal’noi oppozitsii v ugolovnoispolnitel’noi sisteme Rossii (Ryazan’, 2008) and his ‘Vliyanie «vorov v zakone» na kriminologicheskuyu situatsiyu v ispravitel’nykh uchrezhdeniyakh’, Ugolovnoispolnitel’noe pravo 2 (2014), pp. 65 – 70; Fyodor V. Mochulsky, Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, trans. and edited by Deborah Kaple (Oxford, 2010) (this autobiography of NKVD officer in Pechorlag has a short chapter on the hardened criminals, pp. 52 – 7); Anton N. Oleinik, Tyuremnaya subkul’tura v Rossii: ot povsednevnoi zhizni do gosudarstvennoi vlasti (Moscow, 2001) and his Organized Crime, Prison, and Post-Soviet Societies (Aldershot, 2003); Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (Harmondsworth, 1994); Gavin Slade, Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia (Oxford, 2014); Evgenii Sukhov, Ya – vor v zakone (Moscow, 2001); Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford, 2001). 3. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (New York, 2003), pp. 290– 292; Edward Buca, Vorkuta, trans. Michael Lisinski and Kennedy Wells (London, 1976); Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, pp. 354 –5; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 233. 4. Anisimkov, Rossiya v zerkale ugolovnykh traditsii tyur’my, p. 59. 5. In the post-war period the so-called ‘bitches war’ divided the Thieves-in -Law. The ‘bitches’ were those members of the criminal sub-culture who started disobeying the traditional rules, among other things by going to the front to fight the fascists. They constituted a major challenge to the ‘traditionalists who continued

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

NOTES TO PAGES 67 – 71

to insist of application of the thieves rules’. See, Slade, Reorganizing Crime; Glonti and Lobjanidze, Vory-v-zakone, pp. 33 –41. Alexander Blok, Yurii Gerasimov (ed.), Stikhotvoreniya, vol. 3 (SPb, 1994), pp. 265– 445. The name of the club was associated with a popular book, Le Club des Valets de Coeur (1858) by French writer Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail which describes the adventures of a highly resourceful mischievous character, Rocambole. Son’ka was a ‘Rocambole in a skirt’, one of a new generation of swindlers who brought the spirit of capitalism onto Russian soil. See Elena Katz and Judith Pallot, ‘From femme normale to femme criminelle in Russia: Against the past or towards the future?’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 44 (2010), pp. 111 – 39. See Kira Bogoslovskaya, ‘V serialakh net mesta ’pravde zhizni’ on http://www. peoples.ru/science/sociologist/kira_bogoslovskaya/ (accessed 9 April 2014) and her ‘Serialy: welcome v mir inoi’. Iskusstvo kino 9 (2007), pp. 93 – 103. http://www.svidanok.net/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php?f¼ 7&t¼6799&start¼40 (accessed 11 May 2014). Valery Karyshev, Banditskie Zheny (Moscow, 1999). Ibid., p. 147. Sasha Sever – Ispoved’ vora v zakone, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ WwOBt OtBKPk (accessed 14 July 2014). The documentary was shown on NTV channel in 2012. http://pda.svidanok.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f¼7&t¼6799&start¼ 60 (accessed 20 April 2015). For example, http://www.svidanok.net/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php?f¼ 7&t¼ 6799&start¼80 (accessed 19 May 2015); http://forumodua.com/showthread. php?t¼21009 (accessed 28 August 2015). Urka (plr urki) was one of the names given members of the criminal class in Imperial and Soviet prisons. Dostoevsky describes SPb’s Haymarket yama (slum) as being ‘thick with whorehouses’ and filled with ‘dirty, fetid yards’ in his Crime and Punishment (Cutchogue, 1982), pp. 14 and 18. Vsevolod Krestovskii in Slums of Petersburg (Moscow, 1864) presented it as a place of vice and villains (see its 2 vols edition, Moscow, 1990). Alexander Kuprin’s novel Yama: The Pit (1905), characterises Odessa’s slums as ‘a place exceedingly gay, tipsy, brawling, and in the night-time not without danger’, trans. Bernard G. Guerney (Charleston, TX, 2006), p. 21. Maksim Gorkii, himself from the slums of Nizhnii Novgorod, in his play The Lower Depths (1902) portrays slums as desperately unredemptive places (London, 1993). See also, Roshanna Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa (DeKalb, IL, 2005). Galeotti, Russian and Post-Soviet Organised Crime, p. 128. Mark Vincent, ‘Urki’ courts in the spectre of Russian punishment’, paper presented at the BASEES/ISEES European Congress, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK, 7 April 2013. Sergei Kutyakin, ‘«Vory»: istoriya vozniknoveniya i razvitiya fenomena’, Rossiiskii nauchnyi zhurnal, 3 (2008), pp. 162– 9 and Galina V. Kurbatova, ‘Nekotorye istoricheskie aspekty vozniknoveniya i razvitiya prestupnogo fenomena «vory v zakone»’, NovaInfo.Ru, vol. 1/32 (2015), pp. 185 –90. Galeotti, Russia and post-Soviet Organised Crime, p. 141 Ibid., pp. 142 – 4.

NOTES TO PAGES 71 – 89

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22. Eliot Borenstein draws on the prophetic literary tradition about the country’s terrible fate in discussing the post-Soviet mayhem of the 1990s and refers in his analysis of bespredel to the central myths in Russian culture. These are, on the one hand, the notion of the motherland’s ‘boundlessness’ (neob’yatnost’) expressed in its extensively open spaces immortalised in Gogol’s Dead Souls, with the troika scene as a defining feature of Russian expansive national character and on the other the all-pervasive, criminal manifestation of a demonic force as in Dostoevsky’s Demons (Besy) when they are unleashed throwing this boundless country into a chaos of a Boschian nightmare: see his Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca and London, 2008), pp. 207 – 8. The scholar links his analysis to Dale Pesmen’s study, Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, 2000), pp. 66 – 8. 23. Mikhail P. Kleimenov, Dmitrii V. Korneev, ‘Kriminal’nye lidery vchera i segodnya’, Vestnik Omskogo universiteta 3 (2012), pp. 404– 14. 24. These have gone under a variety of different names over time, including byval’tsy (frequenters of prison), brodyagi (vagabonds); sidel’tsy (‘sit-ins’ – those who spend a long time in prison such as recidivists), Ivany (plural from the popular name Ivan), braty (brothers), vory (thieves), smotryashchie (watchers). 25. Anisimkov, Rossiya v zerkale ugolovnykh traditsii tyur’my, p. 61. 26. Ibid., p. 63. 27. Interview with Igor Sutyagin, June 2012. 28. Anisimkov, Rossiya v zerkale, p. 58. 29. Victor V. Beletskii, Kriminologicheskaya kharakteristika i preduprezhdenie prestupnosti sredi sportsmenov: avto : ref. dis. kand. yurid. nauk (Omsk, 1996), p. 13. See also Veronika V. Shemyakina, ‘Sotsial’no-pravovaya i kul’turologicheskaya kharakteristika organizovannoi prestupnosti’, Vestnik Chelyabinskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 15 (2009), pp. 102 – 4. 30. Sveta was right to worry. Under measures entitled ‘The Conception for the Development of the Penal System to 2020’, there was a mass re-location of prisoners in 2010–12 which resulted in thousands of serious offenders and recidivists being concentrated in selected colonies. This was one of the few aims of the new reform that was carried out before the sacking of the then head of the prison service, Reimer (for corruption) and the effective suspension of the new measures. 31. Fishman, Women at the Wall, pp. 212 – 13. 32. Codd, In the Shadow of Prison, p. 25.

