Siberian Exile in Tsarist Russia

Russia’s huge Asiatic hinterland of Siberia has always figured in the Western popular imagination as a limitless frozen wilderness, a place of punishment and exile for the unfortunate victims of Tsarist and Soviet authorities. Dostoevsky languished there for several years and afterwards described it as The House of the Dead , while an official government report of 1900 referred to, but dismissed, the concept of Siberia as ‘a vast roofless prison’. More recently Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago has reinforced this sombre and inhospitable image, which, while being an essential, though sinister, aspect of Siberia’s history, is by no means the whole story.

Ever since its early discovery and penetration in the sixteenth century, the region has attracted merchants, miners, trappers, hunters, peasants and explorers in their millions who have struggled to tap her vast natural resources. In the seventeenth century the lure was in the highly-prized sable and other furs; in the nineteenth century it was land; today it is oil, natural gas and a treasury of valuable mineral deposits buried beneath the dense forests and deep permafrost of northern Asia. Though Siberia’s fabulous resources have not been fully appreciated by all of Russia’s rulers, nevertheless from the time of the Muscovite Tsars to the present day Siberia has played, and will continue to play, an increasingly vital role in the nation’s economy. However, despite these and other positive aspects of the region’s environment, Siberia is still, in many people’s minds, synonymous with suffering and banishment, though in fact very little has been written outside Russia about the pre-revolutionary exile system since the American journalist George Kennan’s first-hand experiences of it were published in 1891.

Though judicial and administrative exile is still retained today as part of the Soviet penal system, the practice has not of course been historically peculiar to Russia. Ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, the judicial and political authorities of many countries have resorted to exile or banishment as a means of ridding society of what they regarded as criminal or subversive elements, sometimes with the twin aims of punishment and of populating sparsely inhabited territories or overseas colonies. Napoleon, for instance, once described exile as ‘le meilleur systà purger le monde ancien en peuplant un noveau’, though his own efforts in this direction were not marked by any real success.    

In classical antiquity, both the Greek city states and the Roman emperors used various forms of ostracism and exile as a means of getting rid of undesirables, though neither in the case of Greece nor Rome was exile used for the purposes of colonisation or for the punishment of common criminals. In more modern times various governments of western Europe developed their own systems of exile and transportation as their over- seas empires expanded. Spain and Portugal regularly deposited their criminals respectively in the Americas and in Africa, while France began the practice in the mid-sixteenth century by dispatching parties of criminals, hobos and whores to the New World – as described for example in l'abbévost's novel, Manon Lescaut . The most illustrious deportee to Devil's Island, off the Guyanese coast, was of course Captain Dreyfus, and though the use of exile diminished in France at the turn of this century it was not abandoned until around the Second World War.

The American War of Independence put a stop to Britain's profitable transportation traffic across the Atlantic and the government was forced to look elsewhere for further outlets. A plan to populate the Crimean peninsular with British convicts was turned down by Catherine the Great, and in 1788 began a half-century process of penal settlement in Australia, finally abolished in response to protests from the free colonists.

In Russia, for historical and geographical reasons, the system of exile (ssylka) developed independently from that of other nations, and in fact predates the discovery and penetration of Siberia itself. In medieval Russian law codes one finds reference to sentence of banishment as a form of punishment, and Ivan the Terrible resorted to the forcible resettlement of the entire population of rebellious cities like Novgorod and Pskov. An edict of 1582 listed certain towns on the periphery of Muscovy as places of banishment for certain offences, but it was really the rapid conquest of Siberia in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which gave the opportunity to introduce ssylka more widely into standard penal procedure. In the early years, exile to Siberia was often used as an act of clemency for offenders who would otherwise have incurred the death penalty and edicts dating from this time contain such judgements as, 'The Grand Sovereign has granted that his life be spared; instead of execution, let him be sent to Siberia'.

