How Soviet Prison Subculture Shapes the Russian Political Landscape
Examining Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, this project highlights a unique societal attitude that can be traced back to the deep-seated history of prison and criminal culture in Russia. To understand this phenomenon, the project’s research will focus on writings from former prisoners, emphasizing the country’s literary tradition as a medium that shapes its collective history, spanning from the early Soviet era to the present.
Project Participant Bios
Lydia Roberts is a doctoral student in the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. She is interested in the literature of East and Central European prisons and labor camps in the 20th century. She is currently writing a dissertation about the Soviet labor camps of the 1920s. Lydia has taught introductory Russian, introductory Polish, and content courses related to Slavic history and culture. She was awarded a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow upon entry to her doctoral program and is currently a University of California Office of the President (UCOP) Dissertation Year Fellow.
Marianna Petiaskina, Ph.D. student, UCLA Department of Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Languages & Cultures. Marianna received her B. Phil in Russian Language and Literature from St. Petersburg State University and an M.A. in Comparative Studies from the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow). Marianna is an experienced archival researcher specializing in the history of political discourse from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Her research interests include intellectual history, postcolonial studies, nineteenth-century studies, and discourse analysis. Her research focuses on imperial politics and related nationalism, the centralization of authority, and the institutionalization of culture.
Igor Pilshchikov is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Pilshchikov is a leading figure in the world of digital humanities and the co-founder and academic editor of the three most important electronic corpora of literary texts and criticism in Russian: the Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Folklore (FEB-web.ru), the Russian Virtual Library (RVB.ru), and an Information System on Comparative Poetics and Comparative Literature (CPCL.info).