Reconsidering Soviet/Russian State Violence in Stanislav Aseyev’s Memoir The Torture Camp on Paradise Street

The presentation examined The Torture Camp on Paradise Street – the memoirs of Ukrainian journalist, writer, and recently a defender at the Armed Forces of Ukraine Stanislav Aseyev, as a testimony of illegal arrest and incarceration in one of the prisons of the so-called “DNR.” The presentation focuses on the historical context of the events subsequent to the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbas in 2014, accompanied by the spread of russkii mir to parts of Ukraine after the full-scale invasion of 2022.

 

Izoliatsiia, where Aseyev was imprisoned, came into being in one of Ukraine’s largest cities, Donetsk, in 2015-17, following its occupation by Russian backed forces and the formation of the so-called “DNR.” The speaker suggests interpreting the Izoliatsiia prison-camp in Michael Foucault’s terms of panopticon and heterotopia. The panopticon provides basic grounds for understanding the design of a prison based on Jeremy Bentham’s plan, presenting a model of a prison aimed at constant surveillance. In Aseyev’s memoir, prisoners in the Izoliatsiia prison are under the constant surveillance of video cameras 24 hours per day.

 

In terms of a panopticon, Izoliatsiia is a place that is difficult to define, as it combines different paradoxical elements and technologies never associated with a torture camp (such as air conditioners and TVs). Prisoners are tortured there, at the same time, on relatively quiet days classical music is present. Such blurred boundaries can potentially create a dangerous illusion of normality, thus masking the crimes of russkii mir and Russian state violence practiced on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

 

 

Olha Poliukhovych, PhD, literary critic & scholar, is Vice President for Research and Academic Affairs and an associate professor at the Volodymyr Morenets Department of Literature of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Dr Poliukhovych is a co-founder and a board member of the Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal. In 2017–2018 she was a Fulbright Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. In 2020 she became a co-founder of NGO New Ukrainian Academic Community (Kyiv). Since the full-scale Russia-Ukraine war, she has been featured on LitHub podcasts and has published essays in Agni, Los Angeles Review of Books, Consequence forum, and Prospect Magazine.