Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 2/Chapter I
SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM
CHAPTER I
PRISONS AND EXILES IN IRKÚTSK
It was so late when we reached Irkútsk Sunday afternoon, and we were so tired from our thousand-mile ride, that we did not attempt to do anything except bathe, change our clothing, dine, and go to bed. Monday, after we had sent our passports to the police-station, Mr. Frost strolled down to the river-side to make some sketches, while I went out to look at the city and find, if possible, a certain political exile to whom I had a letter of introduction.
Irkútsk is situated on the right, or northern, bank of the Angará, about forty miles from the point where that navigable river flows out of Lake Baikál. At the time of our visit it had a population of 36,000, and was therefore the largest city in Siberia. It contained an excellent weekly newspaper,[1] a public library, a branch of the Imperial Geographical Society, a good theater, and about thirty public schools, and the business of its merchants, traders, and manufacturers amounted annually to more than 11,000,000 rúbles. The city had not yet recovered from the great fire of July, 1879, which destroyed nearly 4000 buildings, rendered homeless 15,000 people, and consumed property valued at 20,000,000 rúbles. Traces of this fire were still to be seen in many parts of the city, and even where such traces were not visible the streets and buildings had a raggedness and newness that suggested a rapidly growing frontier mining
town rather than a city founded in 1652. Generally speaking, it seemed to me a much less interesting and attractive place than when I saw it first in 1867. One of the most curious, and apparently one of the oldest, buildings spared by the fire was a massive stone powder-magazine, which stood on the outskirts of the open-air bazar in the midst of the lower half of the city.
Its roof was overgrown with grass and weeds; its sides were incrusted with the barnacle-like stalls and booths of retail traders, and around it, during all the busy hours of the day, surged a throng of Buriáts, Mongols, Cossacks, and Russian peasants, who seemed to be buying or bargaining for all sorts of merchandise, from a tárantás or a teléga to a second-hand pair of boots.
After exploring the bazar, rambling abont the city for two or three hours, and delivering some of my letters of introduction, I returned to the hotel. Zhan, with a perturbed countenance, met me in the hall and informed me that the chief of police had just been there after us and had left a verbal request that we call upon him at once. Zhan's experience of 
BOATS ON THE ANGARÁ. life had evidently convinced him that a visit from the chief of police, like the appearance of a stormy petrel at sea, was a threatening phenomenon; and although he asked no questions, he looked at me with some bewilderment and anxiety. Upon going to our room I found two cards bearing the name of Christopher Fómich Makófski, the Irkútsk chief of police, a gentleman with whom we were destined to become somewhat intimately acquainted, and an officer who had been connected with one of the ghastliest tragedies in the recent history of political exile—the hunger strike in the Irkútsk prison. So far as I could remember, there had been nothing suspicious in our movements since our arrival in Irkútsk, and I was at a loss to know why we were so soon "wanted"; but I had always made it a rule in Russia to obey promptly the first summons of the police, and in less than ten minutes Mr. Frost and I were on our way to Captain Makófski's house. Learning that he was not at home, we left cards and drove to the central police-station. He was not there. Having thus done all that we could, we returned to the hotel, and Mr. Frost went out again to sketch the old powder-magazine shown in the illustration on the opposite page. Half an hour later Zhan appeared with a dejected air, holding gingerly between his fingers another card of the chief of police, who, he said, was waiting in the corridor and wished to see us. This second call within two hours surprised me a little, but of course I told Zhan to show the chief of police in. I heard quick footsteps and the jingle of spins in the hall, and in another instant Captain Makófski, in full uniform, entered the room. I was prepared for something unpleasant, and rose from my chair fully expecting to meet a man with a stern official face who would look at me suspiciously and either tell me that there was something wrong with my passport, or else inquire how long and for what purpose I had been looking up political exiles. Imagine my surprise to see a rather handsome officer of middle age, with good features, blue eyes, closely cut hair, and a full brown beard, who advanced to meet me with outstretched hand, and whose face fairly beamed with smiling cordiality as he said: "I am Makófski, the chief of police. I have the pleasure of knowing you by reputation,—I have read your book,—and when an eminent foreign traveler comes to Siberia to study the country, I regard it as only my duty to call upon him and offer my services."
I was so nearly paralyzed with astonishment at this wholly unexpected greeting that for a moment I could hardly reply; but I managed to thank him and ask him to take a seat. We had a pleasant chat of ten minutes with regard to the roads, the weather, our Siberian experiences, the changed appearance of Irkútsk, etc., and then Captain Makófski said: "I understand that you are interested, among other things, in prisons and the exile system. I think you will find the city prison here in good condition. I will send some one to show you through it, and I will not forewarn the prison officers that you are coming—you shall see it just as it is every day."
"This," I said to myself, "is the kind of chief of police that every well-regulated Siberian city ought to have." 
"The chief difficulty in the way," he said, "is the financial difficulty. The adoption of a central prison system in European Russia in place of the exile system has been suggested and discussed, but the change would necessitate the building of twenty large new prisons at a cost of about ten million rúbles, and the financial condition of the country is such as to render this impracticable."
