But there were still in the fortress a series of oubliettes which had remained sealed, whence no news of any kind had ever transpired since they were erected. I speak, of course, of the Alexis ravelin, — the State prison par excellence, —the mute witness of so many abominations. Everybody at St. Petersburg knows this ter- rible name. It was considered as the safest burial-place, and only two men were kept there. But, we have seen that as soon as they were four, instead of two, the ravelin, too, began to betray its secrets. The soldiers who kept the guard in the ravelin were condemned. But — who would swear that new soldiers nominated in their place would not also carry letters from the ravelin?
Then, the Government of Alexander III. reverted to another tradition of the reign of Paul I. Paul I.'s palace at Gatchina, with its secret doors, traps, concealed flights of steps leading up to watch-towers and down to sub- 122 In Russian and French Prisons.
terranean corridors, had once more become the favourite residence of the Emperor. Why, then, not revert also to Paul I.'s favourite prison at Schliisselburg?
It is forty miles distant from St. Peters- burg, at the head of the Neva, where it issues from Lake Ladoga — a bare fortress on a lonely island. It is surrounded but by a small and deso- late town, all the inhabitants of which can bo easily watched, and years may pass before the revolutionists find a way to force the fortress and to penetrate with their propaganda into the place. So we learned that the Russian Government — so poor that it cannot spare some odd ten thousand roubles for the repair of the foul and dilapidated prisons of Kara — has spent a hundred and fifty thousand roubles in arranging a new State prison at Schliissel- burg, and that the most energetic revolutionists condemned to hard-labour will be sent there. The new prison ought to be a palace; but certainly the money has been spent less in accom- modations for prisoners than in arrangements for closely watching them, and preventing any communication with the outer world.
Who has been sent there? We know a dozen names, but how many more are there The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 123 — nobody knows. What will be their fate there? — nobody knows. Will they be drowned there? Maybe! Will they be shot one after the other " for breaches of discipline," like Minakoff, or like Colonel Aschenbrenner who was "pardoned" and sent to Schliisselburg, and there — shot in secrecy! Or, will they be left quietly to die from scurvy or consumption? Maybe also. But nobody knows as yet what is the fate of the Schliisselburg prisoners. Concealed by the thick walls of the fortress, the courtiers can do there what their masters order — until a Russian Fourteenth of July comes to sweep away all the rottenness of a decaying institution.1 1 Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century, by permission.
124 In Russian and French Prisons.
CHAPTER IV.
OUTCAST IIUSSIA.
The Journey to Siberia.1 SIBERIA — the land of exile — lias always appeared in the conceptions of the Europeans as a land of horrors, as a land of the chains and ltnootr where convicts are flogged to death by cruel officials, or killed by overwork in mines; as a land of unutterable sufferings of the masses and of horrible prosecutions of the foes of the Russian Government. Surely nobody, Russian or foreigner, has crossed the Ural Mountains and stopped on their water-divide, at the border-pillar that bears the inscription " Europe ' ' on one side, and " Asia " on the other, without shuddering at the idea that he is entering the land of woes. Many a traveller has certainly said to himself that the inscription of Dante's 1 Keprinted from the Nineteenth Century, l>y permission.
Outcast Russia. \ 2 Inferno would be more appropriate to the boundary-pillar of Siberia than these two words which pretend to delineate two continents.
As the traveller descends, however, towards the rich prairies of Western Siberia; as he notices there the relative welfare and the spirit of independence of the Siberian peasant, and compares them with the wretchedness and sub- jection of the Russian peasant; as he makes acquaintance with the hospitality of the supposed ex-convicts — the " Siberyaks " — and with the intelligent society of the Siberian towns, and perceives nothing of the exiles, and hears nothing of them in conversations going on about everything but this subject; as he hears the boasting reply of the Eastern Yankee who drily says to the stranger that in Siberia the exiles are far better off than peasants in Russia — he feels inclined to admit that his former concep- tions about the great penal colony of the North were rather exaggerated, and that, on the whole, the exiles may be not so unfortunate in Siberia, as they were represented to be by sentimental writers.
