ABSTRACT
In December 1889, The Times published news of a massacre of political exiles by Russian convoy troops in the Siberian town of Iakutsk. Two months later, details emerged of a second atrocity – a mass suicide among the political inmates of the Kara katorga prison the previous year. News of the ‘Siberian horrors’ (as these events quickly became known) shocked the Anglo-American reading public and galvanized a vigorous campaign against the Tsarist penal system, led by Russian émigrés and the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF), that continued for several years. The first half of this chapter draws on newly uncovered archival evidence to reconstruct the transnational networks through which news of events in Siberia reached the outside world, the development of the ‘Siberian agitation’ in Britain and the United States, and the panicked response of Tsarist security agencies during the early 1890s. The second half of the chapter unpacks the cultural dynamics that underlay the campaign to ‘free the exiles’. By focusing in particular on the work of George Kennan, the campaigning American journalist whose investigations of Siberian prison conditions in the 1880s did much to create international interest in the subject, it shows that Western audiences understood the Russian revolutionary struggle mainly as a crusade for a ‘free Russia’, constitutionalism and liberty, and that the amorphous figure of the Siberian exile-martyr – as a projection of the Western self – played an important role in this misperception.