While we were talking Mr. Frost came in, and after some further general conversation the chief of police took his leave, urging us to call upon him informally and soon. I could not at this interview fully make up my mind with regard to his character and motives. He seemed to be everything that was amiable; but there was a suggestion of surface artificiality about his beaming smile and a touch of exaggeration in his complimentary deference which suggested diplomacy rather than perfect sincerity. I felt, however, that I had no right on this ground to throw stones at anybody, since I myself was living in a very large and very fragile glass house.
On Wednesday we returned Captain Makófski's call, and Thursday afternoon he came to our hotel to escort us to the prisons. The general city prison and the forwarding prison of Irkútsk are situated side by side a little out of the busy part of the city, from which they are separated by a small shallow stream called the Ushakófka. The forwarding prison, which at Captain Makófski's suggestion we visited first, proved to be nothing more than a large but old and half-decayed étape, varying from the usual roadside type of such buildings only in size and in the arrangement of its kámeras. One could see at a glance that it was in very bad repair. The logs in some places had rotted almost entirely away; the stockade around the courtyard looked old and weather-beaten; and in almost every window one or more panes of glass had been broken out and the holes had been stopped with rags, old clothes, or pieces of coarse dirty matting. Captain Makófski, observing that I noticed these things, said in explanation of them that it had not been thought best to make extensive repairs, because there was a plan under consideration for the erection of a new building.[2] As we entered the main corridor the officer of the day sprang hastily to the door, saluted the warden, who was with us, and in a sort of rapid, monotonous recitative said, without once taking breath, "Your-High-Nobility-I-have-the-honor-to-report-that-the-condition-of-the-Irkútsk-forwarding-prison-on-this-the-fifth-day-of-September-1885-is-blagopoluchno [prosperous or satisfactory] and-that-it-now-contains-271-prisoners." The warden nodded his head, said "All right," and we began our inspection of the prison. It seemed to me an extremely dreary, gloomy, and neglected place. Its kámeras did not differ essentially from those in the forwarding prison of Tomsk, except that they were less crowded. Most of them were fairly well lighted, they were warmed by large square brick ovens, and they contained no furniture except low plank sleeping-platforms of the usual type. The prisoners had no bedding except their overcoats, and in a few cases small thin "crazy quilts" about two feet wide and six feet long, which they had evidently made for themselves out of countless hoarded rags and scraps of cloth, and which they used to spread down upon and thus soften a little the hard planks of the nári. I did not see a blanket nor a pillow in the prison. The kámeras contained from twenty to forty men each, and the heavy foulness of the air showed that there was little or no ventilation. The floors, judged by Siberian standards, were not disgracefully dirty, but they had been freshly sprinkled with white sand in evident anticipation of our visit. Throughout the prison the men seemed to be wholly separated from the women and children, and in the kámeras devoted to the latter there was less overcrowding, more cleanliness, and purer air.
From the forwarding prison we went to the general city prison, which stood about a hundred yards away on the same street, and which consisted of a large two-story building of brick covered with white stucco and roofed with tin. In general type it resembled a little the forwarding prison of Tiumén; but it differed from the latter in having an interior courtyard 75 or 100 feet square which, by means of graveled walks and prim geometrical flower-beds, had been tinned into a sort of garden and which served as a place of exercise for the inmates. This prison was erected in 1861 at a cost of 62,000 rúbles, and was intended to accommodate 450 prisoners. At the time of our visit it held 743, and the warden admitted to me that it sometimes contained 1500. According to Mr. S. S. Popóf, who made a special study of this prison and who wrote a monograph upon it for the newspaper Sibír, no less than 2000 prisoners have at times been packed into its kámeras In other words, every cell has been made to hold more than four times the number of prisoners for which it was intended.[3] The results of such overcrowding I have already described several times in my sketches of other Siberian prisons. The air in the kámeras was somewhat less poisonous than in the forwarding prison of Tiumén, but it was nevertheless very foul, and many piteous complaints of it were made by the prisoners, both to Captain Makófski and to me, as we passed through the cells. The condition of the atmosphere in the overcrowded and badly ventilated hospital seemed to me to be something terrible. Although we went through only two or three wards, and that hastily, and although I held my breath almost to the point of suffocation rather than take such terribly polluted air into my lungs, I came out feeling faint, sick, and giddy.[4]
The prevalent diseases here, as in other Siberian prisons, were typhus fever, scurvy, anemia, rheumatism, and bronchitis—all of them disorders pointing to unfavorable sanitary conditions.
From the hospital we crossed the little interior garden to the so-called "secret" or solitary-confinement cells, where the chief of police said there was one political prisoner with whom he would allow me to talk. I had already heard much of the prison life of the Russian revolutionists, but I had not as yet seen a single one actually in solitary confinement. Entering a sort of hall at one corner of the courtyard, Captain Makófski, accompanied by a turnkey, preceded us through a locked and grated door into a long, narrow corridor, where an armed sentry was pacing back and forth in front of a row of cells. The heavy wooden doors of these cells were secured by padlocks, and in the middle of every one was a small square aperture through which food could be passed and the prisoner be watched by the guard. The name of the political offender whom we were about to visit was Ferdinand Liústig,—formerly an army officer, Captain Makófski thought,—who had been arrested in St. Petersburg in March, 1881, soon after the assassination of the late Tsar. He had been tried as a revolutionist, had been sentenced to four years of penal servitude, had finished his term, and was on his way from the mines of Kara to some place in Eastern Siberia, where he was to be settled as a forced colonist.
