Before leaving Rykovsk, I wanted, if just for a minute, to gather my thoughts in private, and so, at dawn, I rushed to the nearby hill where the village cemetery was located.

Imaginarily bidding farewell to my dead friends, I took in the settlement's expanse one last time. Snow began falling on the valley below. It glistened above the higher mountains beneath the sun's amber rays. The bare ground around the peasant dwellings assumed a uniformly gray aspect. Amid them was the bright green of one of the church's cupolas. A light, hazy fog drifted over the river, producing a scene of nature's particular freshness during early spring.

“If you want to say goodbye to Sakhalin,” I told myself, “then say goodbye here. Down there, you’ll be doing a lot of talking, bustling about, loud embracing, crying… but it’ll all be interrupted and scattered and not profound and, most especially, directed at people.”

I walked slowly round several graves and recalled their sufferers’ unhappy lives. Grim scenes of the katorga island, on which I’d been a subject slave, arose before me…

“Protect me, God, from anything similar!” I exclaimed, interrupting my reverie, and with haste departed the hill for the settlement.

A bunch of penal laborers, exile-settlers, and beggars were already standing near my house. They’d all come to bid me farewell.

“Greetings!” the nearest old man, Evdokim Savelˊëv, an exact copy of Turgenev's Kasˊian from “Beautiful Swords,” said to me.

He covered his face with his hands and began crying. I myself was barely holding back tears and could not think how to placate him.

“I won't see you anymore!” he was saying, sobbing louder and louder.

“We’ll all see each other in the next world,” I began consoling the religious old man when, suddenly, a group of comrades-in-exile came out of my house to meet me.

So as to conceal my distress, I began anxiously asking whether they’d packed my things and all was ready to go.

My comrades expressed a desire to accompany me on foot while my travel companion K. dealt with the tarantass.

As we walked through the settlement, past houses and the church where Mass was commencing, exile-settlers whom I knew jogged over, each wanting to express a few heartfelt wishes for my journey.

We had to wait six days in Aleksandrovsk before leaving for Tymovsk District. During that time, we managed to get to know the educated exiles who had arrived on Sakhalin a year or two before us. Each hastened to help and attend to us as he could: one found us shirt linen, another a handkerchief, a third milk or bread, etc. Especially memorable is a stout Pole with an angular manner, P. D— — i. His unattractive wide forehead, awkwardly protruding whiskers, and red-gray eyes did not keep him from being for me the most sympathetic man in our group of exiles. He’d show up in our room early in the morning, carrying a variety of produce in both arms, and would not leave until late in the evening. His kindness seemed limitless. He seemed to be searching for an opportunity to devote himself to a comrade. Indeed, this would later play itself out.

Exiles’ visitations kept us in the ward for entire days, and we rarely exited the prison gates, though were rather scared to do so, having heard of so many unpleasant clashes playing out recently over the “cap issue.” An educated exile fulfils with difficulty all the demands Sakhalin officials impose on penal laborers concerning gestures of respect. Usually upon encountering an official, an exiled penal laborer would step off the pavement and, not at twelve paces, like a soldier, but at twenty paces or more, doff his cap and, with head bared, walk in terror and trepidation past his highness. Not everyone, however, risked going along the street past Warden L— — in this way. Many preferred to turn off and follow a detour of long alleyways. It got to the point that you had to pass with a bared head not just officials but even their houses.

“Not only ‘cause someone's lookin’ out the window. No, ‘tis best to take your cap off: every time!” penal laborers observed. On this basis, they would remove their caps before every stranger dressed in decent European clothing, be he a merchant, curious passenger, or foreign sailor from a steamer.

Exiles from the privileged estates sometimes tried to bow to officials. Some of them condescendingly tolerated such greetings, but others were indignant.

“Why's he bowing to me like an equal, like I’m an acquaintance on Nevskii Prospect?!” such gentlemen shouted.

While I was going to work early in the morning with the carpenters, I did not see the laborers being birched. Normally, the punishments were carried out after secondment, after we’d been sent off to our assignments. It was rare that during the day the warden, enraged by some penal laborer's infraction, would suddenly shout: “The rods!”

In Tymovsk District, there wasn't a standing executioner, as in Aleksandrovsk Prison. In Rykovsk, his responsibilities were fulfilled by the so-called prison barracks headmen. Each ward had a headman. He supervised the order and cleanliness of the domicile, was paid for this by prisoners with portions of bread, and was, in general, a representative for their side. Given this, the people chosen to be headmen were invariably literate, healthy, and strong, and quite capable, if need be, of dealing with brother penal laborers consigned to punishment.

