CHAPTER IV
THE TIUMÉN FORWARDING PRISON
Tiumén, where we virtually began our Siberian journey as well as our investigation of the exile system, is a town of 19,000 inhabitants, situated 1700 miles east of St. Petersburg, on the right bank of the river Túra just above the junction of the latter with the Toból. The chief interest that the place had for us lay in the fact that it contains the most important exile forwarding prison in Siberia, and the Prikáz o Sílnikh, or Chief Bureau of Exile Administration. Through the Tiumén prison pass all persons condemned to banishment, colonization, or penal servitude in Siberia, and in the Tiumén prikáz are kept all the records and statistics of the exile system.
Russian exiles began to go to Siberia very soon after its discovery and conquest—as early probably as the first half of the seventeenth century. The earliest mention of exile in Russian legislation is in a law of the Tsar Alexéi Mikháilovich in 1648.[1] Exile, however, at that time, was regarded not as a punishment in itself, but as a means of getting criminals who had already been punished out of the way. The Russian criminal code of that age was almost incredibly cruel and barbarous. Men were impaled on sharp stakes, hanged, and beheaded by the hundred for crimes that would not now be regarded as capital in any civilized country in the world; while lesser offenders were flogged with the knut and bastinado, branded with hot irons, muti-
- ↑ Poln. Sobr. Zakonof, tom. I. Ulozhenie, gl. XIX, p. 13. [Full Collection of Russian Laws, Vol. I. Penal Code, Ch. XIX, p. 13.]
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