Sarah Badcock focuses on the experiences of criminal and political exiles in eastern Siberia during the years 1905–17. Her evidence comes from central archives and the regional archives of the Republic of Tatarstan, the Sakha Republic, Irkutsk Region, Nizhegorod Region, and the Russian Far East (Primor'e, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk). Despite her disclaimer that she has written a “messy history” of a “kaleidoscopic set of experiences (178),” some theses emerge.
First is her apt description of the Russian Empire as “a shabby and shaggy beast, which did not know its population effectively” (4). While the state situated its criminals into deceptively precise categories in its central records, it soon lost track of them after they arrived in eastern Siberia to complete their sentences. Fully 43% of exiles sent to Irkutsk region alone were unaccounted for in 1913. The state did not know where those 31,043 exiles were; they were listed as having “run away” or being “absent without explanation” (130). Criminals serving a hard labor (katorga) sentence were easier to track. Exiles, however, received state support so inadequate that they moved constantly around their assigned exile regions in search of work or loot to feed themselves. Badcock's examination of the material reality of impoverished exiles supports her conclusions about the “shabbiness” of a state whose stinginess and bungling led to “incidental and arbitrary suffering (177)” for the majority. Her conclusion that exiles became “a significant burden” on the locales where they landed (106) is convincing.
These conclusions are at odds with the more romanticized view of Siberian exile available in memoirs of political exiles of an earlier generation. Badcock's periodization of the exile experience comprises a second argument. She historicizes eastern Siberian exile by tracking changes in penal regulations, the size and composition (political and criminal) of the exile population, and the experiences of exile. She identifies the revolutionary events of 1905–7 as a major turning point. Policies hardened, political exiles’ experiences worsened, and the exile population surged. Badcock reports an “exponential increase in the number of katorga prisoners” in the empire as a whole, from 6,123 in 1905 to 31,748 in 1915, with the majority of hard labor prisons being in Siberia (24). Meanwhile, arrests of participants in workers’ actions and political disturbances in 1905–7 created a population of political exiles from the working class. Their modest means made life in exile far more precarious than the comfortable existence of well-heeled political exiles of the 1870s–90s, who had arrived with cash and supplies in their luggage, and more cash and supplies on the way from family members back home. In 1907–17, by contrast, overcrowding in prisons and small monthly state stipends for exiles created severe poverty, hunger, homelessness, and disease for exiles and those family members (largely women and children) who voluntarily followed them to eastern Siberia.
Late Imperial inspection reports, complaints from regional administrators, and records from medical facilities and wretched orphanages for exiles’ children left behind an uncanny prequel to scenes from Soviet-era GULAG corrective labor camps and special settlements. Off-loading undesirables onto eastern Siberian locales without adequate planning, funding, or personnel was as prevalent in the region in 1907–17 as it was in the 1930s–50s. Equally endemic were such familiar diseases in the GULAG as tuberculosis, dystrophy, pellagra, furunculosis, and scurvy, with their legacies of permanent disfigurement and disability for those who survived the exile experience.
Badcock's attention to geography, maps, and movement contributes to spatial history. She introduces her methodology as “social history with a more cultural approach” (23). She acknowledges the challenges of describing the experiences of the increasingly proletarian exile community, given the preponderance of memoirs written by members of the intelligentsia. Regional administrative records and correspondence offer alternative evidence.
Badcock's writing is uneven. This volume illustrates the need for academic publishers to invest in thorough copyediting. The number of compositional errors exceeds what Oxford University Press should bring to press. Some wince-worthy Russian-language mistakes made their way into the book. Badcock also repeats her statements (and occasionally, the same sentences) too often in the course of each chapter. Given Badcock's research challenges in eastern Siberia, the rough spots in her published results are regrettable.
