The House of the Dead Read online

  Daniel Beer

  * * *

  The House of the Dead

  Siberian Exile Under the Tsars

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Maps

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: The Bell of Uglich

  1. Origins of Exile

  2. The Boundary Post

  3. Broken Swords

  4. The Mines of Nerchinsk

  5. The Decembrist Republic

  6. Sybiracy

  7. The Penal Fort

  8. ‘In the Name of Freedom!’

  9. General Cuckoo’s Army

  10. Sakhalin Island

  11. The Lash

  12. ‘Woe to the Vanquished!’

  13. The Shrinking Continent

  14. The Crucible

  Epilogue: Red Siberia

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  For Gusztáv

  List of Illustrations

  1. ‘The Last of the Exiles’, 1900, by Frederic de Haenen (Copyright © Look and Learn Illustrated Papers Collection/Bridgeman Images)

  2. ‘The Vladimirka’, 1892, by Isaak Ilyich Levitan (Copyright © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/Bridgeman Images)

  3. ‘Farewell to Europe’, 1894, by Aleksander Sochaczewski (Copyright © The Warsaw Museum)

  4. ‘Sick Prisoners’, from George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), Vol. 1 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  5. ‘Russian Civilisation’, from Judy (London, England), Wednesday 3 March 1880, p. 100.

  6. ‘Family Kámera in the Tomsk forwarding prison’, from George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), Vol. 1 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  7. ‘Roll Call’, from Lev Deutsch, 16 Years in Siberia (1905) (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  8. ‘The Siberian Boundary Post’, from George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), Vol. 1 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  9. ‘Russian Convict Prisoners in Siberia’ by Julius Mandes Price, an illustration for the Illustrated London News, 6 June 1891 (Copyright © Look and Learn Illustrated Papers Collection/Bridgeman Images)

  10. ‘The Unexpected Return’, 1884, by Ilya Efimovich Repin (Copyright © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/Bridgeman Images)

  11. Portrait of Sergei Volkonsky by Vasily Tropinin (Copyright © Collection of the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad/Bridgeman Images)

  12. Portrait of Maria Volkonskaya (Copyright © Central Pushkin Museum/Bridgeman Images)

  13. Portrait of Mikhail Lunin (Private collection of art critic Ilya Zilbershtein/Bridgeman Images)

  14. Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Konstantin Trutovsky (Copyright AKG Images/Sputnik)

  15. ‘Life is Everywhere’, 1888, by Nikolai Aleksandrovich Yaroshenko (Copyright © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/Sputnik/Bridgeman Images)

  16. ‘A Break for Liberty’, from George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), Vol. 1 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  17. Convict in Siberia (Copyright © The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)

  18. ‘The Irtysh Prison-Barge’, from Harry de Windt, Siberia As It Is (1891) (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  19. ‘Group of Convicts on the Yaroslavl’, from Harry de Windt, The New Siberia (1896) (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  20. ‘Elderly Prisoners in Kara’, an illustration for The Graphic, 13 August 1898 (Copyright © Look and Learn Illustrated Papers Collection/Bridgeman Images)

  21–23. ‘Aged Ordinary Prisoners at Kara’, from Lev Deutsch, 16 Years in Siberia (1905) (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  24. ‘The Convict Prison, Tobolsk’, from George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), Vol. 2 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  25. ‘Prisoners Marching Through the Streets of Odessa’, from Lev Deutsch, 16 Years in Siberia (1905) (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  26. Jarosław Dąbrowski (Copyright © akg-images/Interfoto)

  27. A political exile in Siberia (Copyright © The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)

  28. Yelizaveta Kovalskaya, from George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), Vol. 2 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  29. ‘Convict Branded S. K. A.’, from James Young Simpson, Sidelights on Siberia: Some Account of the Great Siberian Railroad, the Prisons and Exile System (1898) (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  30. ‘“Brodyágs” or Runaway Convicts’, from George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), Vol. 1 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  List of Maps

  1. Russian Empire circa 1875

  2. Siberia circa 1910

  3. Nerchinsk Mining District circa 1870

  4. Sakhalin circa 1890

  Author’s Note

  Transliteration from the Russian in the notes conforms to the standard system adopted by the Library of Congress. The main text amends this system for the Anglophone reader: ‘soft signs’ are omitted; surnames ending in ‘ii’ and ‘yi’ are standardized to ‘y’; ‘e’ is rendered as ‘ye’ when appropriate, and so on. The names of Russian emperors, empresses and famous writers are given in their commonly Anglicized form.

  Whenever possible, non-Russian (usually Polish) names have been restored to their original Latinate form. As it was not always possible to infer the original name from the Russian-language sources, such names sometimes appear in their Russified form. For any errors in this process, I apologize.

  In the interest of allowing readers to consult the original sources, the book cites widely available translations of major Russian texts whenever possible. All other translations from the Russian are the author’s own.

  Throughout the text all weights and measurements have been converted from the Russian imperial system to the metric system both in the original Russian sources and in the English translations cited. Modifications to existing English translations are noted.

