Stressing the relationship between tsarism's service-state ethos and its utilization of subjects, this study argues that economic and political, rather than judicial or penological, factors primarily ...conditioned Siberian exile's growth and development.
Between 1827 and 1846 Russia exiled as vagrants (brodiagi) to Siberia 48,566 persons, who accounted for 30.4% - the single largest cohort - of exiles during that period. Exiled brodiagi's numbers ...fell briefly after 1846, due to government efforts to use them in labour battalions, but reached unprecedented levels following serf emancipation. This, like other anti-vagrancy campaigns, was symptomatic of states' increasing domination over society and highlights a modernizing process that prohibits nomadism while promoting sedentariness. Yet, although brodiagi were produced by the state's exercise of power, they managed to display agency by resisting this power. The resultant struggle led to Siberia being turned into contested ground. Embodied within this struggle was the larger struggle between tsarist state and society: operating at the edges of society, in a region far removed, or 'deranged', from the centre, Siberia's brodiagi manifested, both territorially and behaviourally, the 'extremities' that Foucault has spoken of with regard to power, how it functions and how it is resisted.
Completely Useless Gentes, Andrew A.
Sibirica : the journal of Siberian studies,
06/2011, Volume:
10, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The ostracizing of mentally and physically disabled individuals is a cross-cultural phenomenon that amounts to what Henri-Jacques Stiker calls a “murderous system,“ which does not kill such ...individuals outright, but instead indirectly. This as well as Foucault's notions about the construction of madness and deviancy serve as a departure point for understanding tsarist Russia's murderous system of deporting the disabled to Siberia. This article charts this system's operation over the longue durée, from the midsixteenth to the late nineteenth century; describes the motivations and factors conditioning those powerbrokers who exiled the disabled; and provides data on the number of disabled exiles and describes conditions they faced. I argue that the state's exploitation of the peasantry, the peasantry's inculcation of commodifying economic imperatives, and the availability of Siberia's expanses combined to make Russia's a uniquely murderous system that lasted for centuries.
Government and civilian authorities in Russia deported tens of thousands of people to Siberia between 1590 and 1822. The state had several goals for exiles including using them as cossacks, peasants, ...industrial labourers, and colonial settlers. Landowners and peasant communes used exile to rid themselves of elderly, handicapped, or troublesome serfs. Siberia was also the destination for thousands of political opponents and religious dissidents. This, the first English-language study of pre-Soviet exile, focuses on Russian Siberia's early years, when its role as an open-air prison was established. Populated by such notable rulers and officials as Boris Godunov, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Mikhail Speranskii, and such celebrated exiles as Archpriest Avvakum, Aleksandr Menshikov, Maurice Benyowsky, and Aleksandr Radishchev, Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 vividly explores the coercive and violent relationship between an evolving bureaucratic state and its body politic.
Relative to Sprague‐Dawley (SD) and Lewis (LEW) rats, the Fischer 344 (F344) strain displays reduced play behavior. While neurobiological explanations for these behavioral differences have been ...explored, we investigated whether impaired skeletal muscle mitochondrial function may contribute to these observed variations.
Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is an important cofactor in protein deacetylase reactions regulating mitochondrial content and activity. We hypothesized that there would be strain‐dependent differences in skeletal muscle NAD concentrations (NAD) matching differing levels of play behavior in these strains. We also hypothesized that F344 rats would show reduced protein expression of nicotinamide phosphoribosyl transferase (Nampt), a key enzyme in intracellular NAD recycling, and sirtuin 3 (SIRT3), an NAD‐dependent protein deacetylase governing mitochondrial content and function.
Rat soleus muscles were obtained from anesthetized SD (n = 10), LEW (n = 7), and F344 (n = 7) rats and processed for NAD measurements. Skeletal muscle tissue samples were homogenized in perchloric acid. Intracellular NAD was quantified via HPLC elution and UV‐visible spectroscopy detection at 261 nm. NAD quantification via HPLC was validated through the analysis of NAD standards and spike‐recovery samples. Tissue harvesting and processing methods for HPLC analysis were optimized to account for the effects of tissue hypoxia, sample storage temperature, and the number of freeze‐thaw cycles on NAD. In addition, relative amounts of Nampt and SIRT3 protein expression were determined via immunoblots.