The turnkey unlocked and threw open a door marked "No. 6," and we stepped into a long but narrow and gloomy cell, where a good-looking young man with closely cut hair, blue eyes, and a full brown beard was sitting in a dejected attitude upon a small wooden bed. He rose hastily when we entered, as if he were anticipating some change in his fortunes, and Captain Makófski, with an air of hearty good-fellowship, exclaimed: "Good afternoon, Mr. Liústig! We have come to cheer yon up a little. These are American travelers who have been looking through the prison, and I thought that perhaps you would like to see them." The transient expression of hope and expectancy in the young man's face slowly faded as he shook hands with us, and his manner became nervous and embarrassed, as if he had been isolated so long from all human society that he hardly knew how to talk or what to say. The situation was an awkward one, even for me, on account of the presence of Captain Makófski, the turnkey, and a soldier. If Mr. Liústig and I had been alone together, we should soon have come to an understanding and should undoubtedly have talked for hours; but under existing circumstances I could say nothing that I wished to say, and felt conscious that I must appear to him like a mere tourist, who had come to look at a "nihilist" in prison, as one might look at a new species of wild animal in a zoological garden. The cell occupied by Mr. Liústig was about 20 feet long by 6 feet wide and 12 feet high. It was lighted by one very small barred window in the end wall opposite the door. This window, which was so high that I could not reach it, would have opened upon the little garden in the courtyard, had not a high stockade been erected in front of it at a distance of a few feet. The stockade hid not only the whole outside world, but even the sky, so that Mr. Liústig could hardly tell, by looking up at his little window, whether the weather was clear or stormy—whether it was winter or summer. Although the walls and ceiling had been whitewashed, the cell was dark and gloomy, and it seemed to me, moreover, to be very cold. It contained no furniture except a small wooden bedstead covered with a thin gray blanket, and a square box in which there was a pail or bucket for excrement, The prisoner was not allowed to have chair, table, books, or writing-materials; lie could not get even so much as a glimpse of the outside world; and he had absolutely nothing to do except to sit on his bed in that gloomy prison twilight and think. I asked him how long he had been there, and he replied, "Since the 1st of June"—nearly four months. He was detained, Captain Makófski said, to await the decision of a question that had been raised as to the place where he should be colonized. How soon his case would be reached in the Circumlocution Office of the Government nobody knew, and apparently nobody cared. Meanwhile his condition was worse than if he had been in penal servitude. I wished very much to ask him a few questions with regard to his life at the mines of Kará; but I knew that it would be useless to interrogate him in the presence of Captain Makófski, and so, after shaking hands with him again and wishing him a speedy release, I bade him good-by. Ten minutes later, as it was beginning to grow dark in the prison, and as I had seen all that I cared to see, we returned to our hotel. I could not agree with Captain Makófski that the Irkutsk prisons were "in good condition"; but as he did not ask me what I thought of them, I volunteered no opinion.
After we had finished our inspection of the prisons Captain Makófski asked me if I would not like to see the calling out of the fire command at one of the stations. I replied, of course, that I should be very glad to see it. We drove to the fire-engine-house of the second municipal district, and Captain Makófski shouted to the watchman in the fire tower "Trevóga!" [Alarm!]. The watchman pulled a long rope stretched between the tower and the engine-house, and in just two and a half minutes, out came the fire command ready for action. First appeared the guide,—a fireman mounted on a fine gray horse,—next came the engine, a rather clumsy English machine with hand-brakes drawn by two spirited horses, then four large barrels mounted on wheels, and finally a hook-and-ladder truck. The fire command consisted of twenty or twenty-five men in gray uniform and big brass helmets. They went a short distance up the street and came back at a tearing gallop, raising a cloud of dust, and attracting an immense crowd of spectators. They then returned, limbered up the engine, and threw a stream of water to the top of the fire tower. The exhibition as a whole was fairly creditable for a provincial town.
Several days elapsed before I saw the chief of police again, and in the mean time a visit of inspection was made to the prisons by Count Ignátief , the newly appointed Governor-general of Eastern Siberia, who had just assumed the duties of his position. Tuesday of the following week Captain Makófski called upon us, and after the interchange of a few unimportant remarks said to me with some eagerness, "Mr. Kennan, please tell me frankly what impression was made upon you the other day by our prisons." I told him frankly that Siberian prisons generally made upon me a very bad impression, and that all I could truthfully say of the prisons in Irkútsk was that they were a little better—that is, somewhat less bad—than the prisons in Tiumén and Tomsk.
