INTRODUCTION

In the late nineteenth century a man named Khrustsel’ was convicted of banditry and sentenced to penal labor (katorga) on the island of Sakhalin. Khrustsel’ told journalist Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich, who visited Sakhalin in 1897, that he had joined a criminal gang because there was no other way “to set himself up” with a house and family. Despite being incarcerated in Sakhalin’s Rykovsk Prison, Khrustsel’ held fast to this goal, knowing that once his labor term was over he would be assigned to a settlement on the island and, although in itself no guarantee of prosperity, would have the opportunities not gotten in Russia. So Khrustsel’ decided to open a maidan, a black market concession available to any prisoner willing to pay the requisite bribes and fees. In his capacity as maidanshchik, Khrustsel’

“paid each prisoner in the ward fifteen kopeks a month; arranged as is usual for a pair of ward attendants to wash floors and empty waste tubs for a ruble-and-a-half; and would open his maidan at dinnertime. He sold milk for five kopeks a bottle, eggs for three kopeks each, sugar for less than a kopek, white bread for six kopeks a pound, cigarettes for a kopek each, boiled pork snout for under a kopek, and matches.”^[1]

Khrustsel’ kept his goods and earnings in a small locker at the head of his place on the sleeping platform (nara) and restricted himself to just one ration a day to save even more money. He regularly paid the other prisoners their fifteen kopeks each and, in turn, expected them to respect his property. But, explains Doroshevich, Rykovsk’s “chains prison” (kandal’naia tiurma^[2]) was the “hungriest of prisons”:

“One day upon returning to the ward Khrustsel’ saw his locker had been broken into: neither money nor goods were there. The chains [prison] was swaggering and smiling. “Matches burned, cigarettes smoked.” The most famished zhigany^[3] were snoring contentedly on the sleeping platforms. “They’d gorged themselves!” The three most desperate prisoners, of the “Ivan” breed,^[4] naked from having gambled away everything, were now sitting and playing cards for money. The locker near the candles was not only broken into but had actually been covered with all sorts of filth. He went crazy and they guffawed.
“My head was spinning, I was seeing stars,” says Khrustsel’.
“Khrustsel’ was smashing his head on the sleeping platforms at the time!” relate the prisoners.
Having cried himself out, Khrustsel’ went to the warden and offered himself as executioner [palach]. This position was then vacant at Rykovsk Prison.”^[5]

