Siberian Exile in Tsarist Russia

historytoday.com

11 points·Thevet··6 comments

Did Foucault not, in _Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison_, talk about expulsion? In western Europe?

There's a strange singling out of Russia in this piece as being the only ones to force the criminals and also the poor and the mental patients, as Foucault would remind us, into exile. But I suppose "Russia bad" and "we're not quoting postmodernists" is status quo for History Today.

Just because an article focuses on one topic doesn't mean the subject is being singled out.

Bingo. And these type of hn posts always bring out the bigots: I generally flag them unless tech related. Some people here can’t talk about any Russian/USSR topic with going full-blown Russophobia. There's other places for that like reddit, hn is not it.

There is a paragraph that mentions other countries having their own deportation systems. How much of "other countries bad" must be in an article about very particular Russian system?

Article is from 1980 and mentions the USSR in the present tense. Surveiller et Punir is from the late 1970s; that’s not exactly a long time for its influence to percolate into the pages of History Today in 1980. This is pretty much what I’d expect from an anglophone article about Siberian exile from the late years of the Cold War.

Russia's Australia where convicts died of frostbites and bear attacks instead of dehydration and snake bites down under

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