"The cold and snow reign”: Cold and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia

Punishment, like pain, is “filtered through the cultural norms of both sufferer and observer.” As such, its experience is profoundly subjective. To get at this, this chapter’s three sections draw on both published accounts written by exiles and travellers to eastern Siberia and ethnographic materials describing the adaptations to cold that were adopted by peasants in late Imperial Russia. The first section explores perceptions of cold more broadly, by considering the reflections of free travelers in Siberia, as well as exiles in Siberia and European Russia. These accounts together interrogate the ways in which cold could be constructed as a sort of punishment. The second section looks at adaptations to cold, in relation to housing, clothing, and outdoor work, both for peasants in their everyday lives, and for exiles. The final section focuses on the physical experience of cold, by exploring cold as the cause of bodily hurt, looking both at peasants’ everyday experience, and at exilic experience. This chapter offers an exploration of how and why exile constitutes a very particular punishment and the role of cold in shaping that punished experience. Cold alone was not a punishment but was enabled as such by exiles’ isolation and distance from their home environment.