Siberia, Penal Colony of Russia

On 21 June 1906, the socialist-revolutionary activist Marja Spiridonova and five of her companions were deported from Moscow to penal servitude in Siberia for having killed a landowner. She spent 11 years in a Siberian prison and was released after the February Revolution of 1917. She blew up Chita prison soon after her release.

As a colony of Tsarist Russia, Siberia was understood primarily as a place for exile and punishment. In Soviet Russia, Siberia became a place of torture and death because of the concentration camps that were developed in these territories from 1926.