Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter IV

by George Kennan

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, mutilated by amputation of one or more of their limbs, deprived of their tongues, and suspended in the air by hooks passed under two of their ribs until they died a lingering and miserable death.^[2] When criminals had been thus knuted, bastinadoed, branded, or crippled by amputation, Siberian exile was resorted to as a quick and easy method of getting them out of the way; and in this attempt to rid society of criminals who were both morally and physically useless Siberian exile had its origin. The amelioration, however, of the Russian criminal code, which began in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the progressive development of Siberia itself gradually brought about a change in the view taken of Siberian exile. Instead of regarding it, as before, as a means of getting rid of disabled criminals, the Government began to look upon it as a means of populating and developing a new and promising part of its Asiatic territory. Toward the close of the seventeenth century, therefore, we find a number of ukázes abolishing personal mutilation as a method of punishment, and substituting for it, and in a large number of cases even for the death penalty, the banishment of the criminal to Siberia with all his family.^[3] About the same time exile, as a punishment, began to be extended to a large number of crimes that had previously been punished in other ways; as, for example, desertion from the army, assault with intent to kill, and vagrancy when the vagrant was unfit for military service and no land-owner or village commune would take charge of him. Men were exiled, too, for almost every conceivable sort of minor offense, such, for instance, as fortune-telling, prize-fighting, snuff-taking,^[4] driving with reins,^[5] begging with a pretense of being in distress, and setting fire to property accidentally.^[6]

In the eighteenth century the great mineral and agricultural resources of Siberia began to attract to it the serious and earnest attention of the Russian government. The discovery of the Daúrski silver mines, and the rich mines of Nérchinsk in the Siberian territory of the Trans-Baikál, created a sudden demand for labor, which led the government to promulgate a new series of ukázes providing for the transportation thither of convicts from the Russian prisons. In 1762 permission was given to all individuals and corporations owning serfs, to hand the latter over to the local authorities for banishment to Siberia whenever they thought they had good reason for so doing.^[7] With the abolition of capital punishment in 1753, all criminals that, under the old law, would have been put to death, were condemned to perpetual exile in Siberia with hard labor.

In the reign of Catherine II. the demand for laborers in Siberia became more and more imperative, by reason of the discovery of the rich and important mines of Ekaterínburg, and the establishment of large manufactories in Irkútsk; and the list of crimes and offenses punishable by exile grew larger and larger. Jews were exiled for refusing or neglecting to pay their taxes for three successive years; serfs were exiled for cutting down trees without leave; non-commissioned officers of the army were exiled for second offenses of various kinds, and bad conduct of almost any sort became a sufficient warrant for deportation to Siberia.

Up to the close of the eighteenth century, very little attention was paid to the treatment of the exiles en route, and still less to the proper organization and control of the exile system. Kolódniks, as the exiles were then called, were simply driven in troops, like cattle, from one provincial town to another, sometimes begging their way because no provision had been made for their subsistence, and sometimes starving to death on the road. No one knew who they were, whence they had come, what crimes they had committed, or whither they were going. Hardened murderers, who should have been sent to the mines for life, were set at liberty in Siberia as colonists; while unfortunate peasants who had merely lost their passports, or incurred the resentment of some hot-tempered land-owner, were kept at hard labor in the mines until they perished from privation and cruel treatment. The exile system, in short, was nothing but a chaos of disorder, in which accident and caprice played almost equally important parts.^[8]

Early in the nineteenth century, steps were taken by the Government to remedy some of the evils that had become apparent under this lax system of administration, and to subject the methods of exile to stricter control. In 1811 a suitable force of regular guards was organized to convoy exile parties, and all exiles were furnished with identifying documents, called statéini spíski, to show who they were and whither they were bound. In 1817 étapes, or exile station-houses, were erected along the most important routes; and in 1823, upon the initiative of the great Russian reformer Count Speránski, the present Prikáz o Silnikh, or Bureau of Exile Administration, was established in Tobólsk. It has since been removed to Tiumén. The duties of this bureau are of a two-fold nature. In the first place it sorts and classifies all exiles, upon their arrival in Tiumén, and keeps a full and accurate record of them, and in the second it watches and controls, through six subordinate bureaus, their transportation and distribution throughout Siberia. These subordinate bureaus, which are known as expedítsii o sílnikh, are situated in Kazán, Perm, Tobólsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyársk, and Irkútsk. They are aided in their work of supervision and control by three inspectors of exile transportation, each of whom looks after one division of the great exile route. At the time of our journey, Colonel Vinokúrof was inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia with headquarters at Tiumén, while Colonel Zagárin occupied a similar position in Eastern Siberia with headquarters at Krasnoyársk.

