Daniel Beer begins this exceptionally well-written and sweeping history of Siberian exile by recounting the exile of the bell of Uglich in 1591. In punishment for the townspeople's revolt, Boris Godunov had his forces lash the bell, rip out its tongue, and then sentence it to exile alongside the town's human rebels to Siberia. They would join the over one million people who would be sentenced to Siberian exile under the tsars. Beer argues that the tsarist government tried to use deportation to Siberia to get rid of undesirables and to fill a new land with convicts. In this way, the systems of Russian exile and colonization were intertwined. Beer makes an important contribution to the field by showing that the tsarist state used the vast space of its empire to exert power, but space also overstretched the state and undermined its control over its exile system.

Beer takes the reader along on the exile's journey from sentencing to the long and torturous road to exile, a journey that could last as long as five years, and finally to the place of exile itself. Beer narrows in on personalities—from lone escapees to noted figures like Fedor Dostoevskii, whose semi-autobiographical novel of his own time in exile gives this book its name. He also highlights the diversity of convicts’ experiences. Most exiles limped their way across Russia on foot to their exile and served their sentences in mines or prisons, finally to be released as new settlers of Siberia. Other, wealthier and better-connected convicts, however, traveled by carriage and lived in rented houses. Beer dwells on the notable political exiles—the Decembrists, the exiles from the two Polish rebellions, and the literary and revolutionary figures—and brings them to life. While they were sentenced to the civil death of exile, their tales of heroic resistance in Siberia (some true, others not) spread across Russia and beyond. In weaving his tale, Beer occasionally, and understandably, gets wrapped up in the revolutionaries’ romantic self-portraits of their steadfast solidarity for their cause. Most political exiles in the late tsarist era, as Sarah Badcock has recently shown, were more concerned on a day-to-day basis with finding food to survive than with their revolutionary dreams.

The Siberian exile system, like all grand state enterprises, was shaped by the interplay between ideas and reality. Beer wonderfully documents how exiles’ lives hinged on the whims of local officials and how corruptible they were. Exiles themselves reshaped and undermined the system by petitioning the state or simply fleeing. Beer argues that it was the space and administrative weakness in exile that helped to subvert the system by leaving the exiles, especially the political convicts, alone. Even as the bell of Uglich returned home from exile in 1892, the Russian government doubled down on the Siberian deportation system for political criminals. It did not work, as prisoners boldly rebelled against the tsarist state and gained national and even international sympathy. Siberian exile had gone from a sign of state power to a sign of its weakness. The author aptly presents Siberia as a metaphor for the whole of tsarist Russia. The exile system began with the promise of building future wealth and expanding state power but, by the early twentieth century, it was clearly doomed to fail. The exiles, themselves literary and philosophical writers, painted Siberian exile as part of the inhumane despotic autocracy.

The House of the Dead builds upon recent scholarship in Russian studies on space and power, colonization, and penology. Beers especially draws up on the ideas of Edward Said (orientalism) and Michel Foucault (discipline and punishment), but the theoretical ideas are implied rather than explicitly stated. He ends, understandably, in 1917 and the decree to stop state exile to Siberia. Does this mean that the Siberian exile system was an archaic legacy and that liberal criticism of the inhumane nature of the exile system prevailed? Beer notes in his epilogue that under the Bolsheviks deportation to Siberia became far worse, with “the ruthless exploitation of convict labor on an industrial scale justified by the need for a ‘purification of society’ and by the prospect of ‘individual rehabilitation’” (376). Beer may, or may not, be arguing that the Bolsheviks took up the liberal critiques and made the Siberian exile system into a modern form of punishment. A study of the interconnected stories of liberating journeys home by exiles, the emergence of Soviet penology, and the administrative transformation of Siberian exile into the brutal gulag system still needs to be written. Beer's wonderful book sets the path and is sure to inspire a new group of scholars to pursue the topic. The House of the Dead is a thought provoking and important study of Siberian exile that will certainly become a classic in our field.