Tukhta: labour and resistance in the audit regime of the Soviet Gulag

ABSTRACT

Working from the memoir literature of Soviet Gulag survivors, the article explores the curious practice of tukhta as contrived by the toiling zeks of the archipelago. In a labour regime tasked with accumulating surplus, destroying political dissent, and transforming the subjectivity of the imprisoned, tukhta proved to be a tactical means for resisting the logic of Gulag as an audit regime. The subtle labour control of numbers effected by Gulag demanded equally sophisticated practices of resistance on the part of the zeks subjected to its technique, and tukhta was one of those practices. When treated as a kind of phronesis, the informal and ethical quality to the practice of tukhta can be appreciated in a way that more formal social scientific epistemology and historical method would miss. Perhaps the most salient counter-conduct to be found in the experiences of Gulag’s orchestration of labour control, tukhta has the potential to reveal a great deal about audit regimes generically beyond the historical bounds of Soviet Russia. Historical inspiration for engaging audit regimes can therefore be derived from the ethico-political practice of tukhta, where otherwise there might just be pessimism, demoralization, and resigned acceptance to the awesome power of those regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Audit culture
• labour process
• meta-disciplinary
• Mētis
• numbers
• Phronesis
• USSR

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Zek (зэк) is an abbreviation of zaključónnyj (заключённый), an incarcerated inhabitant of the Gulag system of labour camps.

2. Whether tukhta, tufta, or toufta, the term seems to have originated in the fenya (феня) of the blatnoyie [блатной], the jargon of the notorious Russian ‘thieves’.

3. The VOKhR (ВОХР) was the Militarized Guard Service of the MVD (Военизированная охрана), the umbrella organisation for the various security personnel of Gulag.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Welsh

John Welsh is a researcher in politics and history at the University of Helsinki. Recent work is published in Capital & Class, Anthropological Theory, Partial Answers, Utopian Studies, Thesis Eleven, Geopolitics, Social Anthropology, Cultural Critique, Contemporary Political Theory, and the International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society. Further information can be found at www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Welsh6.