Перевёрнутый мир

SUMMARIES[31]

L.S.Klejn

The adventures of a Russian scholar in prison and GULAG camp at the very end of the Brezhnev epoch are related in the first person.

The author of the book, a world-renowned archaeologist, who taught at Leningrad University, was arrested in the last wave of repression, which befell the Leningrad intelligentsia in the early ’80s, — when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, the detente policy was wrecked and Sakharov was exiled to Gorki. At that time the blow fell upon professors who supported unorthodox positions; who were too often published in the West; or who were too popular among the student youth. In large part these professors were also of Jewish origin. The author was accused of homosexuality. The investigation and the court trial — resembling that of Oscar Wilde in its tension — are recreated in minute detail, and the facts are presented that relate to the participation of the KGB.

The first chapter (‘The fear’) is devoted to the domination of the KGB over the whole of Soviet society, its (the KGB) influence being felt in all spheres of Soviet life. The KGB kept everyone in awe but the author argues that ultimately fear most affected those in power: they were afraid of the people. The second chapter describes the arrest of the author and the severe conditions in the Soviet prison “The crosses” (Petersburg) — beyond the conditions permitted by international law. The third chapter (‘Short work with the help of the law’) relates the many transgressions of the law by the investigators and judges — evidenced with references to the protocols of the court trial. In the fourth chapter (‘The seventeenth expedition’) the transfer from the prison to the GULAG camp is described as the latest scientific expedition of the author. It was in this way that the author viewed his adventures in the camp. In the fifth chapter (‘Under the red sun’) he discusses the situation with an old and hardened criminal and describes some other cases, including the life story of an imprisoned old French Communist. Criticism of the domestic situation is never far away.

Yet, as distinct from other similar books, this book focus is not the description of oppression, but the contemplation of human nature. The book contains scholarly but vivid description and analysis of the closed criminal society. The author adduces a detailed comparison of this specific world with prehistoric society and advances a theory as to the cause of this similarity. The similarity is manifold: tattooing as a system of signs, rites of initiation, the developed system of taboo, three castes, clan conflicts, chieftains and their retinues, blood brotherhood, non-monetary exchange, etc.

The author considers criminal society to be closer to natural human society, in comparison to which our own society is artificial. The point is that human nature was formed in the Cro-Magnon period and biologically has not changed since. Homo sapiens sapiens, as this species is called with some exaggeration, has existed no less than 40 000 years (and in the Near East much longer). But for all our intellectual and social attainments we owe more to our culture than to our nature. This is seen in examples from India, in reports of feral children nurtured by wolves. When people are deprived of modern culture (or there is a shortage of it), and they are left to selforganisation (as happened in coercive Soviet labour camps), they form a savage society very close to a prehistoric one, to the society of Upper Palaeolithic.

The theme is important, the entire Soviet society experienced at least the influence of camp society with its slang, songs, rituals, customs, notions and morals: for in the space of 30 years more than 30 million people, i. e. a considerable part of the adult population of the country passed through the prisons and camps. This is why the book, whilst still in journal form (serialized over four years, 1988-91) aroused a veritable storm of comments in the most popular Leningrad ‘thick monthly’ Neva, achieving at that time a total sale of 700,000. As the KGB and the censors were then still very powerful, these sketches were published under the pseudonym Lev Samoylov (rather a transparent pseudonym: first name and patronym).

The Editor of Neva (where these sketches were published for the first time) requested the former investigator who led the case to say whether the author’s facts were reliable. In a letter to the Editor the investigator confirmed that the author had not distorted the facts. Moreover he admitted that the case was organised by the “sily zas-toya” (“forces of the stagnation”) and that he deplores his own part in the matter. The text of the letter is attached to the book.

The book is written as a series of recollections and journalistic sketches. As an offence against norms, such as was imputed to the author, was severely punished in the criminal world by the prisoners themselves, his survival, with dignity, was fraught with great difficulties. How, and why, did he survive? This is one of central themes. His co-prisoners denied the charge against him.

The story, as it appeared in journal form (1988-91), was censored. The German edition of 1991 is incomplete (not everything could be taken over the border). A full Russian edition was published in 1993, and from this edition the Slovene edition of 2001 was made. This text is a new Russian edition published in Ukraine.

A new title for the English translation (The Savage Society) has been envisaged because it was found that an English book already exists under the first chosen title (by another author and on a completely different theme).

L.Samoylov (L.S.KIejn)

This article was placed in the main Soviet journal of ethnographers Sovetskaya etnografiya (now Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie) published in Moscow. It contains the main theses of the book The World Turned Upside Down but leaves out particular events and emotional reactions. The author describes the society of prisoners as a special world, exposes its peculiar laws and writes about the force of evil that dominates that world. He compares criminals with savages of primordial times, his professional subject. He seeks the roots of the vitality of evil traditions, of the criminal subculture, and poses the question of how to overcome it.

V.R.Kabo

The article is a response to Samoylov’s (Klejn’s) article ‘Ethnography of a camp’. The author, a well-known Russian ethnographer, who also had been a prisoner in the camp, in 1949-54, compares the conditions that he then experienced with the modem conditions described by Samoylov and comes to a conclusion that they have become more severe. This corresponds with the appearance of ritualised hooliganism within the army. This reflects the degradation of Socialist society. Doubts are expressed as to the close correspondence of camp society to primordial society, for the latter was not as primitive as is often imagined.

G.A.Levinton

The author, a competent Soviet folk-lore student who also experienced Soviet repression, added some other parallels between criminals and primordial people (for instance a self-nomination as “men”, “people” vs. “not-men”), but he believes that it is in general wrong to equate modem culture (not even raw criminal culture) with primordial culture, nor should a comparison be made to the thought and behaviour of children or the insane. In support of his argument he cites Levi-Strauss. The roots of the camp society should rather be traced to school (in particular, to the ethics of the bursa — church boarding school).

