Abstract
In the preface to this book readers are informed that: ‘According to the tenth world prison population list … more than one half of the world’s prison population is to be found in three countries, of which the Russian Federation is the third largest after China and the USA’ (p. xv). This is hardly surprising news, given that China has the world’s largest human population, Russia is geographically the biggest country on the planet and the United States of America is home to one of the most violent, gun-crazy, murderous societies on Earth. Here, however, the authors are not so much concerned with the conditions and circumstances of the men (and women) serving their time behind bars, or at any rate in Russian convict settlements, as with the plight of the womenfolk – wives, mothers, mothers-in-law, daughters, girlfriends – and families of the imprisoned criminals. As one would expect from the researches of two distinguished female scholars into the experiences of just 26 selected females enduring the tribulations of their ‘secondary prisonization’ (p. xix), the whole book is predicated on and permeated by what the authors refer to as a ‘feminist analysis’ (p. xix) based on ‘feminist research’, which, we are assured, ‘tries to reduce the distance between the researcher and those she researches’ (p. 25). (How this differs from the approach and methodology of male researchers is not further elucidated.)
Chapter 1 consists of a discussion of the origins and historical development of the archetypal figure of the dekabristka (Decembrist wife), a word coined in the nineteenth century to describe the self-sacrificing womenfolk of high-minded but foolhardy mutinous army officers, who chose to accompany their husbands who were sentenced to Siberian exile after their nobly intentioned but sloppily executed abortive rebellion in December 1825. The ‘Decembrists’ themselves were highly educated, enlightened army officers, members of the social, cultural and military elite of the Russian Empire, who, fired by the ideals of the European Enlightenment and constitutional government, and an abhorrence of serfdom, failed miserably in their attempt to challenge the whole tsarist regime. Five of their leaders were publically hanged and 121 more were exiled to various terms of exile and hard labour (katorga) in Siberia. Eighteen of their wives and other female relatives chose to abandon their privileged lifestyles and lofty social positions to follow their loved ones and share the punishment of their errant spouses and close male kin. Thus was created the almost saintly image – or ‘trope’, as our authors almost invariably call it – of the dekabristki, the loving, caring, suffering female martyrs, ‘standing by their man’, and supporting him throughout the years of his penal servitude. An examination of the extent to which the twentieth- and twenty-first-century heiresses of this near-mythologized prototype measured up to, were inspired by, emulated or rejected it is one of the major leitmotifs of the present study.
Another ‘trope’ often referred to in the text is that of the matreshka, the nest of gaily painted concentric hollow wooden dolls that have themselves become an almost ubiquitous emblem of ‘Mother Russia’ (Mat’ Rossiia), ever present to nurture and protect generations of her myriad offspring. Indeed, the authors quote one historian (unnamed) who argues unconvincingly ‘that “the secret of Russian identity” lies in “the simple representation of mother and child” on the first wooden matreshka doll at the end of the nineteenth century’ (p. 113). If the dekabristka is the ‘convict wife’, then the matreshka is the ‘convict mother’. One of the problems explored by Pallot and Katz is how this intimate bond between mother and son is affected when he is convicted of possibly heinous crimes (say, serial murder) and incarcerated in a penal colony thousands of miles from the maternal bosom. The distressing effects of the prisoners’ arrest, trial and conviction, and the impact on the wider family in terms of not only emotional stress and conflicting interests but also the logistical problems of travelling often huge distances for visiting days, preparing food and medicine parcels, arranging for child-care, social ostracism, trying to keep in touch via letters, telephone or social media, and financial strain – all these and more are the lot of these victims of what is described as ‘secondary prisonization’ or, to use a military concept, ‘collateral damage’. This is aggravated by the hostile and unsympathetic attitude of officialdom at every level within the ‘penality’ (an archaic term which here presumably means ‘the penal system’ (passim).
Based on their interviews and other sources, the authors introduce the reader to a whole variety of characters, customs and members of the subcultures that are a feature of the prison environment – the avtoritety, the smotriashchie, the blatnye, the vory v zakone (names for various ‘bosses’ in the criminal hierarchy) and the stool-pigeons, most of which have their equivalents in the pre-Revolutionary Siberian exile system. The bulk of the book (chapters 3–7) presents us with a portrayal of the different types of ‘prison wives’ – wives of ‘ordinary prisoners’, the ‘Bandit Wife’, the ‘Social Media Wife’, and then mothers and daughters. Wives of ordinary prisoners are ‘ordinary’ women married to ‘rank-and-file’ convicts who belong neither to the prisoners’ elite nor to the prison pariahs such as paedophiles, rapists, transgenders and the mentally retarded.
‘Bandit wives’, for want of a better term, are those either legally married or in a pre-sentence permanent relationship with a man holding a powerful position within the prisoners’ community. Not only do these often extremely wealthy individuals hold sway inside the prison walls, but also, through their network of contacts with the criminal underworld outside, manage to control and conduct surveillance over the activities of their womenfolk, as well as providing for their personal needs and furnishing them with a regular supply of cash, goods and expensive luxury items. This material comfort is, however, offset by the restrictions on their movements imposed by their faraway husbands. Life on the outside for an incarcerated gangster’s moll was therefore not necessarily a cushy one in comparison with ‘ordinary’ prison wives. What the authors rather unsatisfactorily translate as ‘social media wives’ (zaochnitsy), are women whose first contact with prisoners is ‘unseen’ (zaochnyi) and conducted at a distance through letters, telephone and social media. The motives for these kinds of relationships are difficult to fathom; such women are often despised by their family and friends for entering into a relationship with a convicted criminal; and although these unusual friendships sometimes end up in actual marriage (with attendant benefits such as conjugal visits), the outcome, after the prisoner’s release, is often far from satisfactory (pp. 88–110). The complexities of these liaisons are sympathetically discussed by the researchers, and make for fascinating reading.
Lack of space precludes a consideration of the many other facets of ‘waiting at the prison gate’ phenomenon, but this review ends with a few quibbles from one who is uninitiated into the mysteries of feminist discourse. As a humble historian, the present reviewer finds it difficult, for instance, to figure out the exact meaning of such lexical constructs as ‘reflexive identity project’ (p. 26), ‘meta-narrative’ (p. 18), ‘macro-level expectations’ (p. 26), ‘valorization’ (p. 84), ‘strategies of impression management’ and the wonderful ‘dramaturgilogical perspective’ (p. 22). Very instructive, however, are the many parallels and precedents to be found in the pre-Revolutionary Siberian prison and exile system and society with present-day practices.