DOI: 10.46340/eppd.2025.12.5.1
Dmytro Yagunov, Attorney at Law, D.Sc. in Political Science, Ph.D. in Public Administration, MSSc in Criminal Justice, Associate Professor, Merited Lawyer of Ukraine
Eberhard Karls University
How to cite: Yagunov, D. (2025). Russian Criminal and Prison Culture: Historical Background, Importation in the 21st Century, and the Wagner Phenomenon. Evropský politický a právní diskurz, 12, 5, 5-43. https://doi.org/10.46340/eppd.2025.12.5.1
Abstract
The article is focused on the origins of the Russian criminal and prison subculture and the current state of this phenomenon, which is imported by the Russian Federation within its imperialistic neocolonial policy aimed at restoring the ‘Soviet space’.
In order to analyse the preconditions for the emergence of the Russian criminal and prison subculture, it is necessary to consider a large complex of historical, cultural, political, geographical, and economic factors, which together created the phenomenon that has no analogues in the history. Neither the deportation of criminals by the British government to the New World in the 17th century, nor the deportation of convicts by the British government to Australia in the 19th century, nor the deportation of the relégués to French Guiana and other colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries by the French government created the cultural-criminal-prison phenomenon that began to take shape during the time of the Grand Principality of Moscow. Later, it was significantly strengthened during the reign of Peter I and finally took shape in the second half of the 19th century. Moreover, world history provides no other examples of state formations such as the Vyatka Republic (14th-15th centuries), which was founded by professional criminals and whose economic base was founded on professional and organised criminal activity.
So, the origins of the Russian criminal and prison subculture can be traced back long before the creation of the Soviet Union and even long before the creation of the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917. It remained almost unchanged until the beginning of the Soviet period, when it was transformed to meet the needs of Stalinist industrialisation.
Moreover, multiplied by the phenomenon of the Gulag, the Russian colonial-penal-carceral political complex created a new phenomenon, which, as it turned out, is very useful for modern Russian imperialistic policy in terms of providing an uninterrupted source of recruits for military operations in the war against Ukraine in the 21st century (the Wagner Phenomenon). However, the Wagner Phenomenon is about how to manage the State as a prison. The Wagner Phenomenon is also about how to treat citizens as prisoners.
So, here, we analyse the contemporary phenomenon of the post-Soviet criminal and prison subculture and its importation by the Russian political elites. Limitations in academic research of this phenomenon only to the period after 1917 is a fundamental methodological mistake. Such a mistake makes it impossible to study the real preconditions of the simulacrum of the contemporary Russian criminal and prison subculture, which, we emphasize, has lost the prefix ‘sub’ and has become a national criminal and prison culture.
Keywords: culture, history of prison, Russia, Russian colonial policy, Russian Empire, Soviet Union, Gulag, informal prisoner hierarchies, criminal subculture, prison subculture, prison labour, exile.
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