It has been a long, cold January and how appropriate that I’ve spent most of that time reading about Russian history. This week’s main read was Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (2017) which explores the Romanov precursor to the gulag, the Tsarist system of shipping criminals, political dissidents and other undesirables to Siberia through the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The lucky ones enjoyed a relatively comfortable exile, allowing them to read, think and build a makeshift life; most however endured the region’s harsh conditions as they suffered forced labor in mines and construction progress, random acts of violence from both authorities and the region’s many bandits, and a general sense of misery isolated so far from civilized society. While not as systematic as Stalin’s prison camps, it was a brutality of its own, which came both for Russians and foreign observers (notably American traveler George Kennan, uncle of the famous diplomat) to represent the cruelties of Tsarist Russia.

Beer’s book would be a grim procession of human misery if not for the idealism of many of the victims he portrays, including the philosopher and political activist Mikhael Lunin. Lunin was first imprisoned for his connections to the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, and was repeatedly jailed and exiled until his death in 1845, while serving on a work detail in the Trans-Baikal. Among his most moving perorations, which triggered his final arrest, was an essay addressed to Nicholas I in which he issued a stirring cri de coeur for all liberals and free-thinkers living under an autocratic regime:

You committed yourself to listening to and developing all of the legally expressed opinions about improving the state of this country but have made this impossible by imposing new restraints on the freedom of the press, by impeding relations with Europe and by paralyzing the operation of civilized principles with the help of a reactionary system. We advocated the cult of the law; you advocate the cult of personality, storing the clothes of sovereigns in churches as if they were a new kind of relic. You have taken it upon yourself to cleanse Russia of the contagion of liberal ideas and have plunged her into an abyss of dissolution, into the vices of spying and the darkness of ignorance. With the hand of the executioner, you have extinguished the minds that illuminated the social movement and directed its development. What have you put in their place? We in turn will summon you before the court of our contemporaries and of posterity: answer for yourselves!

Sadly, the court of posterity is the only appeal many men like Lunin had. But we can always take heart that even in the darkest of times in the most oppressive countries, there are men and women who refuse to bend to the forces of darkness and ignorance.