A Living Martyrdom? Representing Life in Emigration in Katorga i ssylka

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Abstract: Katorga i ssylka (Hard Labour and Exile, 1921–35) provides important insights into the personal details of revolutionaries’ lives as well as the (auto)biographical representation of members and deceased colleagues of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. The journal facilitated identity formation at a time when many former revolutionaries found themselves politically marginalized by the Bolshevik rise to power, being a lieu de mémoire for revolutionary martyrs of all types. This article suggests that death or bodily harm as forms of martyrdom were only elements of a wider set of revolutionary practices of self-sacrifice. By drawing comparisons with similar practices in late-imperial revolutionary print culture, it suggests a continuity of practices in emigration across 1917. Such practices drew not only on the individuals and communities involved in publishing work but also the tropes and narratives in these representations. As membership of the Society was dominated by former Socialist Revolutionaries, studying the representation of life in emigration provides insights into the contestations of revolutionary memory during the 1920s and the ways in which members of the Society sought to find meaning in their personal experiences of political activism and that of their deceased comrades. The article explores the ways in which memoir and (auto)biography constructed emigration as a space of useful political activism, and provided the basis for the representation of emigration as meaningful self-sacrifice. This involved invoking tropes of suffering common in the memory of imprisonment and exile, while emigration brought with it new challenges linked to the experience of time passing.