Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet. 2014. 196 p. ISBN 978-91-554-9064-5The volume consists of seven articles by scholars from Italy, Sweden, the UK and the USA, and is devoted to the subject that has primarily been familiar in the West through Stalin’s Gulag. Back then, as a bitter joke had it, Russians could be divided into three categories: those who were imprisoned, those who are imprisoned and those who will be imprisoned. However, Russian prison experience had not begun and would not end with the Gulag. The great value of the book <...> is that it compares and contrasts incarceration in Russia, past and present, with the situation in various other countries, notably the United Kingdom and the United States—but not, unfortunately, in Sweden, where the recidivism rate is much lower than in most other countries. The book’s title, Punishment as a crime?, is deliberately provocative, with the first and last chapters raising the question of whether, in many cases and not only in Russia, the length and severity of the punishment may be greater than the crime that many, but far from all, of the inmates have committed. In the excellent opening chapter, based on his recent personal ten-year experience of punishment in Putin’s Russia, Igor Sutyagin asserts that the ‘existing Russian legal practice of sentencing people to excessively long terms and sending them to serve these terms a great distance away from their relatives can thus have a negative social effect and might in itself be considered a crime’ . In the concluding chapter, Andrei Rogatchevskii contrasts and compares the treatment meted out recently to the Russian writer Eduard Limonov and, at the same time, to the British writer Lord Archer, quoting an American penologist as thinking that by and large ‘the prison as an institutional form has fostered more criminogenesis than moral regeneration, more debasement than redemption, more scandal than success. Were the prison … judged by the same standard as its inhabitants, it would surely be classified as a repeat offender, perhaps a candidate for the death penalty’. All too often, in all too many countries, the punishment simply doesn’t fit the crime. The five chapters in the middle of the book provide additional material on the interrelationship between crime and punishment.Table of ContentsIntroductionPrison RealitiesIgor Sutyagin, Russian Prison Culture Today: A Participant-Observer’s View
Martin Kragh. Free and Forced Labor in the Soviet Economy: An Uncertain BoundaryReactions and Representations.Sarah J. Young. Criminalizing Creativity: Language, Performance, and the Representation of Convicts in Imperial and Soviet-Era Prisons and Penal Colonies
Andrea Gullotta. Gulag Humour: Some Observations on Its History, Evolution, and Contemporary Resonance
Helena Goscilo. Complicity in the Illicit? Liube’s Rock Band Bond with the Criminal ZonaComparative DimensionsInessa Medzhibovskaya. Punishment and the Human Condition: Hannah Arendt, Leo Tolstoy, and Lessons from Life, Philosophy, and Literature
Andrei Rogatchevski. Non-Totalitarian Imprisonment under Western and Eastern Eyes: Lord Archer, Eduard Limonov, and Theories of Human MotivationIndex
Notes on Contributors