Chapter 5

The Social Media Wife

1. http://filister.ru/nevesta-v-tyurmu/ (accessed 10 November 2014). 2. http://otvet.mail.ru/question/15662659 (accessed 24 December 2014). 3. Dal’ comprised his dictionary of the ‘explanatory great living Russian language’ in the middle of the nineteenth century. Our quote is from his dictionary published online http://slovardalja.net/word.php?wordid¼ 9397 (accessed 9 September 2015). 4. http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2005/2/pavl3.html (accessed 8 November 2014). 5. Marius J. Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians, and their War: 1941 – 1945 (Madison, Wisconsin, 2004), p. 137. 6. http://pda.anekdot.ru/id/140632 (accessed 13 January 2015).

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NOTES TO PAGES 90 – 99

7. Leonid M. Mlechin, Lenin: soblaznenie Rossii (SPb, 2012), p. 117. 8. http://www.net-lit.com/writer/687/books/6784/dovlatov_Sergei/zona/read/59/ (accessed 9 October 2014). 9. Here cited from Vladimir Azhippo, Issledovanie prirody tyuremnogo anekdota http:// www.tyurem.net/books/azhipp.o/issl.htm (accessed 23 March 2014). Jokes are notoriously difficult to translate – this one needs explaining for non-Russian speakers. The zaochnitsa is referred in the original to by the word baba, this a not very complimentary term of endearment, just short of ‘old bag’, chifir is the very strong tea brewed by prisoners to give them a ‘high’ and, most importantly because it is the punch line, ‘sharing a bowl’ a loose translation of the Russian khavat’, refers to the ritual of sharing of food and the same cup or bowl in prisons to signify membership of an in-group (see, Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, pp. 199 –201). The implication in this anecdote is that by eating with her, Vanya is showing his attachment to his baba and that this for a prisoner is a more important indication of loyalty than having sex. 10. http://filister.ru/nevesta-v-tyurmu/ (accessed 8 November 2014). 11. Words spoken by a zaochnitsa interviewed on TV programme ‘Poka eshche ne pozdno’, broadcast on 27/03/2013. 12. On the USA, see Comfort, Doing Time Together, pp. 215 –16 and on the UK Angela Devlin, Cell Mates/Soul Mates: Stories of Prison Relationships, pp. 12 – 14. In Devlin’s study of 24 women and 4 men, the average age was 42 years and in 80 per cent of cases the outside partner came from a higher social class than the prisoner, 21 per cent were private school educated and a quarter had a higher education degree. 13. The romance between prisoner and volunteer appears to be particularly popular in the Western print media. See, for example, the story of the romance between lifer, Ben Gunn, and his business studies teacher in Shepton Mallet prison in the UK in the Observer Magazine, 15 September 2013, ‘Life after and life inside’, by Will Storr, pp. 32 – 8. 14. Televised on Russian television Channel 1 27 March 2013. 15. http://www.indexmundi.com/russia/age_structure.html (accessed 11 June 2015). This site gives the 2014 figures which are as follows: 15 – 24 years: males 7,828,947, females 7,482,143; 25 – 54 years: males 31,928,886, female 33,319,671; 55 – 64 years: males 8,408,637, females 11,287,153; 65 years and over: males 5,783,983, females 13,105,896. 16. See, for example, Loı¨c Wacquant, ‘Deadly symbiosis when ghetto and prison meet and mesh’, Punishment and Society 3/1 (2001), pp. 95 –133 and Comfort, Doing Time Together, pp. 314– 15. 17. Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia. 18. Lyudmila Al’pern, Son i yav’ zhenskoi tyur’my (SPb, 2004) discusses the criminaljustice system’s treatment of women who are the victims of domestic violence. See also, Dianne Post, ‘Domestic violence in Russia’, Journal of Gender Studies 9.1 (2000), pp. 81 – 3. 19. http://blogs.nysut.org/sttp/defenders/marina-pisklakova/ (accessed 18 August 2015). 20. Amelia Gentleman, ‘Breaking the taboo: The Moscow women taking a stand against domestic violence’, Guardian, 10 June 2015, also on http://www. theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/10/moscow-domestic-violence-problem-russia (accessed 28 August 2015).

NOTES TO PAGES 100 – 112

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21. Comfort, Doing Time Together, p. 143. 22. The topic of ‘how zaochnitsy are screwed up and how to combat it’ is frequent on prisoner-related websites as women often seek advice to how not get conned. See, for example, http://www.syzo.ru/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num¼1225990501/860 (accessed 8 September 2015). 23. See, for example, John Suler, ‘The online disinhibition effect’, Cyberpsychology and Behavior 7/3 (2004), pp. 321– 6. 24. As we discuss in Chapter 2, the women who contract relationships with men in prison in the USA often have strong religious ideals and justify their relationship as an enactment of loving kindness or doing God’s work or may be driven by a conviction about the injustice of a harsh imprisonment regime or of a miscarriage of justice. 25. The main Western studies are as follows: Sheila Isenberg, Women Who Love Men Who Kill (New York, 1992); Jacquelynne Willcox-Bailey, Dream Lovers: Women Who Marry Men behind Bars (Adelaide, 1997); Devlin, Cell Mates/ Soul Mates. Exprisoners and their partners have written extensively about their relationships. The most notable is the memoir of American poet Asha Bandele, The Prisoner’s Wife (New York, 1999) charts her difficulties keeping the relationship with her prisoner husband alive. 26. Devlin, Cell Mates/ Soul Mates, p. 49 for the prisoner average and for the general rate http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/divorces-in-england-and-wales/2011/stywhat-percentage-of-marriages-end-in-divorce.html (accessed 5 July 2015). 27. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton 2011).

Chapter 6

Mothers

1. http://old.khodorkovsky.ru/news/2014/08/03/18869.html (accessed 1 September 2015). 2. http://www.forumtyurem.net/index.php?showtopic¼1116 (accessed 19 July 2015). 3. On Columbine see, Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love (London, 2013) and on blaming parents for children’s crimes, see Kaitlin Nicole Kall, ‘Mothers of inmates: “Always Being There” in an era of mass incarceration’, honors thesis (Middletown, CT, 2009), p. 80. 4. Richard T. Pienciak, Mama’s Boy: The True Story of a Serial Killer and His Mother (London, 1997). 5. This story is related in Jan Alber, Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens’ Novels, Twentieth-Century Fiction and Film (Amherst, NY, 2007), p. 184. 6. See Nikolai, S. Modestov, Seriinye ubiitsy. Man’yaki i ikh zhertvy (Moscow, 1999). 7. Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex And Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture; Elena Prokhorova, ‘Can the meeting place be changed? Crime and identity discourse in Russian television series of the 1990s’, Slavic Review 62/3 (Fall 2003), pp. 512–24. 8. Katz and Pallot, ‘From femme normale to femme criminelle’. 9. Other notable serial killers where mothers were implicated are Artem Anufriev whose mother is accused of teaching her son to hate people; Alexander Bychkov whose mother was a prostitute; Vladimir ‘Lenin’ Mukhankin thus named because

