Anatomy of the Protests of Political Exiles in Western Siberia in the 1880s

Using the methods of regional history, the present paper studies some little-known pages of the history of the political exile life in Western Siberia. The present case gives us a new perspective on the institution of political exile, and insights into the relationship between the provincial government and political exiles. The article is based on hitherto unstudied documents from the archives of Tobolsk and Surgut. The focus is on collisions of political exiles with the local administration, which resulted in a series of protests by political exiles. Reconstructing the daily life of exiled revolutionaries, the author analyzes the decision-making by central and provincial authorities towards exiled revolutionaries. Special attention is paid to the life circumstances of political prisoners in the Tobolsk North, in particular in the town of Surgut, where the confrontation between exiles and the local administration reached an extreme degree of tension, leading in 1888 to the "Surgut protest". These events later triggered the Yakut protest of 1889, the largest in the history of political exile, which ended in direct bloodshed. The author emphasizes the short-sightedness of the tsarist government as well as the petty and vindictive desire of officials at all levels to brutally and often excessively punish opponents of the existing political system. These factors had harmful consequences for the Russian Empire. On the one hand, the relationship between the government and the opposition became more tense; on the other, the harsh treatment of poli- tical exiles seriously undermined the prestige of the autocracy on the international scene, moving world public opinion into the direction of supporting the Russian revolutionary movement.