The Two Tales of Forced Labour: Katorga and Reformed Prison in Imperial Russia (1879-1905)

This article explores the advance of the prison reform in the Russian Empire. It examines the governmental department that was the driver of this reform, the Main Prison Administration, and focuses on its policy in the domain of the forced labour of prisoners. Two types of forced labour are of particular interest here. One is the traditional hard penal labour, or katorga, and the other is the obligatory labour for the prisoners serving shorter terms. I outline here how this second type of labour came to play the decisive role in the discourse on punishment in the late imperial period, what kind of conceptions supported it, and how it was implemented throughout the empire.

reform. Hence the importance of adopting a perspective that would not be limited to the study of the final legal decisions and the political rivalry between the Ministries.
In this article going to approach the reform through a study of the main administrative innovation it produced: the Main Prison Administration (Glavnoe Tiuremnoe Upravlenie, GTU). Three parts seek to explain how the reform took shape and what long-running impact it had, with a particular focus on the developments in the domain of the forced labour of convicts. First, I will discuss punishments before the reform and outline the legislative and administrative actions that constituted the reform. Second, I will propose a close-up look at one of the heads of the reform and the longest-running head of the GTU (1879-1895), Mikhail Galkin-Vraskoi 8 . Studying his trajectory will allow to understand the intricate mechanics of the preparation of the reform: as he was one of the drivers behind it, tracing his actions sometimes allows pinpointing precise moments of innovation. The third part is dedicated to unveiling the collective work of knowledge production about the Imperial penal system and the convict labour. Switching between these different units of analysis would allow a more balanced view of the changes of the convict labour from 1879 to 1905.

II. Landscape of Russian Punishments Before the Reform
The defeat of the Russian Empire in the Crimean War is considered to be the moment that made the government realize the necessity of profound reforms 9 . The 8 His surname has several possible spellings. Before 1885, he would sign the documents as and after that until his death as in-As he himself, as well as the contemporary secondary sources, favoured the latter spelling, I follow them in this. 9 ZAKHAROVA, Larisa. The reign of Alexander II: a watershed? In: LIEVEN, Dominic (org.) Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 593. dossiê scales of global history most famous and most transformative of them was the abolition of serfdom in 1861, but the financial reform (1863), the reforms of higher (1863) and middle (1871) education, the judicial reform and the reform of local governance (both from 1864) had as well changed the political and social landscape of the Russian Empire. The prison reform is not traditionally considered to be a part of these 10 : in the short-term perspective, it was far less transformative than any of the abovementioned. The legislative acts that shaped this reform and defined the direction of development of the penal system in the decades to come were finished only in 1879.
This was the law that created the Main Prison Administration, and the project of legal transformation that was used as a foundation for a new Criminal Code that finally would become effective in 1903. However, this reform was in preparation for almost a decade. During the early 1870s, two committees were organized in order to elaborate its early blueprints. Right from the start, the prison reform was a ground of cooperation and rivalry between the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Justice.
The committee organized by the latter was preoccupied with the legal part of the penal reform; simultaneously, a special committee headed by Count Sollogub created a project for the prison administration improvements. This project suggested the introduction of the solitary confinement 11 , the obligatory convict labour, and religious education for the convicts, as well as the construction of several new, modern prison buildings 12 . During the same time some practical changes have already been made: in an attempt to alleviate the rampant prison overpopulation, seven military buildings were refurbished as civil prisons 13 .
Finally, the special commission of Konstantin Grot, organized in 1877, worked to incorporate the propositions of the previous commissions and map out a plan for organization of the prison affairs (tiuremnoe delo) along more rational 14 . These works resulted in creation of a law entitled the main principles to be observed during the reform of the prison affairs and during the revision of the 10 EKLOF, Ben; BUSHNELL, John; ZAKHAROVA, Larisa Georgievna (org.). Russia's Great Reforms, 1855-1881. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994 Some of the suggestions and the introduction of the solitary confinement for all prisoners in particular have never been realized. 12 Tiuremnoe preobrazovanie, vol. 1. Saint-Petersburg, 1905, p. 6-7. 13 Tiuremnoe preobrazovanie, vol. 1. Saint-Petersburg, 1905, p. 5. 14 Tiuremnoe preobrazovanie, vol. 1. Saint-Petersburg,1905.

