five times greater than the average number in European Russia.[1]
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.[2] Out of 1619 persons tried for crime in the province of Yeniséisk in 1880, 102 were murderers — all of them common-criminal exiles.[3] 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.[4]
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[5] and they did not. On
- ↑ Eastern Review, No. 8, p. 6. St. Petersburg, Feb. 26, 1887.
- ↑ Newspaper Sibír, No. 36, p. 5; Irkútsk, Sept. 9, 1884. Siberian Gazette, No. 38, p. 1127. Tomsk, Sept. 21, 1886.
- ↑ Eastern Review, No. 17, p. 6. St. Petersburg, July 22, 1882.
- ↑ Siberian Gazette, No. 39, p. 11. Tomsk, May 26, 1888.
- ↑ 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.
