Welcome to Russian History Retold.

Episode number 203, Siberia, Opportunity, Torment, and captivity.

Last time we covered the history, weather and geography of Siberia. Today I'm going to share the dark

side of the vast lands of eastern Russia, the gulags and prisons, and the stories of the people who were sent there or who worked for the system.

I'm going to begin with a passage from the book Russia, a thousand-year chronicle of the

wild east by Martin sixsmith.

Quote, Siberia as a land of opportunity has always co-existed with Siberia as land of torment and captivity.

From the 17th century they developed side by side.

First, the Tsar, then the Soviet leaders saw it as a safe, distant dumping ground for those who threatened their power.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lenin, Stalin, Osep Mandelstam and Alexander Solzhen were among those who trod

its frozen paths. each of them exiled for troubling

the Kremlin autocrats.

The early Romanovs sent convicted criminals and prisoners of war to forced service and battalions defending the frontier.

Exile in Zaurus Times was largely to villages and towns, where offenders would be monitored

until the end of their sentence.

Lenin was allowed to take his hunting rifles and half his voluminous library with him.

But by the 1930s, Siberia was covered in a network of labor camps, and the majority of inmates

were political prisoners.

Even if a prisoner escaped, death awaited him from starvation in the forests and swamps.

We begin to start seeing the forced exile of large numbers of people to Siberia under the

reign of Empress Anna.

Her lover and person who ran Russia during the 1730s, Ernst Johann Birron, began 10 years of

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