Very many visitors to Siberia, and not foreigners alone, have made this mistake. Some occasional circumstance — something like a con- 126 In Russian and French Prisons.
voy of exiles met with on the muddy road during an autumn storm, or a Polish insurrection on the shores of Lake Baikal, or, at least, such a rencontre with an exile in the forests of Yakutsk, as Adolf Erman made and so warmly described in his Travels — some occasional striking fact, in short, must fall under the notice of the traveller, to give him the necessary impulse for discover- ing the truth amidst the official misrepresenta- tion and the non-official indifference: to open his eyes and to display before them the abyss of sufferings that are concealed behind those three words: Exile to Siberia. Then he perceives that besides the official story of Siberia there is another sad story, through which the shrieks of the exiles have been going on as a black thread from the remotest times of the conquest until now. Then he learns that, however dark, the plain popular conception of Siberia is still brighter than the horrible naked truth; and that the horrible tales he has heard long ago, in his childhood, and has supposed since to be tales of a remote past, in reality are tales of what is going on now, in our century which writes so much, and cares so little, about humanitarian principles.
This story already lasts for three centuries.
Ou feast Russia. 127 As soon as the Tsars of Moscow learned that their rebel Cossacks had conquered a new country " beyond the Stone " (the Ural), they sent there batches of exiles; and they ordered them to settle along the rivers and footpaths that connected together the blockhouses erected, in the space of seventy years, from the sources of the Kama to the Sea of Okhotsk. Where no free settlers would settle, the chained colonizers had to undertake a desperate struggle against the wilderness. As to those individuals whom the rising powers of the Tsars considered most dangerous, we find them with the most ad- vanced parties of Cossacks who were sent " across the mountains, in search for newlands." No distance, however immense, no wilderness, however unpracticable, seemed sufficient to the suspicious rule of the boyars to be put between such exiles and the capital of the Tsardom. And, as soon as a blockhouse was built, or a convent erected, at the very confines of the Tsar's dominions — beyond the Arctic circle, in the toundras of the Obi, or beyond the moun- tains of Daouria — the exiles were there, building themselves the cells that had to be their graves. Even now, Siberia is, on account of its steep mountains, its thick forests, wild streams, and 128 In Russian and French Prisons.
rough climate, one of the most difficult countries to explore. It is easy to conceive what it was three centuries ago. Even now it is that part of the Russian Empire where the arbitrariness and brutality of officers are the most unlimited. What was it, then, during the seventeenth century? " The river is shallow; the rafts are heavy; the chiefs are wicked, and their sticks are big; their whips cut through the skin, and their tortures are cruel; fire and strappado; but the men are hungry, and they die, poor creatures, at once after the torture," — wrote the protopope Avvakum, the fanatic priest of the "old religion" whom we met with the first parties going to take possession of the Amor. — " How long, my master, will these tortures last?" asks his wife, as she falls unable to move farther on the ice of the river, after a journey that already has lasted for five years. — " Until our death, my dear; until our death," replies this precursor of the steel-characters of our own times; and both, man and wife, continue their march towards the place where the proto- pope will be chained to the walls of an icy cellar, digged out by his own hands.
Since the beginning of the seventeenth cen- tury, the flow of exiles poured into Siberia has Outcast Russia. 129 never ceased. During the first years of the century, we see the inhabitants of Uglitch exiled to Pelym, together with their bell which rang the alarm when it became known that the young Demetrius had been assassinated by order of the regent Boris Godunoff. Men and bell alike have tongues and ears torn away, and are con- fined in a hamlet on the borders of the toundra. Later on the}' are followed by the raskolniks (nonconformists) who revolt against the aristocratic innovations of Nikon in Church matters. Those who escape the massacres, like that " of the Three Thousand," go to people the Siberian wildernesses. They are soon followed by the serfs who make desperate attempts at overthrowing the yoke freshly imposed on them; by the leaders of the Moscow mob revolted against the rule of the boyars; by the militia of the streltsy who revolt against the all-crushing despotism of Peter I.; by the Little Eussians who fight for their autonomy and old institu- tions; by all those populations who will not submit to the yoke of the rising empire; by the Poles — by three great and several smaller batches of Poles — who are despatched to Siberia by thousands at once, after each attempt at recovering their independence...
