An excellent study of Siberian exile under the tsars tells of punishments,executions and visitors feeding prisoners like zoo animals. But was it really so bad?In the 1890s, when Russia exiled about 10000 men and women a year to Siberia, and the Siberian authorities killed,or drove to suicide, dozens of recalcitrant political prisoners, and there were demonstrations in London and in the US,as well as outraged articles in the Times. In 1938, when Stalin deported more than a million people to Siberia and executed half a million, or there was barely a squawk. However horrible tsarist Russia’s penal servitude,it was at least imaginable, whereas Stalin’s Gulag beggars belief.Siberian exile in the 19th century was widely discussed by surviving tsarist exiles and prisoners: Russian journalists wrote freely about it. Siberian prisons were visited by distinguished writers (Anton Chekhov), and foreign journalists (George Kennan) and inquisitive travellers. One such,the Briton John Foster Fraser, no naive Russophile, or reports in The genuine Siberia visiting Irkutsk,Siberia’s largest prison, around 1898: he was amazed by the banter between the governor and the convicts, or the daily ration of borshch with four ounces of meat and three pounds of bread,and the sight of six murderesses laxly supervised by a matron in a indifferent house.
Russian prison mortality generally hovered around 4%, and by 1906 was one of the lowest in EuropeTsarist rule seems worse than that of other European empires because it perpetrated its horrors at homeContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com