Russia’s penal peripheries: space, place and penalty in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

Russia has a distinctive ‘geography of punishment’ that is the product of the use of the peripheries as a place of exile and incarceration. Framing the analysis in a discussion of recent penal theory, including in the works of Michel Foucault, the author traces the formation of Russia’s penal peripheries up to the present day and uses the example of the north of Perm’ oblast to analyse the process involved in forging a ‘penal region’.