As executioner, Khrustsel’ wreaked vengeance on his enemies and, thanks to the bribes other prisoners paid him to lighten their floggings, eventually managed to acquire his long desired house and family.
Doroshevich uses this episode to describe one of the ways prisoners became executioners; but I use it here as an entrée to prison society in late imperial Russia. Little scholarship exists on pre-twentieth-century prison societies due to the lack of firsthand accounts by prisoners, though interpretations of prison society by officials and others have drawn more attention.^[6] Regarding imperial Russia, Bruce Adams’s work on prison reform does not discuss prison society; and Jonathan Daly’s and Abby Schrader’s studies of tsarist penality similarly bypass it.^[7] Alan Wood, in his contribution to a 1990 collection of essays on Russian communal forms, has discussed what he calls the “criminals’ commune.”^[8] The present article covers some of the same ground, but is different insofar as it is a critical analysis of the topic.^[9]
As of 1890 the average daily population in the empire’s jails and prisons was more than 106,000,^[10] a figure that declined during the next decade before rising steeply to 184,000 as of 1912.^[11] During the period 1867–1876, 18,582 convicts were assigned to katorga sites in Siberia.^[12] In 1899 the Siberian mainland’s seven major katorga prisons or sites accounted for 6,484 penal laborers.^[13] During the 1880s Sakhalin began serving as the principal destination for penal laborers, and by 1895 accounted for 7,068 male convicts.^[14] Siberia’s katorga population reached 22,649 by mid-1909, and approximately 5,400 prisoners were in other katorga prisons outside Siberia.^[15]
Like many other governments, Petersburg grew increasingly worried about its prisons. Russian representatives attended international penological conferences and visited foreign prisons in hope of improving a system considered one of the worst in the world.^[16] Like New Caledonia for French administrators, Sakhalin and the Siberian prison archipelago became foci of plans for reformative individualism, utopia, and even paradise hatched by officials in the Main Prison Administration (Glavnoe tiuremnoe upravlenie), established in 1879. Such plans exemplified what Alice Bullard has called “internal civilization,” whereby European societies’ “barbarians” (criminals, political dissidents, and other deviants) were to be “civilized” by assigning them (paradoxically) to the wilds of the imperial periphery. The carcerals to which they were sent, whether on New Caledonia, Sakhalin, or in Zabaikal’e, were interstices between state power and criminal society, loci that were contested and thus embodied “tensions of empire.”^[17]
This article argues that despite prima facie appearances of consistency and order, Siberian prison society embodied imperial discords and tensions. It was itself a distorted mirror of tsarist society generally – yet because general social relations were themselves already distorted, prisoners often produced a simulacrum of hegemonic society more revealing than anything available for view outside the prison. Doroshevich and other perceptive observers consequently had disturbing visions of what Amy Kaplan, in her study of the United States, has called “the anarchy of empire,” that is, “the breakdown … of the monolithic system of order that empire aspires to impose on the world.”^[18] Having observed the “games” played by his fellow (criminal) inmates, political prisoner Petr Filippovich Iakubovich later recalled: “I was stricken by gloomy thoughts; our country’s future became terrible and awful…”^[19] For these writers, the connection between prison society and tsarist society was tension-filled and elucidatory.
A reliance upon such writers is necessary because average criminal convicts did not leave written records.^[20] Moreover, my research in the Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East (RGIA DV), the Irkutsk State Archive (GAIO), and the Russian Federation State Archive (GARF) has turned up almost nothing about prison society in official documents. A memorandum dated 1876, from Eastern Siberia’s Nerchinsk Prison Administration, orders that only wardens and, in certain cases, starosty (in this context, “prisoner-bosses”) may receive deliveries of food and other items.^[21] This was almost certainly in response to the embezzlement of goods for the maidan. A report of several years earlier by V. I. Vlasov, an official in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Main Administration of Eastern Siberia, deplores the existence of maidany, contraband vodka, and corrupt guards in prisons in Zabaikal’e’s Kara Valley.^[22] The explorer George Kennan learned during his 1885 visit to Kara and other katorga sites that prison wardens, due to their chronic lack of prison personnel, welcomed the maidan and other self-regulating mechanisms supervised by the prison artel’, or “collective.”^[23] As a result, tsarist prisoners enjoyed considerable autonomy. As late as 1910 the Main Prison Administration reported that the “weakening of the prison regime has resulted in drunkenness, depravity, card-playing, and frequent escapes and crimes.”^[24]
The information in this article about Siberian prison society comes almost exclusively from political exiles’ and others’ ethnographic accounts and quasi-fictional memoirs.^[25] Dostoevskii’s Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, memoirs by Ivan Petrovich Belokonskii and Iakubovich, and Nikolai Mikhailovich Iadrintsev’s study of prison society all offer valuable information.^[26] The foreign visitors Kennan and Charles Hawes briefly mention the maidan in their accounts of Siberia and its exile system, as does Anton Chekhov in his book about his 1890 visit to Sakhalin.^[27] But by far the best sources on the maidan and prison society are Doroshevich’s collection of Sakhalin feuilletons, collectively published in 1903, and a voluminous study of exile by Sergei Vasil’evich Maksimov, first published in 1871.^[28] Each of these sources is admittedly imperfect. None of these writers regarded katorga favorably, and so they emphasized its worst aspects. They wrote almost nothing about “the herd” (shpanka) that accounted for the majority of prisoners yet excluded those serial murderers, rapists, thieves, and recidivists who comprised the “core”; and they similarly say little about non-Russian or non-Orthodox prisoners.^[29] Nonetheless, their accounts jibe with each other and even much that has been written about convict/criminal society in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.^[30] Moreover, these correspondents unconsciously engaged in the “thick description” that Clifford Geertz defined as “the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which [various value-laden signs] in fact exist.”^[31] It is incontestable that ethnographies are authorial constructions, but they also hinge upon the societal constructions they portray and so can be analyzed as such. Historians of subaltern groups usually have no other choice than to seek out their subjects through such authorial constructions; but as Gyan Prakash has eloquently argued, “subalterns and subalternity do not disappear into discourse but appear in its interstices, subordinated by structures over which they exert pressure.”^[32] Iakubovich, Dostoevskii, Belokonskii, and Iadrintsev were both prisoners and ethnographers and therefore embodied the very interstices Prakash describes. Altogether, these ethnographies support what is admittedly a tentative foray into understanding tsarist prison society: to forsake introducing this topic because ideal sources could not be found would be inane.