Ya.I.Gilinski

The author, a renowned criminologist, holds that Samoylov has shed light upon the main vices of Russia’s penitentiary system. Culture includes both “useful” and “harmful” forms of activity, so it includes deviant behaviour. The subculture of prisoners is that of a community that has been thrown together and in the cells and camps it is self-organising community that directs its members towards evil. Everywhere, in all countries, prison trains cadres of criminals, i.e. it fails to work.

K.L.Bannikov

The present paper focuses on the sociocultural communities genetically formed under the mechanical suppression of the free will of individuals socialized in various cultural traditions and value systems. The social pattern of the regimented communities (soldiers, prisoners, etc.) consists of a great confrontation of the two systems of organized violence. The first system is the forcible conscription for military service or prison term under inhuman conditions when individual rights and liberty are suppressed by a system of total control. The second system is the dominant relations between peoples of different social strata. Both systems complement each other. The totality of facts related to the violence in the sociocultural structures needs immediate and detailed investigation in social anthropology.

The investigation of aggression and violence in contemporary Russia is rather specific: resulting from the structural transformation of all socio-political systems, violence and aggression invading all social strata are increasing much faster than is our knowledge of them. A discussion of the work by L. Klejn presented in Ethnological Review edited at Russian Academy of Sciences (Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie) led the way in this field in the Russian anthropology of the perestroika period. Nevertheless, despite its particular significance for Russia, the problem of aggression, deviant social behavior, and status violence still remains unresolved. In Western anthropology, such works have established an independent field where the concepts and methods borrowed from other disciplines — psychology, sociology, ethology, and ethnology — arc combined. These works consider aggression as a structure-forming, normalizing, and cultural factor. The analysis of informal social communities such as those of prisoners, marginal people, and policemen, as well as the theoretical studies of the deviant and protesting behavior are presented in works relating to this problem.

Thus, a set of key problems necessary for the analysis of extreme communities as an anthropological phenomenon can be defined as follows: (1) norms of aggression and semiotics of violence in the social interaction, (2) the individual’s dependence upon performing a particular social role, and (3) transformation of the personal value system during the transition from one sociocultural environment to another.

The analysis of these problems contributes to answering the questions of why educated and civilized people when joining the army adopt really inhumanly cruel forms of social contact; why their victims take violence as a social norm; and how it is possible to revive human moral values.

There are many archetypal correlations between social symbolism of non-formal hierarchy of regimented communities and archaic societies. But that is no reason to explore evolutionary schemes. I prefer identity terms ‘archaic’ and ‘archetypal’ rather then ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’. On expected data we can trace re-actualization of archetypes of unconsciousness in circumstances of cultural vacuum as the only basis for the consolidation of a chaotically gathered community under the suppression of legal violence. Social relationships in regimented communities are not primitive. Strange forms of relationships are produced by natural adaptation function of deep structures of the subconscious, realized in the artificial conditions of their mechanical and violent consolidation. The problem of a cultural vacuum is solved by re-actualized archetypal paradigms as a factor of sociogenesis.

A.G.Kozintsev

Leo Samoilov, in his tragic and provocative book on the late Soviet prison community, a member of which he himself was, pointed to numerous parallels linking it with certain late archaic stratified societies. In his view, which is consonant with modem “evolutionary psychology”, deficit of culture causes human behavior to become more natural (in the biological sense) and regress to an earlier stage of social evolution. However, the emergence and rapid evolution of stratification in the prisoners’ community over 130 years, as witnessed by Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and Samoilov, among others, suggest that the process was historically determined rather than “regressive”. At no stage can the prisoners’ behavior be described as less cultural and accordingly more natural. This raises more general issues relevant for current debates over “human nature”. In my view, no such thing exists. A species-specific behavioral norm is incompatible with culture.

L.S.KIejn

This article on the mal-adaptation of human to the modern culture can be considered as the development of Freud’s idea (in his article on “dissatisfaction with culture”). The cause of this is to be sought in the difference in tempos of biological and social evolution. Man is formed under the impact of adaptation to both the natural environment and socio-cultural conditions, and his physiological properties have changed spasmodically rather than gradually and so man, as a physiological being, on each stage soon becomes in disharmony with his own cultural development and milieu. The GULAG camps provide a test for this inference.

L.S.Klejn

As suggested by the similarities of camp criminal culture to primordial culture, the author defends his idea of the mal-adaptation of man, as a physiological being, to modem culture. In his objection Kozintsev says that the penal servitude originated under the Tsars and developed through four stages. Yet in its first stages (under the Tsars) the aims were only to punish the criminal; in Soviet times its aim was to recompense the criminal via collective labour. But the labour is slavish in the camps, and the collective is itself criminal: so it cannot redeem the criminal. Kozintsev says that there is no natural state of human only cultural states, that without culture there is no human. It’s true, but man is by his nature higher than any animal because he is able to apprehend culture and language. The final inference of the article is that concentration camps must be annihilated.

L.S.Klejn

The paradox of cultural development is in the interplay of continuity and breaks. In the light of information theory the cultural-historical process can be seen as a net of communication stretched over time. Accordingly the breaks in development can be seen as infringements of conditions. These conditions are: the existence of panels (circuit boards), sufficient quantity and quality of channels of information, the repetition of information etc. It remains to find cultural correspondences to these physical conditions. Possible applications of the theory are considered: theoretical (explanation of breaks in archaeological continuity) and pragmatic (the struggle against the evil traditions of criminal society in concentration camps).