The organisation and distribution of those so exiled was at first in the care of the Bureau of Criminal Affairs (Razboinyi prikaz ) established in Tobolsk in 1586, and later in the Bureau of Siberian Affairs (Sibirskii prikaz ) which functioned until its abolition during the reign of Catherine the Great. The practice obviously spread very quickly, and there is even a popular legend that the town bell of Uglich was banished to exile in Tobolsk as retribution for sounding the tocsin which announced the mysterious death of the Tsarevich Dmitri in 1591.

In the seventeenth century, Tsar Alexei's Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 specified certain areas of Siberia, namely Yakutia and the Lena River, as places of exile, and prescribed this form of punishment for a number of offences from murder to trafficking in tobacco (tabachnichestvo ). Before starting their journey, the exiles were usually subjected to the routine Russian flogging and often suffered some form of physical mutilation. In 1679, for instance, Tsar Fyodor ordered that thieves and robbers should have two fingers severed from the hand, and thereafter sent with their families to compulsory agricultural labour in Siberia, a practice which, for sound practical reasons, was soon changed from fingers to ears. (George Kennan was later to note that snuff-takers exiled to Siberia were not only knouted but also had the septum ripped from their nostrils.) Despite these barbaric preliminaries, exile was already regarded as a means of increasing the region's working population, and the wives and children of those condemned were often sent to accompany their menfolk, thereby later adding to natural population increase. (There is a moving description of the trials and tribulations of one such famous exiled family in the autobiography of the rebel Archpriest Avvakum, banished beyond Lake Baikal for his part in the origins of the Russian Church Schism.) In 1662 the first census of the area revealed exiles already accounting for 8,000 out of a population of 70,000, the proportion being considerably higher in eastern Siberia.

During the reign of Peter the Great (1696-1725) the pattern of Siberian exile altered to some extent and was largely replaced by the punishment of katorga, or forced labour. In the ancient and medieval world a common punishment was to sentence criminals to work in galleys propelled by the collective muscle-power of the oarsmen. The medieval Greek word for galley was katergon and it was in this sense that it first entered the Russian vocabulary. In 1699 Peter sentenced a number of convicts 'to be knouted without mercy and sent to exile in Azov, there to work in the galleys [na katorgakh ]', but the term soon came to be applied to other forms of forced labour in mines and fortresses, and survived as the harshest category of Siberian exile until it was abolished by the Provisional Government in 1917.

During the period of dynastic crises which followed Peter's death in 1725 the social content of Siberian exile altered as victims of the palace coups and fallen favourites were banished to a respectable distance from the capital. In the seventeenth century the majority of exiles consisted of peasants, brigands and religious dissenters but now the remotest regions of Siberia became the temporary or permanent abode of disgraced government officials, counts, admirals, senators and scions of some of the highest families in the land. The individual fortunes of these distinguished exiles was highly varied, though in all cases subject to the caprice of whomsoever happened temporarily to control the government.

For example, Count Anton Devier, a Portuguese Jew by origin, was picked up by Peter the Great in Holland and later rose through government service to become police-chief of St. Petersburg. In 1728 he was arrested with others for complicity in a plot against Prince Alexander Menshikov, the power behind the throne, knouted and dispatched in chains to Yakutia. After twelve years in that frozen fastness he was appointed commander of the Okhotsk-Kamchatka region where he proceeded with the fortification of Okhotsk until his pardon and return to St. Petersburg in 1742. There he assumed his previous position as the capital's police-chief. The instigator of his persecution, Menshikov, was himself to follow his victims into exile, though not so far. In 1728, having fallen foul of Peter II, he became the first inmate of the garrison at Berezov in western Siberia, recently converted from a monastery into a state prison, where he died the following year.

Other distinguished deportees include ex-Vice-Chancellor, Count Mikhail Golovkin, who spent fourteen years at Kolyma – still one of the most notorious exile settlements of the Soviet Union; State Councillor Heinrich von Fick, one of Peter the Great's most eminent bureaucrats and, after his rehabilitation, author of an influential memorandum on the dreadful plight of the savagely exploited native tribes of Yakutia; ex-Vice-President of the Admiralty, Fyodor Soymonov, at first sentenced to be quartered for plotting against the Empress Anna, but later reprieved, knouted and exiled to Siberia where, under a more benevolent regime, he was later to become Governor and introduce some much needed reforms.

