A Living Martyrdom? Representing Life in Emigration in Katorga i ssylka

Katorga i ssylka (1921-35) provides important insights into the personal details of revolutionaries’ lives as well as the (auto)biographical representation of members and deceased colleagues of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. The journal facilitated identity formation in a period when many former revolutionaries found themselves politically marginalised by the Bolshevik rise to power. It was a lieu de mémoire for revolutionary martyrs of all types and this article suggests that the death or bodily harm as forms of martyrdom were simply the ultimate forms of a wider set of revolutionary practices of self-sacrifice.
This article focuses on the representation of life in emigration of members in memoir and (auto)biography printed in Katorga i ssylka. By drawing comparisons with similar practices in late-imperial revolutionary print culture, it suggests the continuity in practices across 1917. Such practices drew not only on the individuals and communities involved in publishing work but also the tropes and narratives in these representations. Life in emigration was often long-lasting, which shaped personal relationships and generated the cultural significance of emigration. Furthermore, as membership of the Society was dominated by former Socialist Revolutionaries, studying the representation of life in emigration also provides further insights into the contestations of revolutionary memory in the 1920s and the ways in which members of the Society sought to find meaning in their personal experiences of political activism and that of their deceased comrades.
This article begins by exploring how memoir and (auto)biography constructed emigration as a space of useful political activism. This then provided the basis for the representation of emigration as meaningful self-sacrifice. On the one hand, this involved invoking tropes of suffering common in the memory of imprisonment and exile. On the other hand, emigration brought with it new challenges linked to the experience of time passing.