Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 2/Chapter XIV

by George Kennan

CHAPTER XIV

EVILS AND PROJECTED REFORMS

I HAVE regarded and discussed the exile system in this work rather from the point of view of the criminal than from the point of view of the non-criminal Siberian resident; but my survey of the subject would be very incomplete if I should wholly fail to notice the evil influence exerted by the Russian system of deportation upon the moral and economic life of the colony to which the criminals are banished. Opposition to the exile system in Russia rests chiefly upon facts that are not known, or at least are not duly taken into account, by writers on the subject in other countries. With us Siberian exile is condemned because it is thought to be a cruel and unusual punishment. In Russia it is opposed because it has a demoralizing effect upon the Siberian population. In the one case it is regarded from the point of view of the criminal, and in the other from the point of view of society. As the inhabitants of Siberia, and especially of the West-Siberian provinces, become more and more wealthy, prosperous, and civilized, they object more and more strenuously to the colonization of criminals in their towns and villages. "We admit," they say, "that it is essential for the protection of society in European Russia that the criminal should be removed from there, and very desirable that, if possible, he should be reformed; but we do not want him removed to our villages and reformed entirely at our expense. What have we done that we should have eight or ten thousand thieves, forgers, drunkards, counterfeiters, and vagrants turned loose at our very thresholds every year?" Then the eastern provinces of European Russia, such as Perm, Orenburg, and Kazán, join in the protest, on the ground that their towns and villages are overrun by criminals who have made their escape from Siberia, and that the aggregate of crime within their limits is, in consequence, enormously increased. They say to the Government, "You collect criminals from all parts of Russia proper, transport them across the Siberian boundary-line, and then turn them loose only a few hundred miles from our eastern frontier. A large proportion of them make their escape, and, straggling back in a destitute condition, they quarter themselves upon us. We are as much entitled to protection as the central, southern, and western provinces, from which these criminals were originally taken. If you insist upon sending thieves and burglars to Siberia, instead of shutting them up in penitentiaries, we beg you to send them far enough to the eastward so that they cannot straggle back across the frontier to prey upon us."

The number of criminals now sent to Siberia annually, not including innocent wives and children, varies from 10,000 to 13,000. These criminals may be divided, for my present purpose, into five great classes, viz: first, hard-labor convicts; secondly, compulsory colonists; thirdly, communal exiles [persons banished on account of their generally bad character by the village communes to which they belong]; fourthly, vagrants; and, fifthly, political and religious exiles. The proportion which each of these classes bears to the whole may be shown in tabular form as follows, the figures being taken from the report of the Tiumén Prikáz o Sílnikh for the year 1885.

Criminal class.	Number.	Per cent. of whole number.
Hard-labor convicts	1551	15.16
Forced colonists	2841	27.28
Communal exiles	3751	36.66
Vagrants [brodyágs]	1719	16.80
Political and religious exiles	368	3.60
Total	10,230	100.00

When this great body of offenders reaches Siberia it is divided into two penal classes, viz: first, criminals who are shut up in prisons; and, secondly, criminals who are assigned places of residence, and are there liberated to find subsistence for themselves as best they may. The first of these penal classes — that of the imprisoned — comprises all the hard-labor convicts and all of the vagrants, and numbers in the aggregate 3270. The second or liberated class includes all of the forced colonists, all of the communal exiles, and most of the political and religious offenders, and numbers in the aggregate nearly seven thousand.

It is manifest, I think, that when a flood of ten thousand vagrants, thieves, counterfeiters, burglars, highway robbers, and murderers is poured into a colony, the class most injurious to the welfare of that colony is the liberated class. If a burglar or thief is sent to Siberia and shut up in prison, he is no more dangerous to society there than he would be if he were imprisoned in European Russia. The place of his confinement is immaterial, because he has no opportunity to do evil. If, however, he is sent to Siberia and there turned loose, he resumes his criminal activity and becomes at once a menace to social order and security.

