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)
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
The article is a response to Samoylov’s (Klejn’s) article ‘Ethnography of a camp’. The author, a well-known Russian ethnographer, who also had been a prisoner in the camp, in 1949-54, compares the conditions that he then experienced with the modem conditions described by Samoylov and comes to a conclusion that they have become more severe. This corresponds with the appearance of ritualised hooliganism within the army. This reflects the degradation of Socialist society. Doubts are expressed as to the close correspondence of camp society to primordial society, for the latter was not as primitive as is often imagined.
G.A.Levinton
The author, a competent Soviet folk-lore student who also experienced Soviet repression, added some other parallels between criminals and primordial people (for instance a self-nomination as “men”, “people” vs. “not-men”), but he believes that it is in general wrong to equate modem culture (not even raw criminal culture) with primordial culture, nor should a comparison be made to the thought and behaviour of children or the insane. In support of his argument he cites Levi-Strauss. The roots of the camp society should rather be traced to school (in particular, to the ethics of the bursa — church boarding school).
Ya.I.Gilinski
The author, a renowned criminologist, holds that Samoylov has shed light upon the main vices of Russia’s penitentiary system. Culture includes both “useful” and “harmful” forms of activity, so it includes deviant behaviour. The subculture of prisoners is that of a community that has been thrown together and in the cells and camps it is self-organising community that directs its members towards evil. Everywhere, in all countries, prison trains cadres of criminals, i.e. it fails to work.
K.L.Bannikov
The present paper focuses on the sociocultural communities genetically formed under the mechanical suppression of the free will of individuals socialized in various cultural traditions and value systems. The social pattern of the regimented communities (soldiers, prisoners, etc.) consists of a great confrontation of the two systems of organized violence. The first system is the forcible conscription for military service or prison term under inhuman conditions when individual rights and liberty are suppressed by a system of total control. The second system is the dominant relations between peoples of different social strata. Both systems complement each other. The totality of facts related to the violence in the sociocultural structures needs immediate and detailed investigation in social anthropology.
The investigation of aggression and violence in contemporary Russia is rather specific: resulting from the structural transformation of all socio-political systems, violence and aggression invading all social strata are increasing much faster than is our knowledge of them. A discussion of the work by L. Klejn presented in Ethnological Review edited at Russian Academy of Sciences (Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie) led the way in this field in the Russian anthropology of the perestroika period. Nevertheless, despite its particular significance for Russia, the problem of aggression, deviant social behavior, and status violence still remains unresolved. In Western anthropology, such works have established an independent field where the concepts and methods borrowed from other disciplines — psychology, sociology, ethology, and ethnology — arc combined. These works consider aggression as a structure-forming, normalizing, and cultural factor. The analysis of informal social communities such as those of prisoners, marginal people, and policemen, as well as the theoretical studies of the deviant and protesting behavior are presented in works relating to this problem.
Thus, a set of key problems necessary for the analysis of extreme communities as an anthropological phenomenon can be defined as follows: (1) norms of aggression and semiotics of violence in the social interaction, (2) the individual’s dependence upon performing a particular social role, and (3) transformation of the personal value system during the transition from one sociocultural environment to another.
The analysis of these problems contributes to answering the questions of why educated and civilized people when joining the army adopt really inhumanly cruel forms of social contact; why their victims take violence as a social norm; and how it is possible to revive human moral values.
There are many archetypal correlations between social symbolism of non-formal hierarchy of regimented communities and archaic societies. But that is no reason to explore evolutionary schemes. I prefer identity terms ‘archaic’ and ‘archetypal’ rather then ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’. On expected data we can trace re-actualization of archetypes of unconsciousness in circumstances of cultural vacuum as the only basis for the consolidation of a chaotically gathered community under the suppression of legal violence. Social relationships in regimented communities are not primitive. Strange forms of relationships are produced by natural adaptation function of deep structures of the subconscious, realized in the artificial conditions of their mechanical and violent consolidation. The problem of a cultural vacuum is solved by re-actualized archetypal paradigms as a factor of sociogenesis.