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10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

NOTES TO PAGES 112 – 135

he was born on the same day as the former Soviet leader, whose mother is said to have subjected him to systematic beatings when he was a child. Katz and Pallot, ‘From femme normale to femme criminelle’. Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, pp. 32 – 3. Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture, pp. 231 –2. Nikolai Nekrasov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 15-ti tomakh, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1981). Available online http://www.ilibrary.ru/text/1116/index.html (accessed 17 June 2015). Cited from Ekaterina Efimova, Sovremennaya tyur’ma, p. 207 passim. Ibid., p. 212. Yurii P. Dianov et al. (eds), Pesni nevoli (Vorkuta, 1992), p. 129. Ibid., 164. Cited in Dianov, p. 132. The extract from this song in English reads: Wait steam train; don’t clatter wheels; Conductor, put on the brakes!. . . Don’t wait for me, mum, the good son, Your son isn’t the one he was yesterday; A dangerous quagmire sucked me in, And my life is a veritable game. And if I am imprisoned, I’ll be suffering and I’ll die. And you won’t come to see me, my dear mum, To embrace me, to kiss me.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

Cited from http://lyricstranslate.com/en/postoy-parovoz-wait-steam-train.html (accessed 15 July 2015). Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!, p. 132. This was the title of a discussion on forumtyurem – one of the more prominent prisoner support web based social networks: http://www.forumtyurem.net/i ndex.php?showtopic¼1116 (accesses 23 August 2015). Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!, p. 247. http://fsin.su/news/index.php?ELEMENT_ID¼29256 (accessed 1 April 2014). http://pda.svidanok.net/forum/obshchenie/besedka/skazhi-mne-mamaskolkostoit-moya-zhizn (accessed 13 December 2014). http://www.fskn.gov.ru/ http://fsknmsk.ru/korrup/ (accessed 3 September 2015). The discussion of official narcotics control website of their fight against corruption. Currently Narkokontrol is battling against proposal to merge with the MVD and lose independent status.

Chapter 7 Daughters 1. One of the earliest books that set the agenda for research in this area is Pauline Morris, Prisoners and their Families (London, 1965). There is a good review of the literature in Helen Codd, ‘Prisoners’ families and resettlement’. For the USA the

NOTES TO PAGES 135 – 140

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

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leading authority is Christopher J. Mumola, ‘Incarcerated parents and their children. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report’ (2000). On the long term impact of parental imprisonment on a child see, Joseph Murray, Carl-Gunnar Janson, and David P. Farrington, ‘Crime in adult offspring of prisoners a crossnational comparison of two longitudinal samples’, Criminal Justice and Behavior 34/1 (2007), pp. 133– 49. On the children of women prisoners who are at greater risk see, Susan Greene, Craig Haney and Aida Hurtado, ‘Cycles of pain: Risk factors in the lives of incarcerated mothers and their children’, The Prison Journal 80/1 (2000), pp. 3 –23. On policy approaches see, Alice Mills and Helen Codd, ‘Prisoners’ families and offender management: Mobilizing social capital’, Probation Journal 55/1 (2008), pp. 9– 24; Jeremy Travis and Michelle Waul (eds), Prisoners Once Removed. Ande Nesmith and Ebony Ruhland, ‘Children of incarcerated parents: challenges and resiliency, in their own words’, Children and Youth Services Review 30/10 (2008), pp. 1119 – 30; Valerie Pope, ‘”We all went to Prison”: The distress of prisoners’ children’, Probation Journal 34/3 (1987), pp. 92 – 6. Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman, Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (Oxford, 2013). Barnardo’s charity organisation has done research using child respondents: https://www. barnardos.org.uk/working-with-children-with-a-parent-in-prison.pdf; BBC radio five interviews with prisoners children http://www.bbc.co.uk/programm es/p02r6kw9 (accessed 22 July 2014). Jennifer Rosenberg, ‘Children need dads too: children with fathers in prison’, Human Rights and Refugees Publications (2009). Judith Pallot and Elena Katz, ‘The management of prisoners’ children in the Russian Federation’, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 53/3 (2014), pp. 237–54. Sutherland, Princess of Siberia, p. 263. Nikita Murav’ev, quoted in Sutherland, Princess of Siberia, pp. 262– 3. Quoted in Sutherland, Princess of Siberia, p. 263. Cathy A. Frierson and Semen S. Vilenskii, Children of the Gulag (New Haven CT, 2010); Tomas Balkelis, ‘Lithuanian children in the gulag: deportations, ethnicity and identity memoirs of children deportees, 1941 – 1952’, Lituanus 51/3 (2005), pp. 40 – 75. Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890 –1991 (New Haven, 2007). This 1986 novel was a satirical fictional expose´ of the Soviet system, is an assemblage of voices of women placed under quarantine in the Leningrad maternity ward. The women choose to pass the time telling each other stories about everything of concern to the Soviet woman of today. Susan D. Phillips, and Trevor Gates, ‘A conceptual framework for understanding the stigmatization of children of incarcerated parents’, Journal of Child and Family Studies 20/3 (2011), pp. 286 – 94; Codd, In the Shadow of Prison. Elena Yarskaya-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov, ‘Single Mothers – Clients or Citizens? Social Work with Poor Families in Russia’, in Helene Carlba¨ck, Yuliya Gradskova, and Zhanna Kravchenko (eds), And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Everyday Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Central Europe (Budapest, 2012), pp. 207 – 30. Also see Rebecca Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia. ¨ jdestrand, Needed by Nobody: Homelessness, Humiliation, and Humanness Tova Ho In Post-Socialist Russia (Ithaca, 2005).

