A Prison Without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism by Sarah Badcock (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 770 Great Institute. Together with their various co-sponsors, these two beneficent institutions not only brought these books into being, but also facilitated the precious international scholarly interchange from which they derive. UCL SSEES Simon Dixon Badcock, Sarah. A Prison Without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2016. xv + 195 pp. Maps. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Few places on earth are more closely identified with exile and punishment than Siberia. To date, however, scholarly interest in the Siberian exile system prior to 1917 (at least outside Russia) has not been equal to the region’s notoriety, and much of what is widely known about the subject remains derived from the unrepresentative experiences of revolutionary memoirists and notions of topdown brutality long enshrined in Soviet historiography. The present study, in which Sarah Badcock attempts to redress this balance by reconstructing the lives and daily struggles of those who comprised Siberia’s exile population in the final years of autocratic rule (1905–17), is therefore most welcome. Badcock’s book is well researched and cogently structured. She has worked extensively in a number of Siberian archives, and has consulted both official publications and a wealth of memoirs written by political exiles. Following a weighty introduction, four thematic chapters follow the narrative arc of life and death in Siberian exile. The first focuses on the journey to Siberia and on Irkutsk’s Aleksandrovskaia transfer prison, one of the book’s two geographical loci (the other being Iakutsk). The second chapter concerns everyday life in exile, with particular attention devoted to material conditions, community networks and relations with Siberia’s native and settler populations. A third chapter examines exiles’ efforts to find work in Siberia, and their attempts to escape when such efforts failed. The fourth and final chapter deals with experiences of illness and infirmity in exile, and includes an absorbing discussion of the effects of hard labour and enforced isolation on exiles’ mental health (pp. 149-157). Much of this book’s analytical power results from its relatively short chronology. The social unrest that swept Russia after 1905 saw tens of thousands condemned to Siberian exile and hard labour (katorga), with political offenders accounting for an unprecedented 10 per cent of the region’s exile population. Badcock shows these ‘politicals’ — predominantly soldiers, workers and peasants — to have borne little resemblance to their nineteenth-century predecessors, and thereby challenges the traditional juxtaposition of political and criminal exiles, showing such categories to have been more fluid than often REVIEWS 771 supposed. The decade in question also saw mass peasant resettlement in Siberia — a policy at odds with the region’s traditional role as a penal colony. On this point, the chapter on work and escape, which demonstrates that many exiles’ escapes were in reality attempts to move around freely in search of gainful employment — thus revealing the extent to which the autocracy’s failure both to develop Siberia economically and to control its exile population were closely connected — is particularly interesting. Nonetheless, as befits history written from below, such arguments are ultimately secondary to the author’s fascination with her protagonists themselves. She emphasizes ‘the experiences of lower class and disempowered people on the peripheries of empire’ (p. 23), striving to recover their lost voices. In this she succeeds admirably. The book is a treasure trove of archival vignettes and, in all, the best account of preRevolutionary Siberian exile yet written. Badcock’s emphasis on the distinctive features of the exile system after 1905 sometimes sees her overlook illuminating continuities with the preceding period. For instance, she demonstrates the autocracy’s failure to reconcile the punishment of political offenders with its own colonizing mission by highlighting such cases as that of V. A. Voznesenskii, a political exile who found his true calling as a railway engineer in Siberia (pp. 112–13). Such tensions, however, were evident from the early nineteenth century onwards: the case of the Decembrist exile and colonial administrator Dmitrii Zavalishin is especially noteworthy, as are the contributions to Siberian life made by many of the revolutionary populists befriended by George Kennan in the...