PARADIASTOLE AND “ANTIDISCIPLINE”

A look at the etymology of maidan introduces how prisoners used paradiastole toward development of an “antidiscipline.” The word originated in Arabic as maydān before entering the Persian and Urdu languages (maidān).^[33] Geographical proximity suggests it entered Russian directly from the Turkish language, wherein meydan’s primary meanings are “open space; public square” and “arena” or “ring.”^[34] Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’ attributes these same meanings to the Russian term, but subsequently narrows it to mean “market” or “bazaar” before secondarily but tellingly defining it as “a place where rogues gather for games of dice, silver and gold baubles, pitch-and-toss, cards.”^[35] Significantly, neither the Turkish nor Persian meaning emphasizes the qualities of a marketplace. In Turkish, the preferred terms for marketplace are çarşı and (in Persian as well) bazar (var. pazar). It should also be noted that the Turkish phrase meydan dayağı means “a public flogging.”^[36] The Russian maidan appears to have shared with the Arabic-Persian-Urdu-Turkish a primary meaning of “open square.” Over time it acquired more specifically the meaning of “market” or “bazaar,” that is, “an arena of commercial exchange.” Russian convicts’ use of the word therefore makes sense, for as we saw with Khrustsel’, the maidan demarcated an arena wherein everything from cigarettes to pig snouts could be purchased. Moreover, a comparison of Dostoevskii’s discussion of the maidan during the mid-1850s with Iakubovich’s discussion of it shortly before World War I indicates that prisoners used the word consistently over time. Only outsiders would have failed to understand its meaning.^[37]
However, there is the additional Turkish definition likening the meydan to an execution square. The fact that the maidan operated surreptitiously and was completely under prisoners’ (as opposed to officials’) control does not necessarily mean prisoners ignored this latter definition, but rather subjected the word to paradiastole, that is, euphemistically redescribed this negative thing as something positive. In so doing they ignored language rules so as to play with the word ironically, as a kind of inside joke, in a manner linguist Michel de Certeau terms a “tactic” toward construction of a larger “antidiscipline” whereby the weak gain victories over the powerful.^[38] Paradiastole is common in criminal/convict lexicons. For example, on Sakhalin, kobyla (mare) designated the bench prisoners were flogged on. While being punished, a prisoner “rode the mare.” This had a sexual connotation. Doroshevich quotes an experienced convict telling his comrades: “For me, brothers, lying on the mare’s like lying with a woman – it’s all the same. That’s how come I’m used to her [ona]!”^[39] A most unpleasant experience was transformed into an enjoyable, even erotic one. Although carrying no sexual allusions, convicts’ paradiastolic use of maidan similarly inverted its original meaning by denoting not an “open space” that was publicly “known,” but one that was enclosed and under prisoners’ control: the maidan existed inside the barracks, accessibility was limited to prisoners, and it was controlled by the maidanshchik – all factors that pleased convict society. There was another level of paradiastole as well. Whereas in the Turkish meydan officials demonstrated the power of state or sovereign through the spectacle of public executions,^[40] in the Siberian maidan maidanshchiki and other prisoners ignored and defied officialdom and its regulations. With guards bribed or simply oblivious, the maidan functioned entirely according to convicts’ rules. Convicts developed a lexicon that both parodied ruling discourse and embodied their own values.
Dostoevskii offers few details about the maidan per se, except to note that nearly every convict barracks at Omsk Fortress had one that attracted “idlers” (guliaki) who began gambling immediately after the doors were locked and continued all night. Chekhov is almost dismissive of what he calls a “little Monte Carlo, developing in the prisoner an infectious passion for shtos and other games of chance.” Hawes writes that inmates in Sakhalin’s Aleksandrovsk chains prison gambled to relieve “idleness and ennui.” A prisoner who gambled away his rations was “put into a cell, and with his own consent starved for every two days, and fed on the third, thus accumulating rations to his credit, which are taken in payment of his debt.”^[41]