130 In Russian and French Prisons.
Later on, all those whom Russia fears to keep in her towns and villages — murderers and simple vagrants, nonconformists and rebels; thieves and paupers who are unable to pay for a passport; serfs who have incurred tho displeasure of their proprietors; and still later on, " free peasants," who have incurred the dis- grace of an ispravnik, or are unable to pay the ever-increasing taxes — all these are going to die in the marshy lowlands, in the thick forests, in the dark mines. This current flows until our own days, steadily increasing in an alarming proportion. Seven to eight thousand were exiled every year at the beginning of this century; 19,000 to 20,000 are exiled now — not to speak of the years when this figure was doubled, as was the case after the last Polish insurrection — making thus a total of more than 700,000 people who have crossed the Ural Mountains since 1823, when the first records of exile were taken.
Few of those who have endured the horrors of hard labour and exile in Siberia have com- mitted to paper their sad experience. The protopnpe Avvakum did, and his letters still feed the fanaticism of the raslcolnilcs. The melan- choly story of the Menshikoff, the Dolgorouky, the Biron, and other exiles of high rank have been transmitted to posterity by their sympa- thizers. Our young republican poet Ryleeff, before being hung in 1827, told in a beautiful poem, " Voinarovsky," the sufferings of a Little Russian patriot. Several memoirs of the " Decembrists " (exiled for the insurrection of December 26th, 1825), and the poem of ^ekrasoff, " The Russian Women," are still inspiring the young Russian hearts with love for the prosecuted and hate to the prosecutors. Dostoevsky has told in a remarkable psycho- logical study of prison-life his experience at the fortress of Omsk after 1848; and several Poles have described the martyrdom of their friends after the revolutions of 1831 and 1848...But, what are all these pains in comparison with the sufferings endured by half a million of people, from the day when, chained to iron rods, they started from Moscow for a two or three years' walk towards the mines of Transbaikalia until the day when, broken down by hard labour and privations, they died at a distance of 5000 miles from their native villages, in a country whose scenery and customs were as strange to them as its inhabitants — a strong, intelligent but egotistic race!
K 2 K 2 132 In Russian and French Prisons.
What are the sufferings of the few, in com- parison with those of the thousands under the cat-o'-nine-tails of the legendary monster Rozghildeeff, whose name is still the horror of the Transbaikalian villages; with the pains of those who, like the Polish doctor Szokalsky and his companions, died under the seventh thousand of rod strokes for an attempt to escape; with the sufferings of those thousands of women who followed their husbands and for whom death was a release from a life of hunger, of sorrow and of humiliation; with the sufferings of those thousands who yearly undertake to make their escape from Siberia and walk through the virgin forests, living on mushrooms and berries, inspired with the hope of at least seeing again their native village and their kinsfolk?
Who has told the less striking, but not less dramatic pains of those thousands who spin out an aimless life in the hamlets of the far north and put an end to their wearisome existence \>y drowning in the clear waters of the Yenisei? M. Maximoff has tried, in his work on " Hard Labour and Siberia," to raise a corner of the veil that conceals these sufferings; but he has shown only a small corner of the dark picture.
Outcast Russia. 13, Outcast Russia. 13, The whole remains, and probably will remain, unknown; its very features are obliterated day by day, leaving but a faint trace in the folk- lore and in the songs of the exiles; and each decade brings its new features, its new forms of misery for the ever-increasing number of exiles.
It is obvious that I shall not venture to draw the whole of this picture in the narrow limits of these chapters. I must necessarily limit my task to the description of the exile as it is now —say, during the last ten years. No less than 165,000 human beings have been transported to Siberia during this short space of time; a very high figure of criminality, indeed, for a popula- tion numbering 80,000,000, if all exiles were " criminals." Less than one half of them, however, crossed the Urals in accordance with sentences of the courts. The others were thrown into Siberia without having seen any judges, by simple order of the Administrative, or in accordance with resolutions taken by their communes — nearly always under the pressure of the omnipotent local authorities. Out of the 151,184 exiles who crossed the Ural during the years 1867 to 1876, no less than 78,676 belonged to this last cate- 1 34 In Russian and French Prisons.