The lives of these, and many other similar individuals form a fascinating chapter in the history of Siberia, but it was not until the late eighteenth century, when the government became fully aware of the rich economic potential of the area, that it devoted its energies more systematically to the problem of populating Siberia with the manpower necessary to exploit its mineral and agricultural resources. To this end in December, 1760, the Empress Elizabeth promulgated a decree which gave noble landowners and others the right to send their recalcitrant serfs to Siberia. While incidentally increasing the power of the Russian nobility over their serfs, the principal aim of this ukaz and others which followed it was the forcible settlement of undeveloped areas while simultaneously providing a channel for the disposal of insolent or insubordinate peasants from the central provinces. As an inducement to the landowners to rid themselves in this way, so-called recruit-quittances were issued for each serf so exiled, thereby relieving the landowners of the obligation to provide military conscripts. Financial compensation was also provided for wives of the exiles who were bound by the terms of the decree to accompany them. The fact that the government insisted on only able- bodied serfs under the age of forty-five, and the fact that wives must (and children might) join them, underlines the colonising element of the decree; the lavish use of preliminary floggings and torture, and the awful conditions of the journey underline its punitive aspect.

It has recently been calculated by a Soviet historian that between the promulgation of the decree and the fourth official census of the territory in 1782, around 60,000 exiles of one type or another were sent to Siberia, and though these numbers are certainly significant, it can hardly be argued that the scheme was efficient or profitable in terms of a successful settlement policy. Indeed, many factors seriously militated against it. First, despite the wording and the intention of the decree of 1760, landowners regularly used it, if Governors' reports are to be believed, to divest themselves of peasants who were old, sick, physically feeble, maimed or otherwise unproductive. Second, those who were sound in wind and limb were also, by the very nature of the decree, likely to be rebellious or unreliable characters and unlikely to apply themselves with any vigour to their designated labours. Third, the lack of any proper provision for accommodation, supplies, medical care, the absence of sufficient transport facilities, the diseases and the dangers experienced while the exiles were on their eastwards march accounted for their further debilitation or death in hundreds and thousands. In 1760, for instance, the Governor of Siberia reported that of 2,151 exiles transferred from the Solikamsk salt-works to the mines of Nerchinsk in Transbaikal, 517 died of cold or starvation during a seven-weeks' slog through the swamps and forests of central Siberia. This proportion is probably typical of the convoy mortality rate overall. Fourth, for those who did survive the journey, the physical conditions encountered at their destination ranged from the inadequate to the intolerable and did nothing to enhance the orderly settlement of the area. Fifthly, little effort was made by the responsible authorities to distinguish between the different categories of exiles or to evaluate their suitability for particular treatment. Bandits and mass murderers sentenced by the courts; peasants who had willy-nilly joined in a local rebellion; religious dissenters; recaptured fugitive serfs; Polish nationalists; innocent children: all might find themselves mixed in the same convoy, dealt with by the same officials of the Exile Bureau at Omsk, referred to by the same nomenclature and treated equally inhumanely. Finally, the administration of the whole operation from arrest to arrival was so inefficient, brutal and corrupt, the wonder is it worked at all.