"I asked the question," he resumed, "because Count Ignátief and his wife have just made a visit of inspection and they are terribly dissatisfied. The Count finds the prisons dirty and overcrowded, the air foul and bad, the linen of the prisoners dirty and coarse, and the state of things unsatisfactory generally. Of course I know myself that the air in the kámeras is foul ; but if you have to put thirty men into a room like this [indicating our hotel room], how can you keep the air pure? It is very true also that the linen of the prisoners is cheap and coarse, but it is the best that can be had for the money that the Government allows. If you go to a hotel and pay two rúbles for a dinner, you have a right to expect a good one; but what can you expect if you pay only eight kopéks? As for the prisoners' linen being dirty—of course it 's dirty ! The Government gives a prisoner only one shirt every six months and one khalát [gray overcoat] every year. In these clothes he lives and sleeps twenty-four hours a day and thirty days a month without once taking them off except to bathe—of course they get dirty!"
"If a prisoner has no spare clothing," I inquired, "how does he get his one shirt washed? Does he never wash it, or does he go half the time naked?"
"When he visits the bath-house," replied Captain Makófski, "he usually washes at the same time his body and his clothing, dries the latter as best he can, and puts it on again—he has no change."
I referred to the sufferings of exiles who are compelled to sleep in wet clothing after every rain-storm on the road, and said I did not wonder that the hospitals of the forwarding prisons were crowded with the sick. He assented and said, "The life of prisoners on the road is awful. So far as the condition of the prisons here depends upon me," he continued after a moment's pause, "it is as good as circumstances will permit. There are no accumulations of filth anywhere, and the sanitary condition of the buildings is as good as I can make it—better perhaps than that of many private houses in the city."
It was interesting and instructive to me to see how unconscious Captain Makófski seemed to be of the existence of any very extraordinary evils in the Irkútsk prisons. Apparently he had grown so accustomed to the state of things there that it seemed to him to be nearly if not quite normal, and it gave him a sort of mental shock to find that the new Governor-general was so dissatisfied with the prisons and their management. He attributed this dissatisfaction, however, largely to the influence of the Countess Ignátief, whom he characterized as a kind-hearted but inexperienced lady who did not appreciate the difficulties in the way of such a system of prison administration as she desired to bring about.
"The Countess, however," I said, "seems to be a lady of quick perceptions and unusually good sense. An officer of the exile administration whom I met at dinner yesterday told me that during the visit of the Governor-general and his wife to the prisons the other day the Countess asked to be shown some of the prisoners' soup. The warden brought some to her in a clean fresh plate, but she evidently thought that it had been especially prepared for the occasion. She therefore declined to taste it, and asked whether there had not been left in the bottom of the kettle some soup from the prisoners' dinner. Upon examination some soup was found there, and she desired that a spoonful of it be given to her. She tasted it, and then, handing back the spoon, remarked to the warden quietly, 'I 'm glad to see that you are washing out that kettle—it ought to have been washed long ago.' Now, you can't say," I concluded, "that such a lady as that does n't know something about your prisons, and that she is n't very observing."
"Observing—observing!" exclaimed Captain Makófski, "that may all be; she is a very kind-hearted and benevolent lady, but she is impractical. She thinks that a common criminal prison ought to be in as good condition all the time as a young ladies' institute—and you and I know that that is utterly impossible."
I said that I thought the Irkútsk prisons might be improved a good deal without bringing them up anywhere near the level of a young ladies' institute.
Our conversation was interrupted at this point by the entrance of callers, and Captain Makófski took his leave, evidently somewhat disturbed by the attitude that the new Governor-general had taken towards the prisons.
On Count Ignátief's first public reception day Mr. Frost and I called upon him, partly as a mark of respect and partly with the hope that he might be willing to talk about the exile system and the penal institutions of the city. We found him to be a large, somewhat corpulent man about forty-five years of age, with a massive, nearly bald head and a strong but heavy and almost lethargic face. He received us courteously but formally, and began to talk to us at once in English, which language he spoke fairly well but with some hesitation. At the first favorable opportunity I expressed my interest in the exile system and ventured to give him the results of some of my observations in the prisons of Tiumén and Tomsk and on the road. He responded without any apparent hesitation, and said frankly that he believed the exile system to be very prejudicial to all the interests of Siberia, and that in many respects it needed modification. He thought that the common criminal exiles ought to be utilized as laborers. There was plenty of useful work to be done in Siberia, and he could see no reason why the convict exiles should not be compelled to do it. A system of enforced labor would be better for them than the present method of keeping them shut up in prisons in idleness or turning them loose as colonists, and it certainly would be better for the country. He was about to take a step in this direction, he said, by setting one hundred convicts to work in the streets of Irkútsk. I spoke of the overcrowding of the prisons and étapes along the great exile road, and he admitted that they were too small and in very bad condition. He said that a plan was under consideration for the transportation of exiles from Tomsk to Irkútsk in summer only and in wagons. This would relieve the Government from the expense of providing them with winter clothing, it would greatly diminish the amount of suffering, and it would perhaps be more economical.[5]
While we were discussing this subject the Governor-general's wife came in to hand him a letter, and we were presented to her. She was a woman perhaps thirty years of age, of medium height, with brown hair, gray eyes, and a good, strong, intelligent, but somewhat impassive face. The appearance of the Countess Ignátief interrupted our discussion of the exile system, and, as we were making a merely formal call upon the Governor-general, we had no opportunity for renewing it.
