Despite reports of exile proving disastrous to the region, 300,000 Russian subjects, from political dissidents to the elderly and mentally disabled, were deported to Siberia from 1823-61. Their stories of physical and psychological suffering, heroism and personal resurrection, are recounted in this compelling history of tsarist Siberian exile.

2018 Book Prize from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies 2018 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature in Nonfiction from the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto When Julija Šukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught Šukys her family’s story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941 three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years working on a collective farm. It was all a mistake, the family maintained. Some seventy years after these events, Šukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion. Piecing the story together from letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and KGB documents, her research soon revealed a Holocaust-era secret—a family connection to the killing of seven hundred Jews in a small Lithuanian border town. According to KGB documents, the man in charge when those massacres took place was Anthony, Ona’s husband. In Siberian Exile Šukys weaves together the two narratives: the story of Ona, noble exile and innocent victim, and that of Anthony, accused war criminal. She examines the stories that communities tell themselves and considers what happens when the stories we’ve been told all our lives suddenly and irrevocably change, and how forgiveness operates across generations and the barriers of life and death.

"The House of the Dead is a history of Siberia with a focus on the last four tsars (1801-1917). Daniel Beer explores the massive penal colony that became an incubator for the radicalism of revolutionaries who would one day rule Russia"--Provided by publisher.

In late nineteenth-century Russia, a series of organizations emerged from the nascent radical liberationist movement for the purposes of providing aid to political prisoners and exiles. Those leading these endeavors framed them as a philanthropic exercise that was paradoxically always also political, provocatively appropriating the name and humanitarian mission of the Red Cross for their illicit attempts to assist the enemies of the Tsarist state. These efforts provided a unifying thread to the fractious and fragmented revolutionary movement over years and even decades. The unjustly persecuted political prisoner or exile came to serve as a powerful synecdoche for the tyranny of the autocratic state, while assisting these "suffering martyrs" came to be legible as an indisputably noble act across political and even national boundaries. Revolutionary Philanthropy--the first book in any language to provide a comprehensive portrait of the origins of these organizations--posits that the groupings that undertook aid to political prisoners and exiles emerged through gradually accrued shared practices within a series of constantly evolving, overlapping domestic and international personal and political networks. In bringing together two seemingly incompatible modes of social action--radical politics and philanthropy--these "red cross" activities came to form a vital connective tissue across party and ideological lines. Moreover, they connected the still small and isolated groupings of committed revolutionaries to a significantly wider circle of sympathizers, both at home and abroad. Within Russia, this linked radicals to a significantly broader circle of liberals and politically uncommitted supporters, while revolutionary émigrés presented the Western public with a captivating narrative of heroic martyrs unjustly suffering for the cause. While the strain of conflicting imperatives threatened on multiple occasions to unravel the entire affair, in the end this very tension proved instrumental in making them durable. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources inmultiplelanguages,someof which have not been consulted before

This book concerns the mass deportation of Poles and others to Siberia following the failed 1863 Polish Insurrection. The imperial Russian government fell back upon using exile to punish the insurrectionists and to cleanse Russia’s Western Provinces of ethnic Poles. It convoyed some 20,000 inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland and the Western Provinces across the Urals to locations as far away as Iakutsk, and assigned them to penal labor or forced settlement. Yet the government’s lack of infrastructure and planning doomed this operation from the start, and the exiles found ways to resist their subjugation. Based upon archival documents from Siberia and the former Western Provinces, this book offers an unparalleled exploration of the mass deportation. Combining social history with an analysis of statecraft, it is a unique contribution to scholarship on the history of Poland and the Russian Empire.

A new global history perspective on the relationship between convict mobility and governance, nation building, imperial expansion, and knowledge formation.

This book provides a comprehensive history of the genesis, existence, and demise of Imperial Russia’s largest penal colony, made famous by Chekhov in a book written following his visit there in 1890. Based on extensive original research in archival documents, published reports, and memoirs, the book is also a social history of the late imperial bureaucracy and of the subaltern society of criminals and exiles; an examination of the tsarist state’s failed efforts at reform; an exploration of Russian imperialism in East Asia and Russia’s acquisition of Sakhalin Island in the face of competition from Japan; and an anthropological and literary study of the Sakhalin landscape and its associated values and ideologies. The Sakhalin penal colony became one of the largest penal colonies in history. The book’s conclusion prompts important questions about contemporary prisons and their relationship to state and society.