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WORK TITLE: The House of the Dead
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NATIONALITY: British
https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/daniel-beer_9e09fd00-5339-4fc4-b258-412c507d57c4.html * https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/daniel-beer/71219/ * http://www.russianartandculture.com/interview-daniel-beer-author-of-the-house-of-the-dead-siberian-exile-under-the-tsars/
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Male.
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Writer and editor. Royal Holloway, University of London, England, senior lecturer in history.
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Daniel Beer is a British writer and a senior lecturer in modern European history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Beer’s research specialty is nineteenth-century Russian history, and his first book is Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930, published in 2008.
In 2017, Beer released The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars, in which he discusses the practice of transporting political prisoners and criminals to Siberia, where they were often terribly mistreated. In an interview with Theodora Clarke, a contributor to the Russian Art & Culture Web site, Beer explained how he became inspired to write the book: “I suppose it grew out of my research interests from earlier work. My first book was a study of Russian psychiatry and criminology at the end of the nineteenth century. I have always had probably an unhealthy preoccupation with things related to crime and misery, as well as relationships between ideas of justice and right on the one hand, and then the experience of prisoners on the other.” Beer continued: “I noticed that there was actually very little done on the Siberian exile system. There are a couple of people in the United States who have produced a few academic studies, but there was certainly nothing really aimed at a broader audience.” Beer added: “Studies of the exile system specifically tended to get subsumed into broader studies about Siberia, that is why I thought it deserved its own space. I also felt that if you stop most Anglo-American-German-French readers and you say the word ‘Siberia’ to them, it still has this very strong resonance with the idea of punishment and suffering that has been handed down since Dostoevsky. It is lodged very strongly in the Western literary imagination, but it is something I thought had not really been subjected to a properly archive-based study that was nevertheless aimed at a broad audience.”
Critics offered favorable assessments of The House of the Dead. Booklist writer Jay Freeman commented: “This is a well-researched and interesting effort.” “Loosely organized and often repetitive, Beer’s history is nevertheless dense with memorable anecdotes and images,” remarked a contributor to Publishers Weekly. A Kirkus Reviews critic described the volume as “an elucidating study” and “an eye-opening, haunting work that delineates how a vast imperial penal system crumbled from its rotten core,” and a writer in the Economist suggested: “Mr Beer’s book makes a compelling case for placing Siberia right at the centre of nineteenth-century Russian—and, indeed, European—history. But for students of Soviet and even post-Soviet Russia it holds lessons, too. Many of the country’s modern pathologies can be traced back to this grand tsarist experiment—to its tensions, its traumas and its abject failures.” Owen Matthews, a contributor to Spectator, asserted: “In many ways Siberia truly was a House of the Dead—as Daniel Beer, who borrows the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prison novel for his masterful new study, recounts in horrific and gripping detail.” Matthews added that “Beer’s fascinating book teems with human detail—mercifully not all of it grim,” and he concluded: “Because of its far greater scale and brutality, the Soviet gulag has eclipsed the memory of the Tsarist penal system in the popular imagination. Beer redresses that imbalance by bringing the voices of the million-plus victims of katorga [the penal labor system] vividly to life.” Christian Science Monitor reviewer Bob Blaisdell called the book a “thorough and sober history of the tsars’ brutal nineteenth-century penal colonies.” Blaisdell continued: “Beer’s writing is clear, his judgments careful and restrained as he lays out the series of tsars who took for granted that they embodied the law, that their caprice regarding sentencing and pardoning conveyed justice. The author provides numerous accounts of the dysfunction, cruelty, and foolhardiness of the tsarist exile system.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2016, Jay Freeman, review of The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars, p. 17.
Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 2017, Bob Blaisdell, review of The House of the Dead.
Economist, August 20, 2016, “Prison without a Roof: Russian History,” review of The House of the Dead, p. 71.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of The House of the Dead.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Laurie Unger Skinner, review of The House of the Dead, p. 96.
Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2016, review of The House of the Dead, p. 58.
Spectator, July 23, 2016, Owen Matthews, review of The House of the Dead, p. 26.
ONLINE
Russian Art & Culture, http://www.russianartandculture.com/ (July 29, 2016), Theodora Clarke, author interview.*
QUOTED: "I suppose it grew out of my research interests from earlier work. My first book was a study of Russian psychiatry and criminology at the end of the 19th century. I have always had probably an unhealthy preoccupation with things related to crime and misery, as well as relationships between ideas of justice and right on the one hand, and then the experience of prisoners on the other."
"I noticed that there was actually very little done on the Siberian exile system. There are a couple of people in the United States who have produced a few academic studies, but there was certainly nothing really aimed at a broader audience."
"Studies of the exile system specifically tended to get subsumed into broader studies about Siberia, that is why I thought it deserved its own space. I also felt that if you stop most Anglo-American-German-French readers and you say the word ‘Siberia’ to them, it still has this very strong resonance with the idea of punishment and suffering that has been handed down since Dostoevsky. It is lodged very strongly in the Western literary imagination, but it is something I thought had not really been subjected to a properly archive-based study that was nevertheless aimed at a broad audience."
