EXILE. The tsarist regime used Siberian exile as a punishment for dis-
sidents. Following the Decembrists’ Revoltin 1825, hundreds of of-
ficers were exiled to Siberia by Tsar Nicholas I. Most of these offi-
cers took their wives and children with them. The writer Feodor
Dostoyevsky was sentenced to exile for his role in the Petrashevskiy
circle. It is clear that both the police and local authorities used exile
as a way of removing troublesome people from society. Political ex-
iles were often treated with compassion as men and women of prin-
ciples: Vladimir Leninwas allowed to take his revolutionary books
into exile. He was even allowed to go hunting.
During the Soviet period, exile was also used as a punishment for
political prisoners. Millions of peasants were exiled during collec-
tivization: many of them perished in settlements in Siberia. From
1939 until 1953, peoples suspected of collaboration with enemies of
the Soviet Union were exiled to Siberia by the hundred thousands.
The secret police also used exile to keep political prisoners who had
been released from the gulagin the inhospitable regions. In 1949
Minister of Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglovinformed Joseph Stalin
that there were 2,562,830 people living in exile. Five years later, the
MVD reported that the total had grown to 2,819,776, of whom
884,057 were children.
In the post-Stalin era, Soviet courts continued to use both internal
and foreign exile as forms of punishment. KGBChair Yuri An-
dropovargued forcefully for the exiling of certain dissidents, such as
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from the Soviet Union. People convicted
of minor civil crimes were often sentenced to internal exile. The So-
viet criminal code also had provisions for a sentence of imprisonment
plus a term of exile for political offenses. These sentences continued
until 1988.- F –
FALSE FLAG. Intelligence services often recruited agents under the
“false flag” of other countries or political movements. The Soviet ser-
vices used this gambit in two creative ways. A Soviet case officer re-
cruited the British communications clerk John King, for example,
under the false flag of international business. King, the Soviet intel-80 •EXILE06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 80