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NOTES TO PAGES 144 – 158

14. Poehlmann-Tynan, Julie (ed.), Children’s Contact with Incarcerated Parents: Implications for Policy and Intervention (Springer, 2015); Peter Scharff Smith, When the Innocent are Punished: The Children of Imprisoned Parents (London, 2014). 15. Codd, In the Shadow, p. 152. 16. Ross D. Parke and K. Alison Clarke-Stewart, ‘Effects of parental incarceration on children: perspectives, promises, and policies’, in J. Travis and M. Waul (eds), Prisoners Once Removed, pp. 189 – 232; Heath C. Hoffmann, Amy L. Byrd, and Alex M. Kightlinger, ‘Prison programs and services for incarcerated parents and their underage children: Results from a national survey of correctional facilities, The Prison Journal 90/4 (2010), pp. 397 – 416. 17. As Codd observes in the UK the best arrangements allow for children to stay in a cre`che until half way through a visit, allowing parents time to talk to one another: Codd, In the Shadow of Prison, p. 154. 18. See, for example, http://tyurma.com/svidanka-s-zaochnitsei (accessed 11 August 2015). 19. In a survey of women prisoners undertaken in 2007–2010 in two correctional colonies in Mordoviya, of 69 respondents who indicated their current care arrangement for their children, in 20 per cent of cases the children had been taken into care by the Organs of Care and Guardianship, and 19 per cent were with the partner or husband. The majority were being looked after by relatives (59 per cent by grandparents, and 12 per cent by siblings, aunts and great-grandparents) See Pallot and Piacentini, Geography, Gender and Punishment, p. 181. 20. Various websites offer legal advice and information about procedures to how adopt a child (for example) http://lawtoday.ru/razdel/biblo/semei-pr/DOC_047. php (accessed 8 June 2015) and http://zharov.info/adoption/kuda-rebenka (accessed 26 January 2015). 21. Information on children without parental care is registered in a special state databank in accordance with the Federal Law of April 16, 2001 ~ 44-FZ ‘On state databank on children left without parental care’ and RF Government Decree of April 4, 2002 ~ 217 ‘On the State databank on children without parental care, and monitoring of its formation and use’. 22. Tova Hojdestrand, Needed by Nobody, p. 129. 23. http://sunkrug.tomsk.ru/forum/index.php?topic¼ 136.0 24. On Family Code regarding adoption of prisoners’ children see http://adoptlaw. ru/Kogo-mojno-vzyat-v-semyu/status_detey_zaklyuchennyh_na/ (accessed 8 September 2015). 25. Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, pp. 192 – 4; Pallot and Katz, ‘The management of prisoners’ children’. 26. Pallot and Katz, ‘The management of prisoners’ children’. ¨ jdestrand, Needed by Nobody, p. 129. 27. Ho

Chapter 8

The Outer Circle

1. Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, p. 175. 2. Ibid., p. 184. 3. Sisters do not figure prominently in the literature on the Decembrists, although they appear in biographies in subsequent decades by people wanting to establish a link with the Decembrist officers. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, made a point

NOTES TO PAGES 158 – 175

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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of tracing his ancestry to the Decembrists through his ancestor’s marriage to Ivan Pushchin: see, Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 18. Among the sisters who are mentioned in the histories of the Decembrists are Katerina Torson (the sister of Konstantin P. Torson, who went to join him in Siberia after his term had expired), as did the three, unmarried sisters of the Bestuzhev brothers (Elena, Mariya and Ol’ga). For works on youth street cultures see Hilary Pilkington, Al’bina Garifzianova, and Elena Omel’chenko, Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives (London, 2010); Svetlana Stephenson, ‘Street children in Moscow: Using and creating social capital’, The Sociological Review 49/4 (2001), pp. 530 – 47 and her Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Ithaca, NY, 2015). Dominique Moran, ‘Between outside and inside? Prison visiting rooms as liminal carceral spaces’, GeoJournal 78/2 (2013), pp. 339– 51; Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, Chapter 6. Larisa Petrovna spent the last part of the interview comparing the Russian and Spanish penal systems, to the disadvantage of the former. As of 2015, we understand that the family has moved to Spain. Same-sex civil partnership and marriage do not exist in Russia. In the USSR, homosexual relationships were criminalised. This changed in 1993: see, Masha Gessen, The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Federation: An International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Report (International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, 1994) but since then progress towards LBGT rights has been very slow indeed and in recent years legislation, such as the June 2013 law banning ‘the propaganda on non-traditional sexual relationships to minors’ represented a step backwards. On the history of attitudes towards homosexuality see, Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001) and for a general discussion of the post-Soviet period, Edmond Coleman and Theo Sandfort, Sexuality and Gender in Post-Communist Eastern Europe and Russia (London, 2014) and Laurie Essig, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Durham, NC, 1999). Pallot and Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment, p. 2014 and Elena Omel’chenko (ed.), Do i posle tyur’my: zhenskie istorii (SPb, 2012). The reference to stars on his knees is to prison tattoos denoting membership of the Thieves-in-Law.

Chapter 9 Politicals’ Families 1. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/requiem/ (accessed 11 September 2015). 2. Appelbaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, p. 271. 3. For a common interpretation of Oleg’s detention by Putin critics see the Guardian article for 30 December, 2014: http://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2014/dec/30/kremlin-critic-navalny-given-suspended-sentence-brother-jailed (accessed 13 July 2015). 4. See, for example, Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia; Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘Stalin and the politics of kinship: Practices of collective punishment, 1920s – 1940s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 50/1 (2008), pp. 91 – 117. Anfisa R. Kukushkina, Akmolinskii lager’ zhen ‘izmennikov rodiny’:

234

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

NOTES TO PAGES 175 – 177

Istoriya i sud’by (Karaganda, 2002), the book describes the so-called Alzhir – camp for the wives of ‘the traitors to the people’; Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet History (Princeton and Oxford, 2011). The museum-memorial complex “Alzhir” in Kazakhstan offers a range of research and archival findings, see http://alzhir. kz/en/2014-03-17-08-12-58/2014-03-17-08-13-35.html (accessed 26 August 2014). Figes, The Whisperers, p. 305. Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, pp. 237 – 40. In the Stalinist Gulag, moving to the location of the incarcerated husband, if alive, was extremely hazardous. Archival materials testify to cases of wives taking the risk of moving with children to the camp locations of their spouses. For example, a document from Karagandinskii Corrective Labour Camp NKVD reports cases of joint residence of camp inmates with their families on the camp’s territory and orders the camp administration to resolve the situation by expelling families from the camp premises http://gulaghistory.org/items/show/739 (accessed 10 November 2014). Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 312 – 13. See Nina Awsienko, ‘An islet of beauty outside The First Circle’, Interpretations (1978), pp. 56 – 64. On the use of psychiatry against political dissidents see, Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Russia’s Political Hospitals: The Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union (London, 1977); Zhores and Roy Medvedev, A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union (New York, 1971). The exceptionality of the people convicted under article 70 reinforced the tendency that developed in the later Stalin period, when from 1948 special camps were established for especially dangerous enemies-of-the-people, to concentrate political prisoners in special camps separate from other offenders, which had begun in 1948 with the establishment of special camps (osobye lagerya) for especially dangerous enemies-of-the-people. Through the 1960s a majority of political prisoners was held in the large penal complex in the Mordoviyan republic but in 1972 they were transferred further east to Perm’ oblast’. The Moscow Times, 10 September 2015. In 2013, according to Levada Centre surveys, though a large minority of the Russian population believe there are political prisoners in Russia today, they are indifferent to the fact. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/what-thepapers-say-nov-26-2013/490211.html from Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 26 November 2013. http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2012/10/30_a_4835561.shtml (accessed 10 May 2015). This article has an intelligent discussion about the definitions of Russian understandings of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. The list of criteria is as follows: (a) if the detention has been imposed in violation of one of the fundamental guarantees set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols (ECHR), in particular freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and association; (b) if the detention has been imposed for purely political reasons without connection to any offence; (c) if, for political motives, the length of the detention or its conditions are clearly out of proportion to the

