Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter V
CHAPTER V
A SIBERIAN CONVICT BARGE
THE town of Tiumén, and the province of Tobólsk in which it is situated, have much more commercial importance than is generally supposed. Siberian cold and Siberian desolation have been so much talked and written about, and have been brought so forcibly to the attention of the world by the terrible experience of De Long and the survivors of the Jeannette, that nine readers out of ten, in forming a conception of the country, give undue prominence to its arctic side and its winter aspect. When, in conversation since my return, I have happened to refer to Siberian tobacco, Siberian orchids, or Siberian camels, my remarks have even been received with smiles of incredulity. I do not know any better way to overthrow the erroneous popular conception of Siberia than to assail it with facts and statistics, even at the risk of being wearisome. I will therefore say, briefly, that the province of Tobólsk, which is the part of Siberia with which a traveler from Europe first becomes acquainted, extends from the coast of the arctic ocean to the sun-scorched steppes of Semipalátinsk and Akmolínsk, and from the mountains of the Urál to the boundary line of Yeniséisk and Tomsk. It has an area of 590,000 square miles and includes 27,000,000 acres of arable land. It contains 8 towns of from 3000 to 20,000 inhabitants, and its total population exceeds 1,200,000. In the last year for which I was able to get statistics the province produced 30,044,880 bushels of grain and 3,778,230 bushels of potatoes, and contained 2,647,000 head of live stock. It sends annually to European Russia enormous quantities of raw products, such as hides, tallow, bristles, furs, birds' skins, flax, and hemp; it forwards more than 2,000,000 pounds of butter to
Constantinople by way of Rastof, on the Don; and there is held within its limits, at Irbit, a commercial fair whose transactions amount annually to 35,000,000 rubles ($17,500,000). The manufacturing industries of the province, although still in their infancy, furnish employment to 6252 persons and put annually upon the market goods to the value of 8,517,000 rúbles. Besides the workmen employed in the regular manufacturing establishments, the urban population includes 27,000 mechanics and skilled laborers. Cottage industries are carried on extensively throughout the province, and produce annually, among other things, 50,000 rugs and carpets; 1,500,000 fathoms of fish netting; 2,140,000 yards of linen cloth; 50,000 barrels; 70,000 telégas and sleighs; leather manufactures to the value of 2,500,000 rúbles; and quantities of dressed furs, stockings, mittens, belts, scarfs, laces, and ornamented towels and sheets. The quantity of fish caught annually along the Ob and its tributaries is estimated at 8000 tons, and salt to the amount of 3000 tons is used in curing it. Tiumén, which is the most important town in the province, stands on a navigable branch of the vast Ob river system, through which it has steam communication with the greater part of Western Siberia, from Semipalátinsk and Tomsk to the shores of the arctic ocean. Fifty-eight steamers ply on the Ob and its tributaries, most of them between Tomsk and Tiumén, and through the latter city is transported annually merchandise to the value of thirty or forty million rúbles. Sixteen million rúbles' worth of Siberian products are brought every year to the Nízhni Nóvgorod fair, and in exchange for this mass of raw material European Russia sends annually to Siberia nearly 300,000 tons of manufactured goods.
It cannot, I think, be contended that a country which furnishes such statistics as these is an arctic desert or an uninhabited waste.
On the next day after our arrival in Tiumén the weather furnished us with convincing evidence of the fact that the Siberian summer climate, although sometimes as mild and delightful as that of California, is fickle and untrustworthy. During the night the wind changed suddenly to the northeast, and a furious storm of cold, driving rain swept down across the tundras from the coast of the arctic ocean, turning the unpaved and unsewered streets of the city to lakes of liquid mud, and making it practically impossible to go out of doors. We succeeded, with the aid of a droshky, in getting to the post-office and back, and devoted the remainder of the day to reading, and to writing letters. On Saturday, during lulls in the storm, we walked and rode about the city, but saw little to reward us for our trouble. The muddy, unpaved streets did not differ much in appearance from the streets of the villages through which we had passed, except
that some of them had plank sidewalks, and the unpainted log houses with high, steep, pyramidal roofs were larger and more pretentious. There was the same absence of trees, shrubbery, front yards and front doors which we had noticed in all of the Siberian villages; and but for the white-walled and green-domed churches, which gave it a certain air of picturesqueness, the town would have been commonplace and uninteresting.
