How did the bolsheviks do it?

[Great Helmsman]

I've read about the multiple successful escapes that Stalin and other Bolsheviks made from Tsarist prisons in the 1900-1917 period and wonder how they exactly pulled it off.

They were frequently imprisoned/exiled to Sibera, and each time made their way back to the outside or at least continued to agitate from inside. Is this because Tsarist prison security was very loose, or did the government not consider revolutionary activities serious enough?

I wonder how the same activists would manage today. Modern political prisoners wind up in maximum security complexes or Gitmo, and there's no way they could escape or continue revolutionary activities.

[UndergroundConnexion]

if recall Lenin used disguise. They were not put in ordinary prisons though, like you but prison camps, so also that situation if different., and I guess because of the vast amount of prisoners, it might have been easier to escape

[Tower of Bebel]

(edit) My hypothesis: The reason why we know about so many succesful attempts to escape is because they became famous person in Russian history, so we know more about their escapes than those of others. Second, the Bolsheviks escaped because of a necessity, and they knew they would get a hiding place, which is something many other prisoners didn't expect to have when they tried to escape.

[Great Helmsman]

I think they were popularized by their radical organizing and theorizing, not prison escapes.

If the labour camps in Siberia were anything like they were described in Crime and Punishment, then the government counted on them being so isolated that escape was a wasted effort. The Bolsheviks must have had networks to help them get back to civilization.

[Dr Mindbender]

the bolsheviks of 1917 russia had several major advantages over us -
Chiefly, it was russia's disastrous involvement in world war 1, not to mention the fact that they were already massively pissed off with the tsarists anyway.