dossiê scales of global history
Criminal It was passed on 19 December 1879, and thus the Main Prison Administration was created.
From the very beginning the officials were not overly optimistic about the depth and the pace of this reform: as it is stated in the overview of the first ten years of the GTU s activity, government has resolutely abandoned the idea of realizing this reform instantly and on a full 15 . The trade-off between the desire of reform and the lack of means (both financial and administrative) to realize it has been achieved through the decision to start the reform with executive measures, namely the organization of the GTU 16 .
Abolition of serfdom was one of the events that made the officials realize the pressing necessity of a prison reform. It created a new wave of inmates: as serfs, the peasants were subject to the will of their landlord (pomeschik), who could punish them without being accountable to the state. After abolition of serfdom, however, the freed peasants came under the jurisdiction of the state and therefore were supposed to serve the punishment in the state-sponsored prisons. The existing prison system was decentralized and fragmented, many prison buildings were extremely run-down, living conditions of the prisoners were extremely poor, and overpopulation was critical.
Another event that contributed to the crisis of the prison system was the of punishment for those sentenced to katorga and exile, but it was still used as a disciplinary punishment for those who were already serving their katorga and exile terms. In other words, for the wrongdoings that convicts would have committed while serving their term, they could be punished by up to 100 hits of lash. In the same way, birching was abolished as a part of punishment for those sentenced to prison, but it was still used against the male exiled and the katorzhnye up until February 1917 20 .
From early on, preserving the corporal punishment of the exiles and katorzhnye was argued for with the the fact that, according to the head of the Second Section of his prisons, and quantifying the material aspects of imprisonment, the officials of the GTU sought to create new, experience-based knowledge of the imperial prisons. The aspirations to improve the state of prisons through better knowing the prison condition in practice sometimes translated into the measures that were palliative rather than transformative. For example, one of the major issues for the GTU in the early 1880s was the organization of the manufacturing of the prison uniforms. Precise patterns were sent out to the prison officials, and every imaginable aspect of these uniforms was described in lengthy instructions. In other words, the GTU officials were sometimes concentrating on the issues that could be tackled through measurements and prescription.
The GTU officials faced the challenge of creating a modern prison which would at the same time fit accordingly in the Russian context. According to them, this context was chiefly defined by the lack of financial support of prisons and the absence of the coherent legislation and the central administrative body, and right from 1879 these officials embarked on a journey to tackle these issues. Employees the Main Prison Administration rarely hesitated to underline in their reports that most of the problems of Russian prisons were engendered by a consistent lack of funds. Before 1879, the local governors were supposed to manage the prisons and to solicit financial help from the Ministry of Finance; between 1875 and 1879, they received on average just half of the sum they asked for for the prison maintenance. In 1879 the lack of money was particularly salient: the estimate of the expenses was 737 000 roubles, while only the amount of 177 505 roubles was allocated 32 .
However, financial deficit constituted just a fraction of the obstacles that thwarted the advance of the reform. The truly defining features of the Russian context of that time seem to have been far beyond the range of action of the GTU: the existence of the system of exile and, and on the bigger scale, the practices of governance that made it possible; the existence of the two separated of punishment for the nobility and everyone else and, more broadly, the profound social inequality between the elite and the rest of the population; the logistical difficulties of the organization of prisons, namely the lack of the well-trained officials.
dossiê scales of global history

