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Posted: 17 Dec 2025

Taken: 17 Dec 2025

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Farewell to Europe!, 1894, former exile Aleksander Sochaczewski’s painting of his fellow Polish rebels of 1863 taking leave of Europe at the Siberian Boundary Post. the Painting now hangs int he Poland’s Museum of National Independence in Warsaw
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Over the course of the nineteenth century, convoys of prisoners marching across the Ural Mountains into exile would pass a single 3.5-metre column made of plastered bricks. Standing in a forest clearing some 2,300 kilometres east of St. Petersburg, it bore on one side the coat of arms of the province of Perm and the world “Europe”; on the other, that of the province of Tobolsk and the word “Asia”. The simplicity of the boundary post between Russia and Siberia belied its significance as a marker of the wrenching separation of exiles from their homeland. The exiled anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin noted drily that “the inscription of Dante’s Inferno would be more appropriate to the boundary-piller of Siberia than these two words which pretend to delineate two continents.” . . . .~ Page 28

For convicts, to march past the boundary post and cross the Siberian frontier was to enter a dark world in which the weak and vulnerable were delivered into the hands of the cynical, the ruthless and the corrupt. The post bore mute witness to both the frailties of state power and the torments of the men, women and children trudging into exile. ~ Page 50

THE HOUSE of the DEAD
9 months ago. Edited 9 months ago.

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