Why Stalin regarded Russia as "incompetent": four exiles and three escapes.

Core Tip: Stalin himself was arrested and escaped from prison four times. He escaped three times, once from Irkutsk province and twice from Vologda province-this place was later full of labor camps. This article is taken from "Gulag" by Anne Applebaum and published by Xinxing Publishing House.

Administrative exile-without trial procedure-is not only an ideal punishment for troublemakers, but also for political opponents of the Russian regime. Many of these political opponents were originally Polish aristocrats, who opposed Russia's seizure of their territory and property. Later exiles included religious opposition and members of "revolutionary" groups and secret societies, including the Bolsheviks. Although the most famous "forced immigrants" in Siberia in the19th century were tried, they did not belong to the category of administrative exile, but also belonged to political prisoners: some members of The Decemberists, a group of upper-class aristocrats who planned an attempted uprising against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. The Tsar also sentenced five The Decemberists members to death for revenge that shocked the whole of Europe at that time. He deprived others of their aristocratic status and exiled them to Siberia with chains. Some people went there with their brave wives. Only a few of them survived until Alexander II, Nicholas's successor, pardoned them 30 years later. When they returned home to St. Petersburg, they were exhausted. [Csinszka: Siberia: the largest prison in the world], pp. 65-85. Dostoevsky is another famous political prisoner. He was sentenced to four years' hard labor in 1849. After returning from exile in Siberia, he wrote Notes on the House of the Dead, which is still the most widely read work describing the imprisonment system of Tsarist Russia.

Like the gulag, the exile system in tsarist Russia was not only produced as a punishment. Russia's rulers also want to exile political prisoners and criminals to solve an economic problem that has been a headache for centuries: the sparsely populated Far East and the remote northern regions that occupy most of Russia's territory, and the resulting insufficient development of Russia's natural resources by the Russian Empire. Based on this consideration, the Russian government began to sentence some prisoners to compulsory labor as early as the eighteenth century-a penalty called hard labor. Hard labor (кторга) comes from the Greek kateirgo, which means "coercion". Labor has a long history in Russia. /kloc-At the beginning of the 8th century, Peter the Great began to use prisoners and serfs to build roads, fortresses, factories and ships, and participated in the urban construction of St. Petersburg. 1722, he issued a more explicit order, demanding that prisoners, together with their wives and children, be exiled to Daur silver mine in eastern Siberia. [yevgeny Anisimov: The Reform of Peter the Great: Progress Made in Russia through High-handed Rule], p. 1 177. 〕

During the reign of Peter the Great, the use of forced labor was regarded as a great economic and political achievement. In fact, the historical fact that hundreds of thousands of serfs spent their whole lives building St. Petersburg has a great influence on future generations. Many people died in the process of construction-but the city became a symbol of progress and Europeanization. The method is cruel-but the country benefits from it. The example of Peter the Great may help explain why his czar heirs are willing to use hard labor. There is no doubt that Stalin is also one of the admirers of Peter the Great's construction method.