INTERVIEW: Daniel Beer, author of The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars
BY Theodora Clarke POSTED 29/07/2016 12:00 AM
Daniel BeerDaniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on crime, terrorism and punishment in nineteenth century Russia. He is the author of Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 (Cornell UP: 2008). We spoke to him about his new book, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (Penguin, 2016), the product of several years of research, including a year and a half in archives across Russia and Siberia.
Theodora Clarke: Daniel, why did you decide to write a book on this subject?
Daniel Beer: I suppose it grew out of my research interests from earlier work. My first book was a study of Russian psychiatry and criminology at the end of the 19th century. I have always had probably an unhealthy preoccupation with things related to crime and misery, as well as relationships between ideas of justice and right on the one hand, and then the experience of prisoners on the other. I noticed that there was actually very little done on the Siberian exile system. There are a couple of people in the United States who have produced a few academic studies, but there was certainly nothing really aimed at a broader audience.
Studies of the exile system specifically tended to get subsumed into broader studies about Siberia, that is why I thought it deserved its own space. I also felt that if you stop most Anglo-American-German-French readers and you say the word ‘Siberia’ to them, it still has this very strong resonance with the idea of punishment and suffering that has been handed down since Dostoevsky. It is lodged very strongly in the Western literary imagination, but it is something I thought had not really been subjected to a properly archive-based study that was nevertheless aimed at a broad audience.
TC: Why was Siberia selected as this major penal colony and place of punishment?
houseofthedead-196x300DB: Right from the origins of the Russian conquest of Siberia at the end of the 16th century the Russians had been drawn there by fur, by ‘soft gold’. It was an astonishingly rapid project of expansion over the course of the 17th century. Bands of trappers, mercenaries and soldiers gradually travelled all the way from the Urals to the Pacific, claiming the territory for the Tsar. Right from the earliest recorded episodes of Russia’s conquest of the continent, Siberia was also used as a place where the Tsar banishes troublesome subjects. Over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries there were these two policies of punishment and colonisation developing in tandem. I do not think it is fair to say that there was any systematic approach to this at the time. It really started to be systematised in the beginning of the 19th century under the auspices of Russian statesman Mikhail Speransky, who thought that Siberia should not just be used as a kind of remote colony and place of banishment but instead ultimately integrated into the Russian Empire and treated as a fully fledged part of it. That was the point when attempts were made to systemise and bring under control the rather haphazard localised forms of government in Siberia while getting the exile system into shape so that it could fulfill colonial ambitions.
TC: How did they actually get there? I presume a lot of people would not have even made it as far as walking thousands of miles.
DB: That is right, exiles would set off in the beginning of the 19th century in relay convoys. You have a set of convoy soldiers who were responsible for transferring a group (anywhere between two and four hundred exiles) from one stage to the next, where they were handed over to the next exile command at a way station. Penal laborers walked in chains. If you were sentenced to penal labor it was for the most serious of crimes (political crimes or murder). If you were convicted of lesser crimes or if you had been banished by your own village commune, you were exiled to settlement. This means you were not sentenced to hard labor but were assigned to a particular district in a particular Siberian province. At the back of the column came the women and children who were following husbands and fathers. They were not in prison but effectively share the fate of the convicts.
The Romanov dynasty’s paternalism rested on the idea that the Tsar was a benevolent father, but of course what was happening was that the autocracy was consigning hundreds of thousands of women and children to appalling conditions in Siberia where they are forced into poverty and prostitution. Children were being raised in the criminal culture of the convicts and families torn up. By one estimate in the 1870s half of all children making the journey to Siberia did not survive. This whole process was presided over by a Tsar who was supposedly father to his children and for whom the sanctity of marriage and the responsibilities of the patriarchal family was a cornerstone of the regime.
One of the things that struck me about the marching convoys was that part of the reason why the system was so horrendous was because the state was so weak and inept. On the ground many things that Speransky called for were simply not the case. It was underfunded, hopelessly mismanaged and completely undermined by the astonishing levels of corruption within the Siberian administration. The convoy commanders operated these very harsh monopolies, massively inflating the price of bread, clothing and shoes. Therefore, within a few hundred miles of setting out from Moscow or Saint Petersburg, most exiles had chewed their way through all of their savings and were absolutely destitute. Senior officials understood what was going on; they were not blind to it. They reported back to the capital that the colonial ambitions of the state relied on the state’s ability to transfer healthy people from one point in the empire to another and that these colonial ambitions are effectively turning to ashes in the marching convoys. By the time they actually reached their destination they were sickly, ragged mockeries of the idea of the hardy penal colonists envisaged by Speransky.
TC: How did they survive the winter?
DB: Hundreds don’t. They freeze to death in the marching convoys. Many other exiles, who escaped, joined what was called at the time “General Cuckoo’s army”. They would flee at the bird’s call each spring, which heralds the beginning of warmer weather and increased food and vegetation in the summer. After roaming the Taiga for months they would turn themselves back to the authorities, knowing that they could not survive the winter. It was the cold and the winter that prevented the vast majority from returning to European Russia. One exile official said to a journalist at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘Siberia is for us an enormous prison. In which of its particular cells a convict resides is of no real consequence. The main thing is he cannot get over the walls.’ The walls were the winter.
TC: What was the worst punishment as a political prisoner? Where would you have actually been sent when you got there?
