Prison Museums in Soviet Russia in the 1920s

Аннотация

The article concerns the Soviet prison museums that were opened in the 1920s and attached to scientific establishments or places of confinement. Their appearance was connected to the institutionalisation of criminological research at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and to the growing interest in the ‘criminal world’ and prison culture. Thanks to the Soviet prison reforms of 1918–1930, and the emergence of Soviet criminology, this tendency to collect and exhibit ‘artefacts’ from criminals and convicts received a new ideological framework. The Soviet prison museum was not only a scientific establishment, but had wider aims of education and agitation. Exhibitions in such museums conveyed the ideology of early Soviet prison reform. They stressed the revolutionary and ‘emancipatory’ character of the Soviet prison system, opposing it to ‘repressive’ imperial and capitalist prisons. The artefacts and norms of the prison subculture were presented in the museum exhibitions as attributes of an obsolete ‘prison way of life’ which hindered the ‘re-education’ of prisoners. At the same time, the exhibition of products of prison workshops and the prisoners’ ‘amateur activities’ (newspapers or creative work) were intended to demonstrate the ‘progressive’ character of Soviet places of correctional labour, which reformed criminals by means of work and education. This is the first time that Soviet prison museums have been examined in the historical literature. The research is based on documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation and personal archives at the Russian State Library and the National Library of Russia, as well as on published sources (academic publications, articles in newspapers and journals, and museum guidebooks).