gory. The remaining were condemned by courts: 18,582 to hard labour, and 54,316 to be settled in Siberia, mostly for life, with or without loss of all their civil rights.2 2 Our criminal statistics are so imperfect that a thorough classification of exiles is very difficult. We have but one good work on this subject, by M. Anuchin, published a few years ago by the Russian Geographical Society and crowned •with its great gold medal; it gives the criminal statistics for the years 1827 to 1846. However old, these statistics still give an approximate idea of the present conditions, as recent partial statistics has shown that since that time all figures have doubled, but the relative proportions of different categories of exiles have remained nearly the same. Thus, to quote but one instance, out of the 159,755 exiled during the years 1827 to 1846, no less than 79,909, or 50 per cent., were exiled by simple orders of the Administrative; and thirty years later we find again nearly the same rate — slightly in- creased— of arbitrary exile (78,871 out of 151,184 in 1867 to 1876). The same is approximately true with regard to other categories. It appears from M. Auuchin's researches that out of the 79,846 condemned by courts, 14,531 (725 per year) were condemned as assassins; 14,248 for heavier crimes, such as incendiarism, robbery, and forgery; 40,666 for stealing, and 1426 for smuggling, making thus a total of 70,871 cases (about 3545 per year), which would have been condemned by the Codes — although not always by a jury — of all countries in Europe. The remainder, however (that is, nearly 89,000), were exiled for offences which depended chiefly, if not entirely, upon the political institutions of Russia; their crimes were: rebellion against any serf -proprie- tors and authorities (16,456 cases); nonconformist fanaticism (2138 cases); desertion from a twenty-five years' military Outcast Russia. 135 Twenty years ago, the exiles traversed on foot all the distance between Moscow and the place to which they were despatched. They had thus to walk something like 4700 miles in order to reach the.hard-labour colonies of Transbaikalia, and 5200 miles to reach Yakutsk. Nearly a two years' walk for the former, and two years' and a half for the second. Some service (1G51 cases); and escape from Siberia, mostly from Administrative exile (18,328 cases). Finally, we find among them the enormous figure of 48,466 " vagrants," of whom the laureate of the Geographical Society says: — " Vagrancy mostly means simply going to a neighbouring province with- out a passport " — out of 48,466 "vagrants," 40,000 at least, "being merely people who have not complied with passport regulations:' — (that is, their wife and children being brought to starvation, they had not the necessary five or ten roubles for taking a passport, and walked from Kalouga, or Tula, to Odessa, or Astrakhan, in search of labour). And he adds: — " Considering these 80,000 exiled by order of the Administrative, we not only doubt their criminality, we simply doubt the very existence of such crimes as those imputed to them." The number of such " criminals " has not diminished since. It has nearly doubled, like other figures. Russia continues to send every year to Siberia, for life, four to five thousand men and women, who in other States would be simply condemned to a fine of a few shillings. To these "criminals" we must add no less than 1500 women and 2000 to 2500 children who follow every year their husbands or parents, enduring all the horrors of a march through Siberia and of the exile.
136 In Russian and French Prisons.
amelioration lias been introduced since. After having been gathered from all parts of Russia at Moscow, or at Nijniy-Novgorod, they are transported now by steamer to Perm, by rail to Ekaterinburg, in carriages to Tumen,3 and again by steamer to Tomsk. Thus, according to a recent English book on exile to Siberia, they have to walk " only the distance beyond Tomsk." In plain figures, this trifling distance means 2065 miles to Kara, something like a nine months' foot journey. If the prisoner be sent to Yakutsk he has " only" 2940 miles to walk; and, as the Russian Government, having discovered that Yakutsk is a place still too near to St. Petersburg to keep political exiles there, are sending them now to Verkhoyansk and Nijne- Kolymsk (in the neighbourhood of Norden- skjb'ld's wintering- station), a distance of some fifteen hundred miles must be added to the former "trifling" distance, and we have again the magic figure of 4500 miles — or two years' walk reconstituted in full.