DB: It varies. The Decembrists ended up east of Lake Baikal. The fort they were initially sent to was Fort Chita and then from there to a prison Petrovsk Zavod. Both of those are in or adjacent to the Nerchinsk mining region, and that area really becomes the default destination for political prisoners. A later generation of populists, revolutionaries from the 1860s and 1870s, were sent there as well. Up until the 1880s if were are a political prisoner you would be sent to prison, where you would be subject to a policy of containment, not really hard labor.
"Decembrists. Arrival of Nikolai Muraviev's wife", by I. Krivshinko / Courtesy of www.rosimperija.info
“Decembrists. Arrival of Nikolai Muraviev’s wife”, by I. Krivshinko / Courtesy of www.rosimperija.info
The problem they find is that these political prisoners, unlike common criminals, are bound together by strong bonds of solidarity. They shared a common ideology, a visceral hatred for the state, and saw themselves as having committed no crimes at all. If the Decembrists had been content to act out their own republican ideals in their small exile communities in Transbaikal, by the 1880s, a new generation of political exiles were staging symbolic acts of defiance in order to provoke the authorities. The men would refuse to remove hats, refuse to stand up in the presence of a senior official, or refuse to leave their cells at roll call etc. Many had been exiled extra-judicially and had never had their day in court but they now set about trying to convert Siberia’s waystations, prisons and penal settlements into a gigantic courtroom in which they could indict what they saw as the tyranny of the state. The exile authorities were now struggling to win popular support for their repression of the revolutionary movement in an age of a rapidly expanding, if still censored, popular press. You could see very clearly now that the state was succeeding in isolating and punishing individuals, but it was losing a wider war for hearts and minds across the Russian Empire. It was in response to that problem that the state ended up banishing individuals (like Lenin) to distant locations in Siberia, trying to keep them out of the public eye. Part of my story is about the way in which Siberia actually came to play a central role in the development of the Russian revolutionary movement. It was a place in which enemies of the regime forged alliances, won new recruits, and, by crafting compelling narratives of defiance and martyrdom, succeeded in blackening the reputation of the regime (not just in Russia but abroad as well).
TC: How did you go about researching this topic and approaching such a vast subject?
DB: The book relies on a combination of published sources. From the 1860s onwards a lot of memoirs started to be published and what started as a trickle really surged into a torrent of publications in the wake of the collapse of censorship in 1905. Also, after 1917 the Bolsheviks, ironically, invested a great deal of money and time into publicising the horrors of exiles under the Tsar just at the same time when they were expanding their own system of camps. There was a lot of published material but I really wanted to write a book that was based, first and foremost, on archival evidence.
I spent about a year and a half in archives in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Tobolsk, and Irkutsk. The administrative apparatus of the Tsarist state was very centralised, so quite a lot of great material worked its way up the food-chain all the way back to the Ministry of the Interior or the Ministry of Justice. I think the most moving document I found in the archives was a letter written in the Tobolsk prison (which still stands today) by an obscure revolutionary by the name of Sergei Vilkov. He was sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in the murder of a guard in 1910. He sits down to write a note saying ‘You’ve sentenced me to death but you bloodsuckers are in no position to judge the people…’ He has this wonderful line where he says, ‘At the moment you rule over the people with the dark masses of soldiers but there will come a time when they will see you for the murderers, debauchees and frauds that you are, and at that moment the people will show you no mercy.’ And that was his suicide note… He then hanged himself in his cell.
There were these kind of moments where you would stop and realise that these were people who did not necessarily think like we do, but they were fundamentally grappling with the same questions. What is just and what is not? What is legitimate and where does sovereignty lie? Is the government entitled to rule over the people? Is violence legitimate? These are questions that we still deal with in society today.
TC: You mentioned Dostoevsky and I was interested in any other cultural references. I was giving a lecture on Peredvizhniki the other day and I was really interested in Levitan’s painting of Vladimirka.
DB: It is one of the paintings that I have reproduced in the book. By the time Levitan paints it in 1892, it is already an iconic road in the Russian imagination. When you look at the painting you can almost hear the convicts’ footsteps as they tramp eastwards. Dostoevsky underwent a mock execution in 1849 and then had his death sentence commuted to four years of penal labour, which he served in the prison fort in Omsk. After his release, he wrote Notes from the House of the Dead, from which I obviously borrow my own title. It’s a supposedly fictional account but his descriptions of life in the prison barracks in the company of common criminals are clearly based on his own experience and everything he says chimes with all the other sources that I looked at. Dostoevsky really puts Siberian exile on the map in Russian literature, but of course the story is then taken up by a host of other writers. Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, as well as Chekhov, who visits Sakhalin in 1892 and writes a kind of documentary-style travelogue about the appalling condition in which some 20,000 penal laborers are existing in the state’s newest penal colony. Then in 1899 Siberia is subject to a ferocious critique by Tolstoy in Resurrection. Basically, from the beginning of the 1860s right through to the last days of tsarism, Siberia is one of the most discussed topics in the Russian press, including the fate of political prisoners, the indiscriminate use of corporal punishment, the injustices of the system and the fact that people find themselves exiled to Siberia in great numbers without ever having seen the inside of a courtroom because they’re exiled extra-judicially by the state or they are denounced and banished by their own peasant communities, merchant guilds etc.