Gambling was indeed convicts’ overriding passion, but one regulated by rules laid down by prison society. Preeminent among these was that gambling take place only through the maidan. Gambling, or game-playing, served an iterative function in the structuring of prison society. “The more profound, double sense of ‘social game’ is that not only the game is played in a society (as its external medium) but that, with its help, people actually ‘play society,’” observed Georg Simmel.^[42] The maidan’s rules also ensured that gambling would monetarily benefit the entire prison community. Individual prisoners’ losing and winning of their limited funds circulated and thus increased the collective wealth in a Keynesian manner. As we shall see, this cooperative spirit only went so far; but in comparison to today’s prison populations in the United States, where various, often racially segregated, gangs compete for dominance,^[43] katorga’s prison communities were cohesive and unified. Doroshevich quotes prisoners often referring to their svet (world); Iadrintsev uses both obshchestvo and obshchina (community, commune) to describe prison society, and refers to its core of hardened criminals as a korporatsiia (corporation); Maksimov similarly speaks of an arestantskaia artel’ (prisoners’ cooperative); and penal laborers typically referred to themselves with the collective nouns katorga or kobyla (the mare – not to be confused with this word’s paradiastolic use for the executioner’s bench). A consciousness of their cohesiveness (even if it was illusory), gained by learning and adhering to the prisoners’ code, gave prisoners a much needed sense of predictability and security.
In prison, the collective superseded the individual in much the same way as in the Russian village or society generally, with prisoners generally deferring to those mechanisms designed to protect and enrich it. For example, one “game” involved prisoners adjudicating another prisoner’s minor infractions, such as mispronouncing words, then sentencing him to one of several forms of “corporal punishment,” such as beating the stretched-out flesh of his stomach. Iakubovich writes that during one such game the “executioner” meted out one-too-many blows and, after acknowledging this, agreed to let his victim deliver a single sharp blow with a wooden spoon to his own stomach. Parity thus reestablished, neither sought revenge.^[44]
Game-playing reeducated and bonded prisoners together. In his book Games Prisoners Play, Marek Kaminski writes that after he was sent to a criminal prison in Communist Poland for political activism, he “decided to make the best of my personal misfortune and use it as a unique opportunity to study this fascinating society-within-society.”^[45] Kaminski describes how “games” involving riddles, jokes, tests, beatings, and so on, were designed to acclimatize newcomers to prison society, verify recidivists’ and transferees’ previously attained statuses, and assign all prisoners to one of three castes: “grypsmen,” “suckers,” or “fags.” Using game theory, Kaminski argues that prisoners’ seemingly illogical choices were in fact rational within the closed system of prison life. Siberian prisoners’ choices similarly followed an obscure logic, though Kaminski’s model is admittedly too prescriptive given its mathematical assumption of rational choice. Indeed, the work of William Reddy and others suggests that emotional gratification is in fact the primary motive behind the choices people make. Briefly stated, a given community manifests and enforces “feeling rules” as a way to distinguish and regulate itself; individuals’ emotional expressions are measured against these rules and meet with either approval or disapproval from the community; once an individual has sufficiently learned these rules so that they become unpremeditated and, in a sense, “natural,” he or she receives emotional fulfillment and security within the community.^[46] Prisoners in tsarist Siberia would therefore seem to have participated in often unpleasant “games” to win emotional rewards later, though they also repeatedly tested community tolerance, sometimes exceeded it, and were usually brought back into line through violence and other means. But as Kaminski shows, such games were often rationally motivated.
To gamble, prisoners had to pay fees. The first time a prisoner joined in cards he had to pay thirty kopeks, then twenty and ten the second and third times, after which he could gamble without charge. His money was added to the pot or used to hire a “stirrup” (strema or stremshchik), whose job was to watch the door and shout “Spook!” for a guard, “Six!” for the commandant, or “Water!” for “any danger in general.”^[47] Stirrups were usually culled from among the zhigany – prisoners who had gambled away everything including their rations for weeks or even months ahead. Forming the penultimate lowest and most despised caste of prison society, they were forced to survive by cleaning the wards, emptying the waste tubs (parashi), and hiring themselves out as “suborns” (sing., podduvala) to successful “players” (sing., igrok) for whom they delivered meals, cleaned and prepared spaces on the sleeping platforms, and performed other servile tasks. Failing to obtain even these employs, a zhigan might resort to being a kham – the equivalent of a “bitch” in American prisons, that is, a sexual subordinate to a dominant master. Doroshevich writes about these prisoners with undisguised contempt:

