Abstract
Little information exists concerning exile during the period 1725-62,’ but it is clear that whereas both exile and katorga expanded, the balance shifted in the direction of the former as Peter’s successors focused on colonizing Siberia. During this period, the penological distinction between exile (ssylka) and katorga grew almost imperceptible as the state shuttled convicts between settlements and labor sites with little regard for judicially imposed sentences. Elizabeth Petrovna attempted to systematize and regularize the use of exile and katorga, introducing a scale of punishments for the first time in Russian history; however, the administration of these punishments rarely coincided with the regulations.
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Notes
Alan Wood, ‘Siberian Exile in the Eighteenth Century’, Siberica 1, no. 1 (1990): 38–64.
F. G. Safronov, ‘Ssylka v vostochnuiu Sibir’ v pervoi polovine XVIII v.’, in Ssylka i katorga v Sibiri (XVIII—nachalo XXV.), ed. L. M. Goriushkin et al. (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1975), 19–21; Wood, Siberica: 47–8. Despite having been abolished by Peter, voevody briefly reappeared during Anna’s reien.
I. V. Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’ vazhneishikh dannykh iz istorii Sibiri: 1032–1882gg. (1883; rpt. Surgut: Severnyi dom, 1993), 129–30; Wood, Siberica: 49;
S. Maksimov, ‘Gosudartsvennye prestupniki. Piataia chast’, Otechestvennyia zapiski 9(September 1869): 229–72 [here D. 2451.
N. M. Iadrintsev, Russkaia obshchina v tiur’rne i ssylke (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia A. Morigerovskago, 1872), 514.
Cf. Evgenii Anisimov, Dyba i knut: politicheskii sysk i russkoe obshchestvo v XVIII veke (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 655;
Aleksandr B. Kamenskii, The Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Gentuly: Searching for a Place in the World, trans. David Griffiths (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997) 148.
Iadrintsev, Russkaia obshchina, 518, 546. The figure for Siberia’s Russian population includes both sexes and is based on those provided in Tabeli gubernii, provintsii i uezdov s oznacheniem ikh narodonasaleniia v 1766 godu, as reproduced in Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 180. See also A. P. Okladnikov et al., eds., Istoriia Sibiri s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, 5 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1968–9) 2: tables, pp. 183–4.
G. Peizen, Istoricheskii ocherk kolonizatsii Sibiri’, Sovremennik 77, no. 9 (1859): 9–46 [here, pp. 22–4];
I. Ia. Foinitskii, Uchenie o nakazanii v sviazi s tiur’movedeniem (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva putei soobshcheniia [A. Benke], 1889), 267; Ssylka v Sibir’: ocherk eia istorii i sovremennago polozheniia (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia S.-Peterburgskoi Tiur’my, 1900), 14–15; Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen ; 132;
G. S. Fel’dstein, Ssylka: eiagenezisa, znacheniia, istorii i sowemennogo sostoianiia (Moskva: T-vo skoropechatni A. A. Levenson, 1893), 152, 156;
G. M. Lappo, ed., Goroda Rossii (Moskva: Nauchnoe izdatel’stvo, 1994), 547. Not all sources agree on the year the Okhotsk colony was attempted.
M. M. Gromyko, Zapadnaia Sibir’ v XVIII v.: Russkoe naselenoe i zemledel ‘cheskoe osvoenie (Novosibirsk: ‘Nauka’ Sibirskoe Otdelenie, 1965), table, p. 55, and p. 94.
Iu. I. Smirnov, Orenburgskaia ekspedistiia (komissiia) i prisoedinenie Zavolzh k Rossii v 30–40-egg. XVIII veka (Samara: Samarskii universitet, 1997), 41, table 1, pp. 56–7, table 9, p. 142.
For more on the expedition, see Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2004). 46–9.
Sergei Dizhur, ‘Russkaia ssylka. Eia istoriia i ozhidaemaia reforma’, Russkoe bogatstvo 4 (April, 1900): 45–64 [here, pp. 48–9].
K. I. Protopopov, ‘Eniseiskaia politicheskaia ssylka ot dekabristov do 1917 goda’, in Eniseiskaia ssylka: Sbonzik eniseiskogo zemliachestva, ed. V. N. Sokolov (Moskva: Politkatorzhan. 1934). 7.
The plet’ was similar to the knout in construction. Harry De Windt, who toured Siberia in 1894, describes it as a heavy whip weighing 8 lb, with a handle 1 foot long and a solid leather lash 2½ feet long tapering into three circular thongs the size of a man’s little finger. Harry De Windt, The New Siberia (London: Chanman and Hall. 1896). 92.