The Vladimirka, 1892, by Isaak Levitan
The Vladimirka, 1892, by Isaak Levitan
TC: We have many student readers who would be interested in how they might become a ‘future you’. For example if they want to become historians and they are doing their PhD at the moment, what advice would you give to them?
DB: I came to Russian history through literature; I did modern languages as an undergraduate. I would say study the language. It is so much easier to get through sources and tease out the more nuanced stuff if your Russian is good rather than just okay. You need a lot of patience and a sense of black humor to work in those kind of Russian archives, as some of them are pretty chaotic. But there is also something really thrilling about it. Exile is one of many topics in Russian history that have not been very intensively studied. It was often the case that I was the first person to sign those files out of the archive, since they’d been deposited 150 years ago. They have just sat there gathering dust until I stumbled upon them, and that sense of discovery was a real thrill. It is a lot of effort, but the upsides are huge. To move from note collection to writing, I would number each source (thousands in the end) and the page number. I would have a little quote or a point from it and stick underneath it 512: page #. From there I could cut and paste that bit of text from the original source, so when it came to footnotes I could always find it later. You have to have a provisional set of topics, of course. I spent months probably just reading through all of my notes and arranging them into chapters.
TC: What is your next project after this?
DB: I have not yet decided, but I am quite interested in revolutionary movements. I am thinking about doing a book on what was called the ‘Emperor Hunt’ on the campaign to assassinate Alexander II in 1881. It would be great to do something more focused!
TC: Thank you, Daniel!
The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars By Daniel Beer Published by Allen Lane
Daniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Renovating Russia.
QUOTED: "This is a well-researched and interesting effort."
The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars
Jay Freeman
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
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The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars.
By Daniel Beer.
Jan. 2017.496p. illus. Knopf, $35 (9780307958907). 957.07.
For nineteenth- and twentieth-century European liberals, the term, Siberian exile, conjured up the worst perceived aspects of Russian autocracy, including arbitrary imprisonment, torture, beatings, and horrible living conditions. It was, as Dostoevsky termed it, truly life in a house of the dead. But British historian Beer shows that the reality was more complex. Brutality certainly existed, with punishment inflicted with the dreaded knout (a knotted whip). Yet, unlike Stalin's gulag, both Western and Russian writers frequently observed the Siberian prisons and were often surprised by the familiarity between guards and prisoners. Some guards, properly bribed, could be induced to perform onerous tasks in place of some prisoners, such as working in mines. Prison populations could be an eclectic mixture, including outspoken liberals, Polish nationalists, and, eventually, violent Marxist rebels. Wives and other family members sometimes joined the convicted in voluntary exile, and the "cleverest" prisoners could sometimes maintain a relatively comfortable existence. This is a well-researched and interesting effort to examine a "lifestyle that now appears small-scale and almost benign compared to the approaching horrors of Stalinist repression.--Jay Freeman
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Freeman, Jay. "The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 17. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563434&it=r&asid=baca33db0242f5a7789330cc0ad9e47d. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "Loosely organized and often repetitive, Beer's history is nevertheless dense with memorable anecdotes and images."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563434
The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars
263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars
Daniel Beer. Knopf, $35 (496p) ISBN 978-0307-95890-7
In this meticulously researched and often enlightening account, Beer (Renovating Russia), senior lecturer in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, shows that populating and cultivating the resource-rich expanse east of the Ural Mountains was a test that the czars failed spectacularly. As early as the 17th century, Russian peasants, soldiers, and officials began to settle Siberia, soon joined by exiles "in ever greater numbers." Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the state banished people deemed "harmful agents" to serve prison sentences, perform hard labor, or settle permanently in what became Russia's "Wild East." Thrown together in grueling convoys, deteriorating way stations, and hellish mines were minor offenders, hardened criminals, and generations of revolutionaries for whom Siberia was both a punishment and a chance to test and spread revolutionary ideas. Beer details the systemic incompetence of the penal administration and the brutal physical punishments inflicted on exiles, as well as the violence that escaped convicts unleashed on the indigenous population. Loosely organized and often repetitive, Beer's history is nevertheless dense with memorable anecdotes and images, including a hillside of empty graves dug to serve a penal colony. As Beer demonstrates, the Russian empire's grand ambitions for Siberia, like those graves, "sank into the earth without a trace." Illus. Agent: Michael V. Carlisle, InkWell. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 58+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468700052&it=r&asid=1506ddb84d59e3b6240edf99fa850731. Accessed 22 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468700052
Beer, Daniel. The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars
Laurie Unger Skinner
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p96.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Beer, Daniel. The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars. Knopf. Jan. 2017.496p. illus. maps, notes. index.ISBN 9780307958907. $35; ebk. ISBN 9780307958914. HIST
