US AND THEM: Criminality and prisoner hierarchies in the early Gulag Press, 1923–1930

Abstract

The ‘political' vs. ‘criminal’ divide is a familiar one to readers well-versed in Russian penality. Beginning in nineteenth-century texts by eminent writers such as Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky, this dichotomy continued in places of incarceration after the revolutionary events of 1917. In particular it could be seen through prisoner newspapers, one of the cultural-educational initiatives launched by the new regime in an attempt to re-educate its incarcerated population. This article examines a number of prisoner publications from the Secret Police Camps of the 1920s in order to highlight shifting penal hierarchies and the persistence of the political/criminal binary in the early years of the Soviet state.