I sufficiently guarded myself from the terrible spectacle of execution but, living in the prison, it was impossible not to hear the groans emitted by unseen prisoners being shamelessly tortured.

A large, wide, flat bench with thick legs stood on the porch of the first barracks. This was the penal laborers’ mare. When someone had to be punished, the headmen would position it a little way from the porch and bring over an armful of one-and-a-half-arshin-long rods. They always had in supply a whole tub of fresh birch twigs thick as a finger.

Faced with four meaty goons, the prisoner usually submitted to lowering his trousers and laying himself on the mare. One pair then leaned heavily on his body, one man on his shoulders and the other on his feet, while the other pair stood on either side of the subdued victim and, with brief interruptions, separately thrashed the naked body with the rods. A guard counted off the blows before calling to the warden: “That's it!”

The punishment could be halted for many reasons. In addition to the consistency of his breathing, to which the warden attended, the behavior of the prisoner played a large role. One might, in a tearful voice, begin begging for mercy even while undoing his trousers. And all the while, slowly laying himself on the mare, not stop repeating:

“Your excellency, please!”

Having examined the legal nature and value of the European Committee of Social Rights’ (ECSR’s) decisions on the merits, it is now time to consider the actual effectiveness of the quasi-jurisdictional monitoring activity carried out by the ECSR in the collective complaints procedure, that is, the extent to which its monitoring has a real impact on situations that are the object of complaints, in the sense of securing greater respect for social rights obligations by the European states concerned.

From this standpoint, it certainly cannot be said that the collective complaints procedure always – or even usually – results in resolution of the problem at stake, with the national situation concerned brought fully and rapidly into line with the Charter's requirements, in terms of social rights protection.

There are in fact many cases where, even after repeated findings of violation by the ECSR, the situation of non-compliance with the Charter continues to go unremedied for several years, and the state concerned fails to respond and take remedial action. This clearly emerges, unfortunately, from the ECSR's annual ‘Findings’ on states’ follow-up to violation decisions affecting them.

Nevertheless, there are also numerous examples of states that have spontaneously and quite rapidly reacted to ECSR's violation decisions, by taking steps and measures to rectify or improve the situation, in order to bring it into conformity with the Charter provisions. And in a large majority of cases, the fact that a collective complaint has been submitted to the ECSR and that the Committee has adopted a violation decision still appears to be an important factor in the state's positive change of attitude – in terms of social rights implementation – in respect of the situation that was highlighted by the complaint.

As explained above, once the ECSR has adopted a violation decision, it continues to monitor the situation, and the state concerned must regularly report to it on the measures eventually taken to give effect to the decision. This clearly helps to ensure that states that are the addressees of ECSR's violation decision do not remain inactive but somehow undertake to bring the situation more into line with the Charter's requirements.

However, we believe that other factors are still more important in making the collective complaints procedure a suitable instrument for securing the effective implementation of the rights enshrined in the Charter.

Having again spent the night aboard the steamer, we went one more time to the hamlet of Tyk, to ask the Giliaks to provision us with their fish and live swans. They caught some young broods of geese and swans and brought them to us in large wooden crates; they stuck them on tall poles so their dogs couldn't get at them. In these same crates they construct caches for fish and any provisions in general.

One Giliak approached us with a request, and in a language difficult to understand, began lodging some complaint. His face told of extreme suffering and had taken on the pinched look of a person crying, though I saw no tears.

Finally, with other Giliaks’ assistance, it was explained that his little mother (wife) had been taken away from him to another village, and he was now asking the leadership to order she be returned to him. The officials vowed they would.

This was not the first case wherein Giliaks appealed to Sakhalin's administration with such a request. Such weighty matters as the kidnapping of wives were traditionally resolved among families, but the decrees of the few Giliak families currently scattered across hundreds of versts often carry no force. Little-by-little, Giliaks have lost their patriarchal self-government, and respect for family elders has been replaced by fear before the Russian noyoni, i.e., the authorities.