For more than half a century the people of Siberia have been groaning under the heavy burden of common criminal exile. More than two-thirds of all the crimes committed in the colony are committed by common felons who have been transported thither and then set at liberty; and the peasants, everywhere, are becoming demoralized by enforced association with thieves, burglars, counterfeiters, and embezzlers from the cities of European Russia. The honest and prosperous inhabitants of the country protest, of course, against the injustice of a system that liberates every year, at their very doors, an army of from seven to ten thousand worthless characters and felons. They do not object to the hard-labor convicts, because the latter are shut up in prisons. They do not object to the political and religious exiles, because such offenders make the best of citizens. Their protests are aimed particularly at the communal exiles and the forced colonists. Nearly all of the large towns in Western Siberia have sent memorials to the provincial governors, to the Minister of the Interior, or to the Crown, asking to be relieved from the burden of criminal colonization; and in many of these memorials the evils of the exile system have been set forth with fearless candor. The burghers' society of Yalútorfsk, for example, declared that in their town there were twice as many exiles as there were honest citizens, and that the former had almost ruined the latter by means of thefts and robberies.

The burghers' society of Turínsk complained of the constantly increasing quota of exiles quartered upon them, and said that such people would soon outnumber the old residents, and would force the latter to emigrate to some region where criminals were not so plentiful.^[1] The unpaid taxes of the exiles, moreover, rested as an additional burden upon society, and especially upon its less prosperous members, while the exiles themselves, having no means of earning an honest livelihood, either gave themselves up to indolence, drunkenness, and debauchery, or were guilty of robbery and other crimes which the police were almost powerless to prevent or investigate.

The town council of Tára, in its memorial, said: "The exiles sent to Siberia from the interior provinces of Russia, either on account of their crimes or because of their bad conduct in the communes to which they belonged, have brought hither habits of laziness, drunkenness, roguery, debauchery, and violence, and sometimes even of robbery and murder; and as they are adroit and experienced criminals, they are seldom convicted in the courts. Besides all this, their evil example tempts into crime the poorer class of old-resident burghers, and especially the young, some of whom already have taken the criminal infection."

The Ishím town council expressed itself with regard to the subject as follows: "The greater part of the exiles have not even means to pay for an identification-paper, and they roam about the town and the district, begging, thieving, robbing, and trying to excite sympathy or inspire terror by calling themselves brodyágs. The wickedness of these exile inhabitants of Ishím is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb; and travelers, while they are yet hundreds of versts away, are warned to be particularly cautious and watchful while passing through our town."

The burghers' society of Kurgán protested vigorously against a continuance of the practice of colonizing criminals in their town, and declared that the exiles were, in every sense of the words, "a homeless and houseless proletariat and a scourge to the community." They not only were lazy, tricky, depraved, and dissipated, but they were everywhere the corrupters of the young and the sowers of the seeds of crime in the families of the old residents.^[2]

The statements of the West-Siberian town councils and burghers' societies need no other confirmation than the statistics of vagrancy and crime in the books of the Siberian police-stations, the records of the local exile bureaus, and the columns of the Siberian newspapers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Siberia literally swarms with brodyádgs, escaped exiles, and runaway convicts of the worst class. Thousands of forced colonists leave the places where they are enrolled on the very next day after their arrival. Between the years 1871 and 1876 the police arrested 3147 runaway convicts in the province of Tobólsk, and more than 5000 in the province of Tomsk; while three times as many more, probably, crossed those provinces unmolested.^[3] According to statistics published by the Russian exile administration, the number of forced colonists enrolled in the provinces of Irkútsk and Yeniséisk and the territory of the Trans-Baikál in 1886 was 110,000, and of that number 48,000, or 42 per cent., had run away and could not be found. In Western Siberia the number of runaways was still greater. A census of the exiles in the towns and villages of the two West-Siberian provinces of Tobólsk and Tomsk showed that only 33 per cent. of them were in the places where they had been colonized, and that 67 per cent. of them had disappeared.^[4] Thousands of these runaways perished, doubtless, of hunger and cold, or were shot by the exasperated peasants whom they had robbed; but thousands more roamed about the country as brodyágs, begging, stealing, attacking freight caravans, and committing murders, in order to sustain their wretched lives.^[5] The number of crimes committed by common-criminal exiles between 1872 and 1876 in the province of Tobólsk was 5036, and in the province of Tomsk 4856.^[6] In certain parts of the province of Tobólsk, as for instance in the district of Tiukalínsk, the number of judicial condemnations for crime, in every thousand of the population, is five times greater than the average number in European Russia.^[7]