  From 1700 to February 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, which was between eleven and thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar. Dates are given according to the Julian calendar.

  THE ADMINISTRATION OF SIBERIA

  Between 1803 and 1822, all Siberia was under the authority of a single governor-general based in Irkutsk. In 1822, Siberia was divided into two principal administrative territories: a governorate-general of Western Siberia based in Omsk, and a governorate-general of Eastern Siberia based in Irkutsk. Each of these governorates-general was run by a governor-general who answered to St Petersburg and oversaw the governors of individual provinces. The Western Siberian governorate-general comprised Tobolsk, Tomsk and Omsk provinces (the latter was subsequently dissolved, partly merged into Tobolsk province and partly subdivided into the two new provinces of Semipalatinsk and Akmolynsk); the Eastern Siberian governorate-general comprised Irkutsk, Yenisei, Yakutsk and Transbaikal provinces. Each province (guberniia or oblast’) had an administrative capital and comprised a number of districts (uezd), and each district comprised a number of cantons (volost’). Some regions (okrug), such as the Nerchinsk Mining Region, stood outside of this hierarchy and were ruled by a senior official responsible directly to the tsar. In 188
2, the Western Siberian governorate-general was abolished, Tomsk and Tobolsk provinces were placed under the direct control of the central government and Semipalatinsk and Akmolynsk provinces formed the new governorate-general of the Steppe. The Eastern Siberian governorate-general was subsequently subdivided into two new governorates-general: Priamursk, in 1884, and Irkutsk, in 1887. Priamursk administered the provinces of Transbaikal, Primorsk, the Amur and the island of Sakhalin; Irkutsk administered Yenisei, Irkutsk and Yakutsk provinces. Despite some further minor changes, these basic administrative units remained in place until 1917.

  Here was a world all its own, unlike anything else; here were laws unto themselves, ways of dressing unto themselves, manners and customs unto themselves, a house of the living dead, a life unlike anywhere else, with distinct people unlike anyone else. It is this distinct corner that I am setting out to describe.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the House of the Dead (1862)1

  Prologue: The Bell of Uglich

  In 1891, a group of Russian merchants successfully petitioned Tsar Alexander III to allow them to transport a 300-kilogramme copper bell from the Siberian town of Tobolsk to its native town of Uglich, 2,200 kilometres to the west. The bell travelled up the Volga River in the late spring of 1892 and arrived by steamship at a jetty erected in front of the Uglich cathedral. There, it received a ceremonial homecoming exactly three centuries after having first been exiled to Siberia.1

  The bell’s fate had been sealed in the spring of 1591, when the nine-year-old son and designated heir of Ivan the Terrible, Tsarevich Dmitry, was found in Uglich with his throat slit. Dmitry’s mother and her family believed that the tsarevich had been murdered on the orders of a potential rival to the throne, the tsar regent, Boris Godunov. They rang Uglich’s bell to summon the townspeople in revolt. The Uglichans formed a mob and went on the rampage, murdering both the presumed assassins and an official from Moscow. The unrest attracted the Kremlin’s wrath. Godunov ordered forces to Uglich to quash the rebellion, and the following spring, he dispensed justice. He had some 200 townspeople executed and others imprisoned; about 100 were flogged and had their nostrils torn out; the more eloquent lost their tongues as well. Scourged and mutilated, the rebels were banished to Siberia.

  In addition to inflicting retribution on the insurgents, Godunov punished the symbol of their political unity. He had the bell lowered, subjected to twelve lashes, relieved of its ‘tongue’ and then exiled to Siberia. The Uglichans were made to drag the mutinous bell across the Urals before finally bringing it to rest in Tobolsk, where the town’s military governor registered it as ‘the first inanimate exile’. Silenced and banished, the bell became a testament to the power of Russia’s rulers both to drive their turbulent subjects beyond the Urals and to strike them dumb.2

  Yet in the centuries that followed it also became a rallying point for opponents of the autocracy who viewed Godunov’s punishment of the Uglichans as the cruel act of a usurper. In 1862, one nobleman exiled to Tobolsk, Ippolit Zavalishin, discerned in the Uglich Bell an ‘unquelled accuser who bears eloquent testimony to . . . the punishment of an entire blameless town!’3 By the middle of the nineteenth century, then, the bell had come to symbolize not only the supreme authority of the sovereign but also the vengeful power on which it relied.