“There is no further drop. “Kham,” in essence, simply signifies in the prison language a man who is another’s lover. “Zakhamnichat’” means to take it and not give it. A man who’s left without even a scrap of the semblance of the conscience of a throat, suborn, or piper^[48] is called a kham. They befoul the prisoners’ environment. The kham is a traitor; for lack of a bread ration, for a small respite, he’ll inform on escape preparations and reveal where fugitives have hidden. This type is encouraged by the wardens, because only through them can they know what goes on in prison.”^[49]

As a stirrup, a zhigan was less dispensable, though according to Dostoevskii still suffered from his low rank:

“The players usually hired him together and for the whole night, for five silver kopeks, and his principal responsibility was to watch all night for the guard. For the most part, he froze for six or seven hours in the dark, in the entryway, at thirty degrees below zero, listening to every tap, every sound, every step toward the door.”^[50]

Once gambling was finished, usually just before morning, other fees had to be paid. Any winning punter gave 5 to 10 percent of his earnings to the maidanshchik, and if the latter was not also the croupier then the croupier tossed in 5 percent of his winnings as well. The maidanshchik could earn a lot of money this way. He also derived income from selling or loaning frequently handmade playing cards called chaldonki (from chaldon, a Siberian mot for a fugitive or convict). Those cards illustrated with human blood were especially valuable.^[51]
Card games and other games of chance perpetuated prison-society memes on several levels. First, gambling empowered men whose environment generally disempowered them. Winning suggested for those colloquially known as “unfortunates” (neschastnye) that fortune had at last smiled on them. A winner was described as fartovyi – a corrupt derivation of fortuna meaning, in the most literal sense, “fortunate.” Hence the salutation: Talan na maidan! (talan being a corruption of talant, or “lucky chap”), by which a prisoner wished good luck to punters, who in turn would reply: Shaitan na gaitan! (roughly, “Beat the devil!”).^[52] Gambling alleviated, at least for the time being, the victimization exiles often felt.^[53] Even if a prisoner gambled and lost, his mere role as a “player” could be enough to make him feel an actor in his own destiny. Gambling therefore strengthened prison society by providing examples of both success and agency.
Second, gambling provided an outlet for men who engaged in what would today be called high-risk behavior.^[54] Certainly not everyone sentenced to katorga was a repeat offender who, by definition, took risks; most were first-time offenders, arrested after murdering their spouses in a fit of rage or botching an armed robbery; moreover, the vagaries of Russian justice meant a large percentage were wrongly convicted. Nonetheless, many in katorga were high-risk personalities: recidivists and career criminals titillatingly described as hooligans and gangsters in lubki (cheap and popular booklets) and the boulevard press.^[55] Sources agree that the predominant gamblers were to be found in the core of professional criminals sometimes collectively referred to as brodiagi, though this word more narrowly referred to vagabonds who typically adopted pseudonyms (Nepomniashchii [“origins-forgotten”] was most common) and roamed Siberia. For many if not most brodiagi, whose very itinerancy and false identities violated tsarist law, prison was a revolving door: escaping from Siberia’s katorga prisons was quite easy, and in springtime convicts did so en masse to form what was called General Cuckoo’s Army. Iadrintsev estimated no fewer than 30,000 brodiagi were in Siberia at any given time.^[56] The so called Ivans were also an important part of this core group, though unlike brodiagi per se they were products of the prison environment entirely, most particularly through corporal punishment. Doroshevich writes that a prisoner became an Ivan only after receiving 2,000 lashes of the three-tailed plet’ during his prison career, and even then his status depended on his ability to torment other prisoners. Ivans were almost always brodiagi and vice versa, but suffice to say this combined stratum not only ruled the roost but tended more than other prisoners to bet the farm. Fortunately for the rest, gambling gave Ivans and brodiagi an outlet for impulsive and aggressive behavior that could also threaten prison guards and, as such, jeopardize the entire community.
Gambling’s third mimetic function was to create a hierarchy of winners and losers and ipso facto facilitate social mobility. A successful player wealthy enough to hire zhigany as either suborns or “husks” (sing., sukharnik) to perform his labor assignments, might during the course of one game lose everything and himself be reduced to a zhigan. “This is when katorga turns on itself,” writes Doroshevich. “Then there are no limits, no ends to the taunts given a man who’s been deprived of all his friends, admirers, defenders, hangers-on, and humble servants. Katorga knows no mercy and shows no pity.”^[57] A gambler risked not only status and material wealth but human dignity. Zhigany who had already forfeited their rations would gamble further to the point of losing their spaces on the sleeping platform, and have to lie on the filth-encrusted floor beneath. Becoming in this way a “cur” (pes), the zhigan, a target of contempt and cruelty, lived to the fullest the role designated by his name, which came from the verb zhiganut’ (to lash). Doroshevich illustrates this with a scene of utter humiliation, wherein a zhigan ten days into a starvation diet is forced to appeal to each prisoner in the ward for a spoonful of skilly (balanda) or just a lick of his spoon, after which he reels off a litany of unctuous praise to universal delight:

“Glory to God, I been sated by God, no one could see me I so weren’t eating but, glory to God, now I’se full, ate half-a-pood and there’re seven pounds left, and we’ll be eatin’ ’em tomorrow,” wailed the zhigan.
A young chap grabbed his belly. “Oy, gracious, you’re killin’ me! Be off!”

