A Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism, by Sarah Badcock

Abstract

Sarah Badcock’s study of exile in Eastern Siberia between 1905 and 1917 mines several little-explored regional archives to offer a thickly descriptive study of the carceral experience of tens of thousands of tsarist subjects. Building on the transnational historiographies of punishment and migration and more recent spatial or imperial turns in histories of Russia, Badcock explores ‘the formation of multiple identities for the punished and the meaning and experience of displacement’ (p. 23). Moving beyond a discussion of the lives of literate political exiles who left extensive personal correspondence to posterity, Badcock seeks to unearth from the archival record the experiences of common criminals ‘who were often occluded or demonized in the political prisoner accounts’ (p. 24). Badcock acknowledges, though, that the archival sources provide only fragmentary insights into the experiences of the tens of thousands of semi-literate or illiterate prisoners and their families who were transported across the Urals and into (relative) oblivion.