c. 1885

Exiles and convicts in Siberia

Hard time and hard labor for foes of the Tsar

A group of convicts sentenced to hard labor.

Image: Library of Congress

After surveying a route for a telegraph line through Siberia for the Russian-American Telegraph Company in 1864, American George Kennan found success in selling articles, lectures and a book about his travels through the region and his encounters with its diverse native cultures.

He soon made another trip through the northern Caucasus, became famous in America as an expert on Russia and earned the approval of the Tsarist government.

In May 1885, Kennan returned to Russia again. Following the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881, the government had cracked down on protestors, dissidents and suspected rebel groups.

Kennan decided to focus on the swelling ranks of criminals and political prisoners facing exile and hard labor in the harsh wilds of Siberia.

In the course of his meetings with exiled dissidents and convicts in remote penal settlements, appalling prisons and dangerous mines, Kennan began to question his support of the Tsarist government.

When he returned to America, he published his findings in the two-volume Siberia and the Exile System. He became an outspoken advocate for democratic revolution in Russia and was banned from the country in 1901.

A studio portrait of a Russian prisoner in leg irons.

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Convicts at Tyumen wait to board barges on the Ob River for transport to prisons around Siberia.

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Exiles and convicts wait at Tyumen wait to board a prison barge for Tomsk. Many are joined voluntarily by their wives and children.

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Shchedrin, a schoolteacher, was a political prisoner at the Kara gold mines who escaped in April 1882 by tunneling under the prison wall. He and other prisoners were recaptured and permanently chained to wheelbarrows, before being sent to isolation cells at the castle of Schlisselburg.

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A group of convicts rest by a roadside.

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Convicts eat lunch by a roadside.

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Convicts on a road near Tomsk.

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A prisoner named Mikhailof.

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Klenof.

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Dikofski, sentenced in Odessa to 15 to 20 years.

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Women and children exiles stand in front of their barracks.

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Kardashof, a political exile living in the Buriat village of Selenginsk who had served his penal term at the Kara gold mines.

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Scheffer, a prisoner at the mines of Kara.

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Yonof.

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A writer from Odessa, Nikolai Alekseevich Vitashevskii participated in military opposition in 1878 and was imprisoned in Kharkov Central Prison. Sentenced to four years of hard labor, he was exiled to Yakutsk.

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Ivan Cherniavski and his wife were banished to Tobolsk province by administrative process in 1878. In 1881, Cherniavski refused to take the oath of allegiance to Tsar Alexander III and they were sent further east.

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