  Tobolsk played a central role in the development of Siberian exile in the centuries after the banishment of the Uglich Bell. This legacy is still visible today in the jumble of decaying wooden houses and neoclassical buildings that make up the old town. Tobolsk’s central square sits atop a plateau that rears 50 metres above the muddy waters of the great River Irtysh and the lower town that sprawls to the south. It commands distant views of the surrounding countryside and the barges inching their way upstream. Two large buildings bestride the square. One is the stone kremlin, a fortified complex that projected the power and splendour of the imperial state. Its massive white walls, above which soar the blue and gold cupolas of the Sofia Cathedral, were built by exiles: Swedish soldiers taken prisoner by Peter the Great in 1709 at one of the decisive battles of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The second building, whose imposing neoclassical façade spans the length of the square’s western edge, is the Tobolsk Central Penal Labour Prison. Built in the early 1850s, the prison was the second of its kind in the town, adding much needed capacity to the existing ramshackle jail. Convoys numbering hundreds of exiles would be marched up into the town, across the square and through its gates, to be held in the prison while the Tobolsk Exile Office, the administrative centre of the entire exile system, determined their final destinations. Distributed into new convoys, the exiles would then set off on the roads and waterways of Siberia, bound for distant villages and penal settlements. Tobolsk was the gateway to a continental prison.4

  The exile system played a central role in the colonization of Siberia. Towns grew up around Siberian penal forts and colonies to house their officials and military personnel. Rare was the Siberian village left untouched by the exiles who either officially settled almost every district in every Siberian province or unofficially roamed through them as itinerant labourers, thieves and beggars. Siberia’s roads were dotted with the squat ochre waystations in which the marching convoys of deportees would overnight on their long and gruelling journey. The forwarding prisons, city jails, mines, industrial enterprises and exile settlements resembled sinews of state power that stretched eastwards from St Petersburg. When, in 1879, a devastating fire consumed three-quarters of the centre of Irkutsk – then a thriving city of 30,000 inhabitants – one of the few stone buildings to survive the flames was the central prison. Its significance as a major transit point for exiles was laid bare as it suddenly loomed above the smouldering ruins of the city.5

  The Tobolsk Central Penal Labour Prison continued to serve as a penal institution until 1989, when the authorities finally shut it down. Like many of the tsarist-era prisons, it had been refurbished after 1917 and eventually become part of what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would call the ‘archipelago’ of penal facilities that formed the Stalinist Gulag. Both in Russia and abroad, the Gulag has overlaid memories of the tsars’ use of Siberia as a place of punishment. Long before the Soviet state erected its camps, however, Siberia was already a vast open prison with a history spanning more than three centuries.6

  Siberia – the Russian name Сибирь is pronounced Seebeer – dwarfs European Russia. At 15,500,000 square kilometres, it is one and a half times larger than the continent of Europe. Siberia has never had an independent political existence; it has no clear borders and no binding ethnic identity. Its modern history is inseparable from Russia’s. The easily surmountable Ural Mountains have acted less as a physical boundary than as the imaginative and political frontier of a European Russia beyond which lay a giant Asiatic colony and a sprawling penal realm. Siberia was both Russia’s heart of darkness and a world of opportunity and prosperity. The continent’s bleak and unforgiving present was to give way to a brighter future, and Siberia’s exiles were intended to play a key role in this vaunted transition.7

  For the imperial state sought to do more than cage social and political disorder within its continental prison. By purging the old world of its undesirables, it would also populate the new. The exile system promised to harness a growing army of exiles in the service of a wider project to colonize Siberia. In theory, Russia’s criminals would toil to harvest Siberia’s natural riches and settle its remote territories and, in so doing, they would discover the virtues of self-reliance, abstinence and hard work. In practice, however, the exile system dispatched into the Siberian hinterland an army not of enterprising settlers but of destitute and desperate vagabonds. They survived not by their own industry but by stealing and begging from the real colonists, the Siberian peasantry. The tensions embedded in this dual status of ‘prison colony’ were never reconciled over the more than three centuries separating the banishment of the Uglichan insurgents and the implosion of the tsarist empire in 1917. Contrary t
o the ambitions of Russia’s rulers, penal colonization never became a driving force behind Siberia’s development. Rather, as the numbers of exiles grew, it became an ever greater obstacle to it.

  Over the nineteenth century, the scale and intensity of Siberian exile increased so significantly that it easily surpassed the exile systems of the British and French empires. The British transported around 160,000 convicts to Australia in the eight decades between 1787 and 1868; the French state meanwhile had a penal population of about 5,500 in its overseas colonies between 1860 and 1900. By contrast, between 1801 and 1917, more than 1 million tsarist subjects were banished to Siberia.8

  Among those exiles were generations of revolutionaries from towns and cities in European Russia and Poland. Some fought for a liberal constitution, some for national independence and still others for a socialist utopia. Siberia became a desolate staging post in the overlapping histories of European republicanism and the Russian revolutionary movement. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tsarist government was deporting thousands of dedicated revolutionaries to prisons, mines and far-flung settlements in Siberia. Amid the isolation and claustrophobia, they bickered, plotted and published political tracts to inspire and to coordinate the revolutionary underground in Russia’s major cities. Their dreams of impending revolution, undiluted by the compromises of practical politics, filled the yawning Siberian skies. Siberia had become a gigantic laboratory of revolution and exile a rite of passage for the men and women who would one day rule Russia. When revolution finally erupted in 1905, these exiled radicals transformed Siberia’s towns and villages into crucibles of violent struggle against the autocracy. Scaffolds were erected in the courtyards of prisons while, beyond their walls, warders were assassinated in the streets. No longer a quarantine against the contagions of revolution, Siberia had become a source of the infection.