An extraordinarily large proportion of all the crimes committed by common-criminal exiles in Siberia are crimes of violence, and they are not infrequently accompanied by atrocities that are perfectly needless. In the little town of Marínsk, for example, a forced colonist choked a helpless woman to death, killed her three-year-old child by dashing its brains out against the floor, and then, apparently out of sheer bloodthirstiness and deviltry, tore off the head of a chicken, which happened to be the only other living thing in the house. At certain seasons of the year murders, in Siberian towns, are the commonest of occurrences, and you can hardly take up a Siberian newspaper without finding in it a record of one or more. There were four murders, for example, in the little town of Minusínsk on the same night, without an arrest, and from the still smaller town of Marínsk eleven murders were reported to the Siberian Gazette in a single letter.^[8] Out of 1619 persons tried for crime in the province of Yeniséisk in 1880, 102 were murderers — all of them common-criminal exiles.^[9] The small town of Balagánsk, in the province of Irkútsk, has a total population of less than 5000; but there were sixty-one cases of murder there in 1887, — considerably more than one a week, — to say nothing of an immense amount of other crime.^[10]

It could hardly be expected that the Siberian peasants would submit quietly to this campaign of robbery and murder on the part of the varnáks^[11] and they did not. On the contrary, they made the most terrible reprisals. In the district of Verkholénsk, near Irkútsk, sixty or more dead bodies of runaway convicts are found and buried every year, and most of them have been killed by the peasants.^[12] In the spring of 1886 eleven dead bodies were found in the town of Tiumén in the course of a single week, and as nearly all of them were unknown to the police, they were supposed to be the bodies of exiles.^[13] In 1884 the Government surgeon of Ishím made 200 post-mortem examinations of bodies of forced colonists that had been murdered by the peasants in his district alone.^[14] So exasperated do the old-resident Siberians become at times, as the result of incendiary fires, robberies, and murders attributed by them to the exiles, that they treat the latter with all the barbarous cruelty of Apache Indians. In the Marínsk district, for example,—the same district from which eleven murders were reported in a single letter,—the peasants caught a forced colonist who had stolen their horses and committed other depredations, threw him on the ground, tied his hands behind him, and then filled his eyes with finely broken glass, saying as they did so, "Ah, you varnák! You won't find your way to us again."

In view of such a state of things as this it is not at all surprising that the town councils of Yalútorfsk, Turínsk, Tára, Ishím, Kurgán, Yeniséisk, and Tomsk, half a dozen burghers' societies, and almost as many special delegations of Siberian merchants, should have protested, formally and vehemently, against the continuance of criminal colonization. But the Siberian people have not been alone in their protest. Nearly all the governors of the Siberian provinces and territories have called attention repeatedly in their official reports to the disastrous consequences of criminal deportation as now practised; the governor of the Trans-Baikál has expressly asked that no more forced colonists be sent there, since the territory is full of them already; Vice- admiral Possiót and four Siberian governors-general [Kaz- nakóf, Anúchin, Ignátief, and Korf] have urged that the exile system be radically modified or abolished;^[15] the Sibe- rian newspapers have been hammering away at the subject for almost a quarter of a century; three or four specially appointed commissions have condemned penal colonization and have suggested other methods of dealing with crimi- nals — and yet, nothing whatever has been done. Every plan of reform that has been submitted to the Tsar's min- isters and to the Council of the Empire has been found to be "impracticable," "inexpedient," or in some way objec- tionable, and has finally been put, as the Russians say, "under the tablecloth." The principal reason assigned for the failure of the Government to reform its penal system is lack of money; but it has been conclusively shown by Yádrintsef and by Professor Foinítski that the existing penal system is not only wholly unsatisfactory from every point of view, but is actually more expensive and wasteful than almost any other that can be imagined. Yádrintsef, for example, in computing the expense of the exile system to the Government, estimates that it costs, on an average, 300 rúbles, or $150, merely to transport one criminal from European Russia to Siberia; "a sum," he says, "which would maintain that same criminal for a term of at least four years in the most expensive prison in European Russia. In view of the fact," he continues, "that a large number of serious offenders make their escape and are sent back from