III. Profile of an Official: Mikhail Galkin-Vraskoi
The reform of 1879, as I already mentioned, opted for a new organization of prison management rather than an immediate transformation of prison condition. This was why the reform took shape over the course of several decades, and this shape was largely defined by the executives of the Main Prison Administration, and most notably Mikhail Galkin-Vraskoi (1832-1916, who became its first, and longest-serving, director. This part explores the connections between the shape of the prison reform and the administrative practices of the late Imperial period. Administrative career of Mikhail Galkin-Vraskoi allows to trace the emergence of some of the new practices of prison management.
The knowledge-based approach to prison governance was crucial for the transformation of the penal system in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It allowed to reinforce control over the prisoners, and eventually to improve their condition. This desire to solve governmental problems with the help of the new, science-based principles germinated within a limited group of administrators and was proper to other official outside of the GTU as well. Such approach, combined with independent sense of identity and 33 , characterized such Imperial administrative institutions as the Financial Ministry 34 and the Main administration of land management and agriculture 35 . Alfred Rieber suggested that these Imperial officials reached an unprecedented degree of cohesion in their actions: here is the same sense of moral identity as experts, the same dedication to introducing science or special knowledge into life, the same corporate pride in achievement and mastery of 36 .
It is not possible to estimate to which degree this knowledge-based approach to the prison management was implemented in the prisons throughout the Empire; the traditional penal conceptions and practices still lingered powerfully, and after the Nevertheless, over the course of three decades the knowledge-based approach to prisons has profoundly transformed the practices of incarceration in the Russian Empire.
Certain managerial and conceptual innovations that were later incorporated in the prison reform can be traced back to the precise moments of experimentation. One of the officials whose activity has been marked by such experimentation was Mikhail Galkin-Vraskoi. Galkin-Vraskoi did not attract as much attention as other prominent officials of the Late Imperial politics 37 , but his political trajectory shows that he was firmly embedded within the political elite and was able to build a career that spanned over several decades and apexed in obtaining a seat in the State Council in 1896.  prison conditions, but also raised money for the organization of an corrective (uchebno-ispravitelnii dom), which was opened in 1873 45 . It was a penal colony for the juvenile offenders, and its shape was certainly inspired by the Mettray colony. In Saratov, however, both boys and girls were detained; they were to perform not only the agricultural, but also artisanal work. The type of labour they had to perform was gender-specific: the boys were to be taught the trades of shoemaking, carpentry or locksmithing, and the girls were to study knitting, sewing and performing household chores. This colony was not the first one in Empire, but for Galkin-Vraskoi it was the first immediate opportunity to supervise over an extended period of time the

IV. The New Conceptions of Convict Labour
Until the last decades of the nineteenth century the labour of convicts was conceived first and foremost as punishment, therefore implying hard physical labour as its primary form. The penal regime that was shaped by this idea was the katorga: originating as a way to use the convict labour for the state shipbuilding sites in the early eighteenth century 56 , it has developed over several decades to become the harshest punishment for the common criminals in the Russian Empire. Prior to 1845 the katorzhnye were branded, that is, physically stigmatized for life, but even after the  This resemblance is most visible on the organizational level: introduction of remuneration (however meager), the daily norms of work to fulfill (in the form of uroki) and the preoccupation with production were all first introduced during this time.
Unarguably, these practices were continuously transformed, and took a much more violent twist during the Soviet times, but it is nevertheless crucial for a historical study to acknowledge their origin and account for their gradual constitution. Moreover, very much like the Soviet officials several decades later, the GTU officials of the turn of the century would also make a strong connection between the universal (convict) labour and the benefit of the society at large: a correctly organized society not a single dossiê scales of global history healthy and able-bodied member should count on the privilege of being exonerated from the labour that is obligatory for 59 .
The obligatory convict labour could take various forms, and none of them ever became fully dominant throughout the whole Empire; in the beginning, the extramural works were favored, as they were supposed to be beneficial for the convicts health 60 .
However, this type of work required extra guards and often facilitated the escapes.
Some of the first actions of the GTU sought to fight the escapes by increasing the number of guards and improving their working conditions 61 .
An attentive reading of the most important law concerning the introduction of obligatory convict labour suggests some inherent problems of the modus operandi. It clarifies, on the one hand, the pace and the shape of the uneasy introduction of obligatory labour, and, on the other, the ideas behind this type of labour. Leaving aside various consequences of this legal act, here I study it terms of the forms through which [its] authority was 62 .
In order to trace these forms, I have already looked at some of the agents of change, and now I bring into the picture some of legal documents they produced.