The man most responsible for attempting to bring some order out of the chaos and create a more efficient and cost-effective administration of the system was Alexander I's brilliant civil servant, Mikhail Speransky. Victim of palace intrigues and dashed constitutionalist dreams, Speransky was himself banished to Siberia in 1812 and later appointed to the governorship of the region in 1819. There he applied his bureaucratic skills to an overhaul of the entire administration of the region, including its exile system. His Exile Regulations (Ustav o ssyl'nykh ) of 1822 and the Exile Bureau (Prikaz o ssyl'nykh ), established at Tobolsk in 1823, set the pattern and created the organisational framework of Siberian exile which lasted, with some minor emendations, until the reform law of June, 1900. Ironically it was also Speransky, now returned to imperial favour, who took a prominent part in the investigation of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, which resulted in the execution of its five leading conspirators and the banishment of scores more to forced labour and exile in Siberia. The combined effects of Speransky's reform, which involved the keeping of regular records and statistics, and the increasing numbers of highly articulate political exiles, like the Decembrists, who left memoirs, accounts and correspondence about their experiences, enable us to assemble a much more detailed picture of Siberian exile in the nineteenth century than is possible in the earlier periods.

There were six main categories of exile. First came katorga. This punishment could only be inflicted by the courts and was either for a limited term or for life. Further gradations in the severity of the sentence were applied according to the location and type of forced labour prescribed, whether in the goldfields, coal-mines, chain-gangs or factories. Wives could accompany the condemned into exile, or could choose to remain behind, in which case their husbands were regarded as legally dead and the 'widows' were free to remarry. Conditions were vile in the extreme: long hours of work; regular floggings; foul food; overcrowding; prisoners shackled, their heads half-shaven and often chained to their work-tools. After serving a fixed number of years in confinement, the convict labourers were allowed to settle in the so-called 'free command' in the vicinity of the prison or place of work together with their families until the full expiry of their sentence. They were then forcibly settled among the rest of the exile population.

Next was Exile for Settlement in Siberia . Always for life, the harshness of this sentence depended on the remoteness of one's destination. Exiles from among the peasantry were settled on the land, either in specially designated communities (which were often rapidly ruined and depopulated as a result of incompetence, brigandage and flight) or among the villages of the old inhabitants of Siberia (starozhily ), with whom relations were frequently strained. Non-peasants in this category were permitted to reside in urban areas, seek employment and intermarry with the local population. After a certain term with good conduct they were released from the constant surveillance of the authorities and registered among the settled inhabitants of the community.

Third was Exile for Resettlement , a special category, conditions of which varied little from the previous one, but which was reserved for fugitives and vagrants. A further category was established in 1845 for offenders from the privileged classes whose social status made them exempt from corporal punishment. They travelled into exile in their own carriages, under supervision, and on arrival registered in the appropriate social estate and were permitted to engage in trade and industry. Fifth, mainly religious offenders, were those exiled to Settlement in the Caucasus – and thus not strictly speaking part of the Siberian exile system.

Finally came the category of Administrative Exile , which accounted for by far the great majority of all exiles in the nineteenth century (77,000 out of a total exile population of 148,000, i.e. 52 per cent, excluding dependents, during the 1880s and 1890s). Powers of administrative exile were exercised both by government and police authorities, and by local peasant and merchant communities; and it was this latter category which made up the largest numbers. At the end of the century only about 6 per cent of all administrative exiles had been banished by government or police for political offences, the rest were there by virtue of expulsion by the commune, Despite the small proportion of politicals it is still nevertheless true that the police used their powers of administrative exile with alarming arbitrariness. One needed only to be suspected of being likely to behave disloyally in order to incur the full weight of the administrative law, be detained incommunicado, have no access to lawyers or relatives, no entitlement to trial and finally be banished for anything up to ten years anywhere in the Empire.

The abuses of such a system are obvious, and there are countless stories about the grim fate of the innocent victims of the Okhrana , convicted for no offence, and left to rot in the Siberian wastes. Of the not so innocent, almost all the leading revolutionary figures of the nineteenth century, from the Decembrists to the Bolsheviks, ended up or spent a good deal of their time exiled in Siberia. Some fared better than others and were allowed to settle in the major towns of Siberia and suffered not too much discomfort. Many made valuable contributions to the social, cultural and scientific life of the area and in fact chose to stay on in Siberia when their sentence was complete.

