'A Nihilist Kurort': Siberian Exile in the Victorian Imagination, c. 1830-1890

Abstract

In the decades before the collapse of Tsarism in 1917, no issue did more to galvanize British support for the Russian revolutionary movement than the mistreatment of political exiles in Siberia. In popular literature, journalism and Polish and Russian émigré propaganda, Siberian exile was seen as synonymous with the iniquities of autocratic rule in Russia and was represented as a battleground upon which the forces of civilisation and barbarism contested Russia’s future as a European (or non-European) nation. As Siberia captured the popular imagination, the heroic figure of the revolutionary exile-martyr became not only symbolic of the anti-Tsarist struggle, but a projection of the Western self.