The legal act that introduced obligatory labour for all convicts in the Russian
Empire was the law 6 January 1886 63 . This law stated three chief principles of the prison labour: 1) its compulsory character for most categories of prisoners (except for those inmates who were under arrest and those who were awaiting the trial); 2) remuneration of the convicts for their work; 3) responsibility of the prison wardens for the implementation of this law. This last point, the delegation of responsibility for its implementation proved to contribute to the fragmented advance of the reform. The  These reflexions were embedded within the dominant discourse on crime and punishment, with morality of criminals situated in the center of these discussions.
Concentration on morality was often occluding the inherent problems of midnineteenth century incarceration and exile: overpopulation and the inevitable and potentially dangerous close contact of prisoners, the necessity for the families to follow the exiles and the katorzhnye to Siberia, the general absence of sources of income for either prisoners or their families. These articles also illustrate the attempts to synthesize a viable penal system that would incorporate both the forms of punishment borrowed from the Western European contexts and the existing Imperial practices. In 1906 one of the officials of the GTU colorfully alluded to this conflict in the following way: reality, these two currents (that we are going to call and as they collide, produce nothing but a whirlpool where dies all the good will and any good initiative (pochin 70 . Abby M. Schrader noted the same tension between the traditionally Russian penal practices and the Western European legal norms already for a much earlier period, namely the 1850s. She states: Russian officials ostensibly only took into account Russian precedents and Russia s organic historical development when compiling penal legislation, the process by which they developed this notion of physical difference shows that they incorporated Western European laws when deciding whose bodies to spare 71 .
Judging from the publications in Prison the attempts to rely on the initiative and knowledge of the local officials delivered very limited results. We see Vikharev also addressed the issue of the intramural work, and he was very precise about the type of work that should be favored: it was the basket weaving and making of the bast shoes, and all types of work with the bast fiber in general, as this type of labour required quite primitive skills, and yet produced widely needed and easily marketable goods.
Introduction of the obligatory prison labour for shorter-term 75 convicts went in parallel with the forced labour for the prisoners with longer terms. This other type of the forced labour, the katorga, was not abandoned by the administrators either, but it was developing very differently. The main experiment with katorga was the installation of a katorga site on Sakhalin island. It was an important imperial project that had lingering negative effects both on katorga as a type of punishment and the development of the region. 72 VIKHAREV. Arestanstkie raboty. Tiuremnii vestnik, 1895, №8, p. 430-432. The prison that Vikharev was administrating was an uyezd prison, that is, it belonged in a town of several thousand inhabitants. The uyezd was a secondary-level administrative subdivision in Imperial Russia. Generally, the short-term detainees were incarcerated in such smaller regional prisons. 73 Ibidem,p. 431. 74 Ibidem,p. 432. 75 According to the 1890 prison regulations (Ustav o soderzhaschikhsia pod strazhei), people could be sentenced to prison terms of up to two years. There existed another type of punishment, incarceration in the arrest (ispravitelnie arestantskie otdeleniia) that implied terms of up to six years. In contrast, those sentenced to katorga faced terms from 4 to 20 years.

