Sakhalin Hard Labor and Exile Colony

a place where sentences of hard labor or exile were served by criminals from 1869 and by participants in the revolutionary movement in Russia from 1886.

More than 30,000 persons were sent to Sakhalin Island during the time that the forced-labor colony existed there. Of the 54 revolutionaries sent to the island, 39 were sentenced to various terms at hard labor and the rest to enforced residence in exile. Among the latter were the former Shlissel’burg Fortress prisoners L. A. Volkenshtein, I. L. Manucharov, M. N. Trigoni, and I. P. Iuvachev. Most of the political prisoners sentenced to hard labor were convicted for membership in the People’s Will or the Polish Proletariat Party. A. I. Gavrilov and A. I. Ermakov, the leaders of the Obukhov Defense of 1901, were also sentenced to hard labor here.

The political prisoners were housed together with the criminals, did the same work, and were subjected to abuse, beatings, and corporal punishment. Convict labor was used in the coal mines near Due and for logging and road building. The harshness of the prison authorities led to revolts, the largest of which occurred in 1888, and drove some political prisoners and exiles to suicide. After the appearance of Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island and of V. M. Doroshevich’s essays, the progressive public began to protest against the brutality on the “penal island.” With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–05, the exiling of prisoners to the island was curtailed, and in 1906 it was abolished altogether.