Noses ripped apart, branded with iron stamps and chained to wheelbarrows for 10 years: Horrific punishments dreamt up by the Tsars who sent millions to Siberia and treated them as savagely as Stalin

A convict in Siberia in the 1890s 

The crowd of onlookers fell silent as the soldiers in the firing squad raised their rifles and prepared to execute the three men bound to wooden posts on a parade ground in St Petersburg.

Behind these wretched figures was a line of empty coffins and beyond that a scaffold. On it stood the dozens of others due to be shot on that freezing December morning in 1849, among them the young Fyodor Dostoevsky, later to become one of Russia’s most celebrated writers.

Each wearing a long white gown that would shortly serve as his shroud, they seemed certain to lose their lives.

But instead of the order to fire, the silence was broken by the clattering of an imperial emissary galloping into the square on horseback. He announced that the men had been given a last-minute reprieve — but this was no act of mercy.

Tsar Nicholas I had deliberately set out to terrorise the accused with this carefully staged mock execution, and many might have preferred death to the punishment that awaited them instead: banishment to Siberia.

Today, the name of that immense region — one-and-a-half times larger than the entire continent of Europe — evokes the horrors of Stalin’s Gulag, the network of forced labour camps that were largely concentrated there.

But it was used as a penal colony long before the Soviet era, and the brutal and dehumanising conditions imposed there under the Tsars led Dostoevsky to describe his four years in a Siberian prison camp as like being in ‘a world all of its own . . . a house of the living dead’. 

The ‘crime’ of Dostoevsky and the other men whose lives were spared that day was to have called for social reform in Russia. Exile was a well-known means of dealing with dissenters but, as revealed in a harrowing new book, many other innocent people were dispatched to Siberia simply because slave labour was needed there.

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An executioner (pictured left) and Joseph Stalin (right) who ruled the Soviet Empire for 30 years, including during the Second World War

Determined to exploit the region’s mineral resources, Russia’s rulers criminalised activities ranging from felling oak trees and ‘begging with false distress’ to prize-fighting and ‘recklessly driving a cart without the use of reins’.

To boost the numbers of exiles still further, village elders were encouraged to identify those who should be banished because of ‘indecent’ or ‘obscene’ behaviour, or questionable religious and political beliefs.

With no proof required, the scope for abuse was limitless. Everyone from thieves, murderers and rapists to targets of village gossip could find themselves fettered in convoys marching eastwards. Between 1801 and 1917, this was the fate of more than a million Russian subjects, a fifth of them women, and their suffering began long before they arrived in Siberia.

Those guilty of crimes such as murder and rape were flogged in public places before departure. And male felons sometimes had the cartilage that divides the nostrils ripped out with hot pincers as a deterrent to others.

To help identify them if they managed to escape, the men had half their head shaven — to distinguish them from soldiers who were often fully shaven-headed to combat lice — and their faces were branded with iron stamps.

These bristled with needles in the shape of individual letters and spelt out words such as ‘thief’. Gunpowder was then rubbed into the wound to leave a permanent mark and prevent them ever blending back into society.

Prisoners post Stalin's rule were treated just as savagely as the ones here building a copper factory in Norilisk in 1949 

Before the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1916, the prisoners made the journey to Siberia on foot. From St Petersburg to the remotest points of exile was 4,500 miles. It could take the weakest of the exiles as long as three years to walk there, and their sentence began only when they finally arrived.

Many were exiled for life, and this lent great poignancy to the moment when they passed the simple 12ft-high column that stood in a forest clearing in the Ural Mountains and marked the boundary between European Russia and Siberia.

Scenes there were described by American explorer George Kennan when he passed through in 1888. ‘Here hundreds of thousands of exiled human beings have bidden goodbye forever to friends, country and home,’ he wrote.

‘Some gave way to unrestrained grief; some comforted the weeping; some knelt and pressed their faces to the loved soil of their native country and collected a little earth to take with them into exile.’

The convoys continued walking all year round and with never more than a day’s rest, forced ever onwards by the soldiers who guarded them.

Wearing coarse grey smocks with a bright diamond sewn on the back to make escapees more visible, they had both their hands and feet manacled, and were chained in pairs to a pole.

In the intense heat of summer, they were choked by dust clouds raised by hundreds of tramping feet. In autumn the rains transformed the roads into quagmires through which they squelched knee-deep, before September brought the first searing frosts.

Receiving only a meagre daily allowance to buy food, prisoners were frequently starving. (Convicts pictured in a gulag camp hospital)

At minus 20c, the breath froze onto the men’s beards, forming chunks of ice; at minus 30c, the freezing air burned the lungs. And little protection was afforded by the sheepskin coats the convicts were given, so cheaply made that they soon fell apart.

Those too poor to replace their worn-out clothing and footwear in the isolated towns they passed through frequently walked barefoot and in rags, the ulcers caused by their manacles making every step agony.

