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Abstract
This essay reviews new books by Sarah Badcock, Daniel Beer, and Andrew Gentes on Siberian exile in the long nineteenth century. Based on a wealth of memoirs and archival documents, all three studies shed new light on the aims, practices, and lived experience of exile, with Beer providing a broad overview and Gentes and Badcock focusing on specific episodes. Meticulously researched and well written, the books demonstrate the chaotic nature of exile, with corruption, violence, and the nature of the exiles themselves contributing to the system’s failures to achieve its often-conflicting goals. More context in terms of Siberian development and the Russian penal system and greater theoretical and comparative perspective would have further strengthened these important new books.
Contributor Notes
Jeffrey S. Hardy received his doctoral degree from Princeton University and is now associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. His primary research interest is the Soviet Gulag, and he has published several articles and book chapters on that topic. His first book, The Gulag after Stalin, was published by Cornell University Press in 2016. E-mail: jeff_hardy@byu.edu