Chains on Display: Documents of Political Imprisonment and their Object Lessons

As political repressions have once again become a mass experience on the post-Soviet territories, the documentary images and accounts from courtrooms and prisons begin to flood our news, social media feeds, and even art galleries. Yet how are we to read and interpret them? Is it possible for images of political imprisonment to serve as instruments for collective political education and mobilization? Or does the affect that they convey doom them to remain fetishized relics of individual martyrdom or, worse, instruments of police intimidation and further depoliticization? In our conversation, we will put together two examples, almost a hundred years apart, of anti-melodramatic approaches to displaying fetters and other instruments of political torture by those who have worn them. We will juxtapose the playful media treatment of ankle monitors worn by the editors of the DOXA journal during their year under house arrest in 2021-2022 with debates about how to exhibit fetters and other artifacts of pre-revolutionary political imprisonment in the Moscow Museum of Revolution in the 1920s. 

 

IMPORTANT: All participants are expected to read distributed materials in advance of the meeting. 

 

Materials:

Secondary: 

Anastasiya Osipova “The Case of the DOXA Four: A Year in the School of Political Prisoners” (forthcoming in the Russian Review, not for circulation). (attached)

 

Primary: 

Sections from Nikolai Chuzhak’s Pravda o Pugacheve: Opyt Literaturno-Istoricheskogo Analiza, pp.1-12; 71-80. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i0j8w5nk708v151wiggxt/Chuzhak-Pugachev-Selection.pdf?rlkey=mi0txf6lof117h6xatlqzhj52&st=ird7k4zg&dl=0 

Galina Chichagova, Otkuda Posuda: https://dpul.princeton.edu/slavic/catalog/bz60d003h

 

Optional: 

Browse through the page of Alla Gutnikova’s “Freedom is a Verb” exhibit: https://jochenhempel.com/alla-gutnikova-colorado-projects/

  

Anastasiya Osipova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is currently working on her book entitled Survival and Mobilization: The Genre Memory of Soviet Prison Writing that explores inter-generational aesthetic influence among political prisoners from 1920s to 2020s. She is a 2024 Billington Fellow at the Kennan Institute.