Artistic Work of Polish Exiles in the Trans-Baikal Region of Russia in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Polish political exiles to Siberia of the latter half of the 1800s were involved in many aspects of the social and cultural life of the time in the Trans-Baikal Region of Russia. However, in contrast to their scholarly research conducted while in exile, their artistic activities have never been a topic of independent studies. The objective of this paper is to study artistic work of Polish exiles in the context of penal labor and penal settlements. When developing the topic of this study, the author relied on fundamental research principles and methods. Using a broad range of archive materials and private sources, the author describes the artistic journeys of the most famous Polish artists in exile who left a prominent legacy in the Trans-Baikal artistic life of the time. When working on the topic of the article, the author used the following methods of historical research: analysis of written sources, bibliographic method, historical and genetic method. While being formally convicted to penal labor in the mines and factories of Nerchinsk mining region, some Polish exiles were not actually required to engage in hard labor. The most artistically minded among them were looking for the opportunities to selfeducate themselves and engage in artistic activities. The author identified several previously unknown facts associated with the artistic legacy of Polish exiles. Against the backdrop of Polish deportation in the 1800s, the author reconstructed the artistic work of Jozef Baerkman and Stanislaw Wronski. During their time in the Siberian penal system, Polish artists created paintings, taxidermic works, and illustrations to the scholarly works of Benedykt Dybowski. However, their most active creative period began when they were released from hard labor and settled in penal colonies. Today, some works of Polish artists in exile created during the second half of the 19th century are part of collections of regional museums. Keywords: Polish exiles, Polish artists, artistic activity, Trans-Baikal region, Stanislaw Wronski, Jozef Baerkman

Convicts and exiled in Yekaterinburg in 1723 – late 1730s: to the question on formation of social space of the city

This article is dedicated to the history of the Institution of penal servitude and exile in Ural Region in the 1720s – 1730s. The subject of this research is the convicts and exiled who arrived to Yekaterinburg during the period from 1723 to the late 1730s. Analysis is conducted on the legislation dedicated to regulation of penal labor and exile in Russia. Differences in the government policy with regards to exiled in the XVII and XVIII centuries are revealed. The author also examines the reasons of the emergence of exiled and convicts in Ural Region, dynamics of their arrival from Tobolsk and the capital regions, as well as the stance of the mining and metallurgical authorities on this social category. Historians alongside legal historians turned attention to studying penal labor and exile in Siberia, practically not comparing the situation of exiled and convicts in other Russian regions. The novelty of this work consists in studying life of the representatives of this social group in the Ural Region in the early XVIII century, which was noted for transit location, connecting  European and Asian parts of the country, and was the center of mining and metallurgical industry. Leaning on the analysis of documental sources and records, the author concludes that convicts and exiled played a role in the formation of social space of Yekaterinburg. They were well integrated into the social relations: they were allowed to own homesteads and marry, but were under permanent control of the mining and metallurgical administration.

Reading Utopia in the Reformation of Punishment

Recent scholarship on the first English translation of Thomas More's “Utopia” has asked how its publication in the 1550s fits with the larger agenda of Protestant Reformers who promoted the book alongside their other civic projects. This article argues that the initiatives of greatest relevance were the new house of correction at Bridewell (est. 1553–57) and the infamous Vagrancy Act of 1547–49, which failed to introduce slavery as a punishment in English law. Evidence of user interactions with the 1550s editions, including indexing, annotation, commonplacing, and quotation, helps to analyze how the text's complicated ideas about penal labor were received and reemphasized by early English readers.

Class Jurisprudes: Free Labor Ideology and For-Profit Penal Labor in Gilded Age Courts

For-profit penal servitude flourished in Gilded Age America. Prisoners produced consumer goods inside factory-penitentiaries for private enterprise. Regulations protecting free labor encountered litigation by businesses invested in carceral capitalism. Judges who defended “liberty of contract,” maintained “state neutrality,” and condemned “class legislation” exhibited a different approach when evaluating labeling laws. Such statutes were seemingly consonant with the free labor ideology that dominated appellate benches—they remediated markets distorted by state-created privileges. Yet courts routinely struck them down. This article argues that judges were motivated by a class-infused framework structuring interpretation of facts and aliening lower-class Americans. Judges perceived workingmen who sought remedial assistance as seeking class legislation; they saw prison inmates and products as ordinary workers and goods, not as captive manpower and state-subsidized wares. Jurisprudence bent and bowed from judges’ values and associations. This article thus reintroduces the explanatory power of class to the Lochner era through judicial subjectivity.

Myths of Labor: Elements of an Economical Zoology

Labor is both punishment and curse.At least this is what the mythical scenes of division and exclusion in Hesiod and in the Old Testament dramatise.At the same time they can be regarded as symptoms of misogyny.Without doubt, those two mythical scenes and the divine power to curse and sentence have held their spell over the economic tractates from antiquity to the modern period. How do the ancient writings of economic theory—and specifically Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics—regulate female Pleonexia on the one hand, and the limitless penal labor imposed on men on the other? How in turn do the economic tractates of the modern period—and here specifically John Locke’s famous essays on the economy of labor—respond to the problem of female hybris on the one hand and the characteristical burden and suffering associated with labor on the other? What role does the differentiation and separation between free and unfree, productive and reproductive labor and, not least, the economic marginalisation of reproductive labor, play in this? And finally: In what way do »King Bee« and Queen Bee, Nurse Bee and Drone appear in this context as figures of an at once mythical and economic zoology, whose emblematic efficacy extends up to Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees?

Decembrists, Rebels, and Martyrs in Siberian Exile: The “Zerentui Conspiracy” of 1828 and the Fashioning of a Revolutionary Genealogy

In May 1828 the authorities in eastern Siberia uncovered plans, hatched by the Decembrist Ivan Sukhinov, to stage an armed rebellion among the penal laborers of the Nerchinsk mines. Sukhinov was planning to march on Chita in order to liberate his fellow Decembrists from captivity. Found guilty of the charges, the ringleaders were executed and Sukhinov committed suicide. Yet the conspiracy was a fantasy, conjured into being by the chaotic conditions of penal labor and official fears of exiled revolutionaries directing insurgencies in Siberia. The state's destruction of Sukhinov and his alleged co-conspirators created the fictional memory of a revolutionary hero and a noble, if doomed, rebellion. In their memoirs published in the postreform era, the Decembrists offered contemporaries an inspiring tale of insurgency and martyrdom in Siberia. The “Zerentui conspiracy” articulated new possibilities of revolutionary protest in exile