Since the organization of the Prikáz o Silnikh in 1823, a careful and accurate record has been kept of all the exiles that have crossed the Siberian frontier; and from the books of this great central bureau may now be obtained the fullest statistical information with regard to the working of the exile system. The first questions that naturally rise in one's mind in connection with this subject are, "How many persons are banished to Siberia annually, and how many have been sent there in all?" From the records of the Prikáz o Sílnikh it appears that between the years 1823 and 1887 inclusive there were sent to Siberia 772,979 exiles, as follows:

From 1823 to 1832	98,725		Brought forward	593,914
From 1833 to 1842	86,550		In 1878	17,790
From 1843 to 1852	69,764		In 1879	18,255
From 1853 to 1862	101,238		In 1880	17,660
From 1863 to 1872	146,380		In 1881	17,183
From 1873 to 1877	91,257		In 1882	16,945
	————		In 1883	19,314
Total	593,914		In 1884	17,824
			In 1885	18,843
			In 1886	17,477
			In 1887	17,774
				————
Total[9]				772,979

Exiles to Siberia may be grouped, according to the nature of their sentences, into four great classes, namely:

1. Kátorzhniki or hard-labor convicts.
2. Poseléntsi or penal colonists.
3. Sílni or persons simply banished.
4. Dobrovólni or women and children that go to Siberia voluntarily with their exiled husbands or parents. Persons belonging to the first two classes, who are always supposed to be criminals, are deprived of all civil rights and must remain in Siberia for life. Persons belonging to the third class, who are not necessarily criminals, retain some of their civil rights and may return to European Russia at the expiration of their terms of banishment. Convicts and penal colonists go to their places of destination in five-pound leg-fetters and with half-shaven heads, while simple exiles wear no fetters and are not personally disfigured. Exiles of the third class comprise:
a. Vagrants (persons without passports who refuse to disclose their identity).
b. Persons banished by sentence of a court.
c. Persons banished by the village communes to which they belong.
d. Persons banished by order of the Minister of the Interior.

The relative proportions of these several classes for 1885, the year that I spent in Siberia, may be shown in tabular form as follows:

Penal Class.				Males.	Females.	Total.
I. Hard-labor convicts [kátorzhniki], punished by sentence of a court			$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$	1,440	111	1,551
II. Penal colonists [poseléntsi], punished by sentence of a court)			$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$	2,526	133	2,659
III. Exiles	$\scriptstyle {\left\{{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right.}$	a. Vagrants		1,646	73	1,719
		b. Exiled by judicial sentence		172	10	182
		c. Exiled by village communes		3,535	216	3,758
		d. Exiled by executive order		300	68	361
IV. Voluntaries [dobrovólni], accompanying relatives				2,068	3,468	5,536
				———	———	———
Totals				11,687	4,079	15,766

An analysis of this classified statement reveals some curious and suggestive facts. It shows in the first place that the largest single class of exiles (5536 out of 15,766) is composed of women and children who go to Siberia voluntarily with their husbands and fathers.^[10]

It shows, in the second place, that out of the 10,230 persons sent to Siberia as criminals, only 4392, or less than a half, have had a trial by a court, while 5838 are exiled by "administrative process"—that is, by a mere order from the Minister of the Interior.^[11] Finally, it shows that more than one-third of the involuntary exiles (3751 out of 10,230) were sent to Siberia by village communes, and not by the Government.

Every mir, or village commune, in Russia has the right to banish any of its members who, through bad conduct or general worthlessness, have rendered themselves obnoxious to their fellow-citizens and burdensome to society. It has also the right to refuse to receive any of its members who, after serving out terms of imprisonment for crime, return to the mir and ask to be re-admitted. Released prisoners whom the mir will not thus readmit are exiled to Siberia by administrative process.

The political offenders that are exiled to Siberia do not constitute a separate penal class or grade, but are distributed among all of the classes above enumerated. I was not able to obtain full and trustworthy statistics with regard to them from any source of information open to me. A fragmentary record of them has been kept recently by the inspectors of exile transportation, but this record covers only a few years, and includes only "administratives," or persons banished by executive order for political "untrustworthiness." All the rest are classed, both in the reports of the inspectors and in the books of the prikáz, as either hard-labor convicts or penal colonists, and in these classes there is no means of distinguishing state criminals from common felons. There can be no doubt, however, that the number of political offenders is much smaller than it is generally supposed to be. From the annual reports of Colonel Vinokúrof, inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia, it appears that the number of politicals banished by administrative process from 1879 to 1884 is as follows:

1879	145
1880	112
1881	108
1882	88
1883	156
1884	140
	——
6 years	749

This is at an average rate of 125 per annum. If twenty-five more per annum be added for politicals sent to Siberia as hard-labor convicts and penal colonists, and not included in the above table, the whole number deported will make a little less than one per cent. of the total number of exiles; which is probably an approximation to the truth. This estimate, however, does not include Polish insurgents, and it may not hold good for years anterior to 1879. First and last, about 100,000 Poles have been banished, and first and last, a great many thousands of political conspirators. My estimate relates only to the years between 1879 and 1885.

THE TIUMÉN FORWARDING PRISON.

