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In 1754 the Russian government decided to send petty criminals and political opponents to eastern Siberia. Sentenced to hard labour (katorga), the convicts had to travel mostly on foot and the journey could take up to three years and it is estimated about half died before they reached their destination.

Over the next 130 years around 1.2 million prisoners were deported to Siberia. Some prisoners helped to build the Trans-Siberian Railway. Others worked in the silver and lead mines of the Nertchinsk district, the saltworks of Usolie and the gold mines of Kara.

Those convicts who did not work hard enough were flogged to death. Other punishments included being chained up in an underground black hole and having a 48lb beam of wood attached to a prisoner's chains for several years. Once a sentence had been completed, convicts had their chains removed. However, they were forced to continue living and working in Siberia.

Praskovia Ivanovskia explained that the cold was a major problem: "The Kara prison most resembles a tumbledown stable. The dampness and cold are ferocious; there's no heat at all in the cells, only two stoves in the corridor. The cell doors are kept open day and night - otherwise we would freeze to death. In winter, a thick layer of ice forms on the walls of the corner cells and at night, the undersides of the straw mattresses get covered with hoarfrost. Everyone congregates in the corridor in winter, because it's closer to the stoves and you get a warm draft. Since the cells farthest from the stove are completely uninhabitable, the people who live in them carry their beds into the corridor."

A large percentage of the political prisoners tried to escape from the prison camps. Leon Trotsky was imprisoned in a camp close to the Lena River. "The Lena was the great water route of the exiled. Those who had completed their terms returned to the south by way of the river. But communication was continuous between these various nests of the banished which kept growing with the rise of the revolutionary tide. The exiles exchanged letters with each other. The exiles were no longer willing to stay in their places of confinement, and there was an epidemic of escapes. We had to arrange a system of rotation. In almost every village there were individual peasants who as youths had come under the influence of the older revolutionaries. They would carry the 'politicals' away secretly in boats, in carts or in sledges, and pass them along from one to another. The police in Siberia were as helpless as we were. The vastness of the country was an ally, but an enemy as well. It was very hard to catch a runaway, but the chances were that he would be drowned in the river or frozen to death in the primeval forests."

Most of the revolutionary leaders in Russia spent time in Siberia. This included Catherine Breshkovskaya, Lev Deich, Olga Liubatovich, Vera Figner, Gregory Gershuni, Praskovia Ivanovskia, Peter Stuchka, Mark Natanson, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, Sophia Smidovich, Inessa Armand, Andrey Bubnov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Mikhail Frunze, Adolf Joffe, Maihail Tomsky, Ivan Smirnov, Yakov Sverdlov, Irakli Tsereteli, Gregory Ordzhonikidze, Vsevolod Volin and Anatoli Lunacharsky.

After the Russian Revolution the labour camps in Siberia were closed down. These were later reopened by Joseph Stalin and opponents of his regime were sent to what became known as Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagere (Gulag). It is estimated that around 50 million perished in Soviet gulags during this period.

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(1) Praskovia Ivanovskia spent fifteen years in prison. During this time she smuggled out a letter to a friend about the problems of being in prison in Siberia.

The Kara prison most resembles a tumbledown stable. The dampness and cold are ferocious; there's no heat at all in the cells, only two stoves in the corridor. The cell doors are kept open day and night - otherwise we would freeze to death. In winter, a thick layer of ice forms on the walls of the corner cells and at night, the undersides of the straw mattresses get covered with hoarfrost.

Everyone congregates in the corridor in winter, because it's closer to the stoves and you get a warm draft. Since the cells farthest from the stove are completely uninhabitable, the people who live in them carry their beds into the corridor.

I've been one of the temporary residents of the corridor, and I can say that the accommodations weren't particularly comfortable or quiet. Cooking, bread baking, and all sorts of washing were done there: at the table, someone would be reading periodicals, while right next to her, there would be someone making chopped meat for the sick people or sloshing underwear around in a trough.

Last winter, however, we drew up a constitution for ourselves. Since the cold made it impossible to do any studying in the cells, and since the bustle in the corridor would be used exclusively for reading. Anyone who wanted to strike up a conversation had to move off into one of the distant cells and speak softly, since the partitions were thin and loud talk could be heard everywhere.

(2) Leon Trotsky, My Life (1930)

We were going down the river Lena, a few barges of convicts, with a convoy of soldiers, drifting slowly along with the current. It was cold at night, and the heavy coats with which we covered ourselves were thick with frost in the morning. All along the way, at villages decided on beforehand, one or two convicts were put ashore. As well as I can remember it took about three weeks before we came to the village of Ust-Kut. There I was put ashore with one of the women prisoners a close associate of mine from Nikolayev. Alexandra Lvovna had one of the important positions in the South Russian Workers' Union. The work that were doing bound us closely together, and so, to avoid being separated, we had been married in the transfer prison in Moscow.

