Siberian Exile and the Invention of Revolutionary Russia, 1825–1917

Exiles, Émigrés and the International Reception of Russian Radicalism

Ben Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367224806
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000516159
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the course of the nineteenth century Siberia developed a fearsome reputation as a place of exile, often imagined as a vast penal colony and seen as a symbol of the iniquities of autocratic and totalitarian Tsarist rule. This book examines how Siberia's reputation came about and discusses the effects of this reputation in turning opinion, especially in Western countries, against the Tsarist regime and in giving rise to considerable sympathy for Russian radicals and revolutionaries. It considers the writings and propaganda of a large number of different émigré groups, explores American and British journalists' investigations and exposé press articles and charts the rise of the idea of Russian political prisoners as revolutionary and reformist heroes. Overall, the book demonstrates how important representations of Siberian exile were in shaping Western responses to the Russian Revolution.

1 Siberian exile and Russian radical culture, 1825–1873

DOI: 10.4324/9780429275098-2

Ему судьба готовила

Путь славный, имя громкое

Народного заступника,

Чахотку и Сибирь.

[Fate had prepared for him

A glorious path, great renown

As a defender of the people

Consumption and Siberia.]

– Nikolai Nekrasov¹

During the nineteenth century, Siberian exile loomed large in the oral and literary traditions of the Russian revolutionary movement. For those opposed to tsarism, banishment beyond the Urals was not just an occupational hazard but a cornerstone of revolutionary subjectivity, a rite of passage that demonstrated courage and a willingness to suffer in the name of noble ideals. Political prisoners were lionized in pamphlets and party newspapers for their feats of endurance and self-sacrifice in exile. Left-wing writers and propagandists portrayed the heroism of political exiles as symbolic of the struggle against autocratic rule, while many who survived or escaped Siberia contributed to a corpus of prison memoirs that made the region synonymous with injustice and despotism both within and beyond Russia’s borders by the end of the nineteenth century and which remains (together with the GULag memoir genre to which it gave rise) unrivalled for scale and depth in the annals of global prison writing. ‘For most political activists,’ one scholar has concluded, ‘prison and exile were a must’.²

This chapter traces the development of Siberia’s image among the Russian radical intelligentsia during the formative decades of the anti-Tsarist struggle, from the suppression of the Decembrist revolt in 1825–1826 to the revolutionary crisis of the late 1870s. Geographically contiguous with the Russian metropolis yet terra incognita to most educated Russians, Siberia, as we have seen, had been portrayed dualistically in Russian culture – both Russia’s new world and its heart of darkness – from the time of Ermak’s conquest. By the early nineteenth century, a period in which exoticized representations of the imperial borderlands figured heavily in the Russian cultural imagination, the region’s ‘imagined geography’ was hotly contested terrain. The geographer and cultural historian Mark Bassin has shown how contrasting depictions of Siberia kept pace with the development of Russian national identity (with the spectre of an uncivilized Asiatic backwater reifying educated Russians’ increasingly Europeanized self-image) and the early stages of Russian social thought (with Siberia envisaged as a tabula rasa untouched by the worst excesses of autocratic rule, most notably serfdom).³ In what follows, I build on Bassin’s pioneering argument to show how these literary tropes evolved to meet the specific demands of revolutionary politics during the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the abortive Decembrist revolt of 1825 and the conspirators’ exile the following year, both the Decembrists themselves and their peers – most notably Aleksandr Pushkin – portrayed Siberia, on the one hand, as a foreboding land of exile and, on the other, as a stage for the performance of heroic deeds whereupon Russia’s post-autocratic future would be decided. Promoted in later years by figures such as Aleksandr Gertsen, Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Nekrasov (all discussed individually in this chapter), this bifurcated image of Siberia became standard among the revolutionary intelligentsia. Much has been written on the ‘literariness’ of the anti-Tsarist struggle, with various scholars showing the ways in which revolutionaries’ real-life actions conformed to idealized literary models.⁴ In a similar way, I argue here that the literary afterlives of the Decembrist revolt formed the basis of a ‘Siberian text’ which provided revolutionaries of later generations with a template for heroic suffering and political martyrdom in exile.

Between captivity and freedom: the Decembrists in Siberia

The essential features of a Siberian literary topos were firmly established in Russian culture by the early nineteenth century. For most educated Russians, Siberia was first and foremost a place of exile, and usually regarded as a barren wilderness. The decline of the region’s lucrative fur trade (and thus its economic significance) at the end of the eighteenth century largely deprived Siberia of the imperial prestige it had enjoyed in earlier decades (in particular during the reign of Catharine II, 1762–1796), when it had been presented as a jewel in the Russian imperial crown akin to British India and had attracted the attention of Russia’s foremost navigators, adventurers, scientists and ethnographers.⁵ In this context, Russian writers began to ‘other’ Siberia, developing a distinct ‘poetic formula’ derived from contemporary literary romanticism that juxtaposed the Siberian wilderness with the trappings of European modernity.⁶ As the novelist Ivan Goncharov, who travelled across Siberia in 1852, wrote:

An educated man can’t do anything in these primitive conditions. He would have to be a true poet to enjoy a thousand miles of dreary silence, or be a savage himself to think of these mountains, rocks and trees as the furnishings of his home, regard the bears as his comrades and the game as his sustenance.⁷

Likewise representative are the following lines from ‘Voinarovskii’, a historical epic published in 1824 by the poet and future Decembrist leader Kondratii Ryleev:

Никто страны сей безотрадной,

Обширной узников тюрьмы,

Не посетит, боясь зимы

И продолжительной, и хладной.