As a general rule, exile to Siberia, under the severer sentences and for felony, involves first, deprivation of all civil rights; second, forfeiture of all property, which, upon the conviction of the criminal, descends to his heirs as if he were dead; and third, severance of all family relations, unless the criminal's family voluntarily accompanies him to his place of exile. If a prisoner's wife and children wish to go with him, they are allowed to do so, and are furnished by the Government with transportation; but if not, the authority of the criminal over his family ceases with his exile, and his wife is at liberty to marry again precisely as if he were dead.

Exiles of all classes are now brought from Kazán to Tiumén either in convict railway trains or in convict barges. The route is precisely the same one that we followed, viz., down the Vólga and up the Káma by steamer to Perm, and thence across the mountains of the Urál to Ekaterínburg and Tiumén by rail. At Tiumén all exiles go into the Tiumén forwarding prison, and lie there, on an average, about two weeks. They are then sent in convict barges down the Írtish and up the Ob to the city of Tomsk.

After our arrest in Perm for merely looking at the outside of a prison, we naturally felt some doubt as to the result of an application for leave to inspect the forwarding prison of Tiumén; but upon presenting my letters of introduction to Mr. Bóris Krásin, the isprávnik or chief police officer of the district, I was received with a cordiality that was as pleasant as it was unexpected. Mr. Krásin invited us to lunch, said that he had already been informed by private and official letters from St. Petersburg of our projected journey through Siberia, and that he would gladly be of service to us in any way possible. He granted without hesitation my request to be allowed to visit the forwarding prison, and promised to go thither with us on the following day. We would find the prison, he said, greatly overcrowded and in bad sanitary condition; but, such as it was, we should see it.

Mr. Krásin was unfortunately taken sick Monday, but, mindful of his promise, he sent us on Tuesday a note of introduction to the warden which he said would admit us to the prison; and about ten o'clock Wednesday morning, accompanied by Mr. Ignátof, a former member of the prison committee, we presented ourselves at the gate. The Tiumén forwarding prison is a rectangular three-story brick building, 75 feet in length by 40 or 50 in width, covered with white stucco and roofed with painted tin. It is situated in a large yard formed by a whitewashed brick wall 12 or 15 feet in height, at each corner of which stands a black-and-white zig-zag-barred sentry-box, and along each face of which paces a sentry carrying a loaded Berdan rifle with fixed bayonet. Against this wall, on the right-hand side of the gate, is a small building used as a prison office, and in front of it stands a post surmounted by a small A-shaped roof under which hangs a bell. A dozen or more girls and old women were sitting on the ground in front of the prison with baskets full of black rye-bread, cold meat, boiled eggs, milk, and fish-pies for sale to the imprisoned exiles. The Tiumén prison was originally built to hold 550 prisoners, but was subsequently enlarged by means of detached barracks so that it could accommodate 850. On the day of our visit, as we were informed by a small blackboard hanging beside the office door, it contained 1741. As we approached the entrance we were stopped by an armed sentry, who, upon being informed that we desired admittance, shouted through a square port-hole in the heavy gate, "Star-she-e-e!" (the usual call for the officer of the day). A corporal or sergeant, with a saber at his side and a Colt's revolver in a holster on his hip, answered the summons, carried our note to the warden, and in a moment we were admitted to the prison yard. Fifty or sixty exiles and convicts were walking aimlessly back and forth in front of the main prison building, or sitting idly in groups here and there on the ground. They were all dressed from head to foot in a costume of gray, consisting of a visorless Scotch cap, a shirt and trousers of coarse homespun linen, and a long gray overcoat with one or two diamond-shaped patches of black or yellow cloth sewn upon the back between the shoulders. Nearly all of them wore leg-fetters, and the air was filled with a

THE COURT-YARD OF THE TIUMÉN PRISON.

peculiar clinking of chains which suggested the continuous jingling of innumerable bunches of keys.

The first kámera or cell that we entered was situated in a one-story log barrack standing against the wall on the left of the gate, and built evidently to receive the overflow from the crowded main building. The room was about 35 feet in length by 25 in width and 12 feet high; its walls of hewn logs were covered with dirty whitewash; its rough plank floor was black with dried mud and hard-trodden filth; and it was lighted by three grated windows looking out into the prison yard. Down the center of the room, and occupying about half its width, ran the sleeping-bench—a wooden platform 12 feet wide and 30 feet long, supported at a height of 2 feet from the floor by stout posts. Each longitudinal half of this low platform sloped a little, roof-wise, from the center, so that when the prisoners slept upon it in two closely packed transverse rows, their heads in the middle were a few inches higher than their feet at the edges. These sleeping-platforms are known as nári, and a Siberian prison cell contains no other furniture except a large wooden tub for excrement. The prisoners have neither pillows, blankets, nor bed-clothing, and must lie on these hard plank nári with no covering but their overcoats. As we entered the cell, the convicts, with a sudden jingling of chains, sprang to their feet, removed their caps, and stood silently in a dense throng around the nári. "Zdrástvuitye rebiáta!" [How do you do, boys?] said the warden. "Zdrávie zheláiem váshe vuisóki blagaródie" [We wish you health, your high nobility], shouted a hundred voices in a hoarse chorus. "The prison," said the warden, "is terribly overcrowded. This cell, for example, is only 35 feet long by 25 wide, and has air space for 35, or at most 40 men. How many men slept here last night?" he inquired, turning to the prisoners.