NOTES TO PAGES 177 – 179

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

235

offence the person has been found guilty of or is suspected of; (d) if, for political motives, he or she is detained in a discriminatory manner as compared to other persons; or, (e) if the detention is the result of proceedings which were clearly unfair and this appears to be connected with political motives of the authorities. See, http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid¼ 19150&lang ¼ EN (accessed 7 September 2015). https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/detention/ (accessed 24 August 2015). The definition of prisoners of conscience refers to people who are imprisoned and who have not used or advocated violence but are imprisoned because of who they are (sexual orientation, ethnic, national or social origin, language, birth, colour, sex or economic status) or what they believe (religious, political or other conscientiously held beliefs). This exclusion underpinned an Amnesty International decision in 2014 to differentiate between people who took part in protests against Putin that took place in Bolotnaya Square, Moscow, on 6 May 2011, reserving the title ‘prisoner of conscience’ only for those among the people arrested who had not been involved in violence with the police. See, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/ article/bolotnaya-suspect-rejects-amnestys-selective-prisoners-of-consciencestatus-as-ugly-and-cynical/491201.html (accessed 22 August 2014). http://www.politzeky.ru/politzeki/ves-spisok/22379.html (accessed 1 July 2016). http://www.rferl.org/content/explainer-political-prisoners/24881810.html (accessed 29 June 2015). On Vitishko see, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/04/russiarelease-yevgeniy-vitishko/ (8 May 2015) and Kashapov, https://www.amnesty. org/en/documents/eur46/0001/2015/en/ (accessed 5 September 2015). http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/502082.html (accessed 14 August 2015). For amendments to article 275 and 276 which draw the net much wider than previously see, http://www.sova-center.ru/en/misuse/news-releases/2012/09/ d25412/ (accessed 21 September 2015). https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/russia-begins-blacklistingundesirable-organizations/ (accessed 25 August 2015). http://www.bu.edu/iscip/digest/vol9/ed0907.html (accessed 9 September 2015). http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/igor_v_sutyagin/ index.html (accessed 11 September 2015). Zara now lives in France where she has been granted political asylum. Her and Igor Sutyagin’s stories were the subject of a book by journalist Zoya Svetova, Priznat’ nevinovnogo vinovnym. Zapiski idealistki (Moscow, 2011); Zara Mourtazalieva has written her biography, Huit ans et demi: Une femme dans le camps de Poutine (Paris, 2014). This is a thesis developed in the book by Ernst I. Chernyi, ‘Shpiony’ rozhdayutsya na Lubyanke (Moscow, 2003). The case brought against Igor Sutyagin was that he sold state secrets to the USA security forces. He did, indeed, do contract work for a Western company for which he wrote reports about Russian missile technology to supplement his income as a researcher in the USA Institute of the Academy of Sciences, but everything that he wrote was already in the public domain and he did not have access to any classified information.

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NOTES TO PAGES 182 – 190

29. She gave few interviews, one was to Echo of Moscow in January 2011 in which she explained the case against her husband as the result of the Kaluga FSB wanting to prove its worth to the centre http://www.sutyagin.ru/pressa/010111-3.html (accessed 12 December 2014). 30. She attempted to stand for Moscow mayoral elections in 2014 but her candidacy was rejected on a technicality and because of lack of funds amid a storm of negative media coverage from the state-controlled press. 31. NTV is the national television channel, was a pioneer in the post-Soviet independent television media, but was later taken over by state-owned energy giant Gazprom. At present it is a pro-Kremlin broadcaster. 32. She was married twice in the Soviet period; her first marriage ‘never got off the ground’ and her second was a Party member who was sent by the State to the USA as an oil executive. The marriage soon failed and they were divorced in the USA. She returned to Moscow in 1991 to ‘join the barricades’ and married Andrei with whom she had her two, now adult, children. She met Aleksei when her marriage with her third husband had already come to an amicable end. For Aleksei’s biography see, http://lenta.ru/lib/14195253/ (accessed 10 September 2015). 33. Ol’ga Romanova, Butyrka (Moscow, 2010). The blog is available on http://www. forbes.ru/blog/50357-butyrka-blog (accessed 20 September 2015). 34. This according to Svetlana was one of the headlines of a local newspaper reporting Sutyagin’s arrest. There were similar headlines such as ‘Pochem Rodina?’ (How much does the motherland cost?) in Znamya, 2 October 1999 http://www. sutyagin.ru/pressa/991102.html (accessed 11 June 2015). 35. It was produced underground and published in the West for fifteen years from 1968 to 1983. The full list can be read on http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr/ (accessed 20 September 2015). 36. Magnitsky was an auditor at a Moscow law firm when he discovered a massive fraud by Russian tax officials and police officers. After reporting it to the authorities, he was himself detained in 2008 on suspicion of aiding tax evasion, and died in custody on 16 November 2009 aged 37. He acted as a legal adviser for London-based Hermitage Capital Management. The whole affair is described by Bill Browder, the owner of Hermitage Capital, in his Red Notice. A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One man’s Fight for Justice (New York, 2015). 37. Press comment in national and local print media about the Sutyagin case is to be found at http://www.sutyagin.ru/pressa/991102.html (accessed 20 September 2015). 38. They included The Moscow Helsinki Group, The ‘Civic Assistance’ Committee, the Human Rights Institute, All-Russian Civil Movement ‘For Human Rights’, ‘Memorial’, Andrei Sakharov Foundation (Russia) and the Russian branch of Amnesty International. 39. The renewed press coverage was about whether he was guilty or innocent, about his intentions (or not) to return to Russia and speculations about the possibility of his standing for election on the social liberal party Yabloko ticket in Kaluga. See ‘The Sutyagin Syndrome’ article by Yuliya Latynina in The Moscow Times for 14 July 2010, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/2010/7/article/ the-sutyagin-syndrome/410345.html (accessed 4 May 2015). 40. Alena Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (Cambridge, 2013). 41. The opposing views of this case are to be found at https://inforrm.wordpress. com/2015/07/23/case-law-sloutsker-v-romanov-110000-damages-awarded-for-

NOTES TO PAGES 190 – 202

42.

43.

44.

45.

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internet-libel-by-high-court-in-london-michael-frost/ (accessed 21 September 2015) and http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/how-english-libellaws-dent-free-speech-across-the-globe/17242#.VgFBWZfhKuI (accessed 22 September, 2015). This replaced the Investigative Committee of the Procurator’s office. It was formed in January 2011. Its central investigation department is responsible for investigating particularly serious criminal case such as those involving the most powerful organised criminal gangs and cases involving crimes against the state and the economy. For Mark Galeotti’s discussion of the significance of the changes see his blog at https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2010/10/ 05/the-investigations-committee-not-so-much-russias-fbi-more-a-kremlinwatchdog/ and on changes to the FSB https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress. com/2010/07/16/new-fsb-law-not-such-a-bad-thing-after-all/ (accessed 21 September 2015). In 2005, as part of a reform under Dmitrii Medvedev to bring the security services within the purview of the law, this right of the FSB to its own detention facilities was removed. The FSBs jails were reported to have been transferred to the Federal Penal Service (FSIN) where a special Directorate of Centrally Subordinate Detention Facilities was even created, headed by General-Lieutenant Vladimir Semenyuk. However, it turned out that the FSB had managed to work a way out of a seemingly hopeless situation. The prison personnel who had previously served in the FSB were quickly transferred to the FSIN as so-called officers of APS (Apparat Prikomandirovannykh Sotrudnikov) which is an apparatus of attached officers, a practice invented in Soviet times when KGB officers were sent to other state bodies under cover. As a result, while they were formally on the staff of the Penal Service, these officers remained subordinate to the Lubyanka. The FSB’s control was restored through the back door in 2006 when Putin passed a decree allowing the FSB to create ‘temporary’ detention facilities. The Decree recognises that the FSB ‘establishes the procedure for organising the activity of temporary detention facilities, as well as the procedure for performing criminal investigations in them and ensures that those who have been detained, are under suspicion or are accused, are held under guard.’ http://www.agentura.co.uk/english/infrastructure/ prisons/, agentura.ru (accessed 1 August 2014). Among the more scandalous examples of disinformation was a ‘documentary’ on NTV in the summer of 2014 claiming that Ol’ga Romanova used the proceeds from her prisoner support group Rus’ Sidyashchaya to finance neo-fascist groups in Ukraine. See, for example, http://www.ntv.ru/video/887002/ (accessed 1 June 2015). This quotation is taken from Irina’s interview with Ekho Moskvy on 11 January 2001, http://echo.msk.ru/programs/beseda/13241/ (accessed 22 September 2015).

