The GULAGECHOES project formally ended on August 30th 2024. When it began in November 2018, the world was a very different place. However, the developments since then have only emphasized the relevance of a project focusing on the treatment and experiences of prisoners in times of peace and war.
The main objective of GULAGECHOES was to compare the treatment of ethnic, racial and religious difference in the prison systems of a series of case study “post-communist” countries in Europe. The post-communist countries include some of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe, which provides a unique opportunity to examine the treatment and experiences of members of different ethnic minorities passing through prison. On the theoretical side, the project aimed to advance penological theory on identity formation among prisoners and to contribute critically to theoretical debate about prisons as sites of political radicalisation.
The GULAGECHOES project set out to discover the extent to which the character of a prison system – by which we mean prison architecture and design, penal policies, practices and culture, and the nature of prison society as well as the place it occupies in domestic power structures – in different countries influences prisoners’ ethnic self-identification, their relationships with other prisoners and prison authorities and their world views. The premise informing the project was that we must first understand the various processes shaping the experiences of minority groups in prison before addressing current speculations about the effectiveness of prisons in dealing with contemporary issues concerning ethnic minority prisoners, such as their susceptibility to radicalization or high rates of self-harm. The war on Ukraine has underlined the importance of this, as did the various regional wars that have accompanied the collapse of communism in the past thirty years.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which brought fieldwork in Russia to a halt, led to some adjustment of the focus of data-gathering efforts away from the Russian Federation more towards the non-Russian cases study countries, but this brought some surprise benefits. The Russian war on Ukraine inevitably also directed our attention to the different impacts of war and peace on the treatment and experiences of prisoners of different nationalities and ethnicities in all the case study countries so that we have been able to develop a theory of the impact of crisis events on penal practice.
When there was a call in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for scholarship on Soviet communism to pay greater attention to the peripheries of the ‘Soviet Empire’ and the former East European communist countries, the GULAGECHOES project was already ahead of the game in the rich research materials it has gathered for examining the different trajectories of penal change in countries and regions on Russia’s peripheries from the 1930s to the present time. The extensive archive of data consisting of, among else, archival material, ethnographic and expert interviews, prisoner memoirs, and published sources, will be available in the open access depository Zenodo.
The project confirmed that there is an ethnic dimension to the history of communist and post-communist era prisons that contradicts the official Russian discourse of ethnic neutrality in policy but, even more, in practice. At all periods up to the present time, individual prisoners have had to make decisions about whether, and how, to express their ethnic, ethno-religious or national identity. These decisions, in turn, has affected how they are treated, their relationships with other prisoners and with penal administrations, and their view of the world.
The memoirs of prisoners incarcerated in the gulag and interviews with prisoners who have served sentences tell the stories about how these decisions were made at various times over the past 80 years. These stories have formed the basis of our findings about the constellation of factors that have a bearing on prisoners’ identity work in prison. Some of these have already seen the light in academic publication, conference and workshops presentations and in various public media, and publications by project members are continuing. An edited volume, “Continuity and Change in the Multicultural Prisons of the Former Soviet Union, East Central Europe and the Balkans” with Palgrave publishers is underway. This will be first major collection comprehensively to examine the history and legacy of penal institutions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. Two other books are in the pipeline including a monograph co-authored by the PI Judith Pallot, Mikhail Nakonechnyi and Olga Zeveleva in which the project’s main findings will be presented, and monograph on Central Asia transnational prisoners authored by Rustamjon Urinboyev. Sadly, our plans for dissemination in the Russian Federation have had to be put on hold.
The findings of the project confirmed the salience of ethnicity in investigating the character and trajectories of the communist and post-communist penal systems. It has undermined the a priori assumptions that informed pre-existing scholarship on the communist and post-communist prison systems and opened up new avenues for further investigation. In the post-1989-1991 period, most former communist countries and new states in Europe joined the Council of Europe and, in theory at least, set out on a path to bring the treatment of prisoners in line with European standards.
As signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights, the former communist countries renewed their earlier commitments to the non-discriminatory treatment of national minority prisoners. The project’s interviews with former prisoners, civil society organisations, and government officials, reveal wide variations in the degree of this commitment from national down to facility level and, often, contradictory practices. The project found that Council of Europe programmes to promote respect for minority groups among prison staff and to support minority cultural expression and religious observance co- exist today alongside blatantly discriminatory treatment of certain ethnic minority prisoners.
The project’s findings on the treatment of minority prisoners complicates further the view that the former communist countries are universally on a path towards developing human rights-based penal systems.
The GULAGECHOES Principal Investigator was Prof. Judith Pallot. The core team consisted of Dr Costanza Curro, Dr Larissa Kangaspuro, Dr Mikhail Nakonechnyi, Dr Lili di Puppo, Dr Yury Sorochkin, Dr Rustam Urinboyev, Dr Olga Zeveleva, and Mr Ryan Reed, now writing his PhD thesis in the Aleksanteri Institute on the Russian prison service’s memorialization of its history. The project thanks the many partners it had over the course of the project. The project was funded by the European Research Council, Horizon 2020.
The initial case study countries for the GULAGECHOES project were the Russian Federation, Georgia, and Romania to which were added Estonia, Ukraine and Croatia as the project progressed. The project also singled out transnational prisoners serving prison sentences in a foreign country, for separate study.
The research for the project was consisted of seven research questions which were grouped under three sub-headings: the Historical Context; Ethnic Identity Construction of individuals drawn into the Penal Nexus, and Globalization and the Impact of Transformations away from the Soviet Model on the Treatment of Ethnic Difference.
The large corpus of data the project collected will be available in the Zenodo open access depository although some interview transcripts will remain under curfew until 2030 for the safety of the research participants. Please find the depository link above.
The project released a documentary film “Wardens’ Gardens” based around five former correctional labour colonies in the town of Khoni.