"A hundred and sixty, your high nobility," shouted half a dozen hoarse voices.

"You see how it is," said the warden, again addressing me. "This cell contains more than four times the number of prisoners that it was intended to hold, and the same condition of things exists throughout the prison." I looked around the cell. There was practically no ventilation whatever, and the air was so poisoned and foul that I could hardly force myself to breathe it. We visited successively in the yard six kámeras or cells essentially like the first, and found in every one of them three or four times the number of prisoners for which it was intended, and five or six times the number for which it had adequate air space. In most of the cells there was not room enough on the sleeping-platforms for all of the convicts, and scores of men slept every night on the foul, muddy floors, under the nári, and in the gangways between them and the walls. Three or four pale, dejected, and apparently sick prisoners crawled out from under the sleeping-platform in one of the cells as we entered.

From the log barracks in the prison yard we went into the main building, which contained the kitchen, the prison workshops, and the hospital, as well as a large number of kámeras, and which was in much worse sanitary condition than the barracks. It was, in fact, a building through which Mr. Ignátof—a former member of the prison committee—declined to accompany us. On each side of the dark, damp, and dirty corridors were heavy wooden doors, opening into cells which varied in size from 8 feet by 10 to 10 by 15, and contained from half a dozen to thirty prisoners. They were furnished with nári, like those in the cells that we had already inspected; their windows were small and heavily grated, and no provision whatever had been made for ventilation. In one of these cells were eight or ten dvoryáne, or "nobles," who seemed to be educated men, and in whose presence the warden removed his hat. Whether any of them were "politicals" or not I do not know; but in this part of the prison the politicals were usually confined. The air in

MAKING UP AN EXILE PARTY IN THE TIUMÉN PRISON.

the corridors and cells, particularly in the second story, was indescribably and unimaginably foul. Every cubic foot of it had apparently been respired over and over again until it did not contain an atom of oxygen; it was laden with fever germs from the unventilated hospital wards, fetid odors from diseased human lungs and unclean human bodies, and the stench arising from unemptied excrement buckets at the ends of the corridors. I breathed as little as I possibly could, but every respiration seemed to pollute me to the very soul, and I became faint from nausea and lack of oxygen. It was like trying to breathe in an underground hospital-drain. The smatrítel, or warden, noticing perhaps that my face had grown suddenly pale, offered me his cigarette case, and said: "You are not accustomed to prison air. Light a cigarette: it will afford some relief, and we will get some wine or vódka presently in the dispensary." I acted upon this suggestion and we continued our investigations. The prison workshops, to which we were next taken, consisted of two small cells in the second story, neither of them more than eight feet square, and neither of them designed for the use to which it had been put. In one, three or four convicts were engaged in cobbling shoes, and in the other an attempt was being made to do a small amount of carpenter's work. The workmen, however, had neither proper tools nor suitable appliances, and it seemed preposterous to call the small cells which they occupied "workshops."

We then went to the prison kitchen, a dark, dirty room in the basement of the main building, where three or four half-naked men were baking black rye-bread in loaves about as large as milk-pans, and boiling soup in huge iron kettles on a sort of brick range. I tasted some of the soup in a greasy wooden bowl which a convict hastily cleaned for me with a wad of dirty flax, and found it nutritious and good. The bread was rather sour and heavy, but not worse than that prepared and eaten by Russian peasants generally. The daily ration of the prisoners consisted of two and a half pounds of this black bread, about six ounces of boiled meat, and two or three ounces of coarsely ground barley or oats, with a bowl of kvas morning and evening for drink.^[12]

After we had examined the workshops, the kitchen, and most of the kámeras in the first and second stories, the smatrítel turned to me and said, "Do you wish to go through the hospital wards?" "Certainly," I replied; "we wish to see everything that there is to be seen in the prison." The warden shrugged his shoulders, as if he could not understand a curiosity which was strong enough to take travelers into a Siberian prison hospital; but, without making any remarks, he led the way up another flight of stone steps to the third story, which was given up entirely to the sick. The hospital wards, which numbered five or six, were larger and lighter than any of the cells that we had previously examined in the main building, but they were wholly unventilated, no disinfectants apparently were used in them, and the air was polluted to the last possible degree. It did not seem to me that a well man could live there a week without becoming infected with disease, and that a sick man should ever recover in that awful atmosphere was inconceivable. In each ward were twelve or fifteen small iron bedsteads, set with their heads to the walls round three sides of the room, and separated one from another by about five feet of space. Each bedstead was furnished with a thin mattress consisting of a coarse gray bed-tick filled with straw, a single pillow, and either a gray blanket or a ragged quilt. Mr. Frost thought that some of the beds were supplied with coarse gray linen sheets and pillow-cases, but I did not notice anything of the kind. Over the head of each bedstead was a small blackboard, bearing in Russian and Latin characters the name of the prisoner's disease and the date of his admission to the hospital. The most common disorders seemed to be scurvy, typhus fever, typhoid fever, acute bronchitis, rheumatism, and syphilis. Prisoners suffering from malignant typhus fever were isolated in a single ward; but with this exception no attempt apparently had been made to group the patients in classes according to the nature of their diseases. Women were separated from the men, and that was all. Never before in my life had I seen faces so white, haggard, and ghastly as those that lay on the gray pillows in these hospital cells. The patients, both men and women, seemed to be not only desperately sick, but hopeless and heart-broken. I could not wonder at it. As I breathed that heavy, stifling atmosphere, poisoned with the breaths of syphilitic and fever-stricken patients, loaded and saturated with the odor of excrement, disease germs, exhalations from unclean human bodies, and foulness inconceivable, it seemed to me that over the hospital doors should be written, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here."^[13]

