What Was the Siberian Exile in Imperial Russia?
In January 1930, in the Polish village of Hlybokaye (now in Belarus), a Soviet tractor brigade discovered a mass grave of several hundred bodies, the remains of Polish officers and intellectuals executed by the Soviet NKVD in the spring of 1940. The Katyn massacre of 1940 is the most-cited case in the 20th century of a Russian imperial practice that goes back more than three centuries: the practice of removing political opponents, real or potential, to the remote eastern periphery of the empire. Siberian exile (ssylka v Sibir’), as it was called, was the most distinctive feature of the Russian imperial penal system, and it remained in use, with various modifications, from the 16th century until 1917 (see Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002; Levin, The Earliest Modern Russian Laws of Criminal Procedure, 1995).
The origins
The practice of Siberian exile developed gradually over the centuries, as the Russian state expanded eastward and the Siberian frontier came under Russian control. The earliest exiles were political prisoners, including the followers of the various pretenders and rebels of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and the system expanded as the Russian state developed a more complex system of criminal punishment. The 1649 Sobornoe ulozhenie, the Muscovite Law Code of Tsar Alexis, was the first comprehensive Russian criminal code, and it included provisions for exile to Siberia for the worst categories of crime.
The expansion of the exile system reached its peak in the 18th and 19th centuries. The government of Peter the Great and his successors developed a more systematic approach to exile, with the establishment of special courts and administrative procedures for sentencing exiles. The number of exiles grew rapidly, and the exile system became a fixture of Russian criminal and political punishment.
The exile system
The exile system was administered by a special department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and it was supervised by various local officials in Siberia. The exiles were sent to various destinations in Siberia, including Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk, and to the various penal colonies and settlements that had been established throughout the region.
The conditions of the exiles varied considerably. Some exiles, particularly the political prisoners and the members of the nobility, were treated relatively well, and they were able to maintain a reasonable standard of life in the larger Siberian cities. Other exiles, particularly the common criminals, were subjected to harsh conditions in the penal colonies, and many of them died from disease, exposure, and overwork. The harshest fate was the katorga, a regime of penal hard labour served at sites such as the Nerchinsk mines and the island of Sakhalin, and particularly associated with the mines and the construction projects of the Siberian frontier (see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).
The journey to Siberia was itself an ordeal. The exiles were typically forced to walk thousands of kilometres from their homes in European Russia to their destinations in Siberia, and many of them died from disease, exposure, and exhaustion during the journey. The conditions of the journey were particularly harsh in the winter, and the exiles were often subjected to abuse by the guards and the local population.
The Decembrist exiles and the literature of exile
The most famous exiles were the Decembrists, the military conspirators of 14 December 1825 who had attempted to prevent the accession of Nicholas I. The five Decembrist leaders — Pavel Pestel, Kondraty Ryleyev, Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Pyotr Kakhovsky — were executed. The remaining 31 Decembrists were sentenced to hard labour in Siberia: 8 of them to the Nerchinsk mines, 8 of them to the Chita mines, and 15 of them to the Petrovskii Zavod. The Decembrist exiles, who had access to a small library and a few personal effects, became the nucleus of the Siberian intelligentsia.
The wives of the Decembrists — Maria Volkonskaya, Ekaterina Trubetskaya, and others — followed their husbands into exile, and their stories became the central chapter of the Decembrist legend in Russian literature and culture. Nekrasov’s long poem Russian Women (1871-1872), which celebrates the wives of the Decembrists, is the best-known literary treatment of the Siberian exile. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House (1862), based on his own experience of four years of penal servitude in Omsk, is the best-known literary treatment of the katorga (Levin, 1995).
The peak of the system
The peak of the exile system came in the late 19th century. By the 1890s, the exile system held an estimated 800,000 people, of whom about 300,000 were administrative exiles and about 500,000 were penal exiles. The 1897 census recorded about 800,000 exiles in Siberia, of whom about 25 per cent were political exiles and the rest were criminal exiles. The exiles were concentrated in Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk, and in the agricultural settlements of the south Siberian steppe.
The exile system was reformed in 1900-1903. The most important reform was the 1900 law of 12 June 1900, which sharply curtailed judicial exile to Siberia. The 1903 reform of the criminal code, which came into effect in 1903, abolished the most severe forms of the exile system and introduced a more humane system of criminal punishment. The 1905 October Manifesto produced a general amnesty of political prisoners, and the exile system was effectively abolished (Figes, 2002; Figes, 1996).
The end of the exile system
The exile system was finally abolished in 1917, with the revolution that overthrew the imperial government. The Soviet government did not, however, abolish the practice of removing political opponents to the remote eastern periphery: the Gulag system of the 1930s-1950s, the spetsposeleniye (special settlements) of the 1940s-1960s, and the internal exile of dissidents of the 1960s-1980s are all direct continuations of the imperial practice. The Katyn massacre of 1940, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, the deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941, and the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush in 1944 are all examples of the practice in its 20th-century form.