Перевёрнутый мир

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)

ETHNOGRAPHY OF A CAMP

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

STRUCTURE OF A CAMP AND ARCHETYPES OF CONSCIENCE