Tsars of the Nth century, from Alexander I to Nicholas II, used Siberia as a penal colony, believing hard labor would transform convicts into motivated settlers who would pioneer the Westernization of the Russian East. Beer (history, Univ. of London; Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930) relates in harrowing detail the misery of 19th-century exile to Siberia. The harsh climate, primitive living conditions, and physical punishments inflicted on convicts (living in fetters, flogging, knouting, gauntlets, and starvation) turned humans feral or broken. Rather than becoming productive workers when released from slave labor to live in the frontier, criminal exiles terrorized peasants and towns. Political exiles, like the Decembrists, returned to western Russia even more radicalized. By the end of the 1800s, Siberian exile was a rite of passage for the revolutionaries who overthrew Nicholas II. VERDICT Readers with an interest in Russian history and the prehistory of the Soviet gulag will appreciate Beer's effective use of 19th-century journalism, Russian novels, and official reports to evoke the hopelessness of Siberian exile and the utter failure of the region as a prison without walls. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]--Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll, of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Skinner, Laurie Unger. "Beer, Daniel. The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 96. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413020&it=r&asid=3c84beac65fee7d141ff638aa9457489. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "an elucidating study" "an eye-opening, haunting work that delineates how a vast imperial penal system crumbled from its rotten core."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413020
Daniel Beer: THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Daniel Beer THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD Knopf (Adult Nonfiction) 35.00 ISBN: 978-0-307-95890-7
An elucidating study of how Russias east was wonby hard labor.Since the 16th century, Siberia has served as Russias repository for undesirables, much as the New World and Australia served for Britain. In this engaging study of Russias far-flung penal system, British academic Beer (History/Royal Holloway, Univ. of London; Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930, 2008) reveals how the vast area east of the Ural Mountains was gradually settled by fur trappers, soldiers, fugitive serfs, mercenaries, and exiles, pacifying nomadic tribes already sparsely inhabiting the taiga to the north and the steppe to the south. Imperial banishment to Siberia for criminality served both to purge European Russia of mutinous populations and to populate the vast eastern expanse and harvest raw materials at key labor sites like the mines of Nerchinsk. Exile was severe and final, especially in the early centuries, with the victim given a civil death by a public ceremonial breaking of the sword over his head, flogging, facial scarring, and shaving of one side of the skull; malefactors were fettered together and marched over thousands of miles on primitive roads and many miserable months to reach labor camps. Wives and children were encouraged to accompany the men, although little did the women know of the harsh and dangerous conditions that awaited them (return was barred to them as well). Beer concentrates on political exiles, specifically the Decembrists, who, inspired by ideals of national liberalism, attempted to overthrow Czar Nicholas I in 1825. Many of them were educated aristocrats who used exile for fomenting republicanism, becoming martyrs to the causes of freedom and reform. Beer ably shows how these educated dissidentsincluding Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose House of the Dead lends its title to this worktransformed Siberia from a political wasteland into a crucible of the nascent Russian revolutionary movement. An eye-opening, haunting work that delineates how a vast imperial penal system crumbled from its rotten core.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Daniel Beer: THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181849&it=r&asid=81764d81a6164bb588994280a6abf11a. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "Mr Beer's book makes a compelling case for placing Siberia right at the centre of nineteenth-century Russian_and, indeed, European—history. But for students of Soviet and even post-Soviet Russia it holds lessons, too. Many of the country's modern pathologies can be traced back to this grand tsarist experiment—to its tensions, its traumas and its abject failures."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181849
Prison without a roof; Russian history
420.9003 (Aug. 20, 2016): p71(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
The tsars' idea of rehabilitation
The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars. By Daniel Beer. Allen Lane; 487 pages. To be published in America by Knopf in January.
"HERE was a world all its own, unlike anything else," wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like hundreds of thousands of Russians before him, and many more after, Dostoevsky had been in Siberian exile, banished in 1850 to the "vast prison without a roof" that stretched out beyond the Ural mountains for thousands of miles to the Pacific Ocean. The experience marked him for ever. Siberia, he wrote later, is a "house of the living dead".
It was no metaphor. In 19th-century Russia, to be sentenced to penal labour in the prisons, factories and mines of Siberia was a "pronouncement of absolute annihilation", writes Daniel Beer in his masterly new history of the tsarist exile system, "The House of the Dead". For lesser criminals, being cast into one of Siberia's lonely village settlements was its own kind of death sentence. On a post of plastered bricks in a forest marking the boundary between Siberia and European Russia, exiles trudging by would carve inscriptions. "Farewell life!" read one. Some, like Dostoevsky, might eventually return to European Russia. Most did not.
Successive tsars sought to purge the Russian state of unwanted elements. Later, as Enlightenment ideas of penal reform gained prominence, rehabilitation jostled with retribution for primacy. But the penal bureaucracy could not cope. The number of exiles exploded over the course of the 19th century, as an ever greater number of activities were criminalised. A century of rebellions, from the Decembrist uprising in 1825 to the revolution of 1905, ensured that a steady supply of political dissidents were carted across the Urals by a progressively more paranoid state. The ideals of enlightened despotism--always somewhat illusory--were swept away. Exiles re-emerged--if they ever did--sickly, brutalised and often violently criminal.
In the Russian imagination, the land beyond the Urals was not just a site of damnation, but a terra nullius for cultivation and annexation to the needs of the imperial state. Siberia, Mr Beer writes, was both "Russia's heart of darkness and a world of opportunity and prosperity". Exile was from the outset a colonial as much as a penal project. Women--idealised as "frontier domesticators"--were coerced into following their husbands into exile to establish a stable population of penal colonists. Mines, factories, and later grand infrastructure projects such as the trans-Siberian railway were to be manned by productive, hardy labourers, harvesting Siberia's natural riches while rehabilitating themselves.