1 General Kaznakóf , governor-gen- eral of Western Siberia from 1884 to 1879, was strongly opposed to the ex- ile system, and not only urged its abo- lition but made a most comprehensive, detailed, and exhaustive study of its results, in order to have a foundation upon which to base reforms. In a pro- test that he once made against the

forced colonization in his territory of a large number of fierce and lawless Circassian mountaineers he said, in- dignantly, to the viceroy of the Cau- casus, that anybody could govern a country if he had the privilege of sending out of it all the people that he could n't manage. two to sixteen times, it is evident that the above estimate of the cost of transporting one criminal to Siberia must be made considerably higher. But this serious item of expense does not, by any means, comprise all that it is necessary to debit to the exile system. The construction and repair of prisons demand enormous current expenditures, notwithstanding the unsatisfactory condition of such buildings; the maintenance of the large number of sick and infirm exiles who can no longer support themselves is a heavy burden upon the local population; and the work of exiled hard-labor convicts, as shown by long experience, does not begin to reimburse the Government for the expenditures that it makes on their account. If to all this be added the facts that the Government is now spending upon the exile system a comparatively insignificant part of the money that would be required to put it into a satisfactory condition; that the number of persons employed to guard and oversee the exiles is far smaller than it ought to be; that such employees receive only a trifling compensation for their services; that the exiles have no schools; that the asylums required by law are not built; and that the force of guards in Siberia is so small that almost everybody escapes from the prisons and the penal settlements who cares to do so—it will be seen that, upon the amount of money now appropriated for its maintenance, the exile system cannot become successful, either as a punitive, a protective, or a reformatory agency." Nevertheless, this wholly unsatisfactory and inadequate institution, according to the estimates of Lokhvítski, Foinítski, and Yádrintsef, costs the Government of Russia at least five million rúbles per annum, and the people of Siberia almost twice as much more. Yádrintsef is of opinion that the 40,000 exile vagrants who are constantly on the march in Siberia cost the peasants not less than 2,960,000 rúbles per annum, and that the cost per annum of the whole number of communal exiles and forced colonists that are unable or unwilling to work, and that live upon the earnings of others, is 7,500,000 rubles, or almost $4,000,000.^[16]

Within the past five years great pressure has been brought to bear upon the Russian Government to induce it so to modify the exile system as to relieve the Siberian people of a part of their heavy burden. Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy, the chief of the prison administration, has become convinced of the necessity for reform; General Ignátief and Baron Korf, both men of energy and ability, have been appointed governors-general in Eastern Siberia, and have insisted pertinaciously upon the abolition of criminal colonization; the liberal Siberian press, encouraged by the support of these high officials, has assailed the exile system with new boldness and vigor; and the Tsar's ministers have been forced, at last, to consider the expediency, not of abolishing the exile system altogether, but of so modifying it as to render it less burdensome to the inhabitants of a rich and promising colony. In giving the subject such consideration, the Government is not actuated primarily by humane motives — that is, by a desire to lessen the enormous amount of misery that the exile system causes; it merely wishes to put a stop to annoying complaints and protests, and to increase the productiveness and tax-paying capacity of Siberia. In approaching the question from this point of view, the Government sees that the most irritating and burdensome feature of the exile system is the colonization of common criminals in the Siberian towns and villages. It is this against which the Siberian people protest, and it is this which lessens the productive capacity of the colony. Other features of the system are more cruel, more unjust and disgraceful, but this is the one that makes most trouble, and which, therefore, must first have attention.

Just before I left St. Petersburg for the United States I had a long and interesting conversation with Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy with regard to the exile system and a plan of reform that he was then maturing. The view of the question taken by him at that time was precisely the view that I have indicated in the preceding paragraph. He did not expect to bring about the abolition of the exile system as a whole, nor did he intend to recommend such a step to the Tsar's ministers. All that he proposed to do was so to restrict and reform the system as to make it more tolerable to the Siberian people. This he expected to accomplish by somewhat limiting communal exile, by abolishing penal colonization, and by increasing the severity of the punishment for vagrancy. The reform was not intended to change the status of hard-labor convicts, nor of administrative exiles, nor of politicals; and Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy told me distinctly that, for political convicts, a new prison was then building at the famous and dreaded mine of Akatúi, in the most lonely and desolate part of the Trans-Baikál. Of this fact I was already aware, as I had visited the mine of Akatúi only a short time before, and had seen there the timber prepared for the building. It was the intention of the Government, Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy said, to pump out the abandoned Akatúi mine, which was then half full of water, and set the politicals at work in it.

