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Unruly Felons and Civilizing Wives: Cultivating Marriage in the Siberian Exile System, 1822-1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abby M. Schrader
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Abstract

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian imperial authorities advocated colonizing Siberia and linking it to the center. This process was difficult: not only was the region remote, but it also had a reputation for lawlessness that was intensified by the 1822 expansion of the exile system. In this article, Abby M. Schrader examines one attempt that authorities undertook to civilize Siberia. Attributing much of the disorder that prevailed in Siberia to the region's severe gender imbalance and lack of stable households, officials sought to promote marriage among banished men. In doing so, authorities laid bare important preconceptions about Russian women's socio-sexual role. Rather than perceiving women as agents, they saw them as tools that could be deployed to enhance the larger social order. Placing stock in the potential for women to settle Siberia's exiles also provided authorities with an opportunity to displace blame for the failure of their policies upon women.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , Summer 2007 , pp. 230 - 256
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2007

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References

Research for this article was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and Franklin & Marshall College. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Thirty-first Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, at the Harriman Institute of Advanced Russian Studies at Columbia University, and at the Advanced Study Center of the International Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor's seminar, “Empires, States, and Political Imagination.” I am grateful for the considerable feedback provided by fellow panelists and audience members in these various venues, and I particularly wish to thank Jane Burbank for her helpful comments on the original version of this work and for arranging for its presentation to her students at Michigan.

1. For an analysis of Muscovite policies vis-á-vis Siberia, see Lantzeff, George V, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Colonial Administration (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

2. Chudnovskii, S., “Kolonizatsionnoe znachenie Sibirskoi ssylki,” Russkaia mysl’ 7, no. 10 (1866): 42–44 Google Scholar; Schrader, Abby M., Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002), 78–82 Google Scholar. On the legal evolution of Siberian exile during Elizabeth's reign, see Polnoesobraniezakonov (hereafter PSZ), lstser., no. 9875 (22 August 1751); no. 9879 (4 September 1751); nos. 10086-87 (29 March 1753); no. 10101 (25 May 1753); no. 10113 (18June 1753).

3. Gedenshtrom, Matvei, Otryvki o Sibiri (St. Petersburg, 1830), 4 Google Scholar. Gedenshtrom was an explorer who had lived in Siberia since at least 1810. His 1830 survey of Siberian conditions was commissioned and published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

4. Gedenshtrom's negative assessment of the region has been overstated. For example, see Mark Bassin's use of die final sentence of this citation. Bassin, Mark, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gedenshtrom undercut his own negative appraisal of Siberia by declaring that, “this boundless country, bordered on all sides by columns of hills … irrigated by abundant waters that constitute a practically uninterrupted communication link, and inhabited by various tribes of nomadic and vagrant people … this most important part of the Russian empire—particularly for its future—remains in all respects a region little known and poorly understood. Siberia's innumerable benefits … which are essential for bringing together the three parts of the world, have not yet been discovered.” Gedenshtrom, Otryvki o Sibiri, 3-4.

5. The authors of an 1809 Ministry of Internal Affairs survey of Siberia's terrain, population, and climate, which the Russian government commissioned in 1803, cited this assertion, penned by an unnamed official who explored Siberia in 1805. Statisticheskoe obozrenie Sibiri, sostavlennoe na osnovanii svedenii pocherpnutykh iz aktov pravitel'stva i drugikh dostovernykh istochnikov (St. Petersburg, 1810), 1-3. Western scholars have not entirely overlooked the duality of Siberia's images; for example, see Erlich, Victor, “Images of Siberia,” Slavic and East European Journal 1, no. 4 (1957): 243-50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Khodarkovsky, Michael, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, 2002), 220.Google Scholar

7. Breyfogle, Nicholas, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, 2005), 4.Google Scholar

8. Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 215-20.

