Humanities & Social Sciences
October 2021
Outcasts: Punished by Space
by Tamara Vronska, Olena Stiazhkina
Minusnyky (outcasts) are a verbal and social creation of the Soviet state, which, through repression, discrimination and control, created communities of "friends" and "foes", branding the latter with punitive methods and forming a specific language to denote them. The book talks about a special category of citizens of the "Soviet country" who were recognized as "socially dangerous" and punished by a ban on settling in a number of areas of the USSR after forced "removal" from their places of permanent residence, as well as serving time in the Gulag system. The researchers analyze the process of constructing the Bolshevik concept of the geographical isolation of the "disloyal" and determine the logic of creating the Soviet space as a space of prohibitions. The regularity of the Soviet territories is analyzed not only as a manifestation of Stalin's repressive policy but also as an organic part of the functioning of the totalitarian mechanism which picked up momentum when the Bolsheviks seized power.