M. A. Braginskii, ed., Nerchinskaia katorga: Sbornik nerchinskogo zemliachestva (Moskva: Politkatorzhan, 1933), 8;
I. Bogoliubskii, Istoriko-statisticheskii ocherk proizvoditel’nosti Nerchinskago Gornago Okruga s 1703 po 1871 god (S.-Peterburg: V Tip. V. Demakova, 1872), 1–3; Anon., ‘Vzgliad na Dauriiu i v osobennosti na Nerchinskie gornye zavody’ [part of a series], Sibirskii vestnik 9 (15 May 1823): 107–20 [here, p. 108]; Komogortsev, ‘Iz istorii chernoi metallurgii’, 100–3;
Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 81, table 3.7, and pp. 84–5. In the 1710s Peter sponsored expeditions to Central Asia and the Irtysh region to search for gold. Although small amounts were mined in Siberia during the eighteenth century, gold mining would not become a significant industry there until the middle of the nineteenth century. Kahan estimates that during the eighteenth century gold production ‘was never more than one-third of the [empire’s] total value of silver and gold output’. The Plow, 81.
See also Z. G. Karpenko, Gornaia i metallurgicheskaia promyshlennost’ Zapadnoi Sibiri v 1700–1860 godakh (Novosibirsk: Izdatel’stvo Sibirskozo otdeleniia AN SSSR. 1963). 37.
W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (New York: Random House, 1994), 97.
V. I. Semevskii, Rabochie na sibirskikh zolotykh prornyslakh: istoricheskoe izsledovanie, 2 vols. (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia M. Stasiulevicha, 1898) 1: xxxi–xii, 296–7; ibid. 2: 565; Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 103; Lappo, Goroda Rossii, 293; ‘Vzgliad na Dauriiu,’ Sibirskii vestnik 3 (15 February 1823): 27–48 [here. pp. 28–9. 37].
Vasilii Otemirov, ‘Gramota o pervonachal’nom Gornom proizvodstve v Sibiri’, Sibirskii vestnik 10 (October 1822): 120–4. Shcheglov writes that Levandian was sent to the Tomsk region in 1696; but if his date is correct, it must have been after Levandian sent his letter to Peter, the date Otemirov provides. Cf. Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 98 and n.
Cyril Bryner, ‘The Issue of Capital Punishment in the Reign of Elizabeth Petrovna’, Russian Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 389–416.
William Coxe, Travels in Poland and Russia: Three Volumes in One (New York: Arno Press, 1970) 3: 116–17.
John P. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age ot Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 188 and see discussion beginning on D. 186.
Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 58–9.
Jonathan W. Daly, ‘Criminal Punishment and Europeanization in Late Imperial Russia’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47 (2000): 341–62 [here, table 3 p. 3481.
Dostoevskii, who served time during the 1850s, remarks on fellow prisoners’ tattooed faces in Notes from a Dead House; and a photograph from the period shows a convict with a ‘K’ tattooed on his forehead and letters on each cheek. Photo reproduced in Lincoln, Conquest; Benson Bobrick, East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia (New York: Poseiden Press, 1992). Frequent references to fugitive exiles being identifiable by tattoos appear in early nineteenth century documents from Irkutsk guberniia. See GAIO, f. 435, op. 1.
Alan Wood, ‘Crime and Punishment in the House of the Dead’, in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 221; idem, Siberica: 55; idem, ‘Administrative Exile and the Criminals’ Commune in Siberia’, in Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society, ed. Roger Bartlett (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 396–7;
V. N. Dvorianov, V sibirskoi dal’nei storone …(ocherki istorii politicheskoi katorgi i ssylki. 60-e gody XVIII v.-1917 g.) (Minsk: Nauka i tekhnika, 1985), 26–8.
Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NI: Princeton University Press, 1961), 430.
Quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 301.
M. N. Gernet, Istoriia tsarskoi tiur’my, 5 vols., 3rd edn. (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1960–63) 1: 238, 354 et passim, and ch. 6.
Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 183; Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999);
Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in theAge of Catherine the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 239ff.
Cf. Marc Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1956) 17.
A. M. Selishchev, Zabaikal’skie staroobriadtsy. Semeiskie (Irkutsk: Izdanie Gosudarstvennago Irkutskago Universiteta, 1920), 71–2, 74; ‘0 sostoianii novykh poselenii v iuzhnoi Sibiri, i o tamoshchnem pchelovodstve. (Iz Nordisches Archiv. juni 1803. Sochinenie G. Berensa.) (Soobshcheno.),’ Sibirskii vestnik 2 (1820): 293–305;
N. A. Minenko, ‘Ssyl’nye krest’iane — ‘poliaki’ na Altae v XVIII-pervoi polovine XIX v.’, in Politicheskie ssyl’nye v Sibiri (XVIII-nachalo XX v.), ed. L. M. Goriushkin (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1983), 199, 201–2; ‘Zapiski o Sibiri. (Prolozhenie.) Kratkoe opisanie Zabaikal’skago kraia,’ Zhurnal Ministerstva Vnutrennykh Del 3 (1830): 165–82 [here, pp. 173–4];
Jeanne Haskett, ‘Decembrist N. A. Bestuzhev in Siberian Exile, 1826–55’, Studies in Romanticism 4, no. 4 (1965): 185–205 [here, D. 193].