At one point an Ivan taunts the zhigan by ordering him to say what he would like to eat, to which the starving man responds:

“I would now eat, Nikolai Stepanovich, gray hens and some veal, the little hooves of a suckling pig, a tiny bit of ham, just a little touch of pork, and some salted beef with horsey-radish. I do indeed think it beats spit!”^[58]

Prisoners could rise as well as fall. With luck, a zhigan might reclaim his status as a player and the clothes, extra rations, suborns, and husks that came with it. Fellow prisoners’ attitudes toward him would then change as well. One’s status in the prison hierarchy was ephemeral and changeable, contradicting Jane Burbank’s and David Ransel’s assertion that agency cannot be associated with identity.^[59] On the contrary, prisoners gained agency only when they adopted the identity of a zhigan or other type. Without them they were powerless. As with hegemonic society, order (poriadok) had to be maintained. Doroshevich quotes convicts repeatedly using this word as well as approving of the notion. Gambling’s redistribution of wealth therefore also bears a similarity to the mir’s periodic repartitioning of land strips. Although zhigany were not treated humanely, the process by which winners became losers and losers winners was theoretically equitable: everyone had a chance to plow the same furrow.
The fourth function of gambling was, as already noted, to fund the prison collective. A ward’s starosta controlled these monies and usually used them to bribe guards and executioners. Although convicts hated the executioner – who came from the prisoners’ ranks but lived separately to avoid being murdered – they acknowledged the necessity of paying him “wing-money” (makhovye den’gi) if they were slated for punishment.^[60] The executioner would then simply “butter” his victim with the birch rods or plet’. Bribes could work the other way as well. Doroshevich mentions two cases when prisoners bribed executioners to flog to death certain men they “detested.”^[61]
Lastly, although today’s experts disfavor the theory that gambling reflects self-loathing or a compulsion to lose,^[62] this notion is not so easily dismissed when considering the behavior of katorga’s compulsive gamblers. In contrast to the first point made above, some individuals were not empowered by gambling; rather, for them gambling miniaturized a world in which they saw themselves solely as victims. Gambling’s iterative, ritualistic function outlined parameters by which they could account for their circumstances. One’s lot in life came down to fate, and prisoners were after all “unfortunates”; this logic was circular but gratifying, and so gambling was an outlet even for these prisoners insofar as it described their world and helped them resign themselves to it. Resignation possibly forestalled personal breakdowns that could lead to mayhem, and such persons thus balanced off those successful players at the other end of the emotional spectrum who acted out of delusions of grandeur.

VODKA AND USURY

The maidan provided services other than that of casino, and often there were several maidany in one prison, each with its own specialty. If a black market commissary, then the maidan could sell anything from sausage to tallow candles to matches to clothing (personal or regulation). Especially during the march into Siberia, officials sometimes allowed these items to be sold without having to be bribed.^[63] However, the most valuable contraband was vodka and it was never openly sold. Dostoevskii facetiously calls the vodka-maidanshchik a “tavern keeper” (tseloval’nik, which also significantly meant “tax collector”). At Omsk, where convict details routinely worked outside the fortress walls, a tseloval’nik’s confederate from town would hide animal intestines filled with vodka nearby. Upon returning to prison the tseloval’nik wrapped these around his body beneath his clothes and tried to sneak them past the guard. He might have to surrender some of these vodka sausages to avoid a flogging, but still retain enough to set up his maidan. The tseloval’nik next faced an internal struggle between wanting to save money and needing a drink. He reconciled these desiderata by replacing whatever he drank with water and selling diluted spirits. Eventually, the vodka would get so diluted it left what Doroshevich found was “just a nasty taste in the mouth”;^[64] but so strong was the desire for even watered-down vodka that convicts paid handsomely “for a little cup, five or six times more than in a tavern.”^[65] There were ways to smuggle vodka into prison other than inside intestines, but however accomplished, profits were high. Vlasov learned that tseloval’niki had to bribe prison officials as well as contribute thirty to fifty rubles per month to the prison’s communal fund. Such fees suggest large gross incomes. Indeed, Maksimov found that dealers paid the collective up to sixty rubles, but could afford to do so because they earned thirty to fifty silver kopeks for each cup sold.^[66] In Dostoevskii’s account, the tseloval’nik uses his profits to hoard a store of pure vodka and then go on a binge that reduces him to zhigan status.
In addition to being a casino and vodka bar, the maidan’s third major role was that of pawnshop. Sometimes a maidanshchik was simply a usurer and did not barter; but more often he commingled the two services. For example, a maidanshchik who specialized in gambling would allow punters to ante up their possessions, which he then sold; or he would loan money to gamblers who had lost all their possessions but wanted to keep playing. He sold clothes, violins, wooden spoons, shoes – in short, anything. Maidanshchiki loaned money at exorbitant rates: 33 percent per diem according to Maksimov.^[67] When borrowers could not repay, the prison collective asserted its dominance. Doroshevich describes a scene in which a long-term convict conspires with the maidanshchik and Ivans to force a newcomer into his debt. The affair begins with the maidanshchik getting the ingénue drunk:

“Youse got nothing. Youse wary. I see youse a nice chap. Youse been taken from home, maybe given some alms, but youse gotta earn money or youse gonna steal. I trust ya. Youse an honest chap… And don’t youse want a little vodka?” The maidanshchik gives him a cup of vodka. “Drink, drink! We’ll settle up later!”
Having become tipsy, the prisoner asks for another. He becomes tipsier still. Then a neighbor “shoots” him.
“What are ya? A fartovyi guy! Ya sit in on cards an’ there’ll always be vodka and more… See over there, that’s the stuff. You’ll rake in so much cash and then you’ll be living, vodka or no vodka! Ya ain’t timid, boss!”
“I don’t have no money…”
“But just ask the maidanshchik. He’ll take care of ya. He’ll give ya a draw. Hey, uncle…” he calls to the maidanshchik.
“What? A little cash on the draw? Play, I’ll cover youse, we’ll settle up later!”

The conspiracy unfolds as a designated “master player” joins in to gamble against the newcomer and Ivans seem to appear spontaneously to egg him on to drink and gamble for hours.

In a word, by morning, when the hero is sleeping off his hangover, he’s lost everything, even his government bread ration for a year ahead. … He’ll be barely visible from hunger. Then along comes the second-hand dealer.
“Rested up, dear fellow?! Off with the jacket and trousers! Remember how last night you sold ’em to me?!” The hero recalls with horror that last night it seems something of the sort did actually happen! “You mayn’t remember but the prison remembers! They watched everything go!” The dealer turns to the Ivans.
“Right before our eyes!”
“Don’t forget to give me your rations as well. You lost for a year ahead. Or didja forget? Those what’s forget, chap, gets a drubbing. Prisoners’ way – s’well known.”
Then comes the maidanshchik.
“Youse was acting strange last night, dear fellow! Now we wants our pay. Youse ran up a tidy debt to me through the maidan and I paid yer losses. Lay it out! Where’s the cash?”
“But you know I said last night…”
“That’s a diff’rent matter, dear fellow! Last night’s talk was last night. I need the money now, to pay for the goods. But if youse owes and don’t pay, then we’re in a jam. Chaps, what is this? A robbery?”

Ivans descend upon the newcomer and rough him up, though only enough to drive home the message. Then an emissary of the long-term convict who organized the con job offers the newcomer a deal: the long-termer will cover his fictitious debts if he agrees to switch identities, so that the long-termer can serve his, much briefer, sentence. Facing a future of continual beatings and starvation, the distraught newcomer agrees. The resulting “marriage” (svad’ba – another paradiastole with an overt sexual connotation) involves his mutilation and scarification so that his physical characteristics match the long-termer’s, and is celebrated like a real wedding:

“This here marriage is a joy for you and the prison. Don’t you need a little vodka from the maidan, Sidor Karpovich?! Let’s sprinkle the young couple.^[68] For the love of God, let them have love and concord!” jokes katorga. “Maidanshchik, you clumsy sonofabitch, don’t you know your business? Here’s a wedding and you ain’t serving no vodka?!”^[69]

The newcomer’s “debts” are paid and he is sworn to secrecy. If he squeals to the commandant his murder will be justified under the maidan ethos.

CONCLUSION:
THE MAIDAN ETHOS AND ETHNOGRAPHERS’ VISIONS OF ANARCHY

At one point in his semifictional memoirs, Iakubovich lauds what he believed had been unique about his prison of Akatui, which he fictionalizes as “Shelaisk”:

“[E]veryone was cropped with the same comb – the giants, the pygmies, the fools, the sages; the very least waste-tub attendant had a voice equal to that of the top-most throat and snorter [khrap] and that was, of course, the Shelaisk regime’s great merit.”^[70]

But the egalitarianism Iakubovich momentarily so admired was more often brutally enforced than individually realized, and the maidan’s rules were routinely broken. In the case involving Khrustsel’ with which this article began, hunger and poverty seem to have compelled fellow prisoners to act, though the smearing of filth on his locker suggests they also felt he was exceeding his bounds as maidanshchik. At the end of the day, no justifications were needed. Despite the starosta’s and collective’s attempts to impose order, disorder triumphed. Convicts considered themselves the maidanshchik’s victims and arrogated his property because they did not believe he had a right to private property. “[A]rbitrariness rules,” writes Doroshevich, “Ivans are produced, the strong completely rule the weak, the inveterate scoundrel is above the decent man.” Through newcomers’ “initiations” like that described above, “a passion for easy and certain gain, indeed, the desire to swindle one’s own brother, is taught.”^[71] Claiming that maidanshchiki were obliged to credit the “fantastic sum” of one-and-a-half silver rubles to each brodiaga in recognition of his status, Maksimov shared Doroshevich’s view:

