Abstract
Despite the sombre reputation of Siberia as a land of punishment and exile, the origins, organisation and development of the system of punitive banishment under the tsars has attracted little scholarly attention in the west.2 This is not owing to a shortage of research materials, nor is there a corresponding lack of interest in the subject on the part of Soviet scholars.3 Among the various primary and secondary sources available to the researcher in this area, apart from government records, official reports and criminal statistics, are the memoirs of the more literate and articulate victims of the system, exiled to Siberia for various forms of subversive activity (if only of a cerebral nature) which the authorities deemed to be either actually or potentially injurious to the state. Although the numbers of those banished for political reasons (gosudarstvennyye prestupniki) represented only a tiny minority of the total exile population,4 nevertheless the literary expertise of many of those who survived to recount their experiences helped to establish and perpetuate the notoriety of what Dostoyevskiy after his own incarceration there described as The House of the Dead.5 If one were to look for a prototype in the long, dismal repertoire of Siberian prison and exile literature, one would surely turn to the autobiography of the seventeenth-century Russian rebel-priest, Avvakum Petrovich (1620?–82).6
This chapter is based on a paper originally given at a meeting of the Mediaeval Russian and East European Study Group held at Clare College, Cambridge, November 1984, and subsequently at a conference of the Pacific coast branch of the American Historical Association at the University of Honolulu, Hawaii, summer 1986.
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Notes and References
The first and last major western study of the topic was that of the American journalist George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols, New York, 1891 (republished in heavily abridged version, Chicago, 1958). Kennan did not of course have access to ministerial archives made available since the 1917 Revolution, and his principal concern was with the plight of political exiles. Other western publications have been confined to fairly narrow aspects of the system, for example,
Glynn Barratt, Voices in Exile: The Decembrist Memoirs, Montreal and London, 1974;
Alpo Juntunen, Suomalaisten Karkottaminen Siperiaan Autonomian Aikana ja Karkotetut Siperiassa, Turku, 1983.
For a brief historical survey see Alan Wood, ‘Siberian Exile in Tsarist Russia’, History Today, 30, September 1980, pp. 19–24 and ‘Crime and Punishment in the House of the Dead’, in Linda Edmondson (ed.), Civil Rights in imperial Russia, Oxford, 1988, pp. 216–33.
There is an enormous monographical literature in Russian devoted to the social, juridical, penological, economic and colonising aspects of Siberian exile. Among the most recent Soviet publications see, for example, M. N. Gernet, Istoriya tsarskoy tyur’my, 5 vols, Moscow, 1960–3;
V. N. Dvoryanov, V sibirskoy dal’ney storone, 2nd edn, Minsk, 1985;
L. M. Goryushkin (ed.), Ssylka i katorga v Sibiri (XVIII — nachalo XXv.) Novosibirsk, 1975; Ssylka i obshchestvenno-politiches-kaya zhizn’ v Sibiri (XVIII — nachalo XXv.) Novosibirsk, 1978; Politicheskiye ssyl’nyye v Sibiri (XVIII — nachalo XXv.) Novosibirsk, 1983;
E. A. Skripelev (ed.), Gosudarstvenno-pravovyye instituty samoderzhaviya v Sibiri, Irkutsk, 1982. On the later period see also the journal Katorga i ssylka, Moscow, 1921–35.
In the nineteenth century about one per cent (excluding several thousands of Poles banished after the 1830 and 1863 uprisings); see A. Margolis, ‘O chislennosti i razmeshchenii ssyl’nykh v Sibiri v kontse XIXv.’ in Goryushkin (ed.), 1975, p. 233.
F. M. Dostoyevskiy, Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v tridtsati tomakh, vol. IV, Leningrad, 1972.
A. N. Robinson (ed.), Zhizneopisaniya Avvakuma i Epifaniya: Issledovaniye i teksty, Moscow, 1963. Hereafter, reference to the actual text of Avvakum’s Life in Robinson’s edition is given as Zhizneopisaniya, and to the editor’s valuable commentary as Robinson. All translations are by the present author.
The precise dating of Yermak’s expedition is still a subject of controversy: see Terence Armstrong (ed.), Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia, London, 1974, pp. 1–13;
R. G. Skrynnikov, ‘Podgotovka i nachalo Sibirskoy ekspeditsii Yermaka’, Voprosy istorii, 8, 1979, pp. 44–56; Sibirskaya ekspeditsiya Yermaka, Novosibirsk, 1982.
P. N. Butsinskiy, Zaseleniye Sibiri i byt yeya pervykh nasel’nikov, Kharkov, 1889;
S. V. Bakhrushin, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii Sibiri v XVI i XVIIvv., Moscow, 1927–8;
R. J. Kerner, The Urge to the Sea: The Course of Russian History: The Role of Rivers, Portages, Ostrogs, Monasteries and Furs, 2nd edn, New York, 1971, pp. 66–88;
A. P. Okladnikov (ed.), Istoriya Sibiri s drevneyshikh vremen do nashikh dney, vol. 2, Leningrad, 1968, pp. 25–60;
P. P. Yepifanov, ‘K istorii osvoyeniya Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka v XVII veke’, Istoriya SSSR, 4, 1981, pp. 70–84;
N. I. Nikitin, Sibirskaya epopeya XVII veka: nachalo osvoyeniya Sibiri russkimi lyud’mi, Moscow, 1987.
A valuable collection of translated materials is contained in B. Dmytryshyn, E. Crownhart-Vaughan and T. Vaughan (eds), Russia’s Conquest of Siberia: A Documentary Record, 1558–1700, Western Imprints — Oregon Historical Society, Portland, 1985.
