Gulag

Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600.³⁰ Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia’s empty, mineral-rich wastelands.³¹

Their sentences were not necessarily easy ones, and some of the settlers thought their fate worse than that of the katorga prisoners. Assigned to remote districts, with poor land and few neighbors, many starved to death over the long winters, or drank themselves to death from boredom. There were very few women—their numbers never exceeded 15 percent—fewer books, no entertainment.³²

On his journey across Siberia to Sakhalin, Anton Chekhov met, and described, some of these exiled settlers: “The majority of them are financially poor, have little strength, little practical training, and possess nothing except their ability to write, which is frequently of absolutely no use to anybody. Some of them commence by selling, piece by piece, their shirts of Holland linen, their sheets, their scarves and handkerchiefs, and finish up after two or three years dying in fearful penury . . .” ³³

But not all of the exiles were miserable and degenerate. Siberia was far away from European Russia, and in the East officialdom was more forgiving, aristocracy much thinner on the ground. The wealthier exiles and ex-prisoners sometimes built up large estates. The more educated became doctors and lawyers, or ran schools.³⁴ Princess Maria Volkonskaya, wife of the Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky, sponsored the building of a theater and concert hall in Irkutsk: although she had, like her husband, technically been deprived of her rank, invitations to her soirées and private dinners were eagerly sought after, and discussed as far away as Moscow and St. Petersburg. ³⁵

By the early twentieth century, the system had shed some of its previous harshness. The fashion for prison reform which spread through Europe in the nineteenth century finally caught up with Russia too. Regimes grew lighter, and policing grew laxer.³⁶ Indeed, in contrast to what came later, the route to Siberia now seems, if not exactly pleasurable, then hardly an onerous punishment for the small group of men who would lead the Russian Revolution. When in prison, the Bolsheviks received a certain amount of favorable treatment as “political” rather than criminal prisoners, and were allowed to have books, paper, and writing implements. Ordzhonikidze, one of the Bolshevik leaders, later recalled reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, Plekhanov, William James, Frederick W. Taylor, Dostoevsky, and Ibsen, among others, while resident in St. Petersburg’s Schlüsselberg Fortress. ³⁷ By later standards, the Bolsheviks were also well-fed, well-dressed, even beautifully coiffed. A photograph taken of Trotsky imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1906 shows him wearing spectacles, a suit, a tie, and a shirt with an impressively white collar. The peephole in the door behind him offers the only clue to his whereabouts.³⁸ Another taken of him in exile in eastern Siberia, in 1900, shows him in a fur hat and heavy coat, surrounded by other men and women, also in boots and furs.³⁹ All of these items would be rare luxuries in the Gulag, half a century later.

If life in Czarist exile did become intolerably unpleasant, there was always escape. Stalin himself was arrested and exiled four times. Three times he escaped, once from Irkutsk province and twice from Vologda province, a region which later became pockmarked with camps.⁴⁰ As a result, his scorn for the Czarist regime’s “toothlessness” knew no bounds. His Russian biographer Dmitri Volkogonov characterized his opinion like this: “You didn’t have to work, you could read to your heart’s content and you could even escape, which required only the will to do so.”⁴¹

Thus did their Siberian experience provide the Bolsheviks with an earlier model to build upon—and a lesson in the need for exceptionally strong punitive regimes.