9. Sunderland, Willard, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004), 61 Google Scholar. For more on this issue, see Moon, David, “Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia's Frontiers, 1550-1897,” Historical Journal 40, no. 4 (1997): 873-78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Anuchin, E. N., Issledovanie o protsente soslannykh v Sibir’ v periode 1827-1846godov: Materialy dlia ugohvnoi statistiki Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1873), 7 Google Scholar; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg (RGIA), f. 1265, op. 1, d. 167 (on two notes to the Chancellery to the Siberian Committee related to the audit of western Siberia by Adjutant Gen eral Annenkov concerning the suggestion that an upper or noble estate be constituted in the aforementioned region; 1852-1859), 11. 20-21ob.

11. Moon, “Peasant Migration,” 876. See also Vasin, N., Ocherk zavoevaniia i zaseleniia Sibiri (Moscow, 1919), 13, 15 Google Scholar; Chudnovskii, “Kolonizatsionnoe znachenie Sibirskoi ssylki,“ 41-44; Anuchin, hskdovanie o protsente soslannykh v Sibir', 8, 13-14. For a discussion of early efforts at colonizing Siberia and promoting an agrarian way of life there, see Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century, 104-5, 155-73, and Moon, “Peasant Migration,” 872-84.

12. P. Kirilov, “Ocherk Sibiri,” Zhurnal Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, chast’ 34, kniga 12 (1839): 418-20.

13. RGIA, f. 1265, op. 1, d. 167,1. 26ob.

14. Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 137-53.

15. S. S. Shashkov, “Rabstvo v Sibiri,” Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1898), 2:520; RGIA, f. 1589, op. 1, d. 1211 (on the correspondence of the eastern Siberian governor-general concerning the restriction of the right to own serfs in Siberia; 1852), 11. 7-9ob.

16. Convincing the Siberian natives to relinquish trapping (and the payment of the fur tribute, or iasak) in favor of settling down and farming remained difficult for Siberian administrators well into the nineteenth century. For example, see authorities’ depictions of Siberian native peoples as prone to alcoholism and as poor farmers in RGIA, f. 1286, op. 1, d. 228 (on the projects of various people concerning the organization of Siberia; 1803), 1. 11, and the complaints lodged by western Siberia's governor-general about attempts to persuade nomadic natives to settle in Kamchatka contained in his 1831-1832 survey of die province in RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 54 (report on the administration of eastern Siberia for 1831-1832), 11. 91-91ob.

17. Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 186-89; Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 21, 26-27, 62-64,94-95,101-4,110, 226; Paul, Werth, Atthe Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905 (New York, 2002), 5, 7Google Scholar.

18. Werfh, At the Margins of Orthodoxy, 127-28. On the evolution of the ascriptive legal category inorodtsy and its application to Siberian indigenous peoples, see John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy: The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 173-90, esp. 174-81.

19. On the regulations constructing the category of inorodtsy and applying it to Siberia's indigenous peoples, see Ustav ob upravlenii inorodtsev, PSZ, 1st ser., no. 29126 (22 July 1822). On the reorganization of Siberian exile, see Ustav o ssyl'nykh, PSZ, 1st ser., no. 29128 (22 July 1822). N. M. Iadrintsev, Russkaia obshchina v tiur'me i ssylke (St. Petersburg, 1872), 558-73; Chudnovskii, “Kolonizatsionnoe znachenie Sibirskoi ssylki,” 40-61; Anuchin, Issledovanie o protsente soslannykh v Sibir', 9-10. Iadrintsev, who was associated with the Siberian oblastnichestvo, or regionalism movement, that took shape in the late nineteenth century, and Chudnovskii were openly critical of Russian policies concerning Siberian development and both argued that it would have been more beneficial had statesmen promoted voluntary emigration of land-poor peasants to die resource-rich region, which consequently would have come to resemble Canada or Australia by the late nineteenth century. Anuchin, who was not overtly hostile to the government's attempts to use exiles to colonize the region, makes a similar point.