At the time of our conversation the chief of the prison administration did not regard the complete abolition of the exile system as even possible, much less practicable. He estimated that it would cost at least ten million rúbles to build in European Russia the prisons that the abolition of the exile system would necessitate, and he did not think that, in the straitened condition of the Russian finances, it would be possible to appropriate such an amount for such a purpose. Furthermore, the complete abolition of the system would make it necessary to revise and remodel the whole penal code; and to this step objections would probably be raised by the Minister of Justice. Under such circumstances all that the prison administration hoped to do was to make such changes in the system as would render it less objectionable to the Siberian people, and less burdensome to the commercial interests of an important colony. After my return to the United States the plan of reform that Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy had in hand was completed, and an outline of it was published repeatedly in the Russian and Siberian newspapers. Its provisions were, in brief, as follows:

First. To substitute imprisonment in European Russia for forced colonization in Siberia, and to retain the latter punishment only "for certain offenses," and "in certain exceptional cases." The meaning of this is, simply, that one class of exiles — namely, poseléntsi, or forced colonists — would thenceforth be shut up in European Russia, unless the Government, for reasons best known to itself, should see fit to send them to Siberia as usual. This reform — if the "certain offenses" and "exceptional cases" were not too numerous — would have affected, in the year 1885, 2841 exiles out of a total number of 10,230.

Second. To increase the severity of the punishment for vagrancy by sending all vagrants into hard labor on the island of Saghalín. This section was aimed at runaway convicts, thousands of whom spend every winter in prison and every summer in roaming about the colony.

Third. To deprive village communes of the right to banish peasants who return to their homes after serving out a term of imprisonment for crime. This would be a limitation of the exile system as it now exists, and in 1885 it would have affected 2651 exiles out of a total of 10,230.

Fourth. To retain communal exile, but to compel every commune to support, for a term of two years, the persons whom it exiles. The amount of money to be paid for the support of such persons is fixed at $18.25 a year per capita, or five cents a day for every exile. To what extent this would operate in practice as a restriction of communal exile I am unable to say. The Siberian Gazette was of opinion that it would affect it very slightly, and attacked the plan vigorously upon the ground of its inadequacy.

 

Fifth. To modify sections 17 and 20 of the penal code so as to bring them into harmony with the changes in the exile system thus provided for.

This is all that there was in the scheme of reform submitted by the prison administration to the Tsar's ministers. It was a step in the right direction, of course, but it came far short of a complete abolition of the exile system, inasmuch as it did not touch the banishment to Siberia of political offenders, nor the transportation of hard-labor convicts to the mines, nor the deportation of religious dissenters; and it restricted communal exile only to a trifling extent. But even this limited and inadequate measure of reform failed to receive the support of his Imperial Majesty's ministers, and was defeated in the Council of the Empire. The Minister of Finance opposed it in toto, and said that "the reasons assigned by Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy for the proposed changes in the exile system are not sufficiently convincing." He made an elaborate argument against it, the substance of which may be found in the Siberian Gazette for May 20, 1888, page 4. The Minister of Justice declared that the proposed reform could not be carried out without "the essential destruction of the whole existing system of punishment for crime," and that "the substitution of imprisonment in European Russia for colonization in Siberia is impossible." Furthermore, he went out of his way to say that "exile to Siberia for political and religious offenses must be preserved."^[17]

