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procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime. In the early days, many of these were Polish noblemen who objected to the Russian occupation of their territory and property. Later, exiles included religious objectors, as well as members of “revolutionary” groups and secret societies, including the Bolsheviks. Although they were not administrative exiles—they were tried and sentenced—the most notorious of Siberia’s nineteenth-century “forced settlers” were also political prisoners: these were the Decembrists, a group of high-ranking aristocrats who staged a feeble rebellion against Czar Nicholas I in 1825. With a vengeance that shocked all of Europe at the time, the Czar sentenced five of the Decembrists to death. He deprived the others of their rank, and sent them, in chains, to Siberia, where a few were joined by their exceptionally brave wives. Only a few lived long enough to be pardoned by Nicholas’s successor, Alexander II, thirty years later, and to return home to St. Petersburg, by then tired old men. 28 Fyodor Dostoevsky, sentenced in 1849 to a four-year term of penal servitude, was another well-known political prisoner. After returning from his Siberian exile, he wrote
The House of
the Dead
, still the most widely read account of life in the Czarist prison system.
    Like the Gulag, the Czarist exile system was not created solely as a form of punishment. Russia’s rulers also wanted their exiles, both criminal and political, to solve an economic problem that had rankled for many centuries: the underpopulation of the far east and the far north of the Russian landmass, and the Russian Empire’s consequent failure to exploit Russia’s natural resources. With that in mind, the Russian state began, as early as the eighteenth century, to sentence some of its prisoners to forced labor—a form of punishment which became known as
katorga
, from the Greek word
kateirgon
, “to force.”
Katorga
had a long Russian prehistory. In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great had used convicts and serfs to build roads, fortresses, factories, ships, and the city of St. Petersburg itself. In 1722, he passed a more specific directive ordering criminals, with their wives and children, into exile near the silver mines of Daurya, in eastern Siberia. 29
    In its time, Peter’s use of forced labor was considered a great economic and political success. Indeed, the story of the hundreds of thousands of serfs who spent their lives building St. Petersburg had an enormous impact on future generations. Many had died during the construction—and yet the city became a symbol of progress and Europeanization. The methods were cruel—and yet the nation had profited. Peter’s example probably helps explain the ready adoption of
katorga
by his Czarist successors. Without a doubt, Stalin was a great admirer of Peter’s building methods too.
    Still, in the nineteenth century,
katorga
remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000
katorga
convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600. 30 Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia’s empty, mineral-rich wastelands. 31
    Their sentences were not necessarily easy ones, and some of the settlers thought their fate worse than that of the
katorga
prisoners. Assigned to remote districts, with poor land and few neighbors, many starved to death over the long winters, or drank themselves to death from boredom. There were very few women—their numbers never exceeded 15