Through the Pages of the Penal Book: The System of Punishments and the Practice of Students' Resistance to Disciplinary Supervision at the Imperial Tomsk University (1893-99)

In the article, the system of punishment of students of the Imperial Tomsk University is reconstructed. This is done on the materials of the Penalty Book, office documentation, periodicals, sources of personal origin. The Penalty Book contains data on misconduct and punishment of students of the University during 1893-99. This time immediately precedes the 1899 Russian student strike which occurred in Tomsk. These facts allow considering the everyday life of a student imprisoned in the space of "crime and punishment" as a chronicle of the psychological prerequisites of mass protest. The mission to protect the "order and decency" at the University was assigned to the Inspectorate. The students' inspector A.P. Pyatnitsky wrote the Penalty Book from 1893 to 1897 and was rather subjective. He is considered to be an unreliable narrator in the article. Pyatnitsky's subjectivity is reflected in the Penalty Book, which turns it into a sort of a personal diary. Violations of the Rules for Students and the Rules of the Hostel of Tomsk University entailed reprimand, imprisonment in a punishment cell, loss of financial benefits (scholarships, the right to exemption from tuition fees) and a place in the hostel, expelling from the University, including bans on teaching and further education in Russian universities. It is emphasized that students' actions not covered by the rules were also reprimanded. Implementation of the punishments shows that the will of the inspector was actually infinite; he had control over students' life outside of the University. This removed the distinction between the personal and professional lives of students and created a situation in which the priority subjects of panoptic observation were not so much academic performance and relationship with professors as leisure and individual preferences, in particular in clothes and books, friendly and personal relationships, political views and religious feelings. It is noted that the philosophy of suppression in the period under review was based on the concept of an "isolated" student. The deliberate and systematic violations allow considering students' misconduct in terms of practices of resistance to total control. In turn, the strategies of this resistance were built along the lines of collectivization, open challenge and false avoidance, or depersonalization in student behavior patterns with the inspector and University leadership. A striking manifestation of the latter strategy was a symbolic masquerade. It is paradoxical that the preservation of the freedom of the student of the Imperial Tomsk University was in direct dependence on the intentional "masking" of one's own identity.

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