For the convict labourers and the penal colonists (whether political or common) it was a grimmer story, and the abominable conditions of their exile drove many to the point of madness or suicide. In many ways the most painful part of the sentence was the journey there. Week by week the prison convoys crawled along the exile route by river and road from Moscow via Kazan, Tyumen and Tomsk and thence along the 1,000-mile etap route to Irkutsk. The etapy were staging- prisons set at forty-mile intervals, with 'half-way houses' (polu-etap ) between. The columns, moving in all extremes of climate, were marched in chains under heavy guard from one station to the next, staying overnight at the polu-etap , and permitted twenty-four hours rest at the regular etap. The process was repeated in three-day stages (two on the road, one off), until the three months' ordeal was over.

The etapy were wooden, stockaded buildings containing large communal cells with no furniture beyond the long, over-crowded communal bunks and a single open tub for excrement. Disease was rife in the convoys and etapy, in particular tuberculosis, typhus, scurvy and syphilis, and medical care was almost non-existent. The atmosphere in the unventilated cells was mephitic and the effects of two nights' incarceration often debilitated, rather than restored, one for the following forty-eight hours' tramp to the next equally repugnant etap . Before leaving each etap , exiles were given a tiny sum of money with which to buy rations from peasant villages on the journey. This meagre subsistence diet was often supplemented by the standard practice of begging – always with the convoy officers' permission and usually organised by the artel , or prisoner's commune, which was the exile equivalent of the peasant commune or trade corporation.

In the convoys and etapy , the artel 's word was law and the only punishment for disloyalty was death. It was responsible for organising escape attempts (or indeed preventing them in return far some concession); bribing the guards; smuggling illicit goods such as alcohol, and also confirming changes of identity. It was regular practice for names and hence categories of sentence to be exchanged en route . Unscrupulous, hard-bitten criminals sentenced to the mines at Nerchinsk might offer a few roubles, a bottle of vodka or a warm shirt to some unfortunate sentenced to a lighter punishment. Such might be the other's naïvety, craving for liquor, or physical condition that he was prepared to make the deal, temporarily to his physical gratification, but afterwards to condemn him to a living death. An injurious side effect of the practice was to facilitate the escape into Siberian society of large numbers of murderers, rapists and bandits, who, but for the changed identity business, would be kept to their designated place of confinement.

Another regular feature of Siberian exile life was the phenomenon of flight. Individual breaks for freedom from the convoys were common, though, if unsuccessful, severely punished either by the authorities or even by the artel . More interesting, though, was the annual, vernal exodus of hundreds of escaped convicts and penal colonists who simply quit their settlements, slipped their guards and disappeared into the forest wilderness of the taiga . The signal for this annual westward migration was the call of the first cuckoo in spring; after surviving the bitter Siberian winter, the call of the wild was for many irresistible, and despite the dangers, thousands left every year 'to serve in General Cuckoo's army', as the popular jargon put it. These vagabonds (brodyagi ) roamed either individually or in gangs, living in the summer by begging, tinkering, petty thieving or rustling livestock. Many would be recaptured, reshackled and returned along the convict road for resettlement, only to try their luck the following year.

Kennan met one old lag at the Kara goldfields who had made the journey in both directions no less than sixteen times. Old and weak, and by then living in semi-liberty, he asked to be locked up during the spring and summer, knowing he could not survive another season on the run, yet was constitutionally unable to resist the call of the cuckoo. Those who did not find shelter or were not recaptured fell victims in their hundreds to the sub-zero temperatures of the Siberian winter, and the spring thaw revealed countless corpses of those who had either frozen or starved to death, or else suffered the vengeance of the starozhily whose villages they had recently plundered. It has been calculated that at any one time, nearly a third of all the exile population was on the run, a factor which naturally posed serious problems not only for the authorities but also for Siberian society as a whole, both the old inhabitants and the increasing number of voluntary settlers.