In the course of the twelve days that we spent in Irkútsk we made many pleasant and interesting acquaintances, among them Mr. Adam Bukófski, a well-known East-Siberian mining proprietor, who spoke English well and whose hospitable home was always open to us; Dr. Písaref, a well-known physician of the city, to whom we brought a letter of introduction from St. Petersburg; Mr. Bútin, formerly of Nérchinsk, who had traveled extensively in the United States and who was half an American in his ideas and sympathies, and Mr. Zagóskin, the venerable editor of the newspaper Sibír.
On the 21st of September, a little more than a week after our arrival, we were overtaken by our countryman Lieutenant Schuetze, who was on his way to the province of Yakútsk with the gifts sent by our Government to the people of that province who had aided and succored the survivors of the Arctic exploring steamer Jeannette. He had left America long after our departure, and it was a very great pleasure to us to meet him in that far-away part of the world, to hear his New York and Washington news, and to compare our respective experiences of Siberian travel.
A few days after my talk with Captain Makófski about the Irkútsk prisons, I called upon him at his house, and drew him into conversation upon the subject of political exile. He spoke very bitterly, almost contemptuously, of the revolutionists and "nihilists" generally, and seemed to regard most of them as wild fanatics, who were opposed, not only to the present form of government in the empire, but to government in any form, and who therefore should be put down with a strong hand. He said he once asked one of them, an exiled lady, what government she and her companions would establish in Russia if they had their way — a limited monarchy, a republic, a commune, or what? She replied that all men had been created free and equal, and that any kind of government was a violence done to individual liberty. "This, of course," said Captain Makófski, "was simply nonsense."
"There are several classes of political exiles, however," he continued, "for whom I have a great deal of pity and sympathy. In the first place, there are the young people who have never committed political crime themselves, but have happened to be in innocent correspondence with real revolutionists or upon terms of some intimacy with them. They have to suffer merely for being in bad company. In the second place, there are people who, to oblige friends or acquaintances, take charge temporarily of packages or satchels without ascertaining their contents. These packages, upon seizure by the police, are found to contain seditious proclamations, dynamite, or something of that sort. It is of no use for the innocent possessor of such a package to explain how it came into his hands, nor to declare that he was ignorant of its contents. He is always exiled. The third class consists of persons who have innocently lent money to revolutionists, the money being afterwards used, without the knowledge or consent of the lenders, for revolutionary purposes. Such men are also exiled, although they may be perfectly innocent of any thought of conspiracy against the Government. Finally, there is a certain class of young men, from eighteen to twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, who are full of ardor and enthusiasm, who really desire the good of their country, who see defects in the present system of government that they think can be remedied, and who desire not revolution, but modification and reorganization. Such young men are almost certain to be drawn into secret societies or revolutionary circles, and then they fall into the hands of the police and are sent to Siberia, although they cannot be called bad men, and all their aims and intentions may be pure and good. I have known many cases in each of these classes, and have always felt very sorry for them."
I have quoted Captain Makófski's words because they are a frank admission that the Russian Government sends to Siberia not only the flower of its youth, but banishes also at least three classes of people who not only have never committed crime, but are guiltless of any intention to commit crime. I was well aware myself of this fact, but I had never before heard it admitted by a chief of police.
There were not many political exiles in Irkútsk at the time of our visit, and we had some difficulty in finding them. At last, however, we succeeded, without asking the help of Captain Makófski; and although he, as chief of police, was supposed to know everything that was going on, I do not think he dreamed that I sometimes went directly from his house to a place where I met all the political exiles in the city, and that I was spending with them half my nights.
I was surprised to find among the administrative exiles in Irkútsk men and women who had just returned from long terms of banishment in the sub-arctic province of Yakútsk. "How did it happen," I said to one of them, "that you, a mere administrative exile, were sent to the worst part of Eastern Siberia? I thought that the province of Yakútsk was reserved as a place of punishment for the more dangerous class of political offenders, and for compulsory colonists from the mines of the Trans-Baikál."
"That is not quite the case," he replied. "It is true that administrative exiles are usually sent to some part of Western Siberia, but they are frequently transferred afterward to the province of Yakútsk. I myself was sent to Western Siberia in the first place, but in 1881 I was transported to Yakútsk because I would not take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III."
"Do you mean," I said, "that the Government, while punishing you for treason, required you to take an oath of loyalty?"
"Precisely," he replied; "and because I could n't and would n't do it, I was banished to a Yakút ulús."[6]
"But," I exclaimed, "that was not only unjust, but stupid. What was the use of asking a political exile to swear that he was a loyal citizen?"
"There was no use of it," he answered; "but it was done. The Government did not even content itself with exacting an oath of loyalty, but required me to swear that I would tell all I knew about the revolutionary movement; or, in other words, betray my friends. I could not do that, even if I had been changed into a loyal subject by banishment."