We left Tyk at high tide and headed south. This time, our weather was favorable. The warm, sunny day, calm sea, and coastal proximity turned this voyage into a pleasant sea-stroll. In order to defer conclusion of the assignment laid before us, we now decided to alter course, to go to the settlements we’d missed: Trambaüs, Tangi, and Mgachi. Of them, the most beautiful location was Tangi. In a ravine between tall, green mountains, along the shore of a river, two settlements lay beside each other: the closest to the sea was Giliak, behind it was the Russian. This proximity has sparked ongoing quarrels between them. The Giliaks complain that the Russians come to their village and push them out of their yurts onto a small corner of land, rudely abuse them, ruin their nets, pilfer, etc.

Like Americans, the Romans thought of themselves as a nation of immigrants. The story of Rome's founding begins with Aeneas, a refugee from the burning city of Troy, who wanders the Mediterranean for years with his people searching for a new home, as told most poignantly in books two and three of Vergil's Aeneid. Romulus and Remus, Aeneas's descendants, actually founded the city of Rome as a new settlement and invited others to join them. Despite these origin stories, the Romans could be ambivalent or even outright hostile to migrants. Yet they also did extend citizenship rights to non-Romans, that is, one did not have to be born a Roman; one could become a Roman, which comparatively speaking was a rather expansive view. Most ancient societies that had a concept of citizenship had a very strict understanding of who was a citizen. The Athenians, for all their reputed openness, typically did not permit non-citizens to become citizens; they allowed non-citizens to live with them, but these non-citizens, metics as they called them, were a separate class. The Romans, by contrast, had mechanisms for extending citizenship and citizen rights to non-Romans. This is not to say standards were always consistently applied or worked to the advantage of non-Romans. From time to time, the Romans expelled groups of people they found dangerous, including philosophers (161–154 BCE), Jews (139 BCE), Chaldeans (139 BCE), and worshippers of Bacchus (186 BCE). The Romans could be undeniably brutal to conquered peoples, frequently killing and enslaving those they defeated in battle, but the Romans recognized that over time there were benefits to moving these defeated peoples from subjects to be governed to participants in the Roman political community.

As could be expected, the Romans gave citizenship, or a limited version of it, first to those who lived closest to them. Over time, the sense of who belonged to the Roman political community spread until in 212 CE the emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free peoples living within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. However, as mentioned above, there were occasional complications to the process, and the Romans of the first century BCE faced the greatest citizenship crisis Rome ever had. For decades, Rome's Italian allies had been clamoring for some form of citizenship.

The Romans did not lose wars. In fact, the Middle and Late Republic are periods of almost continuous Roman success; yes, they lost battles, but they nearly always won the war. Despite this success, military campaigns still had the potential to be disruptive to political life at home. The resources devoted to them and the political divisiveness they caused wore away notions of the common good, political solidarity, and social trust. Thus, Sulla and Marius viewed the war against Mithridates, who had orchestrated the murder of thousands of Romans and Italians, not only as the serious threat to Rome it was, but also as an opportunity for personal aggrandizement; the consequences of their ambition and violence were devastating for Rome and thousands of its citizens who died in the resulting strife. Later conflicts had similar impacts.

In 60 BCE, Rome's three most powerful, richest, and ambitious men, Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, decided to form a political alliance, which historians call the First Triumvirate. Pompey was the most successful militarily and the richest. He had strung together a number of unprecedented offices and military commands throughout the 70s and 60s BCE. The first elected office he ever held was the consulship, a violation of Roman custom; he also held sweeping commands against the Mediterranean pirates and concluded the protracted war against Mithridates, expanding Rome's empire into the Eastern Mediterranean. The commands, which he executed efficiently and effectively, granted him immense power; his authority against the pirates troubled senators because he did not have a colleague in the office, an unrepublican precedent. His career would later serve as a model for Augustus, Rome's first emperor.

Caesar's career was on the rise, and though he had been a successful military commander, he did not yet have a distinctive military achievement to rival Pompey; in addition, he was indebted to men like Crassus. Crassus, a wealthy slum lord, was infamous for his remark that a man was not rich unless he had the money to buy an army. Though powerful and wealthy, he barely had any military success, save suppressing the revolt of Spartacus, from the Roman perspective hardly the stuff to win a proper triumph. Crassus and Caesar were zealous for military triumphs that would give them the same distinction as Pompey and the plunder that would come with it.

My traveling companions were very happy with the sea journey. They captivated other officials with their rapturous stories about the new route. We were soon assigned to reconnoiter the coastal settlements of northern Sakhalin.

Beginning that evening, we loaded onto the Prince Shakhovskoi a large crate of various snacks and drinks, or, in the district commander's expression, an entire grocery store.

