Siberia, Space, and Ssylka: Visualizing Exile in Late Imperial Russia

The experience of migration and exile, the dislocation of space, were crucial components of the Russian revolutionary tradition and within Siberia more specifically. James Billington notes, these exiles "never lost faith in a coming revolution" and thus could not be broken by the experience. Quite the opposite, in fact, they viewed exile as a pilgrimage to burnish their revolutionary bona fides through suffering for the cause.

The success of the October Revolution provided the first opportunity to openly celebrate these martyrs in print. No expense was spared in documenting, organizing and publishing their experiences. Among the most extensive such work was undertaken by the All-Union Society of Hard Laborers and Exile-Settlers, who published a mix of biographies, histories and hagiographies in 116 issues of the journal Katorga i Ssylka [Hard Labor and Exile] between 1921 and 1935. Among their last publications was a nearly 900-page biographical dictionary of the society’s members. Little work has been done to parse such texts, but digital and computational methods offer new opportunities to explore this large historical data sets. Historical GIS, in particular, can situate diachronic flows within familiar historical narratives as well as reveal underlying trends and unexpected contingencies obscured by the volume of data. As such, this paper will not only illuminate the shifting priorities of the Russian authorities in choosing where to send exiles, but also offer prosopographical insight into those who chose to join the All-Union Society of Hard Laborers and Exile-Settlers to document their story.