Vagabondage and the Tsarist Siberian exile system: power and resistance in the penal landscape

Abstract

Between 1827 and 1846 Russia exiled as vagrants (brodiagi) to Siberia 48,566 persons, who accounted for 30.4% – the single largest cohort – of exiles during that period. Exiled brodiagi's numbers fell briefly after 1846, due to government efforts to use them in labour battalions, but reached unprecedented levels following serf emancipation. This, like other anti-vagrancy campaigns, was symptomatic of states' increasing domination over society and highlights a modernizing process that prohibits nomadism while promoting sedentariness. Yet, although brodiagi were produced by the state's exercise of power, they managed to display agency by resisting this power. The resultant struggle led to Siberia being turned into contested ground. Embodied within this struggle was the larger struggle between tsarist state and society: operating at the edges of society, in a region far removed, or ‘deranged’, from the centre, Siberia's brodiagi manifested, both territorially and behaviourally, the ‘extremities’ that Foucault has spoken of with regard to power, how it functions and how it is resisted.