20. On Russian social engineering as central to the process of imperial expansion, see Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 184-88.

21. The decision to use exiles as colonists was not solely made at the top echelons of imperial officialdom; instead, this was something that local authorities advocated. Their rationale was pragmatic: Siberia simply had too few Russian peasants, scribes, teachers, craftsmen, and the like to lend the region order and stability and needed to rely on exiles to fulfill these important functions. For example, see PSZ, 1st ser., no. 18362 (7 February 1798); RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 392 (concerning whether exiles resetded in Siberia can be permitted to work in industry diroughout Siberia; 1823), 11. 1-7.

22. Schrader, Languages of the Lash, 80-82.

23. Ustav o ssyl'nykh, PSZ, 1st ser. no. 29128 (22 July 1822), arts. 2, 4, 193-94, 201-8, 281-405; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1822, d. 61,11. 229-231. On official permission granted to ex iles to enter more privileged social groupings or work as scribes, teachers, and lower-level functionaries in Siberia, see PSZ, 1st ser., no. 29128 (22 July 1822), art. 340; PSZ, 2d ser., no. 3689 (2 June 1830); no. 4606 (29 May 1831); no. 6556 (7 November 1833); no. 6875 (3 March 1834); RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 392,11. 5-5ob.; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 53 (report on the administration of eastern Siberia for 1829-1830 and relevant statistics), 11. 4ob.-5ob., 18ob.-20; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 208 (on procedures for choosing volost'scribes in Siberia; 1833), 11. 2-4ob., 6ob.-8ob., 11-13,15-15ob.

24. For more details about these regulations see the Ustav o ssyl'nykh, PSZ, 1st ser., no. 29128 (22 July 1822), arts. 2, 4,193-94, 201-8, 281-405.

25. Abby M. Schrader, “Branding the Other/Tattooing the Self: Bodily Inscription among Convicts in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Caplan, Jane, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (London, 2000), 174-79Google Scholar; Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997), 4–7, 42-67, 118-19.Google Scholar

26. PSZ, 1st sen, no. 29328 (23 February 1823); RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 2 (report of Secret Privy Councilor Speranskii and review of his project for administering Siberia; 1821); Marc Raeff, Siberia and theReforms of 1822 (Seattle, 1956), 49-53.

27. Anuchin, Issledovanie oprotsente soslannykh v Sibir', 14-15. The total exile population of the three most populous Siberian provinces, Irkutsk, Tomsk, and Tobol'sk, at the beginning of the nineteenth century consisted of 10,430 people. On this, see ladrintsev, Russkaia obshchina, 566.

28. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 414 (on procedures for transporting exile men and women to Siberia; 1825-1826), 1. 6.

29. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (on the projects of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Tobol'sk Governor A. M. Turgenev concerning the reduction of crown expenses for maintaining resettled exiles by settling them in the homes of local residents, based upon the project of the eastern Siberian leadership council; 1828-1837), 11. 2-2ob.

30. Anuchin, Issledovanie o protsente soslannykh v Sibir', 16.

31. Citing S. V Maksimov's voluminous 1874 work, Sibir'i katorga, Chudnovskii places the number of criminals transported between 1823 annd 1872 at 502,657 and the number exiled between 1754 and 1864 at about 900,000. The vast majority of these—over 75 percent—were poselentsy and the other quarter katorzhniki. ladrintsev arrives at a slightly smaller number of exiles; he asserts that Russian authorities banished 460,000 people to Siberia between 1807 and 1870. Chudnovskii, “Kolonizatsionnoe znachenie Sibirskoi ssylki,” 44-45; ladrintsev, Russkaia obshchina, 566.

