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On 15 April 2026, the human rights project ‘First Division’ released information which came as no surprise to those who systematically study the nature of Russian statehood, yet served as significant documentary evidence of what researchers of carceral practices have long been saying.
According to documents from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, following the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on 8 March 2022 allowing law enforcement officers to deprive people of their liberty and send them to pre-trial detention centres without initiating criminal proceedings and without a court order. This decree applies to individuals deemed to be ‘opposing’ the war. The authority to send people to such facilities has been granted to representatives of the Armed Forces, the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Federal Security Service.
Neither the ‘decree’ itself nor the ‘temporary instruction’ regulating the conditions of detention in such facilities has been made publicly available. The document exists as a shadow – legally amorphous, devoid of a public form, yet entirely real in its consequences. The Investigative Committee, having received a complaint regarding one such detention, rejected it, citing precisely this decision by the ruler.
Formally, this constitutes a gross violation of even Russia’s own Constitution, Article 22 of which prohibits depriving a person of their liberty except by a court decision. But to invoke constitutional norms in a state where the constitution itself serves merely a decorative function of power is to fail to understand the nature of this state.
What is happening is not a deviation from the norm, nor is it an extraordinary wartime measure. It is an organic continuation of that state tradition which constitutes a defining characteristic of Russia as such.
The Russian state took shape as a carceral state – not a police state in the classical sense, but specifically a carceral state, where colonial expansion, imperialist ideology, and penal practices are inextricably intertwined. The need to develop vast territories forced this state to resort to a specific mechanism: recruiting its own population for colonisation, branding them with the stigma of ‘criminal’, as well as deploying the populations of subjugated nations — Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and others.
The uniqueness of this phenomenon lies in the blurring of boundaries between prison and society, between national culture and prison culture. This process took place gradually, over centuries: prison culture initially dominated national culture, then supplanted it – and eventually became the national culture itself.
It is in this context that the secret order of 8 March 2022 takes on its true meaning.
Extrajudicial detention is not an exception to the rule; it is the rule itself. The pre-trial detention centre as a tool for managing dissent, as a mechanism for neutralising the ‘undesirables’ – this is not a wartime improvisation but a reproduction of established carceral practices of social control.
Between Stalin’s extrajudicial troikas and Putin’s ‘decision’ of 8 March 2022, there is not a chasm but a direct line of continuity. Only the technical trappings have changed: instead of NKVD orders – references to the ‘President’s decision’; instead of ‘enemies of the people’ – ‘persons opposing the Special Military Operation’. The logic and mechanism remain the same.
Management methods typical of penal institutions were systematically applied to the governance of society as a whole. The combination of these factors created that unique prison empire which modern Russia continues to be, despite formal changes to the political regime and economic system.
One further fundamental aspect should be emphasised: this document concerns not only Ukrainians in the occupied territories or foreigners. It also applies to Russian citizens themselves, whom the authorities deem to be ‘opposing’ the war. The penal state makes no distinction between ‘its own’ and ‘others’ – the moment a person falls into the category of ‘enemy’, they lose any legal protection regardless of citizenship.
The very form of this ‘decision’ is particularly telling. It is secret. Its legal nature is unclear even to specialists. It operates outside any public legal system. The logic of the penal state requires no public justification – it exists in a regime of administrative self-evidence that requires no explanation and allows for no appeal.
Putin’s secret order is neither a scandal nor an anomaly. It is confirmation of the diagnosis. Russia is a penal state not because it has many prisons or prisoners (though these figures speak for themselves), but because the prison itself – as an institution, as a culture, as a way of thinking about the individual and their place within the state system – is the fundamental principle underpinning the organisation of this society.
As long as Western analysts and politicians proceed from the false assumption of a dichotomy between the people and the authorities in Russia, their policies will be based on flawed premises. It must be recognised that Russian society, for the most part, is not a captive democratic society awaiting liberation from a tyrannical regime, but is an integral part of a prison empire – a bearer of its values and an active participant in its reproduction.
The secret decision of 8 March 2022 is not a document of emergency measures. It is a routine working document of a carceral state.
