Experiencing Siberian exile in late Imperial Russia - Sarah Badcock (University of Nottingham)

Please join us for a talk by Sarah Badcock on her newly-released book A Prison Without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism (OUP, 2016).

Professor Badcock's book draws on previously-unexplored archives in Irkutsk and Yakutsk to paint a snapshot of daily life for exiles and their dependents in eastern Siberia during the very last years of the Tsarist regime, from the 1905 revolution, up until the collapse of the Tsarist regime in 1917. She argues that Siberian exile was the antithesis of Foucault's modern prison. The State did not observe, monitor and control its exiles closely. Despite these freedoms, Siberian exile represented one of Russia's most feared punishments. This book seeks to humanise the individuals who made up the mass of exiles and the men, women and children who followed them voluntarily into exile.

Sarah Badcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on Russia in the late Imperial and revolutionary periods, examining in particular comparative perspectives on questions of punishment, free and unfree labour, and penal cultures. Her first book,  Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia; A provincial history, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. From 2010-2015 Professor Badcock was co-editor of the journal Revolutionary Russia, and in 2015 she published the co-edited volume Russia's Home Front In War And Revolution, 1914-22: Book 1. Russia's Revolution In Regional Perspective.

A seminar hosted by the UCL SSEES Russian Studies Seminar Series.
Convenors: Philippa Hetherington (UCL SSEES) and Simon Huxtable (Loughborough)