Daniel Beer

The historian of Russia on Dostoevsky, Foucault and sympathy for the Bolsheviks. 

For the tsarist regime, Siberia was a ‘vast prison without a roof’, where thousands of revolutionaries and political opponents were exiled. It became, as Daniel Beer explains, a laboratory of the Russian Revolution.

What does Russia’s history of political assassination reveal about its rulers?

Daniel Beer reassesses W. Bruce Lincoln’s 1976 study of Tsar Alexander III’s brief reign, which combined reaction with rapid industrialisation and left a troubling legacy for his successors.

Past experiments with liberal democracy have led Russia to the brink of civil war, economic collapse and the plunder of state resources. Daniel Beer explains why most Russians feel happier with a strongman firmly in control.

Daniel Beer looks at how much Soviet labour camps owed to the theories of Russian liberals on crime, its causes and how to treat it.