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Petersburg on the eve of his execution. Evdokiia
left the convent soon after her son's death but
was soon captured on Peter's orders and con-
fined to the Uspenskii Monastery.
PETER II
, her
grandson, formally rehabilitated Evdokiia and
she died on September 7, 1731 at the Novode-
vichi Convent in Moscow.
exile system
The official use of exile as a system of punish-
ment first appeared in the Law Code of 1649,
where it was included as a penalty in 11
instances. In the centuries that followed crimi-
nals, religious dissenters, disgraced officials as
well as political prisoners were at one time or
another exiled to Siberia. Until 1917, banishment
in the form of hard labor, permanent settlement,
or temporary residence became a central feature
of the czarist penal system. Most, but not all, of
the exiles were banished to Siberia, and it is
with Siberia that the exile system is most closely
associated. As with other contemporary exile
systems, such as Britain's use of Australia as a
penal colony, exile provided Russian authorities
with the opportunity to free European Russia of
“undesirable” elements while colonizing recently
acquired territories. By 1662, exiles composed
10 percent of Siberia's Russian and other immi-
grant population. The use of Siberia as an exile
destination slowed down somewhat during the
early 18th century, as Peter the Great demanded
large quantities of unfree labor for construction
projects such as the city of St. Petersburg. In the
late 18th century, it again increased as serf own-
ers were granted the right to exile insubordinate
serfs and their families. Reformist government
official Mikhail
SPERANSKY
's Exile and Convoy
Regulations of 1822 sought to alleviate the most
extreme conditions by humanizing the exile sys-
tem, but the reform efforts were neutralized by
the growing number of exiles, mostly criminals,
arriving to Siberia. From a yearly rate of 8,000
in the 1830s, by the turn of the 20th century
there were about 300,000 exiles in Siberia.
A group portrait of convicts in Siberia, ca. 1880
(Library of Congress)
Their ability to escape with ease created a host
of social issues that threatened the well-being of
Siberia's free and indigenous population. After
the
EMANCIPATION ACT
of 1861, peasant com-
munes received the right to sentence their own
peasants to administrative exile. Beginning with
Polish nationalists in the 1790s and the
DECEM
-
BRISTS
in 1826, political prisoners were late arrivals
to the Siberian exile population. Although their
historical visibility was high, thanks to the many
memoirs they wrote, political prisoners com-
posed at the most 1 percent of the total exile pop-
ulation. In 1900 the Exile Reform Law sought to
reduce the number of exiles by curtailing the
communes' right to banish peasants. On the
other hand, growing political strife in the final
decades of the
ROMANOV DYNASTY
led to greater
numbers of political prisoners being sent to
Siberia. Other discussions about reforming or
ending the exile system did not bear fruit, despite
growing awareness of the danger of a politically
radicalized population. Only in April 1917, after
the fall of the monarchy, did the successor Provi-
sional Government abolish the system of punitive
exile. Ironically, the
BOLSHEVIKS
, many of whom
had suffered under the exile system, brought the
system of exile and hard labor back into practice
in the 1920s and 1930s, on a much greater and
harsher scale than that of the czarist period.
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