However, for the great mass of exiles, the foot journey has been reduced by one-half, and they begin their peregrinations in Siberia 3 The railway across the Urals having been opened for traffic, they will be transported by rail.
O lit cast Russia. 137 in special carriages. M. Maxim off has very vividly described how the convicts at Irkutsk, to whose judgment such a moving machine was submitted, declared at once that it was the most stupid vehicle that could be invented for the torment of both horses and convicts. Such carriages, which have no accommodation for deadening the shocks, move slowly on the rugged, jolting road, ploughed over and over by thousands of heavily loaded cars. In Western Siberia, amidst the marshes on the eastern slope of the Ural, the journey becomes a true torture, as the highway is covered with loose beams of wood, which recall the sensa- tion experienced when a finger is dragged across the keys of a piano, the black keys in- cluded. The journey is hard, even for the traveller who is lying on a thick felt mattress in a comfortable tarantass, and it is easy to conceive what the convict experiences, who is bound to sit motionless for eight or ten hours on the bench of the famous vehicle, having but a few rags to shelter him from snow and rain.
Happily enough this journey lasts but a few days, as at Tumen the exiles are embarked 011 special barges, or floating prisons, taken in tow by steamers, and in the space of eight or 138 In Russian and French Prisons.
ten days are brought to Tomsk. I hardly need say that, however excellent the idea of thus reducing by one-half the long journey through Siberia, its partial realization has been most imperfect. The convict barges are usually so overcrowded, and are usually kept in such a state of filthiness, that they have become real nests of infection. " Each barge has been built for the transport of 800 convicts and the convoy," wrrote the Tomsk correspondent of the Moscoiu Telegraph, on November 15, 1881; "the calculation of the size of the barges has not been made, however, according to the necessary cubical space, but according to the interests of the owners of the steamers, MM. Kurbatoff and Ignatoff. These gentlemen occupy for their own purposes two compart- ments for a hundred men each, and thus eight hundred must take the room destined for six hundred. The ventilation is very bad, there being no accommodation at all for that pur- pose, and the cabinets are of an unimaginable nastiness." He adds that " the mortality on these barges is very great, especially among the children," and his information is fully con- firmed by official figures published last year in all newspapers. It appears from these figures Outcast Russia. 139 that eight to ten per cent, of the convict passengers died during their ten days' journey on board these barges; that is, something like sixty to eighty out of eight hundred.
" Here you see," wrote friends of ours who have made this passage, "the reign of death. Diphtheria and typhus pitilessly cut down the lives of adults and children, especially of these last. Corpses of children are thrown out nearly at each station. The hospital, placed under the supervision of an ignorant soldier, is always overcrowded."
At Tomsk the convicts stop for a few days. One part of them — especially the common-law exiles, transported by order of the Adminis- trative— are sent to some district of the province of Tomsk which extends from the spurs of the Altay mountains on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north. The others are despatched farther towards the east. It is easy to conceive what a hell the Tomsk prison becomes when the convicts arriving every week cannot be sent on to Irkutsk with the same speed, on account of inundations, or obstacles on the rivers. The prison was built to contain 960 souls, but it never holds less than 1300 to 1400, and very often 2200, or more.
1 40 In Russian and French Prisons.
One-quarter of the prisoners are sick, but the infirmary can shelter only one-third, or so, of those who are in need of it; and so the sick remain in the same rooms, upon or beneath the same platforms where the remainder are crammed to the amount of three men for each free place. The shrieks of the sick, the cries of the fever-stricken patients, and the rattle of the dying mix together with the jokes and laughter of the prisoners, with the curses of the warders. The exhalations of this human heap mix with those of their wet and filthy clothes and with the emanations of the hor- rible Parasha. " You are suffocated as you enter the room, you are fainting and must run back to breathe some fresh air; you must accustom yourself by-and-by to the horrible emanations which float like a fog on the river " — such is the testimony of all those who have entered unexpectedly a Siberian prison. The " families room " is still more horrible. " Here you see," says a Siberian official in charge of the prisons — M. Mishlo — " hundreds of women and children closely packed together, in such a state of misery as no imagination could picture." The families of the convicts receive no cloth from the State. Mostly peasant