IF the scale of the Siberian penal exile inspires a sense of dreadful awe, then the detail is tragic, heart-breaking and marked with individual horror. The vast, Steppe-like sweep of Daniel Beer’s work is impressive, sustaining a narrative that ranges from 1801 to 1917, and involves more than one million exiled souls into an area that is one and a half times bigger than the continent of Europe. There is, therefore, a danger of both writer and reader becoming lost in this landscape. Beer, however, proves to be a steadfast, reliable guide and one who has the capacity to illuminate a theme or an era with an extraordinary story.

The purpose of Siberian exile was two-fold: to rid the tsars of troublesome political dissenters and to populate an area rich in minerals with forced labour. It was, of course, a political and economic failure and Beers is insightful and precise on why the Siberian experiment failed, mostly because of creaking bureaucracy, the depredations inflicted by extreme cruelty and the sometimes absurd dilemmas of precisely how to treat prisoners.

The Decembrists, those who rose in revolt of on the ascension of Tsar Nicholas I to the throne in 1825, were given such latitude in Siberia that many of those aristocrats built up entourages extending to more than 25 servants. In awful contrast, the reality for most of the exiled was grim, debilitating and painful. Conditions were so dreadful that many of the exiled welcomed death whether by suicide or by risking all in revolt. One unfortunate, convicted of killing a guard, could thus walk to the scaffold with the words: “Ah, there you are my sweet gallows, my beautiful sunshine, there you are at last!”

Beer has corralled his story into themes, covering such as the Decembrists, the victims of the Polish uprisings of the 19th century, the criminal classes, the conditions of work and the precise nature of corporal punishment. However, House of the Dead succeeds as a coherent, gripping whole because of his ability to place people at the centre of any discussion whether it be on politics or the notion of exile itself.

It is astonishing to read merely a century and a half on – a blip in historical terms – of just how isolated Siberia was. It took one unfortunate eight years to reach his camp and then he could officially start his sentence. Much of this delay was caused by bureaucracy, the need to hospitalise many of the exiled and the sheer distance involved, all of it negotiated on foot through a land where temperatures could drop to minus 30.

It is also fascinating to glimpse what exile meant for many of the deported. The Russian aristocrat or peasant both shared an almost physical link to the Motherland and the scenes at the Siberian Boundary Post, which marked a farewell to Europe, are intensely moving. All were aware they were moving to a new world, one where certainties only included hardship, suffering and pain. This was a land populated by the serial killer who “always liked to read the Bible after a murder”; the sadistic guards who could inflict terrible damage through lash, knout or birch; intellectuals who reflect with despair or bitterness on their fate; and wives who simply followed their husbands into exile, some being forced to leave their children behind.

Their stories are, in turn, brutal, edifying, shocking and inspiring. But they serve most crucially to describe life in Siberia and why the regime of punishment not only failed but fostered a revolution that was to consume those who created, ran and perpetrated the system. From the first, Siberia was populated by those who viewed the Russia of the tsars as an anachronism. The very existence of a cruel system of punishment nurtured their sense of injustice and sharpened their efforts to overturn not just a primitive penal system but the very forces who ran it.

Revolution was Siberia’s major export. The drama, human tragedy and perverse philosophy of a landscape tainted by suffering found powerful narrators in such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. But its message was also carried by the power of the individual story and how it seeped back into Russia. The plight and awful fate of the exiles was distant only in geographical terms. The mass of Russia knew of and feared what was happening beyond the boundary post.

Lenin and Trotsky were graduates of the Siberian penal system. It fuelled their animosity towards the tsarist regime and it allowed both time to formulate strategy and link up with like-minded dissidents. When revolution came in its most definitive form in 1917, the Siberian prison system was thus destroyed by those who had endured its excesses. Beer’s extraordinary, powerful and important story ends here.

But there is room for a postscript, heavy in irony and laden with suffering. Siberia’s penal existence was sentenced to death but it received a reprieve, given by – among others – those who knew precisely what it entailed, those who had experienced the cold, the beatings, the dread of the unknown, the horror of the known. Siberia was brought back to life under the Bolsheviks and attained a vigorous, brutal adulthood under Stalin. It was then called the Gulag. But it always remained the house of the dead.