But in this, too, the system failed utterly. Unlike Britain's comparable system of penal colonisation in Australia, the tsars never brought prosperity to Siberia. Fugitives and vagabonds ravaged the countryside, visiting terror on the free peasantry, Siberia's real colonists. A continental prison became Russia's "Wild East".
In the end, the open-air prison of the tsarist autocracy collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The exiled and indigenous populations were engaged in low-level civil war, with resentful Siberian townsfolk up in arms protesting the presence of exiles thrust on them by the state. A land intended as political quarantine became a crucible of revolution. And modernisation--above all the arrival of the railway--ultimately turned the whole concept of banishment into an absurd anachronism. With revolution in 1917, the system simply imploded.
But it never really disappeared. The tsars' successors, the Soviets, proclaimed lofty ideals but in governing such a vast land they, too, became consumed by the tyrannic paranoia that plagued their forebears. Out of the ashes of the old system rose a new one, the gulag, even more fearsome than what it replaced. Mr Beer's book makes a compelling case for placing Siberia right at the centre of 19th-century Russian--and, indeed, European--history. But for students of Soviet and even post-Soviet Russia it holds lessons, too. Many of the country's modern pathologies can be traced back to this grand tsarist experiment--to its tensions, its traumas and its abject failures.
The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars.
By Daniel Beer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Prison without a roof; Russian history." The Economist, 20 Aug. 2016, p. 71(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461002011&it=r&asid=a07095f43fe10eabc2e5570a92aee438. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "In many ways Siberia truly was a House of the Dead—as Daniel Beer, who borrows the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky's prison novel for his masterful new study, recounts in horrific and gripping detail."
"Beer's fascinating book teems with human detail—mercifully not all of it grim."
"Because of its far greater scale and brutality, the Soviet gulag has eclipsed the memory of the Tsarist penal system in the popular imagination. Beer redresses that imbalance by bringing the voices of the million-plus victims of katorga vividly to life."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461002011
Russia's dumping ground: Owen Matthews on the horrific early history of the largest open-air prison in the world
Owen Matthews
331.9804 (July 23, 2016): p26.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars
by Daniel Beer
Allen Lane, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 512
Almost as soon as Siberia was first colonised by Cossack conquistadors in the 17th century, it became a place of banishment and punishment. As early as the 1690s the Russian state began to use Siberia as a dumping ground for its criminals, as though its vastness could quarantine evil. Katorga --from the Greek word for galley--was the judicial term for a penal sentence where inmates performed hard labour in the service of the state. The sentence was commonly imposed in place of death from the reign of Peter the Great onwards. And in many ways Siberia truly was a House of the Dead--as Daniel Beer, who borrows the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky's prison novel for his masterful new study, recounts in horrific and gripping detail.
In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky described his own five years as a political prisoner in Siberia as a 'ceaseless, merciless assault on my soul ... eternal hostility and bickering all around, cursing, cries, din, uproar'. Dostoevsky had initially been sentenced to death and was reprieved only as he and his fellow members of the liberal Petrashevsky Circle stood before a firing squad. The experience was to shape his life --not least because katorga had shown Dostoevsky the beast in man.
'Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations,' he wrote in The House of the Dead. 'Tyranny is a habit; it has its own organic life; it develops finally into a disease ... Blood and power intoxicate.'
But for every banished high-profile radical like Dostoevsky, thousands of unknown common criminals and their families were marched off to Siberia and into oblivion. Beer uses police reports, petitions, court records and official correspondence 'stitched into bundles and filed away in rough cardboard folders' to tell their story.
Exile, like transportation, its British judicial equivalent, was a deliberate act of expulsion of poison from the body politic. 'In the same way that we have to remove harmful agents from the body so that the body does not expire, so it is in the community of citizens,' declared the Bishop of Tobolsk and Siberia, Ioann Maksimovich, in 1708. 'All healthy and harmless objects can abide within it, but that which is harmful must be cut out.'
But the scale of Russia's penal migration dwarfed that of western European nations. 'In the eight decades between 1787 and 1868 Britain transported around 160,000 convicts to Australia,' writes Beer, a historian at Royal Holloway University of London. 'By contrast, between 1801 and 1917, more than one million Tsarist subjects were banished to Siberia.'
The crimes for which a man could be exiled included fortune-telling, vagrancy, 'begging with false distress', prizefighting, wife-beating, illicit tree-felling and 'recklessly driving a cart without use of reins'. Until the mid-18th century these exiles were always branded, usually on the face or right hand, to prevent them ever making their way back to the world. In later years half a prisoner's head was shaven--to distinguish them from soldiers, who were often shaven-headed to avoid lice--and fettered for the initial part of their journey.
Before the Trans-Siberian railway was completed in 1916, the convicts walked to their place of punishment. The journey was supposed to take 30 weeks--but some men spent up to two years shuffling in columns along the great Siberian trunk road known as the Trakt. The jingle of their chains and the ritual cries of 'Fathers, have pity on us!' as the condemned men held out their caps for food was, for all the travellers who passed them in their high-wheeled carriages, the sound of Siberia. By tradition at Tobolsk 1,100 miles from Moscow, the prisoners' leg irons were removed--a mercy, but also a sign that they had gone too far into the wilderness to survive escape. Their sentences began only once they had arrived at their designated place of exile.