32. Anuchin, Issledovanie o protsente soslannykh v Sibir', 25.

33. Alan D. Wood, “Russia's ‘Wild East': Exile, Vagrancy and Crime in Nineteenth-Century Siberia,” in Alan D. Wood, ed., The History of Siberia from Russian Conquest to Revolution (New York, 1991), 123. S. V. Maksimov, Sibir i katorga, 3d ed. (St. Petersburg, 1900), 61, 65; RGIA, f. 1261, op. 1, d. 110b (on the organization of a penal system for individuals exiled to Siberia after being stripped of all status-related rights; 1846), 1. 2; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 4, d. 24 (on a new penal system for exiles stripped of all status rights; 1855), 11. 5-7; Chudnovskii, “Kolonizatsionnoe znachenie Sibirskoi ssylki,” 47-48.

34. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 43 (on reducing the number of exiles from the internal provinces designated for resettlement in Siberia; 1832), 11. lob., 4ob., 5ob.-6; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 35 (on distributing land in Siberia for the homesteading of exiles; 1838), 11. 15-16; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 2ob.-3, 7-8ob., 12-14, 15ob.-16.

35. RGIA, f. 1286, op. 1, d. 38 (on appointing to service exiles of various ranks sent here for mischievousness; 1807), 11. 2-2ob., 3ob.-4, 10ob.; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 5ob.-6.

36. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 5ob.-6.

37. Ustav o ssyl'nykh, PSZ, 1st ser., no. 29128 (22 July 1822), statutes 379 and 389. The earliest attempts to ease the transformation of exiles into Siberian agriculturalists date back to the seventeenth century and entail government extensions of assistance in the form of payments, loans, tax exemptions, and land grants to those transported to Siberia, as well as to those who voluntarily relocated to the region. These efforts came to little since the mortality rate of individuals exiled and banished to the region was particularly high. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century, 164-67.

38. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 3, d. 76 (concerning acquisition and transmission of real estate by exiles; 1843), 1. 23ob.

39. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 51 (two reports on the administration of eastern Siberia from 1827-1828), 1. 178ob. Many exiles, while formally born into the peasant estate, lacked general familiarity with how to farm properly. Officials repeatedly complained that it was wrong to preclude exiles from registering in the ranks of the urban estates upon completion of their labor terms because this exacerbated the problems related to homesteading exiles and lending greater order to Siberia. For example, see the long discussion of whether poselentsy should be permitted to join Siberia's urban estate (gradskie zvaniia) contained in RGIA, f. 1149, t. 3, d. 53 (1840).

40. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 51 (1827-1828), 1.178ob.

41. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 87-87ob.

42. RGIA f. 1264, op. 1, d. 493 (on die difficulties of homesteading exiles related to the imbalanced ratio of men to women; 1824), 11. 1-lob.

43. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 393 (on upholding directives contained in the exile regulations when deporting vagrants to Siberia; 1823), 11. 15ob.-16ob.

44. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 598 (on not prohibiting women exiled to penal servitude in Siberia from marrying hard laborers in the factories of Perm'; 1825-1826), 1. 1.

45. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 1. 61ob.

46. Ibid., 1. 18. Authorities took this seriously; while entertaining proposals to improve the exile system's administration in the late 1830s, the Siberian Committee and governors-general asserted that one project that advocated parceling out land to private individuals willing to homestead exiles was workable only if “the [land] owner is obligated … to see to it that they marry. To do this, they must request exiled women from the Exile Expedition.” See RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 35 (1838), 1. 9ob.; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 64-65.

47. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 51 (1827-1828), 11. 54ob., 178-178ob.; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. l-2ob.; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 35 (1838), 11. 15ob., 55-56.

48. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 5, d. 68 (on various questions concerning the marriage of hard laborers; I860), 11. 17-19.

49. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 91-91ob.

50. Rose Glickman, “The Peasant Woman as Healer,” in Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds., Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley, 1991), 149-50.

51. N. L. Pushkareva, “Women in the Medieval Russian Family of the Tenth through the Fifteenth Centuries,” trans. Christine Worobec, and Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Women's Honor in Early Modern Russia,” both in Clements, Engel, and Worobec, eds., Russia's Women, 37-43 and 72-73.

52. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. lOOob.-lOl.

53. Ibid., 11. 19ob.-20 (my emphasis); RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 35 (1838), 11. 18ob.-19.

54. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 55 (reports of the eastern Siberian leadership council for 1833-1836 and part of 1837, including relevant statistical data), 11. 18-18ob.

55. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 5, d. 68 (1860), 11. 17-19.

56. Kollmann, “Women's Honor in Early Modern Russia,” 72-73.

57. For a broader discussion of the impact of this literature on educated circles in nineteenth-century Russia, see Diana Greene, “Mid-Nineteenth-Century Domestic Ideology in Russia,” in Rosalind Marsh, ed., Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions (New York, 1998), 79-90, and Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), 19-84.

58. Heldt, Barbara, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington, 1987), 2–3, 12-13, 16-19Google Scholar. Also see Rosalind Marsh, “An Image of Their Own? Feminism, Revisionism, and Russian Culture,” in Marsh, ed., Women and Russian Culture, 8-9.

59. The prototypical literary analogy of this type of woman is Sonia Marmeladova in Fedor Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment. Although Sonia is a fallen woman, her motives for prostituting herself are rooted in the needs of her family, and it is her father, rather than Sonia herself, who bears ultimate responsibility for her less-than-pure actions. These character traits are what endow her with the potential to offer up redemption to Rodion Raskol'nikov.

60. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 414 (1825-1826), 11. 2-2ob.; Ustav ossyl'nykh, PSZ, 1st ser., no. 29128 (22 July 1822), statute 223; PSZ, 2d ser., no. 521 (11 August 1826).

61. “O prestupleniiakh po vsei Sibiri, v koikh uchastvovali ssyl'nye s 1823 po 1831 god,” in “IV: ‘Smes,'” Zhurnal Ministerstva vnutrennikh del 5, pt. 8, no. 2 (1833): 226-27.

62. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 91-91ob.

63. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 55 (1833-1837), 11.19-19ob.

64. RGIA, f. 1263, op. 1, d. 1853 (short governor-general's report for 1838-1845), 11.19-19ob.

65. Anuchin, Issledovanie o protsente soslannykh v Sibir', 29.

66. Stephen P. Frank, “Narratives within Numbers: Women, Crime, and Judicial Statistics in Imperial Russia, 1834-1913,” Russian Review 55, no. 4 (October 1996): 542-45, 554.

67. For archival sources discussing gender ratios in the exile system, see RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 493 (1824), 1.1; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 415 (1825-1826), 11. 6ob.-7; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 598 (1825-1826), 1. lob.; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 51 (1827-1828), 11.181-182; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 53 (1829-1830), 11. 283ob.-285; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 14-15, 26; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 43 (1832), 11. 14-14ob. According to Anuchin, a total of 159,755 people were consigned to various forms of exile between 1827 and 1846; of these, 134,315 were men and 25,440 were women. This breaks down to a ratio of 19 women for every 100 men. The ratio was worse for convicted criminals than for administrative exiles. In the former case, there were 16.49 women for every 100 men; in the latter, there were 19.49 women for every 100 men. Anuchin, Issledovanie o protsente soslannykk v Sibir', 31-34.

68. For example, see die complaints lodged by Eniseisk administrators that men outnumbered women by a ratio of 10 to 1. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 55 (1833-1837), 11. 19-19ob.

69. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 598 (1825-1826), 11. 3-3ob.; RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 1. 87ob.

70. According to Chudnovskii, “exiled women never constituted more than one-sixth of the general number of exiles, and of this sixth, at least one-eighth was over the age of forty.” Chudnovskii, “Kolonizatsionnoe znachenie Sibirskoi ssylki,” 49-50.

71. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 598 (1825-1826), 11. lob., 3-3ob.

