Promotional Information

This masterly work of original research taps a mass of almost unknown primary evidence held in Russian and Siberian archives to tell the epic story both of Russia's struggle to govern its monstrous penal colony and of Siberia's ultimate, decisive impact on the political forces of the modern world.

About the Author

Daniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Renovating Russia.

Reviews

Excellent... an expansive work that neatly manages to combine a broad history of the Romanovs' Gulag with heart-rending tales of the plights of individual prisoners
*Literary Review*

A splendid example of academic scholarship for a public audience. Yet even though he is an impressively calm and sober narrator, the injustices and atrocities pile up on every page.
*The Sunday Times*

An absolutely fascinating book, rich in fact and anecdote.
*The Times*

In many ways Siberia truly was a House of the Dead - as Daniel Beer, who borrows the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky's prison novel for his masterful new study, recounts in horrific and gripping detail. Because of its far greater scale and brutality, the Soviet gulag has eclipsed the memory of the Tsarist penal system in the popular imagination. Beer redresses that imbalance by bringing the voices of the million-plus victims of katorga vividly to life. The House of the Dead tells the story of how 'the Tsarist regime collided violently with the political forces of the modern world' - and how modern Russia was born among the squalor, the cockroaches and the casual violence of the world's largest open-air prison
*Spectator*

Although Beer's subject is grim, his writing is not. Grace notes of metaphor elevate The House of the Dead above standard histories; it is also ground-breaking and moving
*The Telegraph*

If the scale of the Siberian penal exile inspires a sense of dreadful awe, then the detail is tragic, heart-breaking and marked with individual horror. The vast, Steppe-like sweep of Daniel Beer's work is impressive, sustaining a narrative that ranges from 1801 to 1917, and involves more than one million exiled souls into an area that is one and a half times bigger than the continent of Europe ... An extraordinary, powerful and important story
*Herald*

[This] masterly new history of the tsarist exile system... makes a compelling case for placing Siberia right at the centre of 19th-century Russian-and, indeed, European-history. But for students of Soviet and even post-Soviet Russia it holds lessons, too. Many of the country's modern pathologies can be traced back to this grand tsarist experiment-to its tensions, its traumas and its abject failures.
*Economist*

Daniel Beer's The House of the Dead is a detailed, rich and powerful account of the inhumane system of imprisonment and exile in Tsarist Siberia that shows how little changed between Tsarism and Stalinism. Both were built on the bones of ordinary Russians
*Irish Examiner*

An eye-opening, haunting work that delineates how a vast imperial penal system crumbled from its rotten core
*Kirkus Reviews*

Impeccably researched, beautifully written
*Guardian*

A gripping, horrifying and depressing read, relieved only by the numerous stories of human resilience in the face of adversity that Beer has to tell.
*Times Literary Supplement*

This tale... is brought eloquently and sympathetically to life in Daniel Beer's impressive new book... His extensive archival research and reading of memoirs, eyewitness accounts, official reports and scholarly works on Siberia from the imperial era have unearthed dozens of stories that individualize convicts who elsewhere so often appear as an indistinct, often inhuman mass.
*Times Literary Supplement*

[Beer] has mined an impressive trove of resources... from these rich lodes emerges a history with the sort of granular details - there's an entire chapter, for example, devoted to the knout, the lash and other tools of corporal punishment - that make the terror of the "very name 'Siberia'?" so vividly, so luridly clear.
*The New York Times*

A fascinating new account of the Decembrists that soberly delves into their tensions and personal weaknesses and tells of some of their conspiracies, drinking, debts and feuds. More important, Mr. Beer argues persuasively for a direct line between their story and the role played by the exile system in the eventual fall of the czars... As a result of his work deep in Siberian archives, there is much that is new here... Mr. Beer's excellent book will for some time be the definitive work in English on this enormous topic
*Wall St Journal*

Daniel Beer's The House of the Dead: Siberian exile under the Tsars (Allen Lane) is both a gripping read and an extraordinary feat of scholarly analysis, delivered with the scope and empathy of a novelist - appositely, as both Dostoevsky and Chekhov are part of Siberia's story. The microhistories as well as the grand narrative illuminate a terrible swathe of Russian (and Polish) history.
*TLS*