Prisons, Politics and the Economy: the Ultimate Relationship

Abstract

There seems to exist a very intimate relationship between the Soviet economy and ideology on the one hand and the network of penitentiary institutions, on the other. As mentioned in the preceding chapter, penal law has been employed as a powerful instrument in the state’s attempts to discipline the labour force and to assure its full mobilization. Moreover, penal institutions are themselves production-oriented organizations which fulfil extremely important economic function, not only by forcing inmates to work, but primarily by making them work in locations, in occupations and under conditions which could never attract any free labourers. The forced labour of inmates, probationers, and convicted ‘parasites’ is, therefore, a convenient solution to a problem of labour shortages in inhospitable, but economically important regions or in industries which are notorious for their exceptionally harsh or unsafe conditions. In short, the labour of the ‘zeks’ (convicts) is ‘needed for degrading and particularly heavy work which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform’ (Solzhenitsyn, 1976: 560). Thus, it appears that slavery has been successfully reintroduced into Russia in the aftermath of the victorious Bolshevik revolution (see e.g. Sellin, 1976: 113–27 for a description of penal slavery in Tsarist Russia).