After we had gone through the women's lying-in ward and the ward occupied by patients suffering from malignant typhus fever, I told the smatrítel that I had seen enough; all I wanted was to get out of doors where I could once more breathe. He conducted us to the dispensary on the ground floor, offered us alcoholic stimulants, and suggested that we allow ourselves to be sprayed with carbolic acid and water. We probably had not been in the prison long enough, he said, to take any infection; but we were unaccustomed to prison air, the hospital was in bad condition, we had visited the malignant typhus fever ward, and he thought the measure that he suggested was nothing more than a proper precaution. We of course assented, and were copiously sprayed from head to foot with dilute carbolic acid, which, after the foulness of the prison atmosphere, seemed to us almost as refreshing as spirits of cologne.

At last, having finished our inspection of the main building, we came out into the prison yard, where I drew a long, deep breath of pure air with the delicious sense of relief that a half-drowned man must feel when he comes to the surface of the water.

"How many prisoners," I asked the warden, "usually die in that hospital in the course of the year?"

"About 300," he replied. "We have an epidemic of typhus almost every fall. What else could you expect when buildings that are barely adequate for the accommodation of 800 persons are made to hold 1800? A prison so overcrowded cannot be kept clean, and as for the air in the cells, you know now what it is like. In the fall it is sometimes much worse. During the summer the windows can be left open, and some ventilation can be secured in that way; but when the weather becomes cold and stormy the windows must be closed, and then there is no ventilation at all. We suffer from it as well as the prisoners. My assistant has only recently recovered from an attack of typhus fever which kept him in bed for six weeks, and he caught the disease in the prison. The local authorities here have again and again urged the Government to make adequate provision for the large number of exiles crowded into this prison during the season of navigation, but thus far nothing has been done beyond the building of two log barracks."

The warden spoke naturally and frankly, as if the facts that he gave me were known to everybody in Tiumén, and as if there was no use in trying to conceal them even from a foreign traveler when the latter had been through the prison and the prison hospital.

From the main prison building we went to the women's prison, which was situated on the other side of the road in

COURT-YARD OF THE WOMEN'S PRISON, TIUMÉN.

a court-yard formed by a high stockade of closely set and sharpened logs. It did not differ much in external appearance from the men's barracks inside the prison-wall, which we had already examined. The kámeras varied in size from 10 feet by 12 to 30 feet by 45, and contained from three to forty women each. They were all clean and well lighted, the floors and sleeping-platforms had been scrubbed to a snowy whiteness, strips of coarse carpet had been laid down here and there in the gangways between the nári, and one cell even had potted plants in the window. The women, like the men, were obliged to sleep in rows on the hard platforms without pillows or blankets, but their cells were not so overcrowded as were those of the men, and the air was infinitely purer. Most of the women seemed to belong to the peasant class; many of them were accompanied by children, and I saw very few hard or vicious faces.

From the women's prison we went to the prison for exiled families, another stockaded log barrack about 75 feet in length which had no cell partitions and which contained nearly 300 men, women, and children. Here again the sleeping-platforms were overcrowded; the air was heavy and foul; dozens of children were crying from hunger or wretchedness; and the men and women looked tired, sleepless, and dejected. None of the women in this barrack were criminals. All were voluntarily going into banishment with their criminal husbands, and most of them were destined for points in Western Siberia.

About one o'clock in the afternoon, after having made as thorough an examination as possible of all the prison buildings, Mr. Frost and I went with Mr. Ignátof to lunch. Knowing that our host was the contractor for the transportation of exiles eastward by barge, and that he had been a prominent member of the Tiumén prison committee, I asked him if the Government in St. Petersburg was aware of the condition of the Tiumén forwarding prison, and of the sickness and misery in which it resulted. He replied in the affirmative. The local authorities, the prison committee, and the inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia had reported upon the condition of the Tiumén prison, he said, every year; but the case of that prison was by no means an exceptional one. New prisons were needed all over European Russia, as well as Siberia, and the Government did not yet feel able financially to make sweeping prison reforms, nor to spend perhaps ten million rubles in the erection of new prison buildings. The condition of the Tiumén prison was, he admitted, extremely bad, and he himself had resigned his place as a member of the prison committee because the Government would not authorize the erection of a new building for use as a hospital. The prison committee had strongly recommended it, and when the Government disapproved the recommendation, he resigned.

