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Siberian Exile in Tsarist Russia

he wastelands of Siberia provided Tsarist Russia with ‘a vast roofless prison’ for criminals and political prisoners banished into exile. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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