The only letter of introduction we had to deliver in Tiumén was from a Russian gentleman in St. Petersburg to Mr. Slovtsóf, director of the reálnoi uchílishche, an institution that is known in Germany as a "real schule." Saturday afternoon, the storm having broken, we presented this letter and were received by Mr. Slovtsóf with great cordiality. The educational institution over which he presides is a scientific and technical school similar in plan to the Institute of Technology in Boston. It occupies the largest and finest edifice in the city—a substantial two-story structure of white-stuccoed brick, nearly twice as large as the Executive Mansion in Washington. This building was erected and equipped at a cost of $85,000 by one of Tiumén's wealthy and public-spirited merchants, and was then presented to the city as a gift. One would hardly expect to find such a school in European Russia, to say nothing of Siberia, and indeed one might look far without finding such a school even in the United States. It has a mechanical department, with a steam engine, lathes, and tools of all kinds; a department of physics, with fine apparatus, including even the Bell, Edison, and Dolbear telephones and the phonograph; a chemical laboratory, with a more complete equipment than I have ever seen, except in the Boston Institute of Technology; a department of art and mechanical drawing; a good library, and an excellent museum—the latter containing, among other things, 900 species of wild flowers collected in the vicinity of the city. It is, in short, a school that would be in the highest degree creditable to any city of similar size in the United States.
From Mr. Slovtsóf we obtained the address of Mr. Jacob B. Wardropper, a Scotch gentleman who had for twenty years or more been engaged in business in Siberia; and feeling sure that Mr. Wardropper
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"VOLUNTARY EXILES."
(DOBROVÓLNI.)
would be glad to see any one from the western world, we ventured to call upon him without the formality of an introduction. We were received by the whole family with the most warm-hearted hospitality, and their house was made almost a home to us during the remainder of our stay in the city.
On the morning after our first visit to the Tiumén forwarding prison we had an opportunity of seeing the departure of a marching exile party. We went to the prison merely for the purpose of getting a sketch or a photograph of it, but happened to be just in time to see a party of 360 men, women, and children set out on foot for Yalútorfsk. Our attention was first attracted by a great crowd of people standing in the street outside the prison wall. As we drew nearer, the crowd resolved itself into a hundred or more women and children in bright-colored calico gowns, with kerchiefs over their heads, and about 250 men dressed in the gray exile costume, all standing close together in a dense throng, surrounded by a cordon of soldiers. In the street near them were fifteen or twenty one-horse telégas, or small four-wheeled wagons, some piled high with the gray bags in which exiles carry their spare clothing and personal property, and some filled with men, women, and children, who, by reason of age, weakness, or infirmity, could not walk. It seemed surprising to me that anybody should be able to walk after a week's confinement in that prison. The air was filled with a continuous hum of voices as the exiles talked eagerly with one another, and occasionally we could hear the wail of a sick child from one of the telégas, or a faint jingle of chains as some of the men, tired of standing, changed their positions or threw themselves on the ground. The officer in charge of the party, a heavily built man with yellowish side-whiskers, light-blue eyes, and a hard, unsympathetic face, stood near the telégas, surrounded by women and children, who were begging him to let them ride.
"Please put my little girl in a wagon," said one pale-faced woman, as I approached the group. "She is n't ten years old and she has a lame ankle; she can never walk thirty versts."
"What 's the matter with her ankle?" inquired the officer impatiently, looking down at the child's thin bare feet and legs.
"I don't know; she says it hurts her," replied the mother. "Please let her ride, for God's sake!"
"She can't ride, I tell you—there's no room," said the officer, still more impatiently. "I don't believe there's 
"Stupái!" [Move on!], he said sternly to the child; "you can pick flowers better if you walk."
