This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit psychopolitica.substack.com For the past year and a half, I’ve been using palm-sized cards as the central medium to organize my work, life, ideas, and projects. This is one of the first batches of “idea cards”: These are monthly decks/stacks that accumulate from my visits to the local cannabis club. And in today’s episode of Kosmopolitika, you’ll see the latest version of the medium: a kind of a game board Boris and I are starting to use to organize our biweekly conversations. Here’s what it looked like at the beginning of the two-hour stream: Here’s what it looked like at the end: And here’s what it looks like right now: The texts on the other sides of the cards are drafts of ideas and stories I don’t think I want to share widely, but any PsyPol member can play with the cards on the site: read their contents, drag them around, stack and unstack them, etc. If Boris or I change or add something, it is reflected on the site in real time. You won’t be able to edit cards or save their positions, but I plan on adding real interactivity in the coming weeks. You’ll find the password at the end of this message. Here is an excerpt from a draft in the Escapism deck. ON PRISON The Lukiškės prison was at the very cutting edge of the Russian correctional system when it first opened in 1905, my Lithuanian guide tells me. The main innovation wasn’t so much the design (a panopticon) and the architecture (neo-Romanesque), or the heating, ventilation, and sewage systems, which were all quite impressive for their time, but the very idea of “correcting” the prisoners, rehabilitating instead of simply punishing or isolating them. He cites the beautiful Orthodox church we’re in as evidence — why would you need a church, if not to improve the souls of the inmates? There are also a Catholic church and a synagogue on the premises. The change he’s pointing to is a sequence of reforms to the Russian criminal code that phased away corporal punishment and introduced prison confinement as a penalty in itself — before then, imprisonment was only a temporary measure as one awaited his sentencing, and usually didn’t last long. The actual punishment came mostly in the forms of death, physical pain, katorga (forced labor in harsh conditions), and exile (most commonly to Siberia). Given the kinds of hell prison replaced — whipping, nose-slitting, beating with rods, among others — it’s hard to argue this innovation wasn’t a positive one. Still, I can’t quite see it as such. There’s something uniquely bleak about it: walking through Lukiškės, I see a whole little world built entirely around the idea of stripping one of his freedom and making that fact the center of his existence; there’s nothing else going on. A katorzhanin went to the mine to extract gold, silver, or coal (somebody’s gotta do it?), but a prisoner only extracts the experience of what it’s like being trapped. The “correctional” narrative rings hollow even now, at least in the Russian and, it appears, Lithuanian settings, and it’s been more than a century since Lukiškės first opened its doors. This is my first time in a prison (a night at the police station followed by a day in court is the biggest trouble I’ve gotten from my own state so far), so it’s strange how familiar everything about it feels: the grey and muddy-green paint on the walls, the musty smell, the sickly light that gets dimmed at night but never fully goes out, the hole-in-the-floor shitters in the corners of cells. The guide looks at those in the group who were born in the USSR: “You guys had those in school too, right?” He’s right, schools are one of the environments this reminds me of. Also kindergartens, trains and train stations of my youth, state hospitals, the state itself. Lukiškės was in operation between 1905 and 2019, and at different times belonged to the Russian empire, Poland, Nazi Germany, the USSR, and, finally, after the fall of the Union, independent Lithuania. After Covid, it reopened as a cultural hub: there are bars, cafes, concert venues, open-air movie screenings, and guided tours in Lithuanian, English, and Russian. I wonder about the vibe at the parties. We play a game: the guide shows us different objects and invites us to guess whether they were allowed or banned on the premises. To wired headphones, I say “banned: one could strangle a cell mate or hang himself with them.” I’m wrong: the guide explains that the right way to strangle yourself is by tying yourself to the bed, by the neck, with a wet towel or bed sheet, after several days of sleep deprivation. You fall asleep, you never wake up. He has a polite look on his face, which says “I thought you might find that interesting,” and I nod with appreciation, as if saying “right, that makes sense, thanks.” He gives a chance to ask a follow up to the rest of the group, but nobody has one, and he moves on to the next object: a tiny cell phone, maybe 1/6th of my iPhone, with buttons. We are invited to guess the maximum number of phones that was recovered from a man’s rectum at one time. I think, “Six? Four?” Somebody else gives their guess. The guide lights up: “Very close! Eight.” I spend more time than the rest of the group looking at drawings and reading the writings on the doors and walls of the tiny box-like rooms for preliminary detention: a third, maybe half are in Russian, but I also recognize Georgian and Armenian letters, there’s some Arabic and, of course, Lithuanian. In the bigger cells for long-term confinement, Russian dominates. “Business language,” the guide shrugs, “lingua franca.” The biggest graffiti turns out to be fake though, put on the walls during the filming of Stranger Things 4. Taking pictures in the cells is prohibited except for the one with a cardboard cutout of Putin (Vilnius is absolutely covered in Ukrainian flags). Most are empty, maybe a dozen were turned into some kind of art objects, and one preserves a frozen image of what life here actually looked like: a TV in the corner, light erotica on wall posters (Russian pop bands from the 90s and 2000s, which I recognize), books, bedding. Two men step in to look around, the guide asks how they like it, one says “I could live with this,” and the guide responds by shutting and locking the door. People chuckle. He delivers the next bit of trivia to us, with his back to the door. It’s all very playful, gently immersive, with smiles, raised eyebrows, an occasional sigh, a thoughtful nod. None of this is about the Lukiškės prison for me. It’s about the fact that, a week or two before this excursion, I was looking at tickets to Russia. I hadn’t been home in three years.
