Authors
Elena Omelchenko,1; Albina Garifzianva1; 1 Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Russian Federation Discussion
The focus of the paper is on the emergence of new (intermediate) statuses in the prison hierarchy at the present time in the Russian Federation. It pays special attention to the statuses associated with prisoners of different ethnic/religious identities. The paper is based on research on research undertaken in one of the Siberian cities of Russia in 2019-20. The empirical base was a collection of 28 in-depth biographical interviews with former prisoners, the aim being to understand how prisoners with different ethnic and religious backgrounds fit in to “the society of captives” and their role in the emergence of new, ‘intermediate’ statuses. In the modern Russian prison system, prisoners who choose intermediate positions are held in contempt by those who live according to the ‘thieves’ law’. Nevertheless, in current conditions of the Russian prison more and more prisoners choose to live outside the coordinates of the thieves' world, and also to reject cooperation with the administration. It is these prisoners who often become the object of senseless punishments, among which there may be, for example, Muslims. In the paper I will attempt to answer the question of why the everyday life of the modern Russian prison still reproduces harsh punishment practices, how the respondents themselves explain this, and how ‘new’ so-called intermediate statuses arise in the hierarchy that has existed since the gulag. 
