ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the image of Siberian exile in Russian radical culture in the years 1825–1873. During the nineteenth century, Siberia loomed large in the oral and literary traditions of Russian radicalism: for those opposed to Tsarist rule, banishment beyond the Urals was not just an occupational hazard but a cornerstone of revolutionary subjectivity, a rite of passage that demonstrated a willingness to suffer in the name of noble ideals. After the abortive Decembrist revolt of 1825 and the conspirators’ banishment to Siberia the following year, both the Decembrists themselves and their peers portrayed Siberia not just as a gloomy land of exile, but as a stage for the performance of heroic deeds whereupon Russia’s post-autocratic future would be decided. In later decades, these tropes were used and adapted by other democratic and radical writers, including Aleksandr Gertsen, Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Nekrasov (all of whom are discussed individually). By the time the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia came into open conflict with the state in the 1860s, therefore, the literary afterlives of Decembrism had given rise to a Siberian ‘behavioural text’ that provided revolutionaries with a script for stoical forbearance and heroic conduct in prison and exile.
