Portraits of Women Inside Russia’s Modern Gulags
Russia and Women's Prisons
Elena Anosova spent her teenage years in a Russian boarding school and found it a formative experience. "It was a sheltered institution with its own hierarchy and rules," she says of the memory. A universe of its own, with no private space or security and with its own social norms. And it was growing up in this environment that made Elena interested in closed all-female microcosms, which is how she arrived at female prison colonies.
Russia has a long history of using both female and male prisoners for free labour. Today these "corrective colonies" are direct descendants of the Gulag labor camps of the 1930s, and have become the most common type of prison throughout Russia's current and former territories. Such colonies usually combine low-skill manufacturing and labour with penal detention.
Photographer and artist Elena Anosova got access to some of these women's colonies and photographed their inmates. Here she talks about what she saw, and how Russia's patriarchal society places so many women in prison.
You asked some of these women to hold their favourite item in the images, what sort of things did they hold?
They held lots of different things. The flowers they've cared for, books and things sent from home, bibles, cats, decorations. Everything is different because everyone is an individual.
You visited three different types of prisons. Was there a difference in the women’s behaviour or attitudes at each different place?
I visited three colonies. One was for first-time offenders, the second for repeat offenders, and the third was a settlement colony, a prison for moderate sentences, with minimum security. It is very important to separate the first-time offenders from the recidivists, because all influence each other.
In the colony for repeat offenders, there were fewer hopes for the future. Many of them have empty hands on my portraits because they had nothing or they told me they were no longer interested in anything.