Authority and discipline died over Siberia's vast distances. If detached from European Russia, Siberia would still be the largest country in the world--it is bigger than the United States and Europe combined. Feudal Russia's institutions--serfdom, aristocracy and the authority of the Church--all dissolved in the rough egalitarianism of the frontier. Like America's Wild West, the empty land filled with a mismatched population of God-fearing schismatics and violent criminals. By 1897 more than 300,000 out of a total Siberian population of 5.7 million were convicts and exiles. Every spring the roads of Siberia filled with escaping prisoners, known as General Cuckoo's Army. When recaptured, so many of them pretended to have forgotten their names that the commonest moniker in the police records was 'Ivan Nepomnushchy,' Ivan I-don't-remember. Desperate for money and food, Beer tells us, the escapees terrorised the local population, butchering impoverished peasants for the smallest of sums.
Conditions varied widely. For the aristocratic rebels sent to Siberia for backing the failed Decembrist rebellion against Nicholas I in 1825, the punishment was simply never to see civilisation again--the comfortable mansions where they lived with the wives who voluntarily followed them into exile still stand in Irkutsk. For common criminals sent to the mines at Nerchinsk, conditions were so horrific that they would insert finely chopped horsehair into self-inflicted wounds on the penis to mimic the symptoms of syphilis to escape from work.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
'We have let millions of people rot in jail, and let them rot to no purpose, treating them with an indifference that is little short of barbaric,' wrote Anton Chekhov to his editor Aleksei Suvorin, during a visit to Russia's newest labour camps on Sakhalin Island in 1893. 'We have forced them to drag themselves in chains across tens of thousands of kilometers in freezing conditions, infected them with syphilis, debauched them and hugely increased the criminal population.' Chekhov's blistering report into the inhuman conditions of prisoners shocked liberal society in Russia and abroad--and the American journalist and explorer George Kennan's reports on the terrible condition of political prisoners helped make Siberia, says Beer, 'a byword for the despotism of the Tsars'.
Beer's fascinating book teems with human detail--mercifully not all of it grim. There's the remarkable story of Andrei Tsybulenko, an escaped convict who served as a crewman on a famously daring voyage along the north coast of Siberia in 1877. When he arrived in St Petersburg he was rearrested--but the Tsar was so impressed by his feat of navigation that he was pardoned and given a medal. We meet 'a vagabond juggler called Tumanov' who organised entertainments for the guards at Tobolsk prison, with a teetering human pyramid as the star turn. Climbing to the top of the pyramid, Tumanov promptly leapt over the wall and escaped.
The most famous Tsarist-era political prisoners were of course the socialist revolutionaries who would take power in 1917. Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky all served time in Siberian exile--though none was forced to perform hard labour and all escaped easily and often--as did the future architects of the Soviet terror-state Felix Dzherzhinsky and Genrich Yagoda.
In an important sense, 20th-century Russia was a creation of the Tsarist penal system. The October Revolution itself was the exiles' revenge on their old captors. And the Soviet machinery of state repression that Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the Gulag Archipelago was a crueller, vaster and more inhuman version of pre-Revolutionary katorga.
Because of its far greater scale and brutality, the Soviet gulag has eclipsed the memory of the Tsarist penal system in the popular imagination. Beer redresses that imbalance by bringing the voices of the million-plus victims of katorga vividly to life. The House of the Dead tells the story of how 'the Tsarist regime collided violently with the political forces of the modern world'--and how modern Russia was born among the squalor, the cockroaches and the casual violence of the world's largest open-air prison.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Matthews, Owen. "Russia's dumping ground: Owen Matthews on the horrific early history of the largest open-air prison in the world." Spectator, 23 July 2016, p. 26+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458995073&it=r&asid=63fc5df6f0771b6110363174e19fcb55. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "thorough and sober history of the tsars' brutal 19th-century penal colonies."
"Beer's writing is clear, his judgments careful and restrained as he lays out the series of tsars who took for granted that they embodied the law, that their caprice regarding sentencing and pardoning conveyed justice. The author provides numerous accounts of the dysfunction, cruelty, and foolhardiness of the tsarist exile system."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458995073
'The House of the Dead' recalls heroics, horror in Russian penal colonies
Bob Blaisdell
(Jan. 6, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Byline: Bob Blaisdell
Daniel Beer, a lecturer at University of London, won't allow readers of The House of the Dead, his thorough and sober history of the tsars' brutal 19th-century penal colonies to be distracted by comparisons to the USSR's spectacularly worse Gulag system.
Beer's focus is on the tsars' system, and, as if he were preparing us for an exam, won't let us look ahead to the Soviet or Nazi horrors, or swivel around except for a glimpse or two at the era's smaller-scale and less lethal British and French penal colonies. Beer rigorously leaves the most passionate judgments of Russia's crude and dysfunctional system to its contemporary victims and perpetrators.
