Book on Siberian exile wins author McGill’s esteemed history prize
It happened more than 100 years ago, in one of the most remote locations on the planet, but historian Daniel Beer said much about the Siberian exile in czarist Russia still rings true today.
Beer, a lecturer at Royal Holloway at the University of London, was awarded the international Cundill History Prize at a gala in Montreal on Thursday for his book on Siberian penal colonies, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars.
The book was also shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize and the Longman-History Today Prize.
Beer said it came as a pleasant surprise to win this award, which comes with the highest monetary prize for non-fiction writing in English at US$75,000.
“I never won anything, so I had disciplined myself into thinking there was no way I was going to win,” Beer told the Montreal Gazette Friday morning.
“I was delighted and humbled that the jury picked me from among such distinguished historians around the world.”
He said he believed his work was chosen because of the universal messages from the czarist regime and how the mass exile of dissidents and criminals to Siberia was one of the ways Russia’s czars lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and that led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
“If you treat your own penal population with contempt, or you trample over their rights, or you create dark spaces within your territory or beyond it where people are stripped of rights, that will come back to haunt you at one point,” Beer said.
He said many countries, like Britain and France, also exiled their criminals. However, no country exiled its criminals for as long or on as large a scale as Russia.
While Britain deported about 168,000 people to Australia, more than one million were exiled to Siberia by the czarist regime, so nearly everyone knew someone who was jailed by the state.
The Siberian exile also became a central theme in works of Russian masters Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
In fact, it was those works that first piqued Beer’s interest in the subject.
Beer’s work was chosen from a record 300 submissions for the prize. The Cundill History Prize, run by McGill University, is in its 10th year.
“Daniel Beer has done extraordinary research, using underappreciated and unexamined sources, to show what exile meant to generations of Russians and other nationalities within the Russian Empire,” Margaret MacMillan, chairperson of the jury, said.
Also shortlisted for the prize this year were Montreal professor Christopher Goscha, of the Université du Québec à Montréal (Vietnam: A New History), and U.S.-based Austrian historian Walter Scheidel (The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century).