Further inquiry elicited the fact, which was then a new one to me, that all administrative exiles who were living in Western Siberia when Alexander III. came to the throne in 1881 were required by the Minister of the Interior to take the oath of allegiance to the new Tsar. It was unreasonable, of course, to expect that men who were already undergoing punishment for disloyalty to Alexander II. would stultify themselves by taking an oath of allegiance to Alexander III.; yet the Minister of the Interior either entertained such an expectation, or else made a pretense of it in order to have an excuse for punishing a second time men who had not committed a second offense. If a criminal whose sentence has been pronounced, and who is already in exile, refuses to admit that his criminal act was wrong, such refusal may be a good reason for not setting him at liberty until the expiration of his penal term; but it is hardly a sufficient reason for arbitrarily increasing threefold the severity of his punishment. It would be regarded as a very remarkable proceeding if the governor of Illinois should go to-morrow to the anarchists sentenced to penal servitude in that State, require them to declare under oath that they were not anarchists, and then, if they refused, drag them out of their cells and hang them off-hand without benefit of clergy. Yet that is precisely analogous to the action that was taken by the Russian Government in the cases of administrative exiles who were living in Western Siberia when the present Tsar came to the throne. If the Minister of the Interior did not know that these men were disloyal, he had no right to punish them with exile. If, on the other hand, he did know that they were disloyal, he acted with cruel injustice in forcing upon them such a choice of alternatives as perjury or a living death in the sub-arctic province of Yakútsk. Scores of exiled men and women, who had committed no new offense, were sent from Western Siberia to Eastern Siberia, or to Yakút ulúses near the Asiatic pole of cold, simply because they would not perjure themselves and turn informers. One of these unfortunates was the gifted Russian novelist Vladímir Korolénko. He had already been banished three times, — once to Siberia through an administrative "mistake," — and he was then transported to the province of Yakútsk because he would not betray his friends, kiss the mailed hand that had smitten him, and swear that he was a loyal subject of "The Lord's Anointed," Alexander III.
The reader may perhaps think that in describing banishment to a Yakút ulús as a "living death" I have used too strong an expression. I will therefore describe it as it appears to well-informed and dispassionate Russians. In the early part of the year 1881, when the liberal minister Loris-Melikof was in power and when there existed in Russia a limited freedom of the press, Mr. S. A. Priklónski, a well-known author and a gentleman who served at one time on the staff of the governor of the province of Olónets, published in the liberal newspaper Zemstvo — which was shortly afterward suppressed — a long and carefully prepared article upon exile by administrative process. In that article —a copy of which now lies before me—Mr. Priklónski, over his own signature, uses the following language with regard to the life of political exiles in Yakút ulúses:
"The Cossacks who had brought me from the town of Yakútsk to my destination soon returned, and I was left alone among Yakúts who do not understand a word of Russian. They watch me constantly, for fear that if I escape they will have to answer for it to the Russian authorities. If I go out of the close atmosphere of the solitary yurt to walk, I am followed by a suspicious Yakút. If I take an ax to cut myself a cane, the Yakút directs me by gestures and pantomime to let it alone and go back into the yurt. I return thither, and before the fireplace I see a Yakút who has stripped himself naked, and is hunting for lice in his clothing—a pleasant picture! The Yakúts live in winter in the same buildings with their cattle, and frequently are not separated from the latter even by the thinnest partition. The excrement of the cattle and of the children; the inconceivable disorder and filth; the rotting straw and rags; the myriads of vermin in the bedding; the foul, oppressive air, and the impossibility of speaking a word of Russian—all these things taken together are positively enough to drive one insane. The food of the Yakúts can hardly be eaten. It is carelessly prepared, without salt, often of tainted materials, and the unaccustomed stomach rejects it with nausea. I have no separate dishes or clothing of my own; there are no facilities for bathing, and during the whole winter—eight months—I am as dirty as a Yakút. I cannot go anywhere—least of all to the town, which is two hundred versts distant. I live with the Yakúts by turns—staying with one family for six weeks, and then going for the same length of time to another. I have nothing to read,—neither books nor newspapers,—and I know nothing of what is going on in the world.