The proportion of the exiled, as opposed to the free population of Siberia, fluctuated very much over the centuries and decades within centuries, and the contribution of exiles to the colonisation of the territory has been the subject of much historical and demographical debate. What is certainly clear, however, is that despite the size of the exile operation, the overwhelming weight of statistics goes to show that from the seventeenth century to the First World War the major factor in the increase of the Russian population of Siberia was not exile, but voluntary emigration and natural propagation. This was particularly the case in the later period. For instance, whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century the numbers of enforced immigrants was twice that of the free settlers, by the 1890s 1,078,000 peasants freely crossed the Urals to settle, as opposed to only 130,000 exiles.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century this disproportion is even more noticeable, although easily explained by a variety of factors of which the most important were the agrarian reforms introduced by Prime Minister Stolypin in the wake of the 1905 revolutionary situation, and the reform of the exile legislation itself introduced under the law of June 12th, 1900. On the one hand, the steady stream of voluntary trans-Urals migration observable around the turn of the century was swelled by Stolypin's positive financial encouragement given to peasant families willing to migrate; and on the other, the provisions of the 1900 reform cut down the number of exiles of various categories in response both to social and economic pressures, and penological considerations.

The government enquiry in 1900 was not the first time that Siberian exile had been the object of official scrutiny. Ever since the major reform of 1822, successive tsars, ministers, committees and officials had enquired into the effectiveness, the finances and the wisdom of the system; and the changes in the law, when they did eventually take place, were based on the same kind of evidence and arguments as had been known to the authorities for over half a century.

Lenin on one occasion described the new law as a development in the history of Siberia of equal importance to the building of the Trans-Siberian railway, though the reasons for this are difficult to see. Katorga was still retained, and indeed the range of offences for which it was prescribed was widened. Penal settlement was largely abolished for ordinary criminal offences, but retained for political and religious crimes. However, the peasant wars, the increasing incidence of industrial unrest, the 1905 revolution and the activities of the Social Democratic and Social Revolutionary parties in the first decade and a half after the reform provided a rich source and a continuing flow of involuntary recruits to the population of Asiatic Russia until 1917. Exile for Resettlement was henceforth confined to the island of Sakhalin, from which flight and vagabondage was virtually impossible, and the right of Administrative Exile by local communities greatly curtailed, though police and government agencies still retained their powers to exile political offenders.

In fact the only area where exile could claim to have any value, from the government standpoint, was in isolating the population at large from those it considered to be politically subversive by sending them to the remotest and most thinly populated parts of the Empire However, the case against the continuance of ssylka as a standard form of criminal punishment was that, first, it was costly; second, its contribution to the colonial settlement of Siberia was negligible, even negative, in the sense that most of what is sometimes described as the 'human material' was – at least by the State's own definition – of poor quality, i.e. lazy, insubordinate, inadequate, criminally inclined, antisocial, contumaceous and generally unsuited to the pioneering task of opening up new and difficult frontiers; third, as the massive build-up of free colonisation expanded in the late nineteenth century, the exile population constituted an unnecessarily unstable, dangerous and debilitating element in the social fabric of the region; finally, although exile certainly punished, if one of the aims of a penal policy is rehabilitation and reform, then there was no island of encouragement in the tsarist archipelago of Siberian punishment that could possibly reconcile or endear the average exile to the social, political and economic order by whose authority he had been originally marooned. The somewhat sanguine conclusion of one authoritative pre-revolutionary source on the legislation in question is that 'the law of 1900 again proves that at the present time, exile, throughout Europe, has fulfilled its historical function'.

However the fact that katorga, ssylka and compulsory settlement in Siberia have been utilised in the post-revolutionary period in far more massive and in- human proportions than ever before, together with the fact that the Soviet authorities are still plagued with similar problems of mineral extraction, labour shortage, inadequate social facilities and under-population, suggests that in Siberia at least (pace Napoleon), exile has not so far proved to be 'le meilleur systeme a purger le monde ancien en peuplant un nouveau'..    

Dr Alan Wood is Lecturer in Russian History and Head of the Department of Russian and Soviet Studies at the University of Lancaster.