ABSTRACT
Russia has become one of the main migration hubs worldwide following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of migrant workers travel to Russia from three Central Asian countries. However, Russian immigration laws and policies are ambiguous and highly punitive. The result is that many migrants resort to undocumented status working in the shadow economy, which places them in a disadvantaged and precarious position. In this position they are vulnerable to becoming targets of the Russian criminal justice system as they take to crime to overcome economic uncertainty, become embroiled in interpersonal conflicts ending in violence, or fall victim to fabricated criminal charges initiated by Russian police officers under pressure to produce their monthly quota of arrests. The impact on Russian penal institutions is that they have become ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse sites as a consequence of the incarceration of growing numbers of transnational prisoners. Using person-to-person interviews conducted in Uzbekistan with men and women who served sentences in Russian penal institutions during the past two decades, we show in this article how the large-scale migratory processes have transformed Russian prisons into sites of ethnic and religious plurality, in which formal rules and informal sub-cultures - the colony regime, so-called thieves' law ( vorovskoy zakon), ethnic solidarity norms, and Sharia law - coexist and clash in new ways compared with the status quo ante. Thus, we argue there is a need to revise the prevailing understanding about the power dynamics in Russian penal institutions. Our findings undermine the prison service's insistence of the ethnic and ethno-religious neutrality and 'cosmopolitanism' of Russian penal space, which is presented as a latter-day manifestation of the Soviet-era 'friendship of nations' policy. Russian prisons today must be understood as sites of ethnic and religious pluralism.
This article addresses the question of the experiences of Muslim transnational prisoners in the Russian Federation. It is based on interviews the project GULAGECHOES conducted in Uzbekistan with men and women who previously had served sentences of varying lengths and severity in Russian penal facilities over the past two decades. Unlike in Soviet times when Uzbeks were counted as Russian nationals, today they are legally defined as 'foreigners', and their presence in large numbers in the country's prisons makes the situation in Russia more like in Europe, which has high numbers of prisoners from abroad. The focus of our investigation is on group formation among Muslim prisoners and their relationship between the different power hierarchies that already exist in Russian penitentiaries. We do this through discussing the journey of one Uzbek in-migrant to Russia, through prison and back to Uzbekistan. Our aim is to contest some of the stereotypical assumptions about the linkage between migrants, the traditional prisoner sub-culture of the thieves-in-law, Islamic belief and practices and violent radicalisation. We show that the social interactions among prisoners and the motives lying behind them are multi-faceted and complex. After the introduction and sections giving the contextual information needed to understand the Russian prison system, we discuss the experiences of Muslim transnational prisoners under headings dealing with Islam and prisoner hierarchies; surveillance by prison staff; ethnic solidarity; and contact with the outside world. We conclude that the past two decades have seen the emergence of a far more complicated and plural power geometry between the prison administration and prisoners and between Russian traditional criminal sub-culture and transnational Muslim prisoners.
