Shopping at Sizomag: The Internet as a Potemkin Village of Modern Russian Penal Practice
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Keywords
Penitentiaries, E-Governance, Post-Soviet Studies, Uneven Modernity, Modernization Theories, Nation-State, Communications Technology, History of the Internet
Abstract
The aim of this introduction and the ensuing discussion is to explore the role of the Internet in postsocialist Russian penitentiary practice and the social economy of punishment. The Internet has multiple functions in modern societies, as an information resource, communication tool, and instrument of government. This introductory essay is based on what could be called a digital phenomenology of the Russian Internet, supplemented by interviews with experts and a small selection of photographs from the personal archive of Ol’ga Romanova. As such, it provides only an outline of questions, with few tentative answers, which suggest how one might problematize the social significance of Internet-based services that have been offered in Russian penitentiaries since 2009 alongside the growth of the Internet as a medium of information exchange on penitentiaries. In sharp contrast to the language of modernization that governments and corporations tend to apply when they introduce digital technologies, their practical implementation in penitentiaries suggests at best uneven levels of modernity. Looking at the Russian case through the way it presents itself on the Internet, this essay and the following contributions by Judith Pallot and Yvonne Jewkes invite future studies to apply theories of “uneven modernity” and “normalization” in order to lay out critical perspectives for understanding the Russian case in comparative and diachronic perspective. In English.
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Dina Gusejnova, University College London
Dina Gusejnova is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL's Centre for Transnational History. She specialises in modern intellectual and cultural history and the social history of ideas, with particular interest in twentieth-century cultural internationalism. Her work addresses the relationship between biographical experience and constructions of political identity. Her current research project focuses on positive and negative notions of cosmopolitanism in European and American international cultural institutions during and between the World Wars. She is also completing a book manuscript on aristocratic memory and European identity. Dina holds a doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge. From 2009 to 2011, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.