Brittney Griner and the American View of Siberia

The Russian penal system has long been a point of reference for injustices closer to home.

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Last week, I was relieved to learn that the WNBA star Brittney Griner would be returning home to the United States following nearly 10 months of Russian imprisonment—most recently, in a penal colony—for the possession of a small amount of cannabis oil.

The image we in the U.S. have of the terrors of Russian penal colonies is many generations old. The explorer George Kennan (not to be confused with his younger cousin, a historian who shared the same name) traveled throughout Imperial Russia in the 19th century, and became an extremely popular lecturer and writer. He exposed the brutality of the Russian penal system in Siberia in an extensive series of public talks and articles written for The Century Magazine and, in 1891, published a book titled Siberia and the Exile System, which exposed the brutality of the barren, frigid, and remote sites of punishment. Kennan was a strong critic of the tsar and became an advocate for the cause of democracy in Russia.

With the popularity of Kennan’s work, Siberia immediately became a popular metaphor for brutal punishment. Later in the same year, a U.S. prison guard named J. C. Powell published a memoir titled The American Siberia; Or, Fourteen Years’ Experience in a Southern Convict Camp. The book depicted the horrific conditions of the convict camps in post-Reconstruction Florida and Georgia where Powell worked. These camps were overwhelmingly populated by African American prisoners who had been leased by the state to private landowners. Powell’s stories were somewhat sensationalistic but, as many historians have attested, fundamentally true.

Powell’s use of Siberia as a point of reference is telling. The lives of these Black people laboring in remote areas of the deep South were unimaginable to most of their fellow Americans. The closest ready analogy was to a faraway place they had only heard about: Siberia.

Powell wasn’t the only one to make this analogy. George Washington Cable, a writer and an advocate for Black rights, did as well. And Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching activist and muckraking journalist, wrote the following about convict labor camps:

What is true of Georgia is true of the convict lease system everywhere. The details of vice, cruelty and death thus fostered by the states whose treasuries are enriched thereby, equals anything from Siberia. Men, women and children are herded together like cattle in the filthiest quarters and chained together while at work. The Chicago Inter-Ocean recently printed an interview with a young colored woman who was sentenced six months to the convict farm in Mississippi for fighting. The costs, etc., lengthened the time to 18 months. During her imprisonment she gave birth to two children, but lost the first one from premature confinement, caused by being tied up by the thumbs and punished for failure to do a full day’s work.

In other essays, Wells commented that Americans who were outraged by the evils of penal labor in Siberia should be similarly offended by the conditions under which Black people lived in the Jim Crow South. Her point resonates. It is often far easier for Americans to be horrified by bad deeds elsewhere than by those in their midst.

Prison abolitionists and reformers have made similar observations over the past several months, commenting on how many Americans are held in prison for victimless or nonviolent deeds like Griner’s and in inhumane conditions that are, if not identical to those of Russian penal colonies, certainly indecent. One need only read Albert Woodfox’s 2019 book, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement, to recognize that on both continents, far too little has changed when it comes to brutality in punishment.

There are at least two ways to respond to a cause célèbre. We can simply accept that we often pay more attention to the suffering of prominent people than of others. Or, we can use their plights to expand our scope of concern. The latter is, I believe, the more ethical approach. I hope Brittney Griner’s harrowing experience heightens our care not only for other Americans unfairly incarcerated abroad, but also for those right here at home. Our Siberias are very cold too.