72. This was codified in an ukaz. See PSZ, 2d ser., no. 1893 (22 March 1828). For a discussion of this issue, see RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 43 (1832), 11. 22-23.

73. RGIA, f. 1265, op. 1, d. 191 (on a note to the Chancellery of the Siberian Committee concerning the audit of western Siberia by Adjutant General Annenkov related to the administration of the inorodtsy; 1852), 11. llob.-12.

74. See PSZ, 1st ser., no. 772 (10 September 1679); no. 846 (17 November 1680); no. 1690 (1 July 1699); no. 1716 (16 November 1699). For a discussion of these compulsory practices, see Andrew A. Gentes, “'Licentious Girls’ and Frontier Domesticators: Women and Siberian Exile from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Centuries,” Sibirica 3, no. 1 (2003): 4. On Peter's establishment of this practice as voluntary, see PSZ, 1st ser., no. 3628 (16 August 1720); this order was reaffirmed during the tenure of Empress Elizabeth, ibid., no. 10101 (25 May 1753).

75. Early legislation demonstrates the extent to which Russia's emperors and servitors sought to use convicts’ families to establish settlements in various Russian borderlands. For example, in one 1679 ukaz, the boyars ordered that thieves should be transported “to dwell in Siberia permanently to engage in agriculture [na pashniu] along with their wives and children” instead of having their arms and legs amputated. In 1699, Peter the Great ordered that criminals who had been apprentices or master craftsmen should be banished to Azov rather than put to death; he proclaimed that “such people shall be sent to Azov with their wives and their children to dwell there permanently. But, other than masters and posadskie, members of other ranks and bachelors shall not be transported there.” PSZ, 1st ser., no. 772 (10 September 1679); no. 1690 (1 July 1699).

76. Ibid., no. 25238 (30 September 1812).

77. PSZ, 2d ser., no. 5243 (22 March 1832).

78. Ibid., no. 31465 (29 January 1857).

79. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 457 (on searching out and dispatching female criminals sentenced to exile in Siberia; 1833-1834), 1. 4ob.; PSZ, 2d ser., no. 6989 (14 April 1834).

80. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 415 (on the marriage of exiled women to residents of free social status groupings; 1825-1826), 1. 7.

81. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 11. 96-100ob.

82. Ibid., 11. 109-109ob.

83. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 51 (1827-1828), 11. l78-178ob.

84. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 1. 61ob.

85. Ustav o ssyl'nykh, PSZ, 1st sen, no. 29128 (22 July 1822), statutes 225 and 226.

86. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 5, d. 68 (1860), 11. 22-22ob.

87. Ibid., 11. 27ob.-28ob. One instance where a Siberian governor-general granted such an exception concerned Nikita Pichugin, a serf sentenced to 13.5 years of hard labor for murder. Although it was technically forbidden, the Ministry of Internal Affairs approved his marriage to a free woman because he had been well behaved. RGIA, f. 1263, op. 3,1866, d. 108 (on permitting the hard laborer Nikita Pichugin to enter into marriage with the maiden Avdotia Mel'nikova), 11. 1-7.

88. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 598 (1825-1826), 1. 1. The governor-general of Tobol'sk made a similar point in RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 415 (1825-1826), 1. 4.

89. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 427 (1828-1837), 1. 26.

90. Ibid., 11. 61ob., 96-98,109-109ob., 118-119.

91. Ibid., 11. 164ob.-165.

92. Ibid., 1. 168.

93. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, d. 43 (1832), 11. 6ob.-7.

94. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 5, d. 68 (1860), 1.17.

95. RGIA, f. 1265, op. 6, d. 108 (on the procedure for furnishing grants to exiles at resettlement upon their marriage; 1864), 11. 2-13ob.

96. Gentes, “'Licentious Girls’ and Frontier Domesticators,” 5. On intermarriage between native peoples and ethnic Russians in Siberia, also see Willard Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts? ‘Going Native’ and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1810s-1914,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 811-14.