“A brodiaga may steal money from the maidanshchik, though this is deemed somewhat improper: a comrade may cite this to upbraid him. Still, a brodiaga can easily steal spirits from a maidanshchik and not a single criminal will ever find anything shameful in this, largely because the food-supplying maidan’s tax-farmer [otkupshchik] enjoys no one’s favor but is rather contemptible, like a transit dues-collector or money-grubber who unfairly seeks out the pennies of fugitive penal laborers.”^[72]

For all their descriptions of elaborate rules and rituals, these authors ultimately concluded that anarchy reigned over prison society. Thus Iakubovich describes an intelligent young murderer who before incarceration had “idealized” prisoners but was now constantly at odds with them over their disgraceful behavior. “All their laws and regulations aren’t worth a brass farthing,” he tells him. “I’ve since decided not to respect them, but to counter everything.”^[73]
Contributing to their interpretation of anarchy was these authors’ disdain for the maidanshchik’s entrepreneurialism, the discursive construction of which merits attention. Dostoevskii, Maksimov, Chekhov, and Doroshevich each describe the maidanshchik disparagingly: “Usurer, barkeep, casino owner – he reminds one of some huge spider, sitting in the corner and sucking the blood from the criminals and wretches drawn into his trap.”^[74] Chekhov characterizes Sakhalin’s prisons as abounding in many of the vices he witheringly ascribes to peasants in his short stories:

“Tightfistedness [kulachestvo] is here expressed in the so-called maidany…. The prisoner having and loving money and bringing it to katorga is a kulak, a miser, and a swindler who, for revenue farming [beret na otkup], takes from his katorga comrades monopoly rights over trade in the ward.”^[75]

Doroshevich quotes Khrustsel’ as saying, “A man who sets himself up is envied. There’s spite…. We who have nothing won’t allow another anything! Out of one person’s spite everyone loses.”^[76]
These quotations reflect the well-documented hostility toward merchants and capitalism in imperial Russia and highlight the obvious paradox: prisoners craved goods only the maidanshchiki could provide, yet robbed and destroyed them. That those astute observers of human nature Dostoevskii and Chekhov failed even to mention this paradox shows how fixed were their own anticapitalist sentiments. Chekhov’s phrase “revenue farming,” Dostoevskii’s double entendre tseloval’nik, and Maksimov’s “tax-farmer” may be read as metonyms for kormlenie (lit., “feeding”), the system established under Muscovy but persisting until 1917, and by which officials embezzled and extorted bribes. Siberia had a particularly doleful kormlenie tradition that spawned legends among a public well familiar with corruption.^[77] Chekhov and Doroshevich abundantly detail the corruption on Sakhalin that is confirmed by archival documents.^[78] These writers emotionally sympathized with prisoners’ sense of victimization because, for them, it was a response to the arbitrariness and lawlessness of tsarism itself.
The maidan crystallized prison society’s essential beliefs and sentiments. Through paradiastole, Certeauean “tactics,” and “games,” prisoners created an “antidiscipline” that was nonetheless inseparable from hegemonic society and thus confronted them with the dilemma expressed by Pierre Bourdieu: “Resistance may be alienating and submission may be liberating. Such is the paradox of the dominated, and there is no way out of it.”^[79] The “imperial” quality of this prison society is demonstrated by the weakness of its authority figures, most notably the wards’ starosty. Despite being formally endowed with powers from the prison administration, these men were universally despised by other prisoners, who regarded them as sellouts and so followed their orders only unwillingly. Prestige, not authority, engenders true subordination,^[80] insofar as individuals receive emotional gratification by subordinating themselves. Those who enjoyed the most prestige were the Ivans, for both their criminal exploits and for enduring corporal punishment. This mirrored the hegemonic society, wherein the tsar’s superordination depended primarily upon the prestige he garnered (e.g., as a warrior, as pious, as wise) rather than the authority of his position, the attributes of which were incomprehensible to most subjects. Shifting attention to those chroniclers of prison life, it is worth recalling that Émile Durkheim viewed punishment as a key unlocking society’s larger structures.^[81] Doroshevich and others were probably unaware of Durkheim and his notion of the “common conscience,” but similarly believed that prison society reflected general society. The anarchy they perceived among prisoners revealed their deeper fears about the future of tsarist Russia itself. Admittedly, this was a “constructed” anarchy, though in and of itself this does not exclude the possibility that prison society foreshadowed developments on a larger scale.