Jesse Clardy, ‘Radishchev’s Notes on the Geography of Siberia’, Russian Review 21, no. 4 (1962): 362–9 [here, p. 369]; Anisimov, Dyba, 635.
See also David Marshall Lang, The First Russian Radical: Alexander Radishchev, 1749–1802 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), 216 et passim;
Susi K. Frank, ‘Aleksandr Radishchev’s Interpretation of Shamanism in the Russian and European Context of the Late Eighteenth Century’, in The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia’s Wild East, ed. Eva-Maria Stolberg (Frankfurt-am-Main: Lang, 2005), 43–61.
These reports are contained in GAIO, f. 24, op. 3, k. 1, d. 11. One dated 8 October 1825 is reproduced, along with some additional information on later reports, in L. M. Goriushkin, ed., Politicheskaia ssylka v Sibiri: Nerchinskaia katorga (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1993), doc. no. 2.
Antoni Kuczynski, ‘La contribution des Polonais au processus de civilisation de la Sibérie au début de la colonisation russe’, in Sibérie II: Questions sibériennes, ed. Boris Chichlo (Paris: Insitut d’études slaves, 1999), 241. Concerning those Poles allowed to return home, it appears many obtained this right almost immediately after arriving in Siberia due to the Pugachev rebellion. Recall that in her manifesto abolishing exile, Catherine wrote of ‘not an insignificant number of Poles … awaiting resettlement to their homelands’
S. V. Maksimov, Sibir’ i katorga, 3rd edn. (S.-Peterburg: Izdanie V. I. Gubinskago, 1900), 337.
See also Boleslav Shostakovich, ‘Irkutskie stranitsy “Dnevnika” ssyl’nogo kostiushkovtsa Iuzef Koptsa (k 200-letiiu pol’skogo vostaniia 1794g.)’, Zemlia irkutskaia 2 (1994): 46–51; ibid., 3 (1995): 60–2.
Oliver Pasfield, ed., The Memoirs of Mauritius Augustus Count de Benyowsky in Siberia, Kamchatka, Japan, the Liukiu Islands and Formosa, trans. William Nicholson (New York: Macmillan, 1893), passim. See also Maksimov, Sibir’ (1900), 331–6;
Marina Vasilenko, “‘Bunt ot soslannykh zlodeev …”’, Zemlia irkutskaia 3 (1995): 27–9;
G. Patrick March, Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 77;
Edward Kajdanski, ‘The Authenticity of Maurice Benyowsky’s Account of His Voyage through the Bering Sea: The Earliest Description and the Earliest Drawings of St. Lawrence Island’, Terrae Incognitae 23 (1991): 51–80.
LeDonne, RulingRussia, 280. See also Kabuzan and Troitskii, ‘Dvizhenie naselenie’, table 4, p. 150; Robert D. Givens, ‘Eighteenth-Century Nobiliary Career Patterns and Provincial Government’, in Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuty, ed. Walter McKenzie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney (London: Macmillan, 1980), 117 et passim; Walter M. Pintner, ‘The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755–1855,’ in ibid., 209;
Richard E. Pipes, ‘The Russian Military Colonies, 1810–1831,’ Journal of Modern History 22, no. 3 (September 1950): 205–19 [here, p. 207];
T. N. Kandaurova and B. B. Davydov, ‘Voennye poseleniia v otsenke’, Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriia VIII: Istoriia 2 (1992): 44–55.
A. D. Kolesnikov, ‘Ssylka i zaselenie Sibiri’, in Ssylka i katorga v Sibiri (XVIII nachalo XX v.), ed. L. M. Goriushkin et al. (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1975), 51; Wood, Siberica: 56, 59; Memoirs of … Benyowsky, 95. Revision cited in Dvorianov. V sibirskoi stomne. 29.
Stephen D. Watrous, ed., John Ledyard’s Journey through Russia and Siberia, 1787–1788: The Journal and Selected Letters (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 152–3.
N. V. Sushkov,‘O Sibirskikh solianykh promyslakh,’ Sibirskii vestnik 14 (1821): 225–74, 315–26 [here, p. 271 and n.];
S. Maksimov, ‘Sibirskaia sol”, in Zhivopisnaia Rossiia. Otechestvo nashe v ego zemel’nom, istoricheskom, plemennom, ekonomicheskom i bytovom znachenii, ed. P. P Semenov (S.-Peterburg: Izdanie Tovarishchestva M. O. Vol’f, 1895), 319.
See also related chapters in V. B. Borodaev et al., eds., Guliaevskie chteniia. Vyp. 1: Materialy pervoi, vtoroi i tret’ei istoriko-arkhivnykh konferentsii (Barnaul: Upravlenie arkhivnogo dela administratsii Altaiskogo kraia and Laboratoriia istoricheskogo kraevedeniia Barnaul’skogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta, 1998).
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Gentes, A.A. (2008). ‘Punishment for Insignificant Crimes’. In: Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583894_4
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