Next morning, the expeditionaries were all gathered at the guardhouse on the wharf. The weather was overcast and very windy. Waves jolted the wharf furiously and sprayed the building's roof. A great distance from shore, the breakers seethingly frothed. Some officials suddenly declared we shouldn't leave in such weather. Only I., empowered by some weird notion that the meat-pies would dry out or the boiled food would go bad, prevailed upon the district commander to order us to leave that day. Everyone turned to me, until then sitting silently on the divan. At I— — v's urging, I unwillingly stood up and, in a rather cutting voice, clearly proved there could be no thought of going to sea during a NW wind.

“In such a powerful surf,” I said, “anyone would be driven ashore in an instant. That’d be true anywhere on Sakhalin. At sea, it's going to keep blowing.” (“And I’ll be up to my knees in water, battling the wind alone,” I thought to myself.) “Why, when we’re peacefully inside this building on the wharf, why look anywhere else for a harbor away from the NW wind?”

It was decided, then, to wait until the weather calmed down. After midday, the wind began subsiding, and we were able to go to sea at 4 o’clock. We encountered a swell and it rocked us forcefully. Some of the young expeditionaries got poisoned, as mariners say, and became seasick.

Late in the evening, we reached Khoé settlement and dropped anchor. The administrators went to spend the night onshore, while the mechanic L. and I remained on the steamer: the wind cooled, and a large swell rocked the ship. Running on deck from time to time to see whether we’d drifted, I couldn't sleep all night. Sunrise proved we’d drifted fairly close to shore. Upon our urgent whistles, the administrators woke up and quickly gathered aboard the steamer.

The Background

It did not occur to me at all at the time that I was researching for my PhD that there was a coincidence between my life course and that of Coleridge. I was 22 years old when I began my research, as was Coleridge when he gave his first political lecture. He was already married and was trying various ways to earn a living. My state scholarship ended after three years and I too was then looking for employment. Working in the Civil Service, my wife was our breadwinner. I taught courses for the Workers’ Education Association and for the University of London Department of Extra-Mural Studies while applying for university teaching posts. I assumed that my doctoral research was a preparation for an ‘academic’ career. Although Coleridge and Wordsworth had, famously, been under surveillance of a government agent in the Quantocks, Coleridge was not an activist. He related to an idea of politics, to notions of individual liberty and citizenship, rather than to the cut and thrust of political behaviour. He opposed Pitt's suppression of liberty, but he does not appear to have been interested in the debates within parliament between, for instance, Pitt and Fox. Of course, the ‘people’ whom he addressed in his lectures were not necessarily electors since the suffrage was limited, and there was no sense in which he was involved in swaying the opinions of the MPs who ‘represented’ his audience in parliament. His support for his friend John Thelwall, who was tried for treason in 1794, was a form of vicarious activism. As he put it in later life, he existed ‘collaterally’ – a position which became institutionalised in his belief in the need for a ‘clerisy’ within society which would substitute for the Established Church in disseminating values. I was conscious that I was exploring, through my research into the development of Coleridge's thinking from adherence to a system of materialist Unitarianism towards a moralistic Rousseauism, my own transition from nonconformist conviction to a form of existential religious commitment. In this respect my research was instrumental in encouraging substantive changes in my thinking, but this was all taking place in a context which institutionally continued to objectify the detachment which was indirectly the consequence of the supposed legacy of ‘late’ Coleridge.

Introduction

The reception within the territory of a state to migrants, and indeed to migration generally, is influenced by the zeitgeist of the time and this political stance is matched by regulation and law-making. The subject of migration is just one of the several instances where there is a real-time interpolation of the social and legal orders, and it helps that the socio-legal scholarship is seemingly not intent on drawing (to distraction) theoretical distinctions between these two disciplines (Albiston 2005; Cotterrell 2002; Nelken 2009). This understanding apparently defies the positivists’ view of the law as neatly extractible from the social structures and interpretive schemas that mediate everyday lives (Banakar 2015).

