Midnight Black

In addition to being one of the novel’s chief settings, the penal colony in Mordovia is an important symbol in the novel, embodying the oppressive atmosphere of Russia under President Vitaly Peskov. The narrative describes the colony, a revived Stalin-era gulag, as a collection of derelict buildings where “over almost a century, hundreds of thousands labored and died inside the walls of the various facilities” (62). The novel’s use of a gulag—a known symbol of political repression—emphasizes the dangerous state of affairs in the narrative’s Russia. The novel specifies that the colony is not just a collection of prisons but a “penal fiefdom” where prisoners are harvested like a crop. The reference to a fiefdom is linked with Baronov, as he uses the Mordovia prisons to house people on his watchlist.

While Natan Yarovoy is incarcerated in IK-17 Orzenyi, a men’s prison in the middle of the forest, Zoya and Nadia are in IK-17 Yavas, a busy settlement. Though the two areas are separated by a distance of merely 10 miles, Yarovoy and Nadia are not allowed to see each other. The unbridgeable physical distance between them highlights the sadistic workings of the penal colony. Like the distance between the husband and wife, the colony often utilizes mental, emotional, and physical manipulation to break down prisoners, the chief of these being backbreaking labor. The labor, combined with the terrible living conditions, becomes a convenient way of killing prisoners without having to execute them. The novel’s use of the penal colony as a setting puts the threats posed by an oppressive authoritarian system into stark, concrete terms that highlight the stakes for everyone involved.