Despite growing academic interest in the Gulag, our knowledge of the camps as a lived experience remains relatively incomplete. Criminal Subculture in the Gulag, in its sophisticated analysis of crime, punishment and everyday life in Soviet labour camps, rectifies this. From Gulag journals and song collections to tattoo drawings and dictionaries of slang, Mark Vincent draws on often-overlooked archival material from the Moscow Criminological Bureau to reconstruct a fuller picture of Gulag daily life and society. In thematic chapters, Vincent maps the Gulag ‘penal arc’ of prisoners...

Constantin Catacazy whipped up scandal in Washington after his appointment there as Russian Ambassador in 1869, ignoring diplomatic protocol and defying social mores. By 1871, President Grant and his Cabinet requested that he be recalled. But the timing of this request overlapped with the visit of the tsar’s son to the USA - a celebrated diplomatic event symbolising the friendship and good will between the two nations. Consequently, Catacazy was allowed to travel with the tsar’s son, but only as a persona non grata. This tense resolution led many to worry about the future of the...

Winner of the 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles Samizdat, the production and circulation of texts outside official channels, was an integral part of life in the final decades of the Soviet Union. But as Josephine von Zitzewitz explains, while much is known about the texts themselves, little is available on the complex communities and cultures that existed around them due to their necessarily secretive, and sometimes dissident, nature. By analysing the behaviours of different actors involved in Samizdat – readers, typists, librarians and the editors of periodicals in 1970s...