NAD could be detected reliably and reproducibly by HPLC. Tissues exposed to hypoxic conditions during dissection and collection showed sensitivity to NAD degradation relative to controls. Sample NAD were stable at or below 4°C for at least 1 week.
Average NAD concentrations were not statistically significantly different between the three rat strains (SD, 13.2 ± 0.89 mean ± S.E.M μM/mg tissue, LEW, 14.4 ± 0.81 μM/mg, F344, 13.9 ± 1.21 μM/mg; p = 0.66). No significant difference in Nampt expression was found between the three strains (p = 0.56). However, SIRT3 expression differed statistically significantly between the three strains (SD 0.97 ± 0.076 arbitrary units (AU), LEW 1.26 ± 0.085 AU, F344 1.72 ± 0.187 AU; p = 0.0006). Post‐hoc testing revealed that SIRT3 expression was significantly lower in SD (p < 0.01) and LEW (p < 0.05) strains compared to F344 rats. There was no statistically significant difference in SIRT3 expression between the SD and LEW strains (p = 0.50). No significant correlations between skeletal muscle NAD, Nampt expression, or SIRT3 expression were detected.
In conclusion, F344 rats exhibiting reduced playfulness are characterized by a marked increase in skeletal muscle SIRT3 protein expression despite unaltered intracellular NAD compared to both SD and LEW rats. While intracellular NAD are stable between strains, different NAD/SIRT3 ratios suggest altered dynamics of NAD‐dependent mitochondrial protein deacetylases.
Support or Funding Information
This work was supported in part by a grant to Gettysburg College from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through the Precollege and Undergraduate Science Education Program, and by Gettysburg College.
This is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this published in The FASEB Journal.
Russia's was not alone among modern governments in failing to address adequately the problem of what to do with criminal offenders. Western penology with its rehabilitative prisons proved no more ...effective than exile to Siberia, and in many ways was more pernicious. This article has however avoided what would be a rather pointless qualitative comparison to demonstrate instead how a government that has traditionally been characterized as embarking upon liberal reform managed to establish a major police institution betokening the excesses of more recent times. Historians readily admit that a period of reaction set in no later than 1878, but they have portrayed the various reform era policies as reflecting a kind of bi-polarity within the Alexandrine government, with the tsar moving uncertainly between liberal and conservative agendas. This article has argued that the top leadership's intentions behind the reforms have been misunderstood. Presuming a priori that reform is meant to engender the kind of liberal contract characterizing state/society relations in Western democracies, historians have read a false intentionality into the late imperial government's policies. The result is that historians have characterized as reforms those policies which conform to Western liberal notions of governance, while ignoring or portraying as reactionary or traditional what I have characterized as coeval and compensatory police policies. Although legalists and liberal reformers influenced government during the late imperial period, their influence was slight. The paradigm embraced by top policy-makers was that of a Reglamentstaat rather than a Rechtsstaat, which means law was considered a bureaucratic device rather than a philosophic idyl. Thanks to this, Polizeistaat supporters found common cause with Reglamentstaat supporters via the bridge of bureaucratization. The top leadership never had any goal other than to strengthen autocracy. The case of the Sakhalin penal colony makes this clear, wherein a police (rather than a legalist) strategy was consistently pursued. The result was a bureaucratic police apparatus that countermanded rather than enhanced legal rights.
My visit to Moscow's Maiakovskii Museum serves as starting point for an exploration, informed by Peter Bürger's 'Theory of the Avant-Garde', of the influence of the Russian avant-garde and poet ...Vladimir Maiakovskii's role within this movement. It also queries the essentialism and functionality of the museum dedicated to him, as well as the personal experience of my visit. (Author abstract)
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