ABSTRACT
This chapter examines representations of Siberian exile and high-profile Russian political prisoners both within Russia and in the West during the final decade of Tsarist rule (1905–1917). In the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution, it argues, Siberian exile and the aura of martyrdom it conferred not only provided the embattled opposition to Tsarism with much-needed propaganda victories over the regime, bu talso provided exiled revolutionaries themselves with a means of self-creation and a way of redefining the nature of revolutionary heroism. The first part of the chapter focuses on the famous Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist Egor Sozonov, whose 1910 suicide in a Siberian prison made him not just a political martyr but a contested figure in contemporary debates over revolutionary ethics. When publicized overseas, however, Siberian martyrologies were prone to appropriation in ways their protagonists could not always control. By focusing on two case studies – the former People’s Will terrorist Vera Figner and Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, the self-styled ‘little grandmother of the Russian Revolution’ – the second half of this chapter examines the choices that faced celebrity revolutionaries as they sought to leverage the support and publicity available to them in Britain and the United States while also resisting (or, in some cases, acquiescing to) their portrayal as sanitized ‘martyrs for a free Russia’.
