Russia’s dumping ground

Almost as soon as Siberia was first colonised by Cossack conquistadors in the 17th century, it became a place of banishment and punishment. As early as the 1690s the Russian state began to use Siberia as a dumping ground for its criminals, as though its vastness could quarantine evil. Katorga — from the Greek word for galley — was the judicial term for a penal sentence where inmates performed hard labour in the service of the state. The sentence was commonly imposed in place of death from the reign of Peter the Great onwards. And in many ways Siberia truly was a House of the Dead — as Daniel Beer, who borrows the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prison novel for his masterful new study, recounts in horrific and gripping detail.

In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky described his own five years as a political prisoner in Siberia as a ‘ceaseless, merciless assault on my soul… eternal hostility and bickering all around, cursing, cries, din, uproar’.