Beyond this [says Mr. Priklónski in commenting upon the letter] severity cannot go. Beyond this there remains nothing to do but to tie a man to the tail of a wild horse, and drive him into the steppe, or chain him to a corpse and leave him to his fate. One does not wish to believe that a human being can be subjected, without trial and by a mere executive order, to such grievous torment—to a punishment which European civilization has banished from its penal code even for the most desperate class of villains whose inhuman crimes have been proved by trial in a criminal court. And yet we are assured by the correspondent of the Russian Gazette that up to this time none of the exiles in the province of Yakútsk have been granted any alleviating privileges; ten newly arrived administratives have been distributed, — most of them among the ulúses, — and more are expected in the near future.[7]
The statements made in Mr. Priklónski's article are supported by private letters, now in my possession, from ulús exiles, by the concurrent testimony of a large number of politicals who have lived through this experience, and by my own personal observation. I have myself slept in sod-covered Yakút yurts side by side with cattle; I have borne some of the hardships of life in these wretched habitations, and I know how intolerable it must be for a refined and educated human being — and especially for a woman — to spend months or years in the midst of such an environment. It must be said, however, in fairness, that some administrative exiles, who are allowed to receive money from their friends, buy or build houses for themselves, and have a somewhat more endurable existence. The Russian novelist Korolénko occupied a house of his own, apart from the Yakúts, and a number of the returned ulús exiles whose acquaintance I made in Tomsk and Irkútsk told me that, with the aid of friends, they bought, built, or hired log houses in the ulúses to which they had been banished, and thus escaped the filth and disorder of the Yakút yurts. Some of them, too, had a few books, and received letters from their relatives once or twice a year, through the police. They suffered, nevertheless, great hardships and privations. Mr. Linóf, a cultivated gentleman who had resided several years in the United States and who spoke English well, told me that after his banishment to the province of Yakútsk he sometimes lived for months at a time without bread, subsisting for the most part upon fish and meat. His health was broken down by his experience, and he died at an East Siberian étape in May, 1886, less than six months after I made his acquaintance. That the life of ulús exiles, even under the most favorable circumstances, is almost an unendurable one sufficiently appears from the frequency with which they escape from it by self-destruction. Of the seventy-nine politicals who were in exile in the province of Yakútsk in 1882, six had committed suicide previous to 1885. How many have died in that way since then I do not know, but of the six to whom I refer I have the names.
Since my return from Siberia the Russian Government has been sending political suspects by administrative process to the territory of Yakútsk for longer periods than ever. The "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance" provide that the maximum term of exile without trial shall be five years, but since 1888 this term has been extended arbitrarily to ten years, and politically suspicious or untrustworthy persons have been banished without trial for that length of time to the very worst part of the Yakútsk territory, viz., the strictly arctic settlements of Verkhoyánsk and Srédni Kolímsk. Among such exiles, whose names and photographs have been sent to me, are Alexéi Makaréfski, a student from the Veterinary Institute at Kharkof, and another student named Ivan Tsítsenko. The territory of Yakútsk, moreover, has been made, since 1888, the place of banishment for all Jewish suspects, without regard to the nature of their supposed untrustworthiness, and without regard to age or sex. Among such exiles, whose names and photographs have been sent to me, are two young girls, Rosa Frank and Vera Sheftel, who were students in one of the high medical schools for women in St. Petersburg, and who were banished to Srédni Kolímsk for three and five years respectively in 1888. They can hardly expect, of course, to live to return to their homes.
Two of the most interesting politicals whom we met in Irkutsk were Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Cherniávski, who were banished to Siberia by administrative process in 1878. I became very well acquainted with them, and for Mrs. Cherniávski especially I came to feel the profoundest pity and regard. Few women, even in Russia, have had before the age of thirty-five so tragic and heart-breaking a life, and still fewer have maintained through hardships, sickness, and bereavement such cheerfulness and courage. She was arrested in Odessa in the early part of 1878 at the age of about twenty-five, and after a long term of imprisonment was sent by administrative process to the province of Tobólsk. In the city prison of Kiev, on her way to Siberia, she was detained for a few days, and while there was forced to be almost an eye-witness of the assassination of her dearest friend. A young man of English descent named Beverly, whom she had known from childhood, had been arrested shortly before upon the charge of living on a false passport and carrying on a revolutionary propaganda, and he was at that time in the Kiev prison. The night before Mrs. Cherniávski was to resume her journey to Siberia, Beverly, with a comrade named Izbítski, attempted to escape through a tunnel which they had succeeded in digging from their cell to a point outside the prison wall. The prison authorities, however, had in some way become aware of the existence of the tunnel, and had posted a squad of soldiers near the place where the fugitives must emerge from the ground. Late at night, when they made their appearance, they were received with a volley of musketry. Beverly was mortally wounded, and as he lay writhing on the ground he was despatched by a soldier with repeated bayonet-thrusts. Izbítski, wounded and severely beaten, was taken back into prison. The next morning when Mrs. Cherniávski started with her party for Siberia she had to march past the bloody and disfigured body of her dearest friend, which was still lying where it had fallen, in plain sight of the prison windows.
"I can bear my own personal torment," she said to me with a sob as she finished the story of this tragedy, "but such things as that break my heart."
I need not recount the hardships and miseries that she, a cultivated and refined woman, endured on the road and in the roadside étapes between Kiev and the small town in the Siberian province of Tobólsk where she and her husband had been assigned a residence. They reached their destination at last; a child was there born to them, and they lived there in something like comfort until March, 1881, when Alexander III. came to the throne and Mr. Cherniávski was required to take the oath of allegiance. He refused to do so, and they were sent farther eastward to the town of Krasnoyársk. A second refusal to take the oath of allegiance resulted in their being sent to Irkútsk. By this time winter had set in, and they were traveling in an open tárantás with a delicate baby thirteen months of age. It was with the greatest difficulty that Mrs. Cherniávski could keep her baby warm, and at the last station before reaching Irkútsk she removed the heavy wrappings in which she had enveloped it and found it dead. With the shock of this discovery she became delirious, and wept, sang pathetic little nursery songs to her dead child, rocked it in her arms, and prayed and cursed God by turns. In the courtyard of the Irkútsk forwarding prison, in a temperature of thirty degrees below zero, Mr. Cherniávski stood for half an hour waiting for the party to be formally received, with his wife raving in delirium beside him and his dead child in his arms.
