Abstract
Many eighteenth-century writers appear to have been shocked by the cultural differences that they observed between Eastern and Western Europe. The perception of these differences has been represented as the prototype of Western European attitudes towards the Orient, and towards the ‘other’.1 But John Howard, in his eighteenth-century guide to the prisons of Europe, found himself in familiar territory in the prisons of the East.2 The Russian prisons that he described in the 1780s were in many regards similar to those of the West. Russian sanitary conditions were probably worse, and ultimately that may have been the most important difference. This was certainly the case for John Howard, because this was what eventually killed him.3
This chapter is based on a paper that was presented to the International Conference on ‘Colonial Places, Convict Spaces: Penal Transportation in Global Context, c. 1600–1940’, University of Leicester (UK), 9–10 December 1999. I am grateful to the participants of that conference for their comments. I am also grateful to Dr Peter Holquist for his detailed comments on this chapter and for sharing with me some of his unpublished research.
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Notes
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), chapters 1 and 2.
B. F. Adams points out that Petr Kropotkin, Vladimir Burtsev, Feliks Volkhovskii and others who were familiar with English and European prisons, as well as with Russian prisons, claimed that Russian prisons were no worse than the western prisons of the time. What shocked George Kennan and other western commentators was that gentlemen and ladies were forced to endure these conditions for political crimes: ‘ignorant about living and traveling conditions for the average free Russian and about the inside of prisons in their own countries, they were appalled by the conditions of imprisonment and exile’. See B. F. Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (DeKalb, IL: North Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6.
Classic account of these changes are provided by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939);
Thorsten Sellin, Slavery and the Penal System (New York: Elsevier, 1976);
David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: a Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977).
This also relates to the main argument of Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labour: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987).
The best known of the travellers’ accounts are George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols (New York: Century Company, 1891), and
Anton Chekhov, The Island: a Journey to Sakhalin (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967) (first published in 1893). For reports of former inmates the best known are F. Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (first published in the 1860s) and
Peter Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). See also the journal Katorga i ssyilka that was published by the Soviet association of former tsarist prisoners.
M. N. Gernet, Istoriya tsarskoi tyuf’mi, vols 1–5 (Moscow, 1961) (first published in 1951). For the late tsarist period the work concentrates on the larger central forts (Petro-Pavlovsk and Shlussenberg) rather than on the prison system as a whole.
D. Rawson, ‘The Death Penalty in Late Tsarist Russia: an investigation of judicial procedures’, Russian History/Histoire Russe, 11, no. 1 (1984) 36–7, Table 1. Rawson has characterised the government’s attitude to the penal system at this time as being one in which it adopted ‘the rather ambiguous position of undermining the legal principles it had itself created, while still endeavoring to uphold them as the basis for its judicial system’; ibid., p. 29. Whether this was the conscious ambiguity of a united government or the contradictions of different parts of a complex and poorly integrated governmental system was not pursued.
French and Spanish use of galley slaves ceased in 1715; see Thorsten Sellin, Slavery and the Penal System (New York: Elsevier, 1976).
See A. D. Margolis, Tyur’ma i ssylka v imperatorskoi Rossii: issledovaniya i arkhivnye nakhodki (Moscow, 1995), pp. 7–8. Andrei Vinius was half-Dutch and half-Russian. He was entrusted by Peter with diplomatic tasks in the early part of Peter’s reign, before becoming Director of the Post Office, Inspector of Artillery and Founder of the Urals Iron Works.
See O. P. Podosenov, Zakonodatel’stvo o katorge i ssylke v Rossii v xviii veke (Irkutsk, 1982), p. 4.
Cyril Bryner, ‘The Issue of Capital Punishment in the Reign of Elizabeth Petrovna’, The Russian Review, 49 (1990) 389–416.
Australian imprisonment rates in 1897 were 1045 per million for Victoria, 1817 per million for New South Wales, and 772 per million for Tasmania; calculated from data in S. K. Mukherjee et al., eds, Sourcebook of Australian Criminal and Social Statistics, 1804–1988 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminiology, 1989).
Elsewhere I have argued that similar misguided gestures concerning rural taxation amnesties in 1904 had disastrous consequencies in aggravating the rural question. See S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Crises and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia’, in E. Kingston-Mann and T. Mixter, eds, Peasant Economy Culture and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 128–74.
See Neil B. Weissman, ‘Rural Crime in Tsarist Russia: the Question of Hooliganism, 1905–1914’, Slavic Review, 37 (1978) 228–40.
See Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (University of California Press, 1999), p. 80.
See P. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), and P. Holquist, ‘To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia’, in R. Suny and T. Martin, eds, Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (forthcoming).
A Soviet historian Griner reported in 1949 that German POWs accounted for 33000 out of a total forced labour force of 70000 who built the railway, but he does not give the number of deaths involved; Griner, ‘Iz istorii Murmana i Murmanskoi (Kirovskoi) zheleznoi dorogi’, Letopis’ Severn, 1 (1949) 175–88.
Elsa Brandstrom, Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia (London: Hutchinson, 1929), pp. 137–42. Elsa Brandstrom was the daughter of the Swedish Ambassador who had diplomatic responsibility for the interests of Germany during the First World War. She was also a nurse, who personally investigated the conditions of German POWs.
R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).
The argument is probably better put by Richard Wortman when he argues that under the last two tsars the autocracy ‘took leave of its legal sytem and relied increasingly on force. Elevating itself beyond legality, it subverted the claims to obedience upon which its power ultimately rested’; R. S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), p. 289. Stephen Frank has recently added to this the statement: ‘State reliance on supralegal means to contain the turmoil only legitimized extralegal activity in society itself while further delegitimizing government authority’; Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice, p. 308.
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Wheatcroft, S.G. (2002). The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System. In: Wheatcroft, S.G. (eds) Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506114_2
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