Epilogue Prison the Leveller 1. Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘Stalin and the politics of kinship: Practices of collective punishment, 1920s–1940s’, p. 91. 2. http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/8683.html (accessed 1 August 2014). 3. Pavlyuchenko, V dobrovol’nom izgnanii, p. 28.

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INDEX

abusive relationships see violence Akhmatova, Anna, 7, 217 n. 33

nurseries, 120, 138 see also Organs of Guardianship and Care

alcohol/alcoholism, 30, 32, 40, 97, 105, 119, 130

children’s homes see orphanages Chita, 1–2, 15, 136, 185, 214 n. 3

Amnesty International, 177–9, 207

Christian faith, 48, 164, 165

Anisimkov, V.M., 72

Chukovskaya, Lidiya, 7

ANNA (National Centre for the Prevention

civil partnerships, 23, 47, 61, 74, 86, 169,

of Violence), 99 Arctic/sub-Arctic, xvi, 8, 24, 124, 125, 127, 128, 186 argot (prison), 69, 70 article 58, 173, 175–6 article 70, 176, 177, 234 n. 11

233 n. 7 Codd, H., 20, 21, 79, 146 Comfort, M., 19, 20, 22, 25, 36, 50, 99 common-law wives see civil partnerships corruption, xviii, 28, 32, 56, 78, 97, 125, 182, 190, 192, 227 n. 30, 230 n. 2 Council of Europe,

barracks, xix, 4, 5, 70, 71, 72, 77, 82, 83, 133, 163 bespredel, 71, 81, 227 n. 22

European court, 174, 188 parliamentary committee of, xiv, 177, 200 courts,

blatnoi see prison sub-cultures

Basmannyi district, 191

Blok, Aleksandr, 67 Brezhnev era, 116, 164, 176

Supreme Court, 179, 183, 191 ‘thieves’, 70

Broekmeyer, M.J., 89

trials and appearance at, 26, 40, 42, 44, 121,

Butyrka prison, 84, 183, 185, 189, 212

123, 130, 141, 161, 186, 190 crime,

Central Asia, 16, 39, 41, 223 n. 6

organised, xix, 69, 71, 73, 79 –80, 125, 192

‘chansons’ (prison), xvi, 115, 119, 122

‘political’, 7, 8–9, 141, 173, 174, 175, 176

Chekhov, Anton, 38

serious, 24, 83, 111, 177, 237 n. 42

Chernyi, Ernst, 187 childcare, 96, 119, 166, 168

societal norms about, 35 TV programmes about, 29, 33, 112, 200

children taken into state care, 137, 149, 152 fostering, 150 kingergartens, 138, 145

white-collar, xix, 2, 38, 152, 178, 182, 190, 214 n. 5, 236 n. 36 women partners involved in, 69, 70, 130

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criminal correction code (of the Russian

family-ties benefit, xviii, 19 –21, 87

Federation), 193 criminal-justice system, xiv, 11, 26, 28, 31,

see also prison reform Family Code, of the Russian Federation, 150,

32, 40, 43, 82, 97, 124, 128, 144, 164,

232 n. 24

176, 177, 179, 182, 185, 189, 190, 192,

fantasy play, 50, 63

195, 202

‘fast living’, 79, 169 Federal Investigative Committee, 190, 200,

Dal’ etymological dictionary, 89, 227 n. 3

237 n. 42

Decembrist wives/women see dekabristki

Federal Prison Service (FSIN) see Russian

dekabristki, 1– 17 films about, 12 –4

Prison Service, films about prisoners, 12, 78, 88, 91– 2, 112,

identification with, 2, 8–9, 12, 43, 48, 174, 218 n. 42, 217 n. 30 literary representations of, 5, 6, 7, 12, 15, 37, 116, 216 n. 21 myth/trope, 7, 11, 13, 15 –17, 21, 34, 47, 68, 175–6, 202–3 performance of, 50–1 statue of, 17 Devlin, A., 96, 105

163, 200. Fishman, L. T., 22, 23, 30, 32, 79 fostering see childcare, Frolova, E., 11 FSB (Federal Security Service), 32, 179, 182, 185–6, 190– 3, 195, 199–200, 236 n. 29 jails run by, 237 n. 43 see also Lefortovo prison

divorce, 4, 10, 11, 38, 44 –5, 47, 119, 169, 176–6, 223 n. 9, 136 n. 32 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 6, 37, 70, 216 n. 21, 226 n. 16, 227 n. 22 drugs, bandits, 127 crime related to, 119, 126, 127

gangs, 33, 67, 74, 160, 163 criminal, 73 in prison, 78, 162–3, 199 see also prison sub-cultures gender, 21, 97, 109–10, 138, 176–7. discourses, 34

dealing, 38, 44, 60, 92, 125–8, 147, 200

identities, xi, xvi

relatives use of, 80, 105

inequalities, xix, 17 representations, 13, 192

early release see parole Efimova, E.S., 115

roles, 38, 50, 62, 99 stereotypes, 7, 51, 169

Ekho Moskvy, 187

guards see personnel,

Esenin, Sergei, 115–16 European Convention on Human Rights,

geography, penal, xiv, xvi, 23, 47, 68, 152, 214 n. 9

xiv, 234 n. 15

Ginzburg, Evgeniya, 8, 9, 11, 183, 217 n. 42

European Court, 174, 188

Girshick, L.B., 22, 28

European Russia, 1, 24, 119, 124, 137,

Goffman, E., 22, 29

217 n. 28 exile, xi, 2 –4, 5, 7–8, 11, 15, 38, 124, 136– 7, 175, 213–14 n. 8

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 13, 71, 138, 163, 176 Great Patriotic War see war, gulag, 7, 10– 11, 67, 70, 115, 116, 123, 124,

following husbands into, 16, 17, 90, 114, 175, 176, 198, 215 n. 12, 215 n. 13

137, 177, 193, 213–14 n. 7, n. 8, 234 n. 7 legacy, xvi –iii, 33, 66 –7, 70, 198,

in the twenty-first century, 179, 187,

population size, xvi, 137, 173, 177, 193,

196

234 n. 7

INDEX

249

guardianship, 128, 144, 150, 154,

forced/penal, xi, xvi, 2, 3, 12 fig. 1.2, 90,

232 n. 19 see also childcare Gueble`, Paulina, 114, 123

139, 173,174, 198, 214 n. 3 slave, 123 Larina, Anna, 9, 11, 116, 175 Lefortovo prison, 179, 187, 190, 193–4, 196

