Place, Power, and Experience in Tsarist Exile

Abstract

Place, Power, and Experience in Tsarist Exile Jennifer Keating Sarah Badcock, A Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism. 195 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0199641550. £60.00. Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars. 464 pp. New York: Knopf, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0307958907. $35.00. Few aspects of Russian history are as immediately evocative as the imperial exile system, even to the nonspecialist. From Avvakum to Chekhov, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, and beyond, Russia’s exile system has captured the imagination for centuries, synonymous with brutal depravity, isolation, incarceration, forced labor, and, of course, the frozen landscapes of Siberia. The sprawling collection of prisons, mines, exile settlements, roads, and the open spaces between, scattered across thousands of miles of taiga and tundra, have prompted writers and historians alike to grapple with both the physical dimensions of the exile system and its systemic function as an institution fundamental to the maintenance of autocracy.1 Two new monographs, whose titles incorporate two [End Page 849] of the most well-known metaphors that abound in descriptions of Russia’s carceral regime, add to this growing body of work, exploring exile as an institution and the experiences of prisoners, their wives, and their children in the process. In the spirit of Andrew Gentes’s wide-ranging surveys, Beer’s The House of the Dead explores tsarist exile from the reign of Alexander I to the collapse of the imperial order in 1917. Badcock’s A Prison without Walls? takes a narrower chronology, focusing on a 12-year period from 1905 to 1917. As the title of the latter suggests, tsarist exile was a form of confinement not necessarily bounded by physical constraint as such; both authors explore the system within and without the walls of katorga and transit prisons. Broad in scope and ambition, The House of the Dead charts the evolution of tsarist exile during the 19th and early 20th centuries, weaving together an expansive assembly of people and places into a compelling account rooted in the prisons and mines of central and eastern Siberia, but taking in Moscow, Petersburg, Poland, Paris, London, the United States, and beyond. This is a history written on a numerically and analytically sweeping scale, from the one million prisoners and their families exiled to Siberia during this period, to Beer’s overall suggestion that as the 19th century progressed, Siberia became “a giant laboratory of revolution” (6) and a critical influence on the collapse of tsarism in 1917. Beer maintains a watchful eye throughout on the wider arc of Russian history, developing eloquent connections to larger questions of sovereignty, limitations to autocratic power, the development of rights discourses, and the spread of European republicanism. This is a study of Siberia’s influence on modern Russia just as much as it is an exploration of the workings and consequences of Russia’s carceral institutions in Siberia. Exile, whether to settlement or hard labor, was an act of expulsion: a means of isolating, punishing, and depriving guilty parties of civic rights. At the same time, it was also a mechanism to populate and exploit Russia’s Siberian territories with ranks of convict settlers, and as both volumes reveal, the twin aims were as paradoxical as they were complementary. The act of exile was also a very physical manifestation of the vengeance and authority of the sovereign, and it is striking that Beer opens his account with the [End Page 850] return of the Bell of Uglich from Tobol´sk, the victim of the first “inanimate exile” under Boris Godunov 300 years earlier (3). Not simply an expression of retribution, exile was a performance of autocratic sovereignty that at its most symbolic extended beyond flesh and blood. By the early 19th century, several centuries of purging harmful elements from the Russian body politic had generated an extensive and chaotic institution, partially reformed under Speranskii’s Statutes on Exiles of 1822. Sentencing, travel, and imprisonment were standardized and streamlined, yet the rising number of those exiled to Siberia made adherence to the new rules almost impossible; a divergence between legislation and reality that would become commonplace as...