dossiê scales of global history
For most of the nineteenth century, forced labour of convicts in Russia was not regulated in a straightforward way: the law (Ustav o soderzhaschikhsia pod strazhei) was full of lacunae concerning labour of prisoners 76 , and that created a contradictory landscape of the penal labour throughout the Russian Empire. Traditionally, the chief category of convicts forced to works were those sentenced to katorga, but the inmates of the workhouses, for example, also had to work and would even receive payment for their labour. Prison inmates, on the other hand, could make the decision about work in prisons themselves and were not remunerated. Prior to 1886, starting from the 1860s, two different processes were at play in the unequal development of the convict labour.
On the one hand, some workshops within prisons were organized in the regions with the higher density of population. Ostensibly, the development of the smaller workshops was connected with the overall industrial development of the surrounding region: it was the initiative of the prison keepers to organize them, which they would do only if there existed an opportunity for them to derive profit from convict work. This was the case, for instance, of the experimental prisons in Saint-Petersburg, Moscow and Saratov that I already mentioned before. This particular form of labour would later be promoted by the GTU to become the most important one, yet the organization of these workshops was heavily embedded in the local contexts: it required well-prepared officials and instructors and the markets for the items produced by the convict labourers. While reflecting on the 1860s as the period of the crisis of the Imperial penal system, the GTU officials presented the convict labour at that time as an ultimately fragile enterprise: in some regions, like the more densely populated Western borderlands of the Empire, the workshops in prisons existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, but in the 1860s, confronted with the prison overpopulation, the local prison keepers transformed them into cells 77 .
On the other hand, the forced labour has also been developing in the Eastern Siberia, most notably at the katorga sites in Transbaikalia that were typically silver mines belonging to the Emperor (the most well-known of them is Nerchinsk). This type of organization of the convict labour was guided by the profit of the Emperor, rather 76  than the local prison officials, and implied concentration of labour force. It was applied in the regions where labour shortage existed and the state desperately needed workforce for extraction of resources. Such a way of exploitation of convict labour required a higher amount of guards but less sophisticated managing skills, and generally implied much harder work than that in the workshops. Such work in mining was the main type of katorga labour before the installation of the katorga facilities on the Sakhalin island in 1869 (where agricultural and road construction work were favoured), and continued to exist in Siberia.
These are the two contradictory trends reflecting different ideological underpinnings of the prison labour. Theoretically, modernization of the prison system as it was conceived by the GTU did not leave much space for the big, katorga-style facilities like mines: both its officials and the experts not affiliated with the GTU have been consistently putting forward the idea of prison workshops that would be small, decentralized, and well-inscribed in local conditions. In practice, however, even though the organization of katorga labour was in utter decay since the beginning of 1860s 78 , katorga was still widely used as punishment and coexisted with the new types of punishment up until the revolution of 1917.
The legislation in the domain of katorga seems to have been lagging behind the practice. For example, the distinction between fortresses (kreposti), plants (zavody) and mines (rudniki) as traditional sites for katorga originated in the eighteenth century; Smaller workshops within prisons were the type of the prison labour that the GTU has generally favored, but it is not possible to assess numerically the scope of its implementation; it was, most certainly, limited. According to the GTU reports, the profit from the convict work has been steadily growing from 1887 to 1895, with extramural work generally bringing more profit than the work in the workshops or the maintenance work within prisons 83 . At the same time, the GTU admitted that the allencompassing statistical data were missing.
It seems that in the last years of Empire, the idea of organizing workshops and producing locally marketable goods prevailed even among some katorga prison wardens: at least, this was the case of the Tobolsk katorga prison. When a criticallyminded young jurist Maksim Isaev lamented the disarray in the katorga prisons throughout the empire, he singled out the Tobolsk katorga prison no.1 as the only one that had the convict labour organized a partially satisfactory 84 . From the archival documents we see that this prison hosted a brick factory that achieved consistent profitability 85 . In other prisons, however, the katorzhnye could find themselves in a completely different situation. For instance, a report about the katorzhnye in one of the Western regions of the empire 86 states that despite their sentences that implied hard labour and exile, they were still detained in the local prisons that were not sufficiently guarded. Therefore, other inmates in these prisons had to perform the extramural works despite the fact that they were sentenced to dossiê scales of global history lighter punishment, while the katorzhnye would spend the whole days without any occupation.
Somewhat similar situation was observable already in the 1860s: until the introduction of obligatory convict labour in 1886 the prisoners who were generally obliged to work were sentenced by the magistrates of peace [mirovoi sudia] rather than the criminal court. These people committed less serious wrongdoings than the criminals, and were sent to the workhouses. However, in the regular prisons prior to 1886 the criminal convicts had the right to choose whether they preferred to work or not, even if the facilities were there 87 .

V. Conclusion
The last decades of the nineteenth century were marked by the advance of the prison reform in Russia. Compared to the this process could look trivial: spanning over the course of almost four decades, it did not involve an immediate improvement of the condition of prisoners, and at least in the beginning was limited to the administrative transformation. As I have shown, the pace and the nebulous shape of this reform was partly defined by the functioning of the nascent Imperial bureaucracy. However, concentrating on 1879 as the single moment of reform does not allow to perceive its scope. The significance of the reform can only be seen in the long run: the reform initiated the development of a new, knowledge-based and centralized, way of managing the prisons.
The emergence of this new approach gains additional significance when we look beyond the revolutionary divide: the ways in which this reform has re-organized the The driver of this change was the Main Prison Administration. Right from its creation it was preoccupied with the development of the new approaches to the penal system, gradually collecting information about prisons within and without the Russian empire, appropriating and developing different conceptions of punishment, and searching for the optimal settings of confinement and forced labour. This approach was quite limited in practice, and the precise scope of these limitations is hardly observable: historical sources cannot grasp these limitations even approximately, as we only know what the officials knew, but there is no possibility of establishing what escaped them. Despite these limitations it is nevertheless clear that the transformation of the penal system over the course of the twenty six years that I examined here was profound: its management was gradually yet persistently centralized, the new information-based approaches to the organization of punishment and convict labour were gaining ground, and all kinds of new techniques of documenting the life of convicts -from photographing the inmates to using new uniform blanks for the personal dossiers -were used in more and more regional prisons.
Although this is not a statement that can be explicitly supported by the sources, possible to suggest that the obligatory convict labour was particularly