¨ jdestrand, T., 139 Ho

Lotman, Yurii, 5

human-rights activists, 86

Magnitsky, Sergei, 185, 236 n. 36

monitors, 26, 83

Mahmood, S., 106

ombudsmen, 23, 123, 210–11, 222 n. 39

Mamlyga, V., 15 Mandel’shtam, N., 7

organizations, xv, 14, 27, 83, 174, 176,

Marmeladova, Sonya, 6, 34, 37, 48

177–8, 187, 188, 201, 202, 203, 210,

masculinities, 32, 50, 62, 98 –9, 106, 139–40

233 n. 7, 234 n. 15

matreshka, xi, 34, 176, 113–15, 121, 130, 166, 172, 176

intelligentsia, 5, 7, 8, 13, 116, 140, 174, 178, 180, 198 internet, 15, 21, 26, 59, 130, 200 chat-rooms and forums, 28, 35, 67, 90, 91, 107, 108, 110, 199

Matrosskaya Tishina prison, 187, 190, 193– 4 Matza, D., 31 Medvedev, President Dmitrii, 191, 237 n. 43 Memorial (NGO), 177 middle class, 138, 140, 152

dating, 69, 90, 101, 102, 103, 105

Mikhlin, A.S., 19

shopping, 27, 126 fig. 6.3, 131 fig. 6.4

Ministry of Justice, 123, 220 n. 7

see also websites

miscarriages of justice, 31, 43, 121, 165, 167,

Ivanovo Oblast’, 184

229 n. 24 mobile phones see telephones,

journey to colonies, xii, xviii, 38, 45, 47, 50, 57 –9, 76, 92, 113, 128, 132, 134, 147, 149, 156, 159, 175, 187, 194, 224 n. 21 in the nineteenth century, 2, 3, 7, 8, 38, 136 in the twentieth century, 11 –12

Mordoviya (republic of), xiv fig. P.2, xv fig P.3, 133, 147, 151 fig. 7.2, 153, 155–6, 194 Moscow, xii, 9, 15, 24, 26, 58, 136, 179, 182, 192, 193 prisons (sizos), xiii fig. P.1, 52 fig. 3.1, 117

Kaluga oblast, 179–88, 193, 236 n. 29, 237 n. 39

fig. 6.1, 118 fig. 6.2, 131 fig. 6.4, 179, 183, 187, 190, 193, 196

Karyshev, V., 68 Kay, R., 99, 139

Rublevka suburb, 183 mother-daughter relationship, 144, 166–8

Khodorkovskaya, Inna, 1–3, 15, 35, 182,

mother-in-law, 45, 46, 75, 103, 130– 1, 133,

183, 185 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 1 –2, 14, 16, 38, 85, 111, 178, 183, 185, 191, 200, 214 n. 5

139, 159, 163–6, 182 Mourtazalieva, Zara, 179, 200 Muslims, 24, 124, 161, 168, 179

Kollontai, Alexandra, 6

Chechens, 129

kolonii-poseleniya see open prisons

Tatars, 40, 44, 119, 121, 124, 161, 167

Krupskaya, Nadezhda, 6–7, 90 Nabutov, Kirill, 97 labour (prison), 124, 128 camps, 11, 67, 70, 175, 181

narcotics see drugs, narrative resources (strategies), 22, 26

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appeal to higher morality, 31, 33 –5, 47,

Perm’ krai, 58, 184

103, 165 denial, 31–2

Perm’, 36, 176, 234 n. 11 personnel, 21, 27, 47, 85, 129, 150, 152,

disengagement, 170 journey-to-colony, 57 neutralisation, 31, 39, 47, 73, 165 redemption, 13, 48, 160 stand-by-my-man, 14, 21, 34 visiting room, 50 see also dekabristka (i); matreshka Nasibullina, Elina, 92 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 1, 5, 6, 7, 11, 114, 116, 216 n. 21

237 n. 43 colony governors, xii, 23, 39, 41, 65, 83, 85, 95 guards, 65, 82, 143, 146, 155–6, 160 treatment by, 30, 57, 58, 60 –6, 86, 185 Pisklakova, M., 99 police, 31, 61, 74, 100, 126, 128, 129–30, 141 corruption of, 125, 236 n. 36 searches and arrest, 40, 44, 153, 160, 191, 235 n. 17

Nerchinsk, 136, 214 n. 3

political prisoners, ix, xix, 24, 38, 83, 91–2,

Nikitin, Alexander, 186

177–9, 181, 185, 188, 191, 195– 6,

non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 107, 136, 177, 178, 200, 220 n. 7 North Caucasians, 24 see also Muslims

189–99, 200 prisoners of conscience, 1, 177–8, 179, 201, 235 n. 16 in USSR, 71, 91, 173, 176, 177, prison administrations, 58, 61, 67, 75, 76, 81,

obshchak see social fund, open days, 19, 26, 27, 20 fig. 2.1, 60 fig. 3.4, 149

83, 195, 221 n. 25 women’s relationship with, 23, 26, 53, 84 –86, 107, 123

open prisons, xvi, 28 n. 8

prison commune, 70

Organs of Guardianship and Care (Organ

prison industries, xi, 26, 33, 75, 95

Opeki i Popechitel’stva), 149–52, 154, 232 n. 19 orphanages, 150, 137, 152

prison reform, xiv, 2, 19, 63, 77–8, 176, 182, 191–2, 197, 203, 220 n. 7, 227 n. 30, 237 n. 43 prison sub-cultures, 66 –7, 70, 72, 78, 80, 82,

parcels (for prisoners), xi, xii, xiv, 2, 16, 21, 23, 29, 51– 4, 56 –7, 113, 118, 120

85, 201 avtoritet(y) (authority figures), 71–5, 83, 85

contents of, 32, 41, 118 fig. 6.2, 122

blatnoi/blatnye, 83, 103, 171

not sending, 75

code (laws/rules), 71, 81, 81 –4, 87

preparation of, 51, 75, 156, 159, 161, 194 prisoners’ entitlement to, 224 n. 20

smotryashchii, 72, 74–5, 77, 227 ch. 4 n. 24 shesterki, 71

sending by post or courier, 51, 83, 127–8, 130, 155 Soviet-era, 7, 116, 123

see also Thieves-in-Law prison weddings see weddings prisoners,

survival, 32, 51, 101, 105, 109,143

bomzhi (homeless), 38, 82, 83, 139–40, 152

taking to prisons and colonies, 60, 156, 201

career criminals, 25, 35, 36, 68, 70

parole (early release), 42, 61, 75, 79–81, 95,

hierarchy of, 38, 82, 83, 139–40, 152, 164

153, 156, 160, 190 Pavlova, Vera, 89

juveniles, xiii, 2, 159 lowest rank and marginals, 24, 38, 83

penal culture, xi, xv, xviii, 2, 214 n. 8.