This chapter begins with an examination of the intricacies of socio-legal studies and migration as an empirical undertaking. This includes a review of the socio-legal schemas deployed to account for the relationship migrants have with the law in the host state, including legal assimilation and adaptation, while noting their inherent flaws. This segues into a discussion of the empirical framework of legal consciousness (Ewick and Silbey 1998) which we use as the principal schema for this aspect of our study. However, our approach has been adapted to incorporate notions of legal pluralism and second-order consciousness so to make it more relevant for the nature of this study. In the second part of the chapter we review the concept of legal mobilisation and migrants’ claims-making behaviour. This includes a discussion of the ‘naming, blaming, and claiming’ dispute transformation pyramid as introduced by Felstiner et al. (1980). In the final substantive aspect of the chapter, the migrants’ relationship with state bureaucratic structures is considered. Here, we deconstruct and critique the subject of migrant legal status as an empirical object. Further, we review the concept of semi-legality in respect of student-migrants, which is being deployed as an indeterminate (perhaps halfway point) between legality and illegality of migrant labour. We close the chapter with a discussion that ties the three frameworks – legal consciousness, legal mobilisation and semilegality – and consider how these cumulatively inform socio-legal scholarship and migration.

In early November, a thick layer of snow fell on Sakhalin. Hence it was a snowy road that lured me to travel. Also, comrades urged me to travel to Aleksandrovsk for a personal interview with the governor if I wanted to leave Sakhalin aboard the first springtime steamer.

My preparations didn't take long; I also soon found a felicitous travel companion, the secretary of the police administration, who’d just begun his professional career there.

We quickly acquired a pair of horses and harnessed them Siberian-style, in single-file. Such a method of traveling is needed there in the snow drifts. The attaching, that is, the lead, horse pushes its way through the snow with its broad chest, and it is the root horse that actually pulls the sleigh along the newly cut path.

I’d never crossed the Pilinga Range nor seen the faintly defined Tatar Strait coastline during winter, so this trip offered me an interesting novelty. Just three colors reigned the entire way: sky blue, snowy white, and forest green. Amid this palette, the spruce and fir tree needles seemed even darker and the snow even clearer and brighter.

As the snowy mountains rose, so lifted our mood. There was something ceremonial in the white road that seemed to abut the sky itself. It was quiet, clear, and fresh.

The raging sea spread threateningly in a wide blue ribbon along the whitened shoreline. All the promontories, necessarily cloaked in snow, had assumed a softer form than during summer; but, in general, the scene was cold and lifeless.

In Aleksandrovsk, I hurried to the island's military governor without delay. Though it was an inconvenient hour, he greeted me very courteously and listened patiently to my extensive testimony about life in Sakhalin exile.

Among other things, the general asked a lot about my jobs on the island. Having learned I was paid nothing for my work surveying Tymovsk District and measuring Aleksandrovsk Bay, he became indignant.

“This shows that we unceremoniously exploited you!” the governor loudly cried. “My ethical responsibility is to correct my predecessors’ mistakes. List all your jobs while on Sakhalin, bypass the administration, and address it ‘to my eyes only,’ and I’ll order you immediately be paid at least two hundred rubles. Your monthly salary should be increased as well…

The Background

My interviews with the candidates and their agents for ‘Mr. Benn or Lord Stansgate?’ took place in July 1962. I must have submitted the report at the end of the month. At about the same time, I received my A-level results and, as expected, stayed on at school for a third year in the sixth form in order to sit Oxbridge entrance examinations. I took the Cambridge entrance examinations in a freezing Cambridge in December 1962. After receiving an offer of a place at Clare College to read English, I left school at the end of the second term of that school year, at Easter, 1963. I heard at the beginning of January that my Trevelyan scholarship application had not been successful. There were some moderate signs of subversion in my last years at school. I was among the few prefects who caused some stir in the school by wearing a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) badge on school uniform, and I won the annual public speaking competition with a speech which satirically imitated the accent of Harold Macmillan and joked about the policies of his government. The decision to study the electoral process by which Tony Benn sought to renounce his peerage in order to remain an MP was consistent with these anti-establishment demonstrations. The positions adopted were not articulated politically. They simply indicated an underlying moral objection to militarism and to class distinctions. They may also disclose a tension between an inherited framework of moral obligation and a desire to develop and express independent attitudes. It was, perhaps, a wish to explore that tension which caused me to leave school and to spend three months in the spring of 1963 working in a market garden in Vallentuna, near Stockholm, in Sweden. I learnt Swedish, read Strindberg and the whole of Shakespeare, but also observed the ambivalent puritanism and permissiveness of Swedish society.

I started at Clare College just one week before my 19th birthday. I have written elsewhere about the differences of ‘cultural capital’ between students studying English at Clare (and the whole university), dependent on their previous schooling. I was conscious of becoming initiated into a discourse. By the end of the three years I had become proficient. Academic success was my main goal. I simply assumed that this was why I was there.