Однообразно дни ведет

Якутска житель одичалый;

Лишь раз или дважды в круглый год,

С толпой преступников усталой,

Дружина воинов придет.

[Nobody will visit this desolate land

This vast prison of the exiles

Deterred by the winters

So long, and so cold.

The Iakutsk native, gone native

Passes his days in monotony

Only once or twice the whole year round

Will the Cossacks bring a crowd of criminals

Exhausted from their journey.]⁸

In the Russian cultural imagination of the early nineteenth century, Siberia represented not just a desolate wilderness, but a stage for the performance of heroic deeds. Renowned as a place of exile, Siberia often featured in (or, more usually, stood in the background of) expressions of political dissent in early nineteenth-century Russian literature. In 1824, Aleksandr Pushkin composed an imagined conversation with the Tsar in which he found himself exiled to Siberia (instead of the southern borderlands of the empire to which he had, in fact, been exiled after 1820) for writing the seditious ode ‘Freedom’ (‘Volʹnostʹ’, 1817).⁹ Similarly, the writer Pavel Katenin, upon his expulsion from government service in 1820, wrote to a friend that he had been exiled ‘not far from Siberia’ – by which he meant the town of Kostroma, just under 200 miles from Moscow.¹⁰ In Ryleev’s poetry, the Siberian wilderness provides a setting for feats of moral and civic virtue: the eponymous hero of ‘Voinarovskii’, a fictionalized version of a Ukrainian Cossack who rebelled against Russian authority in 1708, finds himself ‘banished to the distant snows for an affair of honour and fatherland’, while another of his historical protagonists, the celebrated memoirist Nataliia Dolgorukova, is seen following her husband into Siberian exile, forgetting ‘her native home, wealth, honour and fame to share the Siberian cold and the vicissitudes of fate’.¹¹

Such rhetorical flourishes, although hardly out of kilter with the typical moral profile of the Byronic hero, marked an important stage in the development of Siberia’s literary image: after the events of 14 December 1825, both the Decembrists and their contemporaries exploited the region’s romantic associations to proclaim an insurgent political message. The facts of the Decembrist revolt are familiar, but may be briefly recapped here.¹² In the midst of a succession crisis precipitated by the sudden death of Alexander I a month earlier and the unwillingness of the heir apparent, the Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, to take the throne, a cohort of young officers of liberal political persuasion – most of them members of various conspiratorial secret societies formed over the preceding decade – marched into the centre of Petersburg at the head of thousands of elite troops and refused to swear allegiance to the new tsar, Nicholas I, pledging instead their support to Konstantin Nikolaevich and demanding the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The insurrection was rapidly crushed, most of the participants arrested and an investigative commission established under Nicholas’ personal direction; the following May, over one hundred conspirators were convicted of treason. The five ringleaders – Ryleev, Pavel Pestelʹ, Petr Kakhovskii, Sergei Muravʹev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Riumin – were sentenced to death and executed in the Peter-Paul Fortress on the morning of 13 July. The remainder, sentenced to hard labour and exile, set off for Siberia at various points throughout the summer: several were followed by their wives, who (perhaps inspired by the example of Ryleev’s Dolgorukova) renounced their privileges to endure exile alongside the men.¹³ Both the revolt itself and the ensuing repression had a chilling effect on educated Russian society. ‘The hanged are hanged’, Pushkin wrote in 1826, ‘but 120 friends, brothers and comrades sentenced to hard labour is awful’.¹⁴

Examining the Decembrists’ influence on the moral profile of later Russian radicals, the semiotician and cultural theorist Iurii Lotman argued that ‘so close did they come to an approximation of the norm and the ideal that their contribution is comparable with that of Pushkin to Russian poetry’.¹⁵ This judgement applies perforce to the myth of the Decembrists’ ‘proud forbearance’ in the face of Tsarist oppression that took shape during the exiled conspirators’ years in Siberia and which subsequently became a yardstick for revolutionary enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. First propounded in several key literary works of the 1820s, the Decembrists’ image as political martyrs owed much to a reframing of Siberia not as romantic wilderness, but as a site of struggle against tyranny where the lines between captivity, freedom, victory and defeat were blurred. Here we shall adduce two well-known but nonetheless important examples: Pushkin’s ‘Poslanie v Sibirʹ’ (‘Epistle to Siberia’), written in 1827, and ‘A. S. Pushkinu’ (‘To A. S. Pushkin’), written in response to the former by the Decembrist Aleksandr Odoevskii in 1828. ‘Poslanie v Sibirʹ’, which was conveyed to the Decembrist exiles by Nikita Muravʹev’s wife shortly after Pushkin wrote it,¹⁶ utilizes a number of familiar Siberian literary tropes. The harsh natural environment and the noble romantic protagonist feature prominently, and Ryleev’s ‘Voinarovskii’ provides an obvious intertext: echoing Voinarovskii’s lament that ‘like the Siberian climate, I have become cruel and cold in my soul; nothing can cheer me, love and friendship are alien to me’, Pushkin assures the Decembrists that ‘in the dark of the underground, hope will bring you cheer and joy…. Love and friendship will reach you through the prison locks’.¹⁷ Yet Pushkin goes beyond romantic literary convention to make an explicitly political statement, exhortin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• 1 Siberian exile and Russian radical culture, 1825–1873
• 2 ‘A nihilist kurort’: Siberia in the Victorian imagination, c. 1830–1890
• 3 The Siberian agitation, 1890–1895
• 4 ‘Apostles of the gospel of reform’: Prison, exile and the limits of revolutionary subjectivity, 1905–1917
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index