PositiveThe GuardianThe House of the Dead is impeccably researched, beautifully written, but not incontrovertible. Was Siberian exile under the tsars exceptionally deplorable? In western Europe, murderers would have been executed ... Beer’s ironic conclusion is that ending an unjust, corrupt penal system is more destructive than the system itself. When 70,000 prisoners were released in 1917, there was a wave of robbery, rape and murder; similarly, when Lavrentiy Beria amnestied non-political prisoners after Stalin’s death, Moscow and Leningrad experienced a crime wave. And finally: in 1890, for every million people in Tsarist Russia, there were 970 prisoners. Today, for every million people in Russia, there are 4,500. The House of the Dead no longer seems so bad.
