Katorga

The hard labor was a punishment in Russia, in which the convict had to do forced labor.

During the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1721), the term referred to the forced labor in a penitentiary.

The Baltic Historical Commission of the Russian Criminal Code describes the hard labor of 1845 as follows:

Dostoevsky in Notes from the House of the Dead ( published 1860-1862 ), his experiences as a political prisoner from 1849 to 1853 in Siberia, and thus described the reality of hard labor at the time.

In the Russian Penal Code of 1885 was a punishment for political prisoners, in which they were sentenced to forced labor in labor camps. Usually the prisoners were banished for life, with the forced labor ended a few years after the deportation. The delinquents had then to settle near the Verbannungsorts.

Anton Chekhov traveled in 1890 on the island of Sakhalin to interview there for three months, the deportees. His experience he described in 1894 in the book " The Island of Sakhalin ".