I literally had never conceived of how the banished arrived in Siberia, I suppose I assume by train. Of course they walked, fettered, sometimes for two years through the worst of seasons before they could even begin their sentences.

The individual chapters read as lectures, without much narrative glue but the chapters together do illustrate the terrible tale. So many endless, thwarted upstarts and revolutionaries. ( )

Didn't actually finish it. Excellent account of Russian punishment... Siberian and otherwise. Also picked up lots of Russian history along the way. ( )

I came across this book while of all things reading a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche. There was reference to Dostoevsky's book of fiction/non-fiction of the similar title. So it peaked my curiosity and I thought I would give it a go.

The book covers roughly 100 years of the Czarist regimes efforts to deport to and also populate the remote and forbidding recesses of the vast Siberian expanse of Asia. Starting around the Decembrist uprising to the full Bolshevik revolution of 1917. A grim story of suffering and anguish for so many that suffered the fate of banishment and penal servitude. This encompassed a variety of offenders from street criminals and murderers to political dissidents and revolutionaries. Many paid with their lives but even more astonishingly many more survived. Yet few ever made it back to European Russia.

The many accounts and ordeals of these unfortunates play out in a never ending procession leading at some point to almost monotony. And the end result was that despite their oppression the tide eventually turned as the aristocracy was itself obliterated. Lesson learned. Or was it, as this was simply replaced with the intensified version of the Soviet answer to opposition on an even greater scale. ( )

The Russian "Exile System" during the 19th century was a fraction of the size of the more famous Gulag system under the Soviets in th 20th. They were not exactly the same but both systems solved two problems: how to deal with "sedition" (political agitators) and criminals; and how to obtain labor for resource extraction (mines and lumber). For the Tsar's in the early 19th century the solution was simple and obvious - send the rabble to Siberia to be forgotten. It worked for a while but by the 1860s the contradictions and public outrage began to undermine its legitimacy. What started as a good idea lasted far longer than it should have at huge human cost and arguably was an accelerant of the Russian Revolution.

Many famous books have been written by Exiles in the 19th century including Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead (1860). Lenin spent three years in an exile camp. Checkhov wrote a series of articles later published as a book Sakhalin Island. The thread of exile runs long and deep in Russian history.

What this history teaches is how a fundamentally inhumane system that almost everyone agrees is wrong can still become self-reinforcing and impossible to dismantle for economic and political reasons, a problem that continues to this day in many forms and places. A modern example of this is described in the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. ( )

It was known as 'the vast prison without a roof'. From the
beginning of the nineteenth century to the Russian
Revolution, the tsarist regime exiled more than one million
prisoners and their families beyond the Ural Mountains to
Siberia. Daniel Beer's new book, The House of the Dead, brings
to life both the brutal realities of an inhuman system and the
tragic and inspiring fates of those who endured it. This is the
vividly told history of common criminals and political radicals,
the victims of serfdom and village politics, the wives and
children who followed husbands and fathers, and of fugitives
and bounty-hunters.
Siberia served two masters: colonization and punishment. In
theory, exiles would discover the virtues of self-reliance,
abstinence and hard work and, in so doing, they would
develop Siberia's natural riches and bind it more firmly to
Russia. In reality, the autocracy banished an army not of
hardy colonists but of half-starving, desperate vagabonds.
The tsars also looked on Siberia as creating the ultimate
political quarantine from the contagions of revolution.
Generations of rebels - republicans, nationalists and socialists
- were condemned to oblivion thousands of kilometres from
European Russia. Over the nineteenth century, however,
these political exiles transformed Siberia's mines, prisons and
remote settlements into an enormous laboratory of
revolution.
This masterly work of original research taps a mass of almost
unknown primary evidence held in Russian and Siberian
archives to tell the epic story of both Russia's struggle to
govern its monstrous penal colony and Siberia's ultimate,
decisive impact on the political forces of the modern world.
Daniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at
Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of
Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal
Modernity, 1880-1930, 2008.