R. H. Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, 1550–1700, Berkeley, 1943, pp. 28–47, 108–22, 184–234.
I. Ya. Foynitskiy, Ucheniye o nakazaniyakh v svyazi s tyur’movedeniyem, St Petersburg, 1889, p. 260.
Ibid., p. 261. A bizarre aspect of this exercise was the decision also to exile the town bell of Uglich for having sounded the tocsin on Dmitriy’s death! It remained in the Kremlin at Tobol’sk until 1892 when it was returned to the museum at Uglich; see S. V. Maksimov, Sibir’ i katorga, 3rd edn, St Petersburg, 1900, p. 369.
Butsinskiy (Zaseleniye Sibiri, p. 198) calculates that, between 1593 and 1645, 1500 persons were exiled to Siberia, excluding wives and dependents. By 1662 the number had risen to 7400 out of a total Russian population of 105 000. See also N. M. Yadrintsev, Sibir’ kak koloniya, St Petersburg, 1882, p. 127.
Ssylka v Sibir’, p. 7. See also the contemporary comments of Yu. Krizhanich on the usefulness and sound sense of the exile system in J. M. Letiche and B. Dmytryshyn, Russian Statecraft: the Politika of Iurii Krizhanich, Oxford, 1985, p. 162.
For a fuller discussion of these problems see N. M. Yadrintsev, Russkaya obshchina v tyur’me i ssylke, St Petersburg, 1872, pp. 259–305;
Alan Wood, ‘General Cuckoo’s Army: Siberian Brigands and Brodyagl’, Britain-USSR, 65, September, 1983, pp. 5–8; ‘Sex and Violence in Siberia: Aspects of the Tsarist Exile System’, in John Massey Stewart and Alan Wood, Siberia: Two Historical Perspectives, London, 1984, pp. 23–42.
The title of a twentieth-century account of Siberian exile: Andrei Amalrik, Involuntary Journey to Siberia, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, London, 1970.
The literature on the origins of the Raskol is legion: see, for example, V. E. Gusev’s introduction in N. K. Gudziy (ed.), Zhitiye protopopa Avvakuma im samim napisannoye i drugiye ego sochineniya, Moscow, 1960, pp. 5–16;
Pierre Pascal, Avvakum et les débuts du Raskol: La crise religieuse au XVIIe siècle en Russie, Paris, 1938 (hereafter cited as Pascal, Raskol);
S. Zenkovskiy, Russkoye staroobryadchestvo, Munich, 1970;
for a short discussion see Alan Wood, ‘Archpriest Avvakum and the Russian Church Schism’, Exeter Tapes, R790, University of Exeter, 1979.
V. K. Nikol’skiy, ‘Sibirskaya ssylka protopopa Avvakuma’ (Rossiyskaya assotsiatsiya nauchno-issledovatel’nikh institutov obshchestvennykh nauk, Institut istorii) Uchenyye zapiski, II, Moscow, 1927, p. 159.
George V. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Colonial Administration, Berkeley, 1943, pp. 34–5, 47–61.
For further material on Tobol’sk in the mid-seventeenth century see S. A. Belokurov, ‘Yu. Krizhanich v Rossii. Iz dukhovnoy zhizni moskovskogo obshchestva XVIIv.’, in Chteniya v Obshchestve istorii i drevnostey Rossiyskikh, 205, Moscow, 1903, pp. 108–18.
Zhizneopisaniya, p. 150. It is possible that the speed and progression of soft tissue and blood-borne infection which one would expect to follow such a ferocious beating (as a result of the breached skin and deep flesh wounds being vulnerable to air- and earth-borne infection), could have been reduced by the sub-zero temperatures of the Siberian winter. Bacterial replication is temperature-dependent. Also the vascular response to low temperature would be to reduce blood flow to, and hence blood loss from, the injured area. Progression of the infection would be slowed down by the low perfusion level and low oxygen supply to the damaged tissue. Incarceration in the freezing tower may, therefore, actually have saved Avvakum’s life, as he might otherwise have died of resultant blood-poisoning — a common form of death after flogging. See Harry de Windt, The New Siberia, London, 1896, p. 310. (The author is grateful to Dr John Halloran of the Medical Centre, University of Lancaster, for confirming the pathological details of this hypothesis.) The tower in which Avvakum was imprisoned is traditionally thought to be the one that now stands in the grounds of Kolomenskoye museum park in Moscow. Another similar tower from the seventeenth-century fortress still remains at Bratsk, not far from the famous hydro-electric station which has now harnessed the enormous energy of the Padun Rapids first described by Avvakum (see Plate 3).
Pierre Pascal, ‘La conquête de l’Amour. II. Les campagnes de Paškov’, Revue des Études slaves, XXVI, 1950, pp. 55–8. Hereafter Pascal, ‘La conquête, II’.
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Wood, A. (1989). Avvakum’s Siberian Exile: 1653–64. In: Wood, A., French, R.A. (eds) The Development of Siberia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20378-9_2
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