In the Archives: A Visit to Arkhangel'sk in 1999

Europe-Asia Studies, 2013

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History , 2015

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema : Borders and Encounters

FMSH-WP-2014-62, 2014

This article is a contribution to our understanding of a largely unexamined part of the history of the Gulag, the story of the children deported from Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Second World War. It suggests a few starting-points for an approach to the speciic experience of children in deportation, its variety and late commemoration. It examines the speciic forms of the recall and narration of childhood in the Gulag and the mark of these “displaced” years in adult life, particularly via the process whereby the experience is turned into a testimony. he research is based on the corpus of oral testimony collected by the authors and others in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe for the European Memories of the Gulag project.

Europe-Asia Studies, 2013

This essay presents the subjective experience of life and sickness for the punished in late Imperial Siberia, and the distinctions the punished made between legitimate and illegitimate forms of punishment. The essay also explores state policies towards the sick punished, and explores how different levels of the Tsarist administration and local Siberian society dealt with the challenge of sick and decrepit exiles. It argues that conditions in Siberian prisons were, in general, worse than those in European Russian prisons in the post-1906 period, and that the experience of exile in eastern Siberia placed it among the most difficult locations for exile. Though neither the state nor the punished regarded illness as an integral part of their punishment, the prevalence of illness and disease compounded the cruelty of sentences. illegitimate forms of punishment. I also explore state policies towards the sick punished, and how different levels of the Tsarist administration and local Siberian society dealt with the challenge of sick and decrepit exiles. The chronological framework for this work is the last years of the Tsarist period, from 1900 to 1917, and the case studies are drawn from the regions of Yakutsk and Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. I start by providing an overview of Siberian exile, before going on to present a profile of the exile population, and an evaluation of the prevailing types of illness. I then go on to assess the environmental factors that influenced sickness and health for Siberian exiles. Treatment and care for the punished is assessed, looking particularly at a case study of the almshouse established in Yakutsk province. Finally, the experiences and treatment of voluntary followers is evaluated. This essay refers throughout to 'the punished', in an attempt to encapsulate the grey areas between imprisonment and exile. The sentences and categories of individuals sent to eastern Siberian exile were very varied. One could be sentenced to exile, to prison followed by exile, or to katorga (hard labour) followed by exile, depending on the perceived severity of one's crime. All katorga prisoners were sent to exile on completion of their term. Some of the punished were not convicted at all, having been given their terms of exile administratively, without recourse to the courts. All those sent to exile, on whatever grounds, spent at least some time in prison, usually in transfer prisons en route. Though they cannot be included in the definition of the punished, the experiences of voluntary followers, who accompanied spouses and parents to Siberia, will be discussed in this essay. The state explicitly sought to minimise followers' sufferings, and recognised them as 'innocents'. Despite this, they shared all of the privations of exile with their partners or parents. Political prisoners, that is, state criminals and those exiled administratively for political unreliability, are considered here alongside 'common' criminals. Studying the punished population more generally allows this study to explore the impact of and interactions between the native population and the punished population more effectively. The state, and prisoners themselves, were keen to distinguish those convicted of political crimes and those convicted of criminal offences. Their subjective experience of punishment, however, particularly after 1905 when there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of those punished for 'political offences', was often hard to distinguish, as crowded prisons and poor conditions in exile affected all prisoners, regardless of their category. The political prisoners are those about whom most is known, but the vast historiography they have generated tends to focus on the privileged political aristocracy. The predominantly young, lower class people, usually without private means, who made up the bulk of political prisoners in exile after 1905, have been largely neglected. Similarly, the criminal element has been almost entirely ignored in the historiography. The source materials for this study include local government records and correspondence drawn from regional archives in eastern Siberia, memoirs, prison journals and prison inspectors' reports. We face some fundamental challenges in studying Siberian exiles in this period. The state did not 'know' its exile population. Official publications revealed startling uncertainty about the numbers and location of exiles and their followers. I found only fragmentary evidence on the medical treatment, illness and mortality rates of exiles, and significantly more information on sickness and treatment in prisons. The statistical information presented here is drawn mainly from prison inspectors' reports and the official, published statements of the Main Prison Administration. These statistical sources are problematic, as both could be charged with trying to present the state of the prisons in the

Central Asian Survey, 2015

The defeat, devastation and exile of the Kazakhs in the early eighteenth century, commonly known as the Barefooted Flight, was the nation's most distressing pre-Soviet calamity. Kazakh nation-building and official remembrance projects – commemorated in state ceremonies, public education and popular culture – portray an uninterrupted, centuries-old practice of tribute to local heroes who challenged the foreign aggressors. Twentieth-century Kazakh and Russian intellectuals in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras studied and enshrined these events based on published, secondary sources, rarely giving attention to the thin trail of documents preserved in state archives. The historiography of the Barefooted Flight exposed a trend in how politically convenient historical lessons shaped the interpretation of events. By the end of the Soviet Union, some archival material was introduced, it was but misquoted so as not to challenge the current interpretation.