population of, xv, xvi, xviii– xix, 33, 71,

penal reform see prison reform,

173, 200

INDEX rank-and-file, 25, 35, 30, 71, 72, 83, 84,

251

school, 116, 119, 138, 154

200, 224 n. 18 society of, 31, 38, 66, 67, 71, 87, 169, 201

employment problems, 96, 108 experiences of prisoners’ children, 116, 119,

women, xix, 19, 28, 36, 64, 67, 147, 149,

128, 140, 141, 146–7, 153, 154–6, 160,

152, 159, 222 n. 33, 232 n. 19 see also prison sub-cultures; political prisoners prodigal son, 113, 114–15, 130

164, 167, 188 security, in prisons, relatives’ experience of, xviii, 61, 85 –6, 147, 155–6

Pussy Riot, 178, 179, 191, 200

serial killers, 111, 116

Putin, President Vladimir, 1, 14, 16, 174, 177, 178–9, 184, 185, 197

Sever, Alexander, 68, 71, 72 sex (intimate relations), 57, 62, 67, 92, 95, 101, 102, 106, 148

quasi-prisoner status, 28, 42, 57, 58, 84

non-traditional, xiii, 82 –3, 159, 169,

razvod(y), 100, 101

sexually-transmitted diseases, 61, 124

178 recidivists, 69, 78, 92, 159, 106, 164, 167, 227 n. 24, n. 30 re-entry (re-socialisation), 26, 128–9, 163 rehabilitation, 2,19, 26, 135, 175

Shabanskaya, V., 15 Siberia, xii, xvii fig. P.4, 15, 18, 39, 45, 47, 55, 74, 125, 128, 158, 198, 202 Decembrists in, 1–6, 10, 12 fig. 1.2, 14,

release,

15, 37, 38, 65, 114, 136–7, 214 n. 1,

religion, 33, 34, 47, 164, 177, 234 n. 15

215 n. 12, 215 n. 13, 216 n. 21,

remand prisons (sizos), xiii P.1, xvi, xviii, 25, 51, 52, 85, 118 fig. 6.2, 141, 153, 160, 179, 181, 187, 189, 190, 193 TV soap opera about, 14, 29, 60 Romanova, Olga, 15 –16, 83– 4, 176, 178, 182–4, 184 fig. 9.2, 188–92, 196, 200, 201–3 Rus’ Sidyashchaya (Imprisoned Russia), 192, 203, 184 fig. 9.2 Russian Orthodox Church see religion, Russian Prison Service, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 25, 97, 102, 223 n. 8 family policy, 19, 21, 49, 64, 166, 168, 203 organization, xviii, 23, 220 n. 7 public relations, 26, 51, 52, 58, 63, 123

216 n. 28 in Soviet period, 6–7, 8, 11, 12, 19, 174 sizos see remand prisons, Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 7–8, 9, 176, 217 n. 41 Son’ka the-Golden-Hand, 67, 226 n. 7, social fund (obshchak), 51, 70, 71, 73, 75, 224 n. 18 Soviet legacy, xiii–xviii, 70 –1, 174 Soviet Union, xiii, 2, 11, 71, 89, 116, 119, 120, 120, 164 collapse of, 32, 126 St Petersburg, 1, 3, 6, 106, 136, 165 stigma, xix, ix, 30, 31, 161 courtesy, 29, 30, 33, 35

statistics, xiii, xix

sub-cultures see prison sub-cultures,

see also personnel

Supreme Court, 179, 183, 188, 191 Sutyagin family, 178, 179–82, 185, 187–8,

secondary prisonisation, xix –xx, 21, 203 see also quasi-prisoners Sakhalin, 37, 38 same-sex partnerships, 160, 169– 72, 223 n. 2, 233 n. 7. Scholars’ Defense Committee, 188

192–5, 196, 199 Stalin era, 7, 9, 11, 112, 116, 123, 137–8, 164, 181, 184, 199 repression, xv, xviii, 7, 8, 9, 67, 70 –1, 90, 97, 137–8, 174–6, 181, 200 Sykes, G., 31

252

WAITING AT THE PRISON GATE

Tambov oblast’, 184

cost of, 23, 41, 46, 51, 56 –7, 85

tattoos, xvi, 70, 233 n. 9 Taylor, S., 22

entitlement to, xiii, 23, 39, 60 –1, 64, 41 –2, 51, 56, 132, 133, 155, 224 n. 16, 224 n. 20

telephones, 19, 23, 53, 97, 155, 162, 194

frequency of, 1– 2, 28, 29, 41, 45, 47, 52 –3,

control of wives by, 53, 55, 77, 79, 97 conversations with prisons by, 51, 52, 55, 105, 155, 171 illicit mobile devices, 23, 53, 55– 6, 79, 88, 93 –4, 153, 155, 156, 187 television, 67, 112, 182, 184, 187, 200, 223–4 n. 13 Before it is Too Late, 43, 97 Zona, 14, 27, 29, 60, Thieves-in-Law (vory-v-zakone), 33, 67, 70–1, 73, 81– 4, 171, 221 n. 25, 225–6 n. 5 see also prison sub-cultures

56, 64, 144, 152 long/residential, xvi, 26, 39, 41 –2, 56 –7, 61 –4, 75, 76, 86, 94, 97, 132, 142–3, 147–8, 162, 175 planning, 41, 43, 57– 8, 59 regulations about, 39, 41 –2, 60 –1, 64 –5, 75, 76, 80, 85, 86 short, 41, 47, 53 fig. 3.2, 56, 65, 75, 84, 97, 147, 163 Volga-Urals region, xii, xvii fig. P.4, 20 fig. 2.1, 24, 39, 74, 119, 124, 127 Volkonskaya, Mariya Princess, 5, 6, 8,

trial see courts,

9– 10, 10 fig. 1.1, 12 fig. 1.2, 136–7,

Trubetskaya, Ekaterina, 5, 6, 9–10, 12 fig. 1.2 Tsereteli, Zurab, 17

202

Tsyryul’nikov, A., 15 the ‘understanding’ (po ponyatiyam), 33, 81 –2, 115 see also prison sub-cultures

war, 89, 90, 97, 114, 116, 119, 122, 138, 173, 225 n. 5 World War II (Great Patriotic War), 90, 137–38, 175–6 websites, 27

United Russia (political party), 177

offering legal advice, 61

unmarried status, 38, 42, 61, 64, 223 n. 10 see also common-law wives

official penal service, 27, 63, 123 prisoner-dating, 69, 97

Urals region see Volga-Urals region

prisoner-support, 27, 47, 57 –9, 61, 130, 148, 202

violence, domestic, 82, 92, 93, 99, 112, 214 n. 8 in prison, 72, 169, 222 n. 39 visitation, 23, 26, 50 –1, 65, 122, 144, 147, 162, 169 visiting facilities and rooms, 19, 50, 51, 59 –60, 37, 56, 61 –4, 62 fig. 3.5, 175 visits, xii–xiv, 21, 23, 56–64

see also internet weddings (in prison), 39, 64 –5, 76, 88, 104 fig. 5.2, 105 wives-of-enemies-of-the-people, 7, 174, 179, 196, 199, 234 n. 11 Yakushkin, I., 4, 137 Yukos affair, 178, 185