Description

Andrew Gentes was born and educated in the United States and holds graduate degrees in history from the University of California at Riverside and Brown University. He is the author of Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Palgrave, 2008) and Exile, Murder and Madness in Siberia, 1823-61 (2010), and translator and editor of Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s “Sakhalin” (Anthem, 2009). He has held research fellowships at Hokkaido University’s Slavic Research Center and at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center. He teaches at Bradley University.

This talk concerns the influence that Russia’s possession and use of Siberia as a destination for criminals and other social deviants had on that country’s penal development. Other countries, for example England and France, used exile to remove criminals. But whereas Australia and New Caledonia were far removed from these countries, Siberia was contiguous to its imperial motherland, and so the problems exile created there directly affected European Russia. Moreover, in comparison to China’s use of Xinjiang, Russia exiled many more of its citizens over a longer period to Siberia. Besides focusing on the period 1590-1917, this talk provides historical context for the Soviet GULag as well as present-day Russian penality.