97. Chudnovskii, “Kolonizatsionnoe znachenie Sibirskoi ssylki,” 54.

98. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 55 (1833-1837), 11. 18-19. On the broader problems posed by “going native” and how this challenged Russian national identity by eliminating the distinction between the Russian and the native “other,” see Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts?” 806-25.

99. N. Grigorsovskii, who studied the old-timers of Narymsk, in western Siberia, asserted that these peasants had sunk to the intellectual level of the indigenous pagan tribes and called their unbaptized children “Tatars.” Likewise, D. N. Belikov, who analyzed the lifestyles of Russian peasants who settled Tomsk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries noted that they were “habitual wanderers.” He attributed this to their geographic proximity to nomadic pagans, whose values they had acquired. Belikov blamed the degradation of Siberia's Slavic population partly on crossbreeding. He noted that in 1733, local Kalmyks took some Russian residents hostage. Even when their Slavic brethren freed them, the victims refused to return to their Slavic ways and took wives from among the Kalmyks, with whom they lived outside the law, and refused to baptize their children. One priest who had proselytized among the Chukhchi and Shelagov tribes and had ministered to Russians in Kolyma in the early 1850s noted that early Russian settlers in this region had disappeared because they had married into the Omok tribe. N. Grigorsovskii, “Krest'ianestarozhily Narymskago kraia,” Zapiski Zapadno-Sibirshago otdela Imperatorskago Russkago geograficheskago obshchestva, no. 1 (1879): 1-2; D. N. Belikov, “Pervye Russkie krest'ianenasel'niki Tomskago kraia raznyia osobennosti v usloviiakh ikh zhizni i byta (Obshchii ocherk na XVII i XVIII stoletiia),” in N. F. Katsenko, ed., Nauchnye ocherki Tomskago kraia: Sbornik publichnykh lektsii po razlichnym voprosam estestvoznaniia i sel'skogo khoziastva mestnago kraia, organizovannykh osen'iu 1897 goda byvshim Tomskim otdelom Imperatorskago Moskovskago obshchestva sel'skago khoziastva (Tomsk, 1898), 69,106; Argentov, “Severnaia zemlia,” Zapiski Imperatorskago geograficheskago obshchestva: Issledovaniia i materialy,” no. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1861), 23.

100. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 51 (1827-1828), 11.186-186ob.

101. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 3, d. 110 (MayJewish children follow their parents to Siberia?), 11. 12-18, 21-22.

102. RGIA, f. 1286, op. 8, d. 719 (correspondence of the governor-general of eastern Siberia concerning the marriage of those sentenced to exile to native-born Siberian women and the marriage of people of high-born ranks to exiled women; 1843), 11. 6-13; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 3, d. 11 (on marriages to exiled women; 1846), 11. 17ob.-21, 29ob.-30.

103. RGIA, f. 797, op. 32, otd. 2, d. 242 (on the petition of Grigorii Timofeev to enter into a second marriage; 1862), 11.1-2, 9-13,15-16.

104. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 415 (1825-1826), 11. 2-3, 4, 7-7ob. On this issue, also see Nina Adamovna Minenko, Russkaia krest'ianskaia sem'ia v Zapadnoi Sibiri (XVIII-pervoi polovinyXIXv.) (Novosibirsk, 1979), 191-92.

105. RGIA, f. 1264, op. 1, d. 415 (1825-1826), 11. 8-8ob.

106. Ustav o ssyl'nykh i soderzhanii pod strazhei, Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii poveleniem Gosudaria Imperatora Nikolaia Pervago sostavlennyi, vol. 14, 1857 ed. (St. Petersburg, 1857), statutes 763 and 764.

107. The regulations cautioned that women had to agree to remain in Siberia and noted that “such marriages do not confer upon die woman the rights and properties of her husband when he belongs to a higher rank.” Ibid., statute 765.

108. Ibid., statute 766.