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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Gulag ruins in central Kazakhstan to show how ruins of penal infrastructures are lived through pragmatic reuse rather than memorialisation. Ruination emerges as a layered process where past punishment, socialist promise, and post-Soviet precarity coexist in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the afterlives of Soviet penal and socialist infrastructures in former Karlag settlements in central Kazakhstan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with residents of villages built on the territory of the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp, it explores ruination not as a singular moment of collapse, but as a layered and ongoing process unfolding across socialist development and post-Soviet withdrawal. Structures originally built through forced labor: barracks, isolation cells, administrative buildings, and agricultural infrastructure, were not simply abandoned after the closure of the Gulag. Instead, they were actively reused during the Soviet period, particularly during the Virgin Lands campaign, when these landscapes were reframed as zones of agricultural promise and settlement. In the post-Soviet period, however, the withdrawal of state support, privatization, and out-migration transformed these infrastructures into partially used or abandoned ruins. This paper argues that ruination in former Karlag settlements materializes polarised temporalities: the coexistence of penal pasts, socialist futures that were once promised, and present-day conditions of precarity. Rather than being primarily sites of memory or heritage, ruins here function as everyday resources: homes, barns, storage spaces, embedded in strategies of endurance and survival. By focusing on pragmatic reuse rather than commemoration, the paper shows how residents live with and through decay, transforming spaces of punishment into ordinary environments. In doing so, it contributes to anthropological debates on ruination, memory, and infrastructure, and demonstrates how entangled ruins reveal the social life of decay in post-socialist contexts.