For instance, Tsar Nicholas I's minister of foreign affairs, applying a typically thuggish psychology, regretted when Russia's eastern border opened onto the Pacific Ocean, because, as he put it, "remote Siberia had been for us a deep sack into which we tossed our social sins in the form of exiles and penal labourers and so on." The heartless bureaucrats in St. Petersburg thought that shackled prisoners and desperate exiles would somehow scamper away across the sea; most often, however, they longed for European Russia, the contemptuous Mother who had cast them into that "deep sack."
Beer devotes fine attention to the group of idealistic officers known as the Decembrists; after trying in 1825 to steer authoritarian Russia toward democracy, those do-gooders who weren't executed served decades in exile. Many of them were joined in Siberia by their heroically activist spouses. (A prison commandant "once remarked that he would rather deal with 100 political exiles than with half a dozen of their wives.") A few families, on the other hand, turned their backs on the brave men. The political philosopher Alexander Herzen, writes Beer, "was indignant at this 'shameless repudiation of loved ones.' In their loyalty to the emperor, many relatives and friends 'proved themselves to be fanatical slaves - some out of baseness and others,which was even worse, out of conviction.'"
Beer's writing is clear, his judgments careful and restrained as he lays out the series of tsars who took for granted that they embodied the law, that their caprice regarding sentencing and pardoning conveyed justice. The author provides numerous accounts of the dysfunction, cruelty, and foolhardiness of the tsarist exile system, as seen through the eyes of Fyodor Dostoevsky (whose great novel "Notes from the House of the Dead" inspired Beer's title), Anton Chekhov (who wrote a long careful survey of the prison island Sakhalin in 1890), and survivors' memoirs, diaries, and letters.
Among the victims of tsarist exile was Vladimir Lenin: "Despite his frustrations with the speed of the postal system (it took about 35 days to send a letter to the capital and receive a reply), Lenin devoured texts on politics, economics, industrial history, agriculture and statistics, and, when he finally left Siberia at the beginning of 1900, he took with him 225 kilograms of books." Of course under Lenin's leadership of the Bolsheviks before, during, andafter the 1917 Russian civil war, he initiated a labor-camp system that would never allow such freedom of time and thought to another prisoner. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was serving an eight-year term in the Gulag (his crime: making jokes about Stalin), he and other prisoners were delighted when for toilet paper they were handed a page from a book, the contents of which they devoured while standing in line. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in "The Gulag Archipelago": "[A]nd what reading that was! You could try to guess whence it came, read it over on both sides, digest the contents, evaluate the style - and when words had been cut in half that was particularly essential! You could trade with your comrades.... Visits to the toilet thus became a means of acquiring knowledge."
(Pardon me! I can imagine Professor Beer frowning that I've gone off topic: Don't think about the Gulag or about America's own dysfunctional prison system!) Beer is liveliest and less buttoned-up when he discusses Poland's repeated resistance to the bullying Russian empire and the consequent imprisonment of the idealistic, democracy-promoting Polish revolutionaries who were often remarkably unbowed, refusing to see themselves as tsarist subjects. In 1865, Polish revolutionaries "insisted upon rights not encoded in the penal statutes of the Russian state but rather rights fundamental to all human beings." Leo Tolstoy was among many who admired the idealistic and enlightened Poles, and his fictional story, "What For?," about an escape attempt by a Polish noble and his heroic wife is, even in Beer's doggedly historical recounting of it, absolutely thrilling.
The tsars, one after the other, could not comprehend a society founded on civil rights or democratic processes. Mikhail Lunin, one of the Decembrists exiled to Siberia, kept his pen flowing and publicly admonished the tsar and his minions: " 'You have taken it upon yourself to cleanse Russia of the contagion of liberal ideas and have plunged her into an abyss of dissolution, into the vices of spying and the darkness of ignorance. With the hand of the executioner, you have extinguished the minds that illuminated the social movement and directed its development. What have you put in their place? We in turn summon you before the court of our contemporaries and of posterity: answer for yourselves!'"
The authorities' answer, of course, was to take away Lunin's pen and lock him away in a frigid cell until he died. We've learned that autocrats take offense when accused of doing what they're actually doing. But what is prison and exile for: to reform or to mercilessly grind down the souls and bones of our fellow sinners? Beer presents us with one of those cases that would leave a classroom full of earnest undergraduates in tears. Fyodor Shirokolobov was, even to himself, a seemingly irredeemable criminal; Dostoevsky could have invented him and developed his situation into an excruciating fictional episode.
After an attempted escape, Shirokolobov was chained to a wheelbarrow for five years: "'When I went out to work with the barrow, it filled me with hatred. I suffered it ... like a dumb beast.... I would look at my wheelbarrow wife with a sense of bitterness, absurdity and shame.... It might seem unlikely that a moral abomination such as myself could feel a sense of human shame ... but my soul was outraged by this punishment.'"
The many photographs and images of this grim period (including one of a prisoner and his "wheelbarrow wife") are enough to make one blush with shame for the human race.
Bob Blaisdell edited "Essays on Civil Disobedience" (Dover).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blaisdell, Bob. "'The House of the Dead' recalls heroics, horror in Russian penal colonies." Christian Science Monitor, 6 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476719684&it=r&asid=663bf5a3593cfb60545c8dbbdf36a2d1. Accessed 22 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476719684