From Bamlag to Ukraine: Intersections of Class, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Context of Punishment, 1930S - 2023.
The purpose of the panel is to examine the role of penal systems of the different countries of the former Soviet Union have used their prison systems in national building. The panelists will discuss the ways that penal institutions at various time from the 1930s to the present day have been the sites of insider/outsider identity construction, the public understanding of their role, and instruments of state power and nation building. The panel will explore these themes in relation to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway in East Siberia in the 1930s ( which recently entered the news as an example of a project that the “new” punishment of “forced labour as an alternative to deprivation of liberty” will be used to complete); the way in which language policy in Estonia’s prisons (claimed to be the most progressive among those of the former Soviet states) is used to define the borders of national belonging in that country; public attitudes towards, and affects on, current penal reform in the Russian Federation; and the use of prisons in times of war to achieve states’ domestic and international goals.
