NICK SANDERS

Given its remoteness Siberia became a traditional place of exile. The Vladimirka witnessed crowds of prisoners in shackles marching from Moscow to thekatorga, a Russian term for penal colony. In connection with the gulag function that the road figures in the works of Alexander Herzen, Nikolay Nekrasov but especially Fyodor Dostoevsky’s existential novel, ‘Crime and Punishment,’ it features as a Highway to Hell.