The village comprised about a hundred peasant huts. We settled down in one of them, on the very edge of the village. About us were the woods; below us, the river. Farther north, down the Lena, there were gold-mines. The reflection of the gold seemed to hover about the river.

In the summer our lives were made wretched by midges. They even bit to death a cow which had lost its way in the woods. The peasants wore nets of tarred horsehair over their heads. In the spring and autumn the village was buried in mud. To be sure, the country was beautiful, but during these years it left me cold. I hated to waste interest and time on it. I lived between the woods and the river, and I hardly noticed them - I was so busy with my books and personal relations. I was studying Marx, brushing the cockroaches off the page.

The Lena was the great water route of the exiled. Those who had completed their terms returned to the south by way of the river. But communication was continuous between these various nests of the banished which kept growing with the rise of the revolutionary tide. The exiles exchanged letters with each other.

The exiles were no longer willing to stay in their places of confinement, and there was an epidemic of escapes. We had to arrange a system of rotation. In almost every village there were individual peasants who as youths had come under the influence of the older revolutionaries. They would carry the 'politicals' away secretly in boats, in carts or in sledges, and pass them along from one to another. The police in Siberia were as helpless as we were. The vastness of the country was an ally, but an enemy as well. It was very hard to catch a runaway, but the chances were that he would be drowned in the river or frozen to death in the primeval forests.

(3) Victor Serge worked with Vera Figner in 1929 when he had the task of translating her memoirs into French. Serge revealed in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, that in her final years Figner came close to being arrested by the Soviet Secret Police.

I was translating her memoirs, and she overwhelmed me with corrections framed in her fastidious tones. She was, at 77 years of age, a tiny old woman, wrapped in a shawl against the cold, her features still regular and preserving the impression of a classical beauty, a perfect intellectual clarity and a flawless nobility of soul. Doubtless she looked upon herself proudly as the living symbol of the revolutionary generations of the past, generations of purity and sacrifice.

As a member of the Central Committee of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will Party) from 1879 to 1883, Vera Figner was responsible, together with her comrades, for the decision to take to terrorism as a last resort; she took part in organizing ten or so attempts against Tsar Alexander II, arranged the last and successful attack on 1st March 1881, and kept the Party's activity going for nearly two years after the arrest and hanging of the other leaders.

After this this she spent twenty years in the prison-fortress of Schlusselburg, and six years in Siberia. From all these struggles she emerged frail, hard and upright, as exacting towards herself as she was to others. In 1931, her great age and quite exceptional moral standing saved her from imprisonment, although she did not conceal her outbursts of rebellion. She died at liberty, though under surveillance, in 1942.

(4) Eugene Lyons, Workers’ Paradise Lost: Fifty Years of Soviet Communism: A Balance Sheet (1967)

The decade of 1906-1916 was sufficiently blood-soaked for its time. Andrei Vishinsky, long Stalin's chief administrator of Soviet "justice," was not likely to underestimate anything in favor of the old regime. Yet according to his own figures there were in 1913 only 32,000 convicts at hard labor (hatorga) in Russia, including ordinary criminals. They could all have been accommodated in one of the larger Soviet forced-labor camps; and this was at the peak of the reaction that followed the 1905 revolution. About 25,000 were sentenced to Siberia and other exile regions in the first ten years of the century and 27,000 more between 1911 and 1916...

In the 1880's, George Kennan (great-uncle of his namesake, the former American ambassador to Moscow) made his historic investigation of the Siberian exile system, and published his findings in two fat volumes. Not only was he permitted to visit any prisons and exile places he chose but St. Petersburg gave him full cooperation. He returned to the United States to condemn what he had seen with unflagging passion. Yet he acknowledged that "the number of political offenders is much smaller than it is generally supposed to be." He estimated the yearly score of political exile, between 1879 and 1884, at 150. The totals increased rapidly after the turn of the century and in particular after 1905.

The most extreme estimates came from Prince Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist philosopher, in his efforts to awaken the conscience of mankind. Writing in London in 1909, he gave the number of all inmates in Russian prisons as 181,000 and the number of exiles as 74,000 plus some 30,000 more then believed to be in process of transportation. The totals covered offenders of all categories, with ordinary prisoners constituting a majority of convicts and "politicals" a majority of exiles...

The exiles were usually joined by their families and lived a relatively normal life despite harsh surroundings. They were in unlimited correspondence with friends and political comrades in Russia and abroad. Those who had money or received help from outside - committees to aid Russian political prisoners collected funds throughout the liberal world - often went in for hunting, fishing, and other sports. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were all ardent huntsmen in their exile years.

Reading today the memoirs of exiles during the monarchy is an interesting experience, against the knowledge of Soviet concentration-camp purgatories. Nadezhda Krupskava, Lenin's wife, recounting their routine in Siberia, might be talking of a middle-class winter vacation. One of her letters to a relative does have a tragic note: the maid has just walked out on her, Mrs. Lenin reports, and she has been obliged to do her own housework!

© John Simkin, March 2013