...[a] masterly new history of the tsarist exile system ... Mr Beer’s book makes a compelling case for placing Siberia right at the centre of 19th-century Russian—and, indeed, European—history. But for students of Soviet and even post-Soviet Russia it holds lessons, too. Many of the country’s modern pathologies can be traced back to this grand tsarist experiment—to its tensions, its traumas and its abject failures.
Mr. Beer’s excellent book will for some time be the definitive work in English on this enormous topic ... Mr. Beer devotes 80 pages to a fascinating new account of the Decembrists that soberly delves into their tensions and personal weaknesses and tells of some of their conspiracies, drinking, debts and feuds. More important, Mr. Beer argues persuasively for a direct line between their story and the role played by the exile system in the eventual fall of the czars ... Mr. Beer provides a valuable sketch of life on Sakhalin island in the north Pacific, where late in the 19th century the apparat decided that convicts and exiles could more or less be dumped to fend for themselves—thus providing a perfect greenhouse for the exile system to flower into its purest moral expression.
Beer has done more with his own House of the Dead than merely reprise the accounts of great writers before him. A senior lecturer at the University of London, he has mined an impressive trove of resources, including state archives in St. Petersburg, Moscow and two Siberian cities that became hubs for the expanding penal system, Tobolsk and Irkutsk. From these rich lodes emerges a history with the sort of granular details that make the terror of the 'very name ‘Siberia’?' so vividly, so luridly clear.
The 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.
Beer devotes fine attention to the group of idealistic officers known as the Decembrists; after trying in 1825 to steer authoritarian Russia toward democracy, those do-gooders who weren’t executed served decades in exile ... Beer’s writing is clear, his judgments careful and restrained as he lays out the series of tsars who took for granted that they embodied the law, that their caprice regarding sentencing and pardoning conveyed justice ... Beer is liveliest and less buttoned-up when he discusses Poland’s repeated resistance to the bullying Russian empire.
