The punishment of exile in itself does
not involve a
penal experience. However if you were
convicted of a criminal conviction then
your sentence will usually involve hard
labor which will take place within a
prison, followed by exile. For those who
are administratively exiled, that is they
are exiled without recourse to a court,
they would not have any formal
prison sentence in sight within that
punishment but in practice,
they would spend somewhere between a
minimum of weeks and a maximum of years
in squallored transfer prisons enroute from
the center of Russia to the peripheries to
Eastern Siberia. And then when you
actually get to your exile destination --
so your exile destination will normally be a named
village or named region -- exiles
themselves are often quite startled to
finally arrive and have no confines, no
controls, that they will go and live with
their friends, that they have
no restriction whatsoever except to be
registered once a week.
In Eastern Siberia, the conditions were
generally quite harsh although this
really depended upon your personal
circumstances. If you were compared to be
wealthy, so if you have some family
support or if you have support from a
particular political party, then you
could possibly live reasonably well in
exile, as many famous exiles like Lenin
did. If, however, like the majority of
exiles, you were from a lower-class
background, you didn't have any money
behind you, then your experience in exile
will be primarily determined by a
desperate struggle to find work because
you would not be provided for by the
state. You will need to work in order to
live and finding work in a very sparsely
populated location with very limited
industry and agriculture was very,
very difficult so people really struggled
just to live on their day to day means.
Comparatively few women were sent to
exile as a punishment. Very, very small
numbers of women make up the number
of criminal convicts and a larger but
still very small proportion of political
exiles were women. However I think that
we need to incorporate the women that
followed male convicts into exile.
These followers, although they were not
convicted of any crime and they were not
intended to be punished,
they actually suffered the same pains of
punishment that the men folk did.
It's difficult to make
generalizations about distinctions
between male and female experience in
exile.
I think we can certainly say that women
without the protection of men, in what
was a very volatile, under-governed
environment, were vulnerable to
attack and particularly to sexual
assault and we can also say, and based on
the records, that we have that the women
followers who followed their husbands
and men folk into exile were often
in the most sorry state of poverty
and they often ended up working in
the sex trade in order to scrape
a living together.
Well, the February Revolution brought a quite abrupt
end to the late imperial system of punishment.
So the February Revolution, which
happened in Petrograd and spread out
across the country and all over the
Empire in the urban centers,
prisoners were freed from prisons,
often criminal prisoners were
released at the same time as the
politicals that were the crowds'
targets and this may have contributed
to something of a crime wave in 1917 but
this kind of window was really short-
lived. Although exile was formally
abolished by the provisional government
in April of 1917, the
regime, the Soviet regime which emerged from
the ashes of Russia's terrible civil war,
was very quick to utilize geographies
punishment using the same
and tropes that the late imperial state had
done but they took all these models
of punishment to very new extremes and I
don't think that you can make any direct
comparison in terms of the scale and scope between
late imperial and Soviet systems of
punishment.