Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/382

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366
SIBERIA

way into Siberia the previous summer, and Messrs. Shamárin and Peterson went to the house of an acquaintance.

In the course of the three days that we spent in Krasnoyársk we renewed our acquaintance with Mr. Innokénti Kuznetsóf, the wealthy mining proprietor at whose house we had been so hospitably entertained on our way eastward five months before; took breakfast with Mr. Sávenkof, the director of the Krasnoyársk normal school, whose collection of archæological relics and cliff pictographs greatly interested us; and spent one afternoon with Colonel Zagárin, inspector of exile transportation for Eastern Siberia. With the permission of the latter we also made a careful examination on Wednesday of the Krasnoyársk city prison, the exile forwarding prison, and the prison hospital; and I am glad to be able to say a good word for all of them. The prisons were far from being model institutions of their kind, of course, and at certain seasons of the year I have no doubt that they were more or less dirty and overcrowded; but at the time when we inspected them they were in better condition than any prisons that we had seen in Siberia, except the military prison at Ust Kámenogórsk and the Alexandrófski central prison near Irkútsk. The hospital connected with the Krasnoyársk prisons seemed to me to be worthy of almost unqualified praise. It was scrupulously clean, perfectly ventilated, well supplied, apparently, with bed-linen, medicines, and surgical appliances, and in irreproachable sanitary condition generally. It is possible, of course, that in the late summer and early fall, when the great annual tide of exiles is at its flood, this hospital becomes as much overcrowded and as foul as the hospital of the forwarding prison at Tomsk; but at the time when we saw it I should have been willing, if necessary, to go into it for treatment myself.

The Krasnoyársk city prison was a large two-story building of stuccoed brick resembling in type the forwarding prison at Tiumén. Its kámeras, or common cells, were