Presentations by Streams

The Wardens’ Gardens is a documentary film made by the European Research Council advance grant project GULAGECHOES (no 788448). Originally, the project planned a film about the treament of ethnic minorities in Russian correctional colonies but with the Russian war on Ukraine that had to be dropped. Instead, we shifted the focus of the film to one of the project case study regions, Georgia. The Wardens’ Gardens is based in the town of Khoni in Imereti, western Georgia. In the post-Stalin era, it was chosen as the location of five correctional labour colonies providing forced labour for cotton production. The colonies were closed after Georgia gained its independence. Today, many of the prison personnel and some former prisoners still live in the town. In the film, former officers and guards talk about their work in the labour colonies in the late Soviet period, and about the people they marched out to the cotton plantations daily, their relationship with the Moscow centre and with the Vory-v-Zakony (Thieves-in -Law), and they reflect on their lives in Khoni since 1991. The film is unique in three respects: it gives an insight into the late Soviet “gulag” about which very little is known, other than what was happening to political prisoners under article 70; secondly, it fills an important gap in knowledge about the people who worked as prison officers in the Soviet penal system; thirdly, and perhaps most important given the call since February 22nd 2024 to decolonise Russian and East European studies, it give an insight into how an apparently unified Soviet prison system was mediated by culture and had its own history that was very different from in the Russian centre – we learn, for example, that the greatest fear prisoners incarcerated in Georgia had was of being sent for regime violation to a colony in the Russian mainland where life was far more difficult.

The interviews were taken by members of the GULAGECHOES team Costanza Curro and Vakhtang Kekoshvili. It will be introduced at the conference by GULAGECHOES PI, Judith Pallot.