In the foregoing pages I have tried to describe the Tiumén forwarding prison as it appears to the senses; I will now describe it as it appears in the official records.

Colonel Vinokúrof, inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia, in his annual report for 1884 refers to it as follows:

The Tiumén forwarding prison and the two wooden buildings of the former étape, taken together, have not cubic air space enough to accommodate more than 550 persons. To these accommodations of the prison proper there may be added, in summer, two cold barracks [not warmed in any way], one in the prison yard and one outside. In each of them may be put 150 persons.

It thus officially appears that the Tiumén forwarding prison, including the log buildings that once constituted the étape and two unwarmed wooden barracks, cannot properly be made to hold more than 850 prisoners. From the table quoted below it may be seen how many prisoners these buildings actually did hold during the exile season from May 1 to October 1, 1884. The figures are from the report of Colonel Vinokúrof above cited.

1884 The prison population was		In May, Days.	In June, Days.	In July, Days.	In August, Days.	In Sept., Days.	Total, Days.
300						2	2
350						2	2
400						7	7
450						7	7
500						3	3
550						2	2
600		6		1	1	3	11
650			1	1		1	3
700		1	1	1	2		5
750			3	4	4		11
800			3	1	2	2	8
850		1	4	3	4	1	11
900		1	1	4	5		11
950		1	3	1			5
1000		1	2	3	6		12
1050		1	4	4	4		10
1100		3	3	4	5		15
1150		1	1	1			3
1200		2	2	2			6
1250		4			1		5
1300		3	1	1			5
1350		2					2
1450		2					2
1500		2					2
1650		1					1
		32	29	31	31	30	153

From this table it appears that the prison began to be overcrowded in May, almost as soon as the great annual flood of exiles began to pour into it from European Russia. It was crowded beyond its normal capacity 24 days in May, 17 days in June, 20 days in July, and 18 days in August; and at the time of the greatest congestion, just before the opening of the season of navigation on the river Ob, it held almost twice the number of prisoners for which it was intended.

The natural result of such overcrowding as this, in old buildings, not properly warmed, ventilated, or drained, is an extremely high death-rate. The following table of sickness and mortality is from the annual report of the inspector of exile transportation for the year 1885.

HOSPITAL RECORD OF TIUMÉN FORWARDING PRISON.

1885. Month.	Average daily number of prisoners.	Average daily number in hospital.	Percent.	Number of deaths.
January	705.2	88.3	12.5	14
February	668.4	62.6	9.3	9
March	670	50	7.4	3
April	823.1	58.5	7.1	2
May	1200	60.6	5	10
June	1278.6	78.2	6.1	18
July	963.5	78	7.8	18
August	431.3	46	3.2[14]	20
September	346.6	34.3	9.9	15
October	682.8	48	7	8
November	964	71.6	7.4	12
December	709	89.8	12.6	20

Average daily number of prisoners for the year, 786. Total number of deaths, 182. Death rate, 23.1 per cent.

The significance of the figures in the foregoing table will become apparent if the reader will take into consideration the fact that the average death-rate in English towns is from 1.9 to 2.5 per cent. Even in the most benighted and unheathful parts of Siberia, where there are no physicians, where the peasants are densely ignorant, and where no attention whatever is paid to the laws of health, the death-rate rarely exceeds 6 per cent. In the Tiumén forwarding prison in 1885 it was 23.1 per cent. Nor was the year 1885 an exceptional year in the sense of being worse than usual. On the contrary, that year, regarded from the point of view of vital statistics, seems to have been a better one than usual. Below will be found another table, also taken from the annual report of the inspector of exile transportation, containing statistics of sickness and death in the same prison for the year 1884.

HOSPITAL RECORD OF TIUMÉN FORWARDING PRISON.

1884. Month.	Average daily number of prisoners.	Average daily number in hospital.	Percent.	Deaths.
January	552.3	64.3	11.8	13
February	543.62	62.7	11.5	3
March	553	50	9	4
April	575.8	37	6.4	5
May	1105	48	4.3	7
June	989.5	53.2	5.4	26
July	978	58.8	6	39
August	938	68.2	7.3	48
September	521	42	8	16
October	472	58.4	12.3	9
November	771	75	9.8	11
December	899	129	14.3	38

Average daily number of prisoners for the year, 741. Total number of deaths, 219. Death rate, 29.5 per cent.

Such an annual death-rate as this is not to be found, I believe, outside the Russian empire, in all the civilized world. In the prisons of France the average death-rate is about 3.8 per cent., in the prisons of Austria 3.5 per cent., in the prisons of Belgium and Denmark 1.8 per cent., in the prisons of the United States 1.7 to 2 per cent., and in the prisons of England 1.4 per cent. In the Tiumén forwarding prison the average death-rate was 29.5 per cent., or almost 300 per thousand.

