Two “Siberias”

We read a lot about different revolutionaries being sent into internal exile to Siberia. But what does this mean? Siberia, after all, is a huge mass, basically everything Russian that is east of the Ural Mountains.

Internal exile, or ‘administrative exile’, was a way of dealing with political opposition by sending would-be revolutionaries to remote areas cut-off from their organisations, however basic the structure of those organisations might have been. Criminals were sent into internal exile too, to work camps, but of course it is the ‘political exiles’ that we are interested in. The place of exile was itself graded: the more dangerous the individual, the more remote, the harsher, the place of exile would be.

The conditions of exile also varied, and based on the same criteria. This included transport to their place of exile as well as living conditions once there. The most dangerous men were sent on foot manacled to each other but others (and women were exiled as well as men) could get permission from the Ministry of the Interior to travel privately to their exile. It seems crazy but that’s how it was. Permission could be granted to live in particular houses, to take up paid work, and to be allowed to visit nearby towns; family could also live with an exile. They could receive and send mail (though how often depended on the remoteness). It all depended on the degree of risk the Ministry of the Interior placed on an individual. Of course, this meant that political exiles could try to maintain contact with their different groups and continue to cause trouble, whilst escape was relatively easy from some locations, but the political exile had to balance this factor against the certainty that their exile would be made much harsher if they were caught.

Lenin, for his internal exile, travelled privately and went to what the Bolsheviks called ‘Siberian Italy’. He was first let out of prison and given three days to prepare for his journey. He travelled from St Petersburg to Moscow with his mother and was given permission to spend a few days more with his family before heading to Siberia. His mother and sisters, as well as his brother-in-law actually travelled with him to Tula, south of Moscow, before he journeyed onto Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia. He stayed there for two months waiting for the frozen river to thaw and, having still not been told where his final destination would be, he took the opportunity to write to the region’s Governor-General asking if he could serve out his exile in Krasnoyarsk or, if not, Minusinsk, the area known as the ‘Siberian Italy’, citing medical reasons for his request. He got a favourable response (as did two other comrades from his St Petersburg group) and the three of them were ordered to journey on to Minusinsk and, for Lenin, the lakeside village of Shushenskoe. This meant a four-day journey on a steamboat , with their own cabin, of course, before the three men hired a carriage for the final leg of their journey.

Once ensconced in Shushenskoe, Lenin didn’t waste time before writing to the Police Department in St Petersburg asking for permission for his fiancée, Nadezhda Krupskaya (herself in exile), to join him so that they could marry. Permission was granted, she did join him (with her mother) and they did marry. In preparation for their arrival, Lenin had rented a larger house and employed a young maid.

A political exile, we mustn’t forget that, Nadezhda, herself in political exile, had arranged for the publication of Lenin’s Economic Studies and Articles before joining him, and came armed with a commission to translate the British socialists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s book, The History of Trade Unionism into Russian, and he also worked on his own influential book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. All in political exile!

As for Stalin, he was arrested and imprisoned seven times in total between 1908 and 1917; he escaped five times.

The first time Stalin was sent into internal exile, he was sent to Irkutsk province, north of Mongolia. He was also exiled in Vologda, to the east of St Petersburg (twice, escaping once). This was a labour camp and Stalin was to later recall how he spent most of his time with the criminals, drinking with them in the bars. He thought the criminals were the salt-of-the-earth, whereas there had been lots of rats amongst the political prisoners.

His hardest internal exile, beginning in 1913, was his last (he was actually betrayed by a fellow member of the Central Committee who was also an Okhrana agent). He was sent to Yenisei-Turukhansk region, one of the most remote penal settlements in northern Siberia. It was a six-week journey by sledge to the nearest point on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Consequently, escape was near-impossible.

It was a region of tiny settlements hundreds of miles apart. The temperature in winter dropped to below -40 degrees Centigrade and the long Arctic winter nights lasted for eight or nine months. Hunting and fishing provided what food there was. The soil, which in any case was very poor, was frozen and so produced no food. The short summer was not much better as it brought mosquitoes. Letters or newspapers would take weeks, even months, to arrive.

In 1916, Stalin was summoned to Krasnoyarsk for a medical examination for military service but a defect in his left arm which he had had since childhood meant that he was turned down. And rather than being sent back to the frozen Arctic he was allowed to serve out his sentence at Achinsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway and “only” four days from Petrograd (which, of course, had been St Petersburg when he was sentences) by the fastest trains. And it was from Achinsk that Stalin headed to Petrograd when the revolution broke out.

So, two very different “Siberias”; two very different experiences. I got my information from two excellent biographies that you should be able to find in your school library:

Robert Service, Lenin (Pan Books, 2002)

Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Fontana Press, 1998)