The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars
By Daniel Beer, Knopf, 496 pages, $35
In the 1890s, when Russia exiled about 10,000 men and women a year to Siberia, and the Siberian authorities killed, or drove to suicide, dozens of recalcitrant political prisoners, there were demonstrations in London and in the US, as well as outraged articles in the “Times”. In 1938, when Stalin deported more than a million people to Siberia and executed half a million, there was barely a squawk. However horrible tsarist Russia’s penal servitude, it was at least imaginable, whereas Stalin’s Gulag beggars belief.
Siberian exile in the 19th century was widely discussed by surviving tsarist exiles and prisoners: Russian journalists wrote freely about it. Siberian prisons were visited by famous writers (Anton Chekhov), foreign journalists (George Kennan) and inquisitive travellers. One such, the Briton John Foster Fraser, no naive Russophile, reports in “The Real Siberia” visiting Irkutsk, Siberia’s largest prison, around 1898: he was amazed by the banter between the governor and the convicts, the daily ration of borshch with a little over 100 grams and 1kg of bread, and the sight of six murderesses laxly supervised by a matron in a detached house.
Daniel Beer takes his title from the documentary novel by Dostoevsky, “The House of the Dead” (Dostoevsky’s only work that Tolstoy revered). The novelist spared his readers none of the gruesome cruelties he witnessed and endured during his four years’ imprisonment in Siberia in the early 1850s. Yet penal servitude is salvation for the murderer in “Crime and Punishment” and the would-be murderer in “The Brothers Karamazov” — Siberia is a place where, as Dostoevsky did, they make contact with the common people, win faith in God and receive a woman’s love. Nobody in the Gulag felt that.
Beer discusses the Decembrists, a hundred or so men, the first Russian rebels with ideals, however ill-defined, who were punished (mildly, by the standards of the 1820s, only five being hanged) for their attempted coup against Tsar Nicholas I. Followed to the mines of Nerchinsk by their womenfolk, and soon allowed to live as gentlemen, they eventually contributed to civilising Siberia’s cities. Beer debunks the myths of their saintliness, but the Decembrists remain exemplary exiles. The book then considers the Polish insurgents against Russian rule of 1830-31 and 1863, articulate protesters, if they escaped execution, against Siberian exile. They aroused all the less sympathy in Russia for the outcry their fate provoked in Europe: thanks to the Poles, Siberia became synonymous with hell on earth.
Beer devotes two chapters to writers’ experiences: Dostoevsky as a prisoner, Chekhov as a social scientist at Russia’s worst penal colony, Sakhalin island. After a survey of corporal punishment — the knout, lash, birch and much-feared gauntlet — the book concludes with the sufferings (or, frequently, the easy life) of convicted revolutionaries in the second half of the 19th century, with Siberia’s inhibited civic development and the collapse of the penal system in 1917, before the Bolsheviks reconstructed it.
“The House of the Dead” is impeccably researched, beautifully written, but not incontrovertible. Was Siberian exile under the tsars exceptionally deplorable? In western Europe, murderers would have been executed: Britain hanged 6,000 during the 19th century. Excluding Polish insurgents, Jewish revolutionaries and recidivist murderers, Russia executed 636 in 100 years (in Russia the punishment for murder has often been milder than for making a seditious utterance). As for Russia’s vicious floggings of serfs and convicts, Britons may recall their country’s notoriety for flogging children, whereas in 1864 it was forbidden in Russia to strike a schoolchild. After the knout was abolished in 1845, corporal punishment waned (largely because of the protests of Russia’s influential and uncensored medical establishment). Beer gives shocking figures for prison mortality — a quarter of the prisoners in Wilno died in 1875 — but Russian prison mortality generally hovered around 4 per cent, and by 1906 was one of the lowest in Europe. Such facts make Mark Twain’s protest — that the Russian government deserved dynamiting for its mistreatment of political prisoners — disingenuous, when we look at the horrendous mortality for Mississippi’s prisoners in the 1880s.
One of Beer’s arguments is that prison and exile crippled Siberia’s development. Undoubtedly — as shown by his chapter on hordes of vagabonds robbing and murdering their way back to European Russia — being a dump for convicts harmed Siberia, as it did New South Wales. But there were positives. Under the tsars and even under Stalin, the indigenous population of Siberia suffered little, once the 18th-century depredations by Cossacks stopped. Yakuts and Buryats flourished and multiplied: they were already immune to measles and mumps; the Russians gave them only syphilis, alcoholism and tobacco, while protecting their culture and grazing and hunting lands from missionaries, settlers and prisoners. Even before the Trans-Siberian railway belatedly provided Siberia with its spinal column, its cities, such as Tomsk with its university, and Irkutsk with its prosperous merchants, were widely admired. Siberia was advanced enough to export butter to the UK before the First World War: it was not primarily a penal colony.
The worst aspect of the tsarist penal system was corruption (although bribery often mitigated the prisoners’ pain); the best aspect was the sympathy people felt for the “unfortunates”, seeing them set off in shackles on the long walk (until the railway network developed) to Siberia, and visiting prisons, as Westerners visited zoos, to feed the inmates. When, in Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata”, a prisoner returning from Siberia tells fellow passengers in the train how and why he murdered his wife, his audience is fascinated: in the West, everyone would have left the carriage at the next stop.
Beer claims that 90 per cent of the Gulag’s victims survived their imprisonment, but tsarist penal servitude was far more bearable than Lenin’s and Stalin’s prison camps. Most researchers agree that the Gulag’s survival rate was well under 84 per cent, while very few men (more women) survived long sentences: typical is Lev Razgon, who, after 18 years, counted only 27 survivors of his contingent of 517. Tsarist rule seems worse than that of other European empires because it perpetrated its horrors at home: Britain committed atrocities in Tasmania and Bengal, France in north Africa and Vietnam. Western Europe sent surplus peasants to colonies, where the immigrants exterminated the natives.
Beer’s ironic conclusion is that ending an unjust, corrupt penal system is more destructive than the system itself. When 70,000 prisoners were released in 1917, there was a wave of robbery, rape and murder; similarly, when Lavrentiy Beria amnestied nonpolitical prisoners after Stalin’s death, Moscow and Leningrad experienced a crime wave. And finally: in 1890, for every million people in Tsarist Russia, there were 970 prisoners. Today, for every million people in Russia, there are 4,500. “The House of the Dead” no longer seems so bad.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
Donald Rayfield’s “Stalin and His Hangmen” is published by Penguin.