Receiving only a meagre daily allowance to buy food, they were frequently starving. And with diseases such as typhus and TB spreading in the squalid way stations in which they were housed at night, they perished in such numbers that there were protests from local peasants charged with disposing of the corpses.

The convoys reserved special torments for their female members. Many were innocent of any crime, but often the male convicts treated them all as prostitutes, auctioning them off to the highest bidder.

If a woman rejected the winning ‘suitor’, she was subjected to terrible reprisals, with frequent rapes and other savage assaults. The convoy guards outdid their male captives as predators, regarding forced sex as a perk of the job.

In all, the passage through Siberia was one of unrelenting misery for the prisoners, made worse by fears about the suffering in their final place of exile.

The trans-Siberian railway under construction, circa 1903. Much of it was built by convicts

For Dostoevsky, this was a prison in south-western Siberia in which the men were made to work in a local brick factory and at night slept in decrepit wooden barracks, 120 of them in rooms only nine yards square.

‘We were packed in like herrings in a barrel,’ he wrote. ‘All the floors were rotting through and we slept on bare planks and shivered all night.

‘There were fleas, lice and cockroaches by the bushel and we were not allowed to leave the barracks to relieve ourselves from dusk till dawn because they were locked.

‘Tubs were placed inside the door to meet our nocturnal needs and so the stench was unbearable.’

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) 

And many hundreds of miles to the east lay the prison island of Sakhalin, where it was said starving convicts resorted to cannibalism when their bread rations were cut off as punishment for failing to meet crippling workloads.

But perhaps the most feared of all places was the northern mining region of Nerchinsk, where the woods for 30 miles around each settlement were chopped down to prevent escapees hiding in them.

Prisoners would work 12-hour shifts, often underground. With rats scurrying about in the claustrophobic gloom of the silver mines, the men used 20 lb hammers to hack at the rock, which they then had to carry out by hand.

Crumbling roof supports claimed many lives and so arduous was the work here and in other places across Siberia that convicts resorted to desperate measures to avoid it.

Some deliberately inflicted frostbite on their hands, even to the point of having fingers amputated. Others simulated the symptoms of syphilis by inserting finely chopped horse hair into tiny incisions on their genitals, producing sores they hoped would persuade prison doctors they were not fit to work.

During the sustained floggings used as punishments, the doctors were called upon to halt the proceedings if they thought the convict was on the verge of death.

This was not a humane act, but designed to ensure that the workforce was not depleted. And once his wounds had healed, the victim was led back out for a resumption of the lashing. These beatings were often carried out at the whim of sadistic overseers such as Major Krivtsov, who ran the prison in which Fyodor Dostoevsky was incarcerated.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's pre revolutionary edition of The Notes from the House of the Dead

He made a habit of bursting into the barracks at night and ordering that anyone found sleeping on his right side should be whipped.

He justified this by saying Christ always slept on his left side and everyone was required to follow his example.

Other common punishments in Siberia included chaining convicts to the wall of a cell or even to a wheelbarrow for up to ten years at a time. One man recalled his revulsion at being yoked to what he called his ‘wheelbarrow wife’ for five years.

‘When I went out to work with the barrow, it filled me with hatred,’ he said. ‘Like a dumb beast, I had lost any kind of human form.’

Even this was preferable to the much-feared ‘running the gauntlet’, which involved the accused stripping to the waist and passing between two lines of soldiers, who delivered him stinging blows with birch rods.

Sometimes there were as many as 500 men on each side and offenders were made to stagger past them up to six times, suffering a pulverising 6,000 blows in all.

Some found respite from this terror in gambling, using home-made cards with the diamonds and hearts coloured in using the blood of the card-makers themselves.

Others relied on illicit supplies of vodka brewed by former convicts who lived around the penal settlements and brought in by those trusted to work outside the grounds. Filling the rinsed-out lungs and intestines of slaughtered cattle with the alcohol, they wrapped them around their bodies, beneath their ragged clothing, and smuggled them past the guards.

Getting drunk offered a brief illusion of the freedom that other desperate souls sought for real. Each year the retreat of winter snows revealed the frozen bodies of those who had tried to escape, but got only a few miles before perishing in blinding snowstorms.

Most, like Dostoevsky, opted to serve out their sentence. It was an experience he described as ‘inexpressible, unending suffering’, and it inspired him to write his first novel The House Of The Dead, a semi-autobiographical story about life in a Siberian prison camp. A glimpse into a horrifying world of which most educated Russians were wholly ignorant, it caused a sensation when published in 1860.

Thanks to this and other critical works, Siberia became a byword for the despotism of the Tsars, helping to fan the revolution of 1917, only to be replaced by a regime in whose hands this vast ‘prison without a roof’ became synonymous with even greater tyranny and evil.

• The House Of The Dead: Siberian Exile Under The Tsars by Daniel Beer (Allen Lane, £30). © Daniel Beer. To buy a copy for £22.50, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P free on orders over £15. Offer valid until August 20, 2016.