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.
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.
Prisoners
in chains in Siberia.
(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, on;y 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.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