The opposition of these two powerful ministers was fatal to the reform in the Council of the Empire, and in the winter of 1889–90 a new commission was appointed to draw up another "project." When the new project will reach the stage of consideration, and what will be its fate, I have no means of knowing; but my anticipations, so far as a reform of the exile system is concerned, are by no means sanguine. The region that comprises the great mountain-range of the Caucasus has recently been governed by an officer who bears one of the double names that in Russia are so common, viz: Dóndukof-Korsákof. The quick-witted Caucasian mountaineers, who soon discovered that it was virtually impossible to get a desirable thing done by any of the bureaucratic methods of Prince Dóndukof-Korsákof's administration, invented a proverb, based on his name, to express their opinion with regard to the nature of the trouble. It was, simply, "Dóndukof promises and Korsákof hinders." To the proposed reform of the Siberian exile system the witty saying of the Caucasian mountaineers is strictly applicable. The prison administration promises and the Council of the Empire hinders. Then they exchange places, and the Council of the Empire promises while the prison administration hinders. Finally, they both promise and the hindrance comes from an investigating "commission" that has not yet obtained all the money that it hopes to get in the shape of salaries and mileage from the imperial treasury, and that, consequently, has not yet finished its researches in a field that has been examined, surveyed, and investigated ten or fifteen times already.

I hope, with all my heart, that the Siberian exile system may be abolished; but I greatly fear, nevertheless, that it will remain, for many years, one of the darkest blots upon the civilization of the nineteenth century.

 

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1. The prediction has been fulfilled. In 1885 the old residents began to leave the okrugs of Yalútorfsk, Ishím, Kurgán, and Turínsk, in order to escape from the forced colonists. See Siberian Gazette, No. 13, p. 325. Tomsk, March 31, 1885.
2. "Siberia as a Colony," by N. M. Yádrintsef, p. 217. See also the Memorandum Book of the Province of Tobólsk for the year 1884, published by authority of the provincial statistical committee. The official compilers of that volume publish the above-quoted statements, and declare, emphatically, that "there is not the slightest reason to doubt their perfect justice and accuracy. The only wonder is," they continue, "that the members of these town councils had the civic manliness to express themselves thus boldly and justly without fear of reprisals." [Memorandum Book of the Province of Tobólsk, p. 225.]
3. Eastern Review, No. 35, p. 2. St. Petersburg, Sept. 3, 1887.
4. Siberian Gazette, No. 48, p. 3. Tomsk, June 26, 1886.
5. Freight caravans were attacked constantly by armed bands of highwaymen on the great Siberian road between Tomsk and Áchinsk in 1886, and several of the worst stretches were finally patrolled by a force of mounted police. Even the city of Tomsk itself was terrorized in February, 1886, while we were there, by a band of criminals who made a practice of riding through the city in sleighs at night and catching belated wayfarers with sharp grappling-hooks. See Eastern Review, No. 9, p. 5; Feb. 27, 1886, No. 40, pp. 1, 2; Oct. 2, 1886, and No. 48, p. 2; Nov. 27, 1886. See also Siberian Messenger, No. 23, p. 6; Oct. 17, 1885, and Siberian Gazette, No. 38, Sept. 21, 1886, and No. 4, Jan. 1, 1888.
6. Eastern Review, No. 48, p. 3. St. Petersburg. Nov. 27, 1888.
7. Eastern Review, No. 8, p. 6. St. Petersburg, Feb. 26, 1887.
8. Newspaper Sibír, No. 36, p. 5; Irkútsk, Sept. 9, 1884. Siberian Gazette, No. 38, p. 1127. Tomsk, Sept. 21, 1886.
9. Eastern Review, No. 17, p. 6. St. Petersburg, July 22, 1882.
10. Siberian Gazette, No. 39, p. 11. Tomsk, May 26, 1888.
11. The word varnák is a slang term in Siberia for a forced colonist or convict. It is said to have had its origin in the practice of branding highwaymen, in the old times, with the letters "V. R. N. K.," which are the initial letters of the Russian words Vor, razboinik, nakazanni knutom. [Robber, brigand, flogged with the knut.] By adding two "a's" to these letters the word varnák was formed.
12. Eastern Review, No. 28, p. 5. St. Petersburg, July 16, 1887.
13. Eastern Review, No. 30, p. 7. St. Petersburg, July 17, 1886.
14. Siberian Gazette, No. 13, p. 325. Tomsk, March 31, 1885.
15. 1
16. "Siberia as a Colony," by N. M. Yádrintsef, pp. 213-216. "The Question of Siberian Exile," by Prof. I. Foinítski. Journal of Civil and Criminal Law, No. 2, pp. 94-98, St. Petersburg, March, 1879.
17. Eastern Review, p. 11. St. Petersburg, April 22, 1888.