ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe thanks to many individuals and not a few institutions for their help with this book. Grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board and the Fulbright-Hays program in 19781979 made the initial research possible. An IREX Preparatory Fellowship gave me the summer of 1978 to concentrate on background reading and research plans. The IREX exchange with Fulbright support then provided access to archives and libraries in Moscow and Leningrad.
My scholarly experience in post-dtente Moscow was like that of many other exchange students in those years. I found service at the Central State Archives of the October Revolution (TsGAOR) in Moscow to be friendly but spotty. The papers of the Main Prison Administration, which I eventually was able to read, were long delayed in delivery but copious and well organized. I learned later from a Soviet historian in Leningrad that they had been evacuated from Moscow during World War II and had never been returned from the small Siberian town where he had had to go to read them. But while I waited for TsGAOR, I could work productively at the Lenin State Library, where the holdings were wonderful and where reading conditions and service were good.
In Leningrad I received excellent assistance at the Central State Historical Archives (TsGIA) from archivists who understood the tsarist bureaucracy better than I did and who brought me not only the materials I requested but also other files that proved to be valuable. My sincere thanks to the staff of TsGIA. Many years later I also received excellent service at the State Archive of Perm Region (GAPO). My thanks to the archivists there and to my Sister City friends in Perm, especially Viktor Khenner and Olga Bogoslovskaia, who made my stay there not only possible but also memorably pleasant.
Friends at the University of Maryland, where I completed my dissertation, have my gratitude. The inspired teaching of George Yaney and Clifford Foust helped me choose my profession. Georges exacting standards and his personal example of hard work helped me understand how a scholar does his work. George Majeska gave me much-needed encouragement and advice. I owe a special debt to the late Walter Rundell Jr., who was then chairman of the Department of History. A kind and generous man, Walter befriended many graduate students. I was particularly grateful at the time for his help in finding summer jobs in Washington with which I supported my family and could afford to return to school each fall. In retrospect I am at least as grateful for his friendly, supportive personality. I am sure many graduates from College Park owe a similar debt of thanks.
I am happy to acknowledge many others for the support I have had in researching parts of this book subsequent to my dissertation. For grants I thank the Graduate Research Committee and the Arts and Sciences Research Committee of the University of Louisville and the Southern Regional Education Board. For housing, access to an excellent library, and many a stimulating stay at the Summer Laboratory in Urbana I thank the Russian and East European Center at the University of Illinois, the Slavic Reference Room, and their excellent staffs. I would like to especially thank Ralph and Ruth Fisher for their hospitality and many kindnesses and Helen Sullivan and Larry Miller for their expert guidance to the librarys resources.
For whatever problems may remain in the book I bear full responsibility.
INTRODUCTION
Russias penal system has an extremely negative reputation. Soviet scholars, Russian and foreign observers, and writers and memoirists who experienced Russias prisons and exile system have generally agreed that they were horrible. Russian practices and conditions, as they understood them, were backward and brutal. For most of the tsarist period there were good reasons for this. Russian notions of punishment were not the same as Europes, and from a Western perspective Russia seemed behind. All these observers wrote from such a perspective. They observed correctly that the forms of punishment Western societies had decided were cruel and unnecessarydisfigurement (such as the slitting of nostrils), branding, permanent exile, and a variety of corporal punishmentslasted longer in Russia than in most Western nations. But long after Russia had abolished most of these anachronisms, the reputation for backwardness and brutality remained.
The image of gauntlets and salt mines still survives. And I dare say the image most Russian specialists have is not much different from the popular image. The more we have read in the memoir and secondary literature, the more likely we are to have this negative impression. For the last forty or fifty years of the tsarist regime, however, it is undeserved. After a false start in 1845 Russian statesmen and administrators began again in 1863in the midst of the Great Reformsto discuss the need to modernize Russias penal practices. The discussion was protracted. Although it accomplished little in the way of prison reform before 1879 and had not ended in 1917, the discussion slowly led to substantive changes in criminal punishment and in the physical condition, population, regimes, and administration of Russias prisons.
The abiding negative image comes from many sources. First, the memory of Russias long history of very real violence, penal and societal, was not suddenly eradicated by the reforms of the 1860s and following decades. It takes a long time to live down a bad reputation. Repins famous portrait of Ivan IV cradling the son he had just murdered; engravings of Peter the Great personally axing the streltsy; the execution and exile of Decembrists, memorialized in literature and on Herzens masthead for Kolokol, which was published in London; and Dostoevskiis The House of the Dead are but a few of the well-known images of Russian culture and history that may have stuck in the popular imagination. In the West, where few people knew Russian, the writings of dissident expatriates, which naturally cast Russia in a bad light, were also influential. Aleksandr Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin were probably the most important of them in the 1850s and 1860s. Especially in England and France, where the yellow press sold many an issue in the decades before the Crimean War with exaggerated accounts of Russian backwardness and oppression, their views could be readily accepted.
In the decades following the Great Reforms, when significant reforms in penology were begun, political violence, popular and official, added to the impression of penal harshness. When the Polish uprising of 1863 was put down, popular sympathy in the West belonged to the Poles. When populists rose against the government in the 1870s, public sympathy at home and abroad supported the young radicals. Until the assassination of Alexander II, arrests, trials, executions, and sentences of imprisonment and exile only seemed to spur both sides to more violence and to create more sympathy for the populists. Heroes of the movement who fled Russia or were released from their exile wrote of their experiences and those of their comrades, emphasizing tales of bravery and sacrifice on the one hand and brutality, mistreatment, and injustice on the other. There were numerous incidents in the heyday of populism, 18731881, and famous massacres later in Siberia, which needed little dramatizing to seem horrible.
Lev Deich, Vera Zasulich, and, especially, Sergei Kravchinskii wrote colorful memoirs. So did the famous anarchist Petr Kropotkin. Kravchinskii, who had no personal experience with Russian prisons, made a career of writing, speaking, and publishing on the revolutionary movement and tsarist oppression. Other populists who had not escaped the tsarist courtsKaterina Breshkovskaia, Vera Figner, Mikhail Frolenko, Nikolai Morozov, Sofia Perovskaia, Andrei Zheliabovlater wrote voluminously about themselves and one another or were written about as heroes and martyrs of the revolutionary movement. Europeans, who had little else to read about Russia in those years, might easily believe that Russia, so recently a land of serfs and always a mysterious and frightening nation, was a vast prison house.
