Gulag

In retrospect, it is easy to find, in the history of the Czarist prison system, many echoes of practices later applied in the Soviet Gulag. Like the Gulag, for example, Siberian exile was never intended exclusively for criminals. A law of 1736 declared that if a village decided someone in its midst was a bad influence on others, the village elders could divide up the unfortunate’s property and order him to move elsewhere. If he failed to find another abode, the state could then send him into exile.²⁵ Indeed, this law was cited by Khrushchev in 1948, as part of his (successful) argument for exiling collective farmers who were deemed insufficiently enthusiastic and hardworking.²⁶

The practice of exiling people who simply didn’t fit in continued throughout the nineteenth century. In his book, Siberia and the Exile System, George Kennan—uncle of the American statesman—described the system of “administrative process” that he observed in Russia in 1891:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.²⁷

Administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime. In the early days, many of these were Polish noblemen who objected to the Russian occupation of their territory and property. Later, exiles included religious objectors, as well as members of “revolutionary” groups and secret societies, including the Bolsheviks. Although they were not administrative exiles—they were tried and sentenced—the most notorious of Siberia’s nineteenth-century “forced settlers” were also political prisoners: these were the Decembrists, a group of high-ranking aristocrats who staged a feeble rebellion against Czar Nicholas I in 1825. With a vengeance that shocked all of Europe at the time, the Czar sentenced five of the Decembrists to death. He deprived the others of their rank, and sent them, in chains, to Siberia, where a few were joined by their exceptionally brave wives. Only a few lived long enough to be pardoned by Nicholas’s successor, Alexander II, thirty years later, and to return home to St. Petersburg, by then tired old men. ²⁸ Fyodor Dostoevsky, sentenced in 1849 to a four-year term of penal servitude, was another well-known political prisoner. After returning from his Siberian exile, he wrote The House of the Dead, still the most widely read account of life in the Czarist prison system.

Like the Gulag, the Czarist exile system was not created solely as a form of punishment. Russia’s rulers also wanted their exiles, both criminal and political, to solve an economic problem that had rankled for many centuries: the underpopulation of the far east and the far north of the Russian landmass, and the Russian Empire’s consequent failure to exploit Russia’s natural resources. With that in mind, the Russian state began, as early as the eighteenth century, to sentence some of its prisoners to forced labor—a form of punishment which became known as katorga, from the Greek word kateirgon, “to force.” Katorga had a long Russian prehistory. In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great had used convicts and serfs to build roads, fortresses, factories, ships, and the city of St. Petersburg itself. In 1722, he passed a more specific directive ordering criminals, with their wives and children, into exile near the silver mines of Daurya, in eastern Siberia.²⁹

In its time, Peter’s use of forced labor was considered a great economic and political success. Indeed, the story of the hundreds of thousands of serfs who spent their lives building St. Petersburg had an enormous impact on future generations. Many had died during the construction—and yet the city became a symbol of progress and Europeanization. The methods were cruel—and yet the nation had profited. Peter’s example probably helps explain the ready adoption of katorga by his Czarist successors. Without a doubt, Stalin was a great admirer of Peter’s building methods too.