In his new book, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars, Daniel Beer discusses how the tsarist regime attempted to use the open prison of Siberia as a vast political quarantine for the contagions of sedition. Generations of rebels – republicans, nationalists and socialists – were condemned to oblivion in regions thousands of miles from European Russia. Over the nineteenth century, however, these political exiles transformed Siberia’s mines, prisons and remote settlements into an enormous laboratory of revolution. Dr. Beer outlined how exile became a rite of passage for the men and women who would one day rule Russia.