But the mortality in the Tiumén prison has been, at times, even greater than this. Below will be found a table that I have compiled from the annual reports of the inspectors of exile transportation for the eleven-year period from the 1st of January, 1876, to the 1st of January, 1887.^[15]

DEATH-RATE IN TIUMÉN FORWARDING PRISON

FOR ELEVEN-YEAR PERIOD FROM 187G TO 1886 INCLUSIVE.

Year.	Whole number of prisoners for year.	Average daily umber of prisoners.	Whole number of deaths.	Percentage of deaths.
1876	20,482	813	284	34.9
1877	19,042	756	279	36.9
1878	19,972	793	329	41.4
1879	20,174	801	354	44.1
1880	19,975	793	256	32.2
1881	19,063	757	219	29.9
1882	18,580	738	175	23.7
1883	22,010	874	311	35.5
1884	21,014	834	224[16]	26.8
1885	19,250	764	182	23.8
1886	19,016	755	254	33.6

From the above table it appears that, in the course of the eleven-year period from 1876 to 1886 inclusive, the death-rate in the Tiumén forwarding prison ranged from 23.7 per cent. to 44.1 per cent.; and that in seven years out of the eleven it was higher than 30 per cent. This would completely annihilate a fixed population in from two and a half to four years. The record of our convict camps, and the history of our leased-convict system in North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana—shocking and shameful as that record is—cannot parallel this rate of mortality. According to Mr. Cable, whose researches in the field of leased-convict labor are well known, the annual death-rate amongst leased convicts working on railroads in North Carolina in 1879 was a little less than 11.5 per cent.—a death-rate, he remarks, higher than that of the city of New Orleans during the great epidemic of yellow fever in 1853. And yet this rate is only a quarter as high as the death-rate in the Tiumén forwarding prison that very same year of 1879.

It has been said to me repeatedly, since the publication of my magazine articles upon this subject, that "there are prisons in America as bad as any that you have described in Russia." This remark has been made to me even by American prison officials. I should like to know in what part of the United States such prisons are situated. Some American prisons, I know, are bad enough, and I have no desire to excuse or palliate their evils; but when an American says that they are as bad as the Tiumén forwarding prison, he does not know, or does not appreciate, the state of affairs in the latter.

In the year 1885 Dr. P. D. Sims, chairman of the prison committee of the Tennessee State Board of Health, made a report to the president of that board upon the condition of the convicts in the Tennessee State prisons under the so-called "lease system." In this report he showed that among the prisoners in the branch prisons at Coal Creek and Tracy City the death-rate ranged from 10 to 14 per cent. per annum, or from 105 to 147 per annum per thousand. After quoting the statistics in detail he said:

Before these figures humanity stands aghast and our boasted civilization must hide her face in shame. We are appalled at their enormity. We fain would throw over them the mantle of eternal oblivion and forever hide them from the gaze of the civilized world; but we must not. They are our own published records, made by ourselves for ourselves. The once proud State of Tennessee, chivalrous and public-spirited, stands to-day before the world a self-convicted murderer; and her victims are her own sons and daughters. Prison mortality should run from 8 to 25 per thousand per annum, whereas ours has reached the startling height of 147 per thousand per annum. If by a humane and well-regulated penal system prison mortality is reduced to an average of 15 per thousand per annum, then the system that shows a mortality of 147 per thousand is responsible for the murder of 132 per annum of every thousand in its charge.^[17]

I would ask the gentlemen who think that some American prisons are as bad as any that I have described, to compare the Coal Creek and Tracy City statistics with the records of Tiumén. Dr. Sims declares that "before a death-rate of 147 per thousand per annum humanity stands aghast." What, then, must be said of a death-rate that ranges from 230 per thousand to 440 per thousand? Between 1876 and 1887 there was not a single year in which the death-rate in the Tiumén forwarding prison was not more than double that in the Tennessee prisons, and in 1878 and 1879 it was more than three times the Tennessee rate. If, to adopt the metaphor of the Chattanooga surgeon, "Civilization hides her face in shame" at a death-rate of 147 per thousand, by what gesture or attitude shall she express her humiliation when shown in Russia a death-rate of 440 per thousand?

It may be said that the cases are not parallel, for the reason that the population of the Tiumén forwarding prison is composed largely of young children, who, by reason of their tender age, are more susceptible to disease and more likely to die than the mature convicts in Tennessee. This may be a good and sufficient explanation of a part of the difference between a death-rate of 147 and a death-rate of 440; but it is by no means a good defense against the charge of inhumanity. If it be cruel and shameful to kill grown criminals by subjecting them to murderous sanitary conditions, how much more cruel and shameful it is to put to death in that way innocent children, whose only crime is their helpless dependence upon exiled parents.

Readers who are familiar with the constant relation that exists between a high death-rate on the one hand, and overcrowding, filth, foul air, bad food, and bad sanitary conditions generally on the other, will not, I think, regard my description of the Tiumén forwarding prison as exaggerated, when they read it in the light of an officially admitted death-rate ranging from 23 to 44 per cent.—a death-rate which, to adopt the words of Mr. Cable, "exceeds that of any pestilence that ever fell on Europe in the Middle Ages."