Mrs. Cherniávski lay in the prison hospital at Irkútsk until she recovered her reason, and to some extent her strength, and then she and her husband were sent 2000 miles farther to the northeastward under guard of gendarmes, and colonized in a Yakút settlement known as the Batarúski ulús, situated in the taigá or primeval wilderness of Yakútsk, 165 miles from the nearest town. There, suffering almost every conceivable hardship and privation, they lived until 1884, when the Minister of the Interior allowed them to return to a more civilized part of Siberia.
Mrs. Cherniávski when I made her acquaintance was a pale, delicate, hollow-cheeked woman, whose health had been completely wrecked by years of imprisonment, banishment, and grief. She had had two children, and had lost them both in exile under circumstances that made the bereavement almost intolerable; for seven years she had been separated by a distance of many thousand miles from all of her kindred; and the future seemed to hold for her absolutely nothing except the love of the husband whose exile she could still share, but whose interest she could do so little in her broken state of health to promote. She had not been able to step outside the house for two months, and it seemed to me, when I bade her good-by, that her life of unhappiness and suffering was drawing to a close. I felt profoundly sorry for her, — while listening to her story my face was wet with tears almost for the first time since boyhood, — and hoping to give her some pleasure and to show her how sincerely I esteemed her and how deeply I sympathized with her, I offered her my photograph, as the only memento I could leave with her. To my great surprise she sadly but firmly declined it, and said, "Many years ago I had a photograph of a little child that I had lost. It was the only one in existence, and I could not get another. The police made a search one night in my house, and took away all my letters and photographs. I told them that this particular picture was the only portrait I had of my dead boy. The gendarme officer who conducted the search promised me upon his word of honor that it should be returned to me, but I never saw it again. I made a vow then that it should not be possible for the Russian Government to hurt me so a second time, and from that day to this I have never had a photograph in my possession."
I do not know whether Mrs. Cherniávski is now living or dead; but if she be still living, I trust that these pages may find their way to her and show her that on the other side of the world she is still remembered with affectionate sympathy.
- ↑ The Sibír, edited by Mr. M. V. Zagóskin. After a long struggle with the press censorship, this enterprising and ably conducted newspaper has finally been suppressed.
- ↑ Three years later a new forwarding prison, intended to take the place of this, was erected in the village of Alexándrofsk, a short distance north of Irkútsk. (See Appendix G.)
- ↑ "The Prisoners of the Irkútsk Prison Castle, and their Maintenance," by S. S. Popóf, Annual of the newspaper Sibír p. 210. Irkútsk, 1876.
- ↑ See statements with regard to this prison in Appendix G.
- ↑ I shall have occasion to refer to this plan in a later chapter.
- ↑ Ulús is the name for a native settlement, consisting perhaps of only one or two earth-covered yurts, situated in the taigá, or primeval wilderness of Yakútsk, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest Russian village and more than 5000 miles from St. Petersburg. The gentleman to whom I here refer was sent to an ulús in the district of Amgá, only five degrees south of the arctic circle, and reached his destination in December, in the midst of an arctic winter. I have a list of names of seventy-nine political offenders who were living in Yakút ulúses in the year 1882, including the Russian novelist Vladimir Korolénko, Professor Bogdanóvitch, who was formerly instructor in chemistry in a university in Austrian Poland, and M. Linóf, who had lived four or five years in the United States and had taken out his first naturalization papers as an American citizen. The list includes also one Frenchman, one German, and nine educated women. The Frenchman and the German had made appeals for help, I believe, to their own Governments, but without result.
- ↑ Since Mr. Priklónski, the fearless and talented author of this article, is now dead, I may say, without fear of injuring him, that he himself gave me the copy of it that I now have, together with a quantity of other manuscript material relating to exile by administrative process. He was a man of high character and more than ordinary ability, and is well and favorably known in Russia as the author of "Sketches of Self-government," published in 1884; "Popular Life in the North," which appeared in 1886; and a large number of articles upon local self-government and the condition of the Russian peasantry, printed from time to time in the journals The Week, Zemstvo, and Russian Thought. Mr. Priklónski was not a revolutionist, and the article from which I have made quotations was not published in a revolutionary sheet. It appeared in the Zemstvo, the unofficial organ of the Russian provincial assemblies, which was at that time under the editorial management of the well-known author and publicist Mr. V. U. Skalon. I mention these facts merely to show that if the Russian Government cared anything about the condition of political exiles in the province of Yakútsk, it had no excuse for inaction. Its attention was called to the subject by persons who did not seek to escape responsibility for their words, and by citizens whose abilities and patriotic services entitled them to a respectful hearing. As the Minister of the Interior has continued to send educated human beings to Yakút ulúses from that time to this, he has made it impossible for the civilized world to draw any other conclusion than that he consciously and deliberately intends to subject men and women, without trial or hearing, to the miseries set forth in the letter from which Mr. Priklónski quotes.