 

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1. Poln. Sobr. Zakonof, tom. I. Ulozhenie, gl. XIX, p. 13. [Full Collection of Russian Laws, Vol. I. Penal Code, Ch. XIX, p. 13.]
2. Izsledovániya o Protsénte Sóslannikh v Sibir; E. N. Anúchina; Vedénie. [An Investigation of the Percentages of Siberian Exiles; by E. N. Anuchin; Introduction.] Memoirs of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Statistical Section, St. Petersburg, 1873.
3. Full Collection of Russian Laws, Vol. I, Nos. 105, 343, and 441, and Vol. II, Nos. 772, 970, 1002, and 1004.
4. The snuff-taker was not only banished to Siberia, but had the septum between his nostrils torn out.
5. This was punished as a Western or European innovation. The old Russian driver had been accustomed to ride his horse or run beside it.
6. Full Collection of Russian Laws, Vol. VIII, Nos. 5611, 5632, 5441, and Vol. IX, No. 6406. See also a paper entitled "Exile in Russia in the Seventeenth Century," by Professor Sergéyefski, read at the annual meeting of the St. Petersburg Juridical Society, March 8, 1887.
7. Full Collection of Russian Laws, Vol. XIII, Nos. 10,086 and 9643, and Vol. XV, No. 11,116.
8. Count Speránski, for example, refers to a case in which a peasant from the Russian province of Kostromá was condemned to forced colonization for having innocently bought a stolen horse. Through confusion and error he was not set at liberty in Siberia, as he ought to have been, but was transported as a murderer to the Berózef mines, where he worked twenty-three years underground. See Speránski's explanation of his projected "Exile Statutes," Vostóchnoe Obozrénie, No. 7, 1887, p. 2.
   As an illustration of the extent to which caprice was carried, it is only necessary to refer to one of the many arbitrary acts of the notorious Siberian governor Tréskin. Taking a spite, for some reason, against one of the councilors of the Kazónaya Paláta, or State Chamber, Tréskin banished the latter from the province of Irkútsk, with instructions that he should not be allowed to live more than ten days in any one place. The unfortunate exile spent the remainder of his life in wandering aimlessly about Siberia. Sibir i Kátorga [Siberia and Penal Servitude], S. Maximof, St. Petersburg, 1871, Vol. Ill, p. 8.
9. The statistics of exile in this chapter are all from official sources, as are also the facts, unless otherwise stated.
10. The records of the Bureau of Exile Administration for the four years ending with the year of my visit to Siberia show that the numbers and percentages of women and children who voluntarily accompanied their husbands and fathers to Siberia are as follows:

    Year.	Whole number of exiles.			Women and children.		Percentage.
    1882	16,945				5,276	31
    1883	19,314				6,311	33
    1884	17,824				6,067	34
    1885	18,843				5,536	28
    	———				———	—
    Totals	72,926				23,190	31

     

11. The proportion of the judicially sentenced to the administratively banished varies little from year to year. In the ten-year period from 1867 to 1876 inclusive, there were sent to Siberia 151,585 exiles; 48.80 per cent. went under sentences of courts, and 51.20 per cent. were banished by administrative process. In the seven-year period from 1880 to 1886 inclusive, there passed through the Tiumén forwarding prison 120,065 exiles, of whom 64,513, or 53.7 per cent., had been tried and condemned by courts, and 55,552, or 46.3 per cent., had been banished by orders from the Minister of the Interior. A prison reform commission appointed by Alexander II. in the latter part of the last decade reported that on an average 45.6 per cent. of all the exiles sent to Siberia went under sentences of courts, and 54.4 per cent. were banished by administrative process.
12. According to the report of the inspector of exile transportation for 1884, the cost to the Government for the food furnished each prisoner in the Tiumén forwarding prison is 3+¹⁄₂ cents a day (7 kopéks). Prisoners belonging to the privileged classes (including politicals) receive food that costs the Government 5 cents a day per man. Of course the quality of a daily ration that costs only 3+¹⁄₂ cents cannot he very high.
13. The cost of the maintenance of each patient in the hospital of the Tiumén forwarding prison in 1884, including food, medicines, etc., was 27 cents a day. The dead were buried at an expense of $1.57 each. [Report of inspector of exile transportation for 1884.]
14. Error in original report. Should be 11.3.
15. The average daily number of prisoners is computed from the total annual number upon the basis of 14½ days' detention for every prisoner. This is not absolutely correct, but the error, as may be seen by comparison with the foregoing tables, is not great enough to make any material difference.
16. As regards this number there is a discrepancy in the original report which I am unable to rectify. In one table it is given as 219, in the other 224.
17. Report of Dr. P. D. Sims, chairman of the prison committee of the Tennessee State Board of Health, dated Chattanooga, January 6, 1885. Nashville Weekly Banner, January 29, 1885.