The mother and the child shrank away without a word, and the officer, to escape further importunities, shouted the order to "Form ranks!" The hum of conversation suddenly ceased; there was a jingling of chains as the prisoners who had been lying on the ground sprang to their feet; the soldiers of the guard shouldered their rifles; the exiles crossed themselves devoutly, bowing in the direction of the prison chapel; and at the word "March!" the whole column was instantly in motion. Three or four Cossacks, in dark-green uniforms and with rifles over their shoulders, took the lead; a dense but disorderly throng of men and women followed, marching between thin, broken lines of soldiers; next came the telégas with the old, the sick, and the small children; then a rear-guard of half a dozen Cossacks; and finally four or five wagons piled high with gray bags. Although the road was soft and muddy, in five minutes the party was out of sight. The last sounds I heard were the jingling of chains and the shouts of the Cossacks to the children to keep within the lines. These exiles were nearly all persons banished by Russian communes, and were destined for towns and villages in the southern part of the province of Tobólsk.[2]
Having witnessed the departure of one of the marching parties, we went down Saturday afternoon to the steamer-landing to see the embarkment of 700 exiles for Tomsk. Criminals destined for points in Eastern Siberia are transported from Tiumén to Tomsk in convict barges, furnished for the purpose by a wealthy firm of contractors, and towed back and forth by their passenger steamers. The contractors, at the time of our journey to Siberia, were Kurbátof and Ignátof, steamboat proprietors of Tiumén. The convict barges are three in number, and during the season of navigation, which lasts from May until October, they make, on an average, six round trips each, or eighteen trips altogether. In 1884, the first barge left Tiumén on the 27th of May and the last one reached Tomsk on the 4th of October. The voyage between the two cities occupies from seven to ten days according to the season of the year and the stage of the water. In 1884, the shortest voyage was seven days and six hours, and the longest ten days and nine hours. The number of convicts and exiles transported by these barges from Tiumén to Tomsk in the five years from 1880 to 1884 inclusive was reported by the inspector of exile transportation as follows.
| Year | Received in Tiumén. |
Delivered in Tomsk. |
| 1880 | 10,243 | 10,269 |
| 1881 | 10,757 | 10,462 |
| 1882 | 10,630 | 10,245 |
| 1883 | 10,726 | 11,049 |
| 1884 | 10,229 | 10,692 |
| Totals | 52,585 | 52,717[3] |
The contract for the transportation of exiles from Tiumén to Tomsk, which was made with Kurbátof & Ignátof in 1882, provides that the contractors shall furnish three barges large enough to accommodate 600 prisoners each, and that such barges shall make eighteen trips between terminal points in the course of every season of navigation. The contract, therefore, requires the transportation of 10,800 exiles per annum. The average number actually carried in the five years covered by the foregoing table was 10,543 per annum, and at that rate the average barge-load would be 586 persons. Owing, however, to circumstances beyond the control of the contractors and the local authorities in Tiumén, it becomes necessary, at certain times, to despatch the barges only half loaded, and at other times to crowd them to the very point of suffocation. In 1884, for example, the barge-loads ranged from 334 to 797. The
A, Men's cage; B, Women's cage; C, Hospital cells and dispensary; D, Officers' quarters and cells for privileged class; E, Cook's galley.
F, Cabin for hard-labor convicts (men); G, Cabin for exiles and penal colonists (men); H, Women's cabin; a, b, Nares, or sleeping-platforms.
D D, Deck-houses; G, Sleeping-cabin; a, b, Cross-section of sleeping-platforms.
latter number was probably more than twice as great as could be comfortably accommodated in a vessel of such form and dimensions.
The convict barge which lay at the Tiumén steam-boat-landing on Saturday, June 27th, and which we were permitted to inspect, did not differ much in general appearance from an ordinary ocean steamer, except that it drew less water and had no rigging. The black iron hull was about 220 feet in length by 30 in width, pierced by a horizontal line of small rectangular port-holes which opened into the sleeping-cabins on the lower deck. The upper deck supported two large yellow deck-houses about 75 feet apart, one of which contained three or four hospital wards and a dispensary, and the other, quarters for the officers of the convoy and a few cells for exiles belonging to the noble or privileged class. The space between the deck-houses was roofed over and inclosed on each side by a coarse network of heavy iron wire, so as to make a cage 30 feet wide and 75 feet long, where the prisoners could walk and breathe the fresh air. This cage, which is known to the common-criminal exiles as the "chicken-coop," was divided by a network partition into two compartments of unequal size, the smaller of which was intended for the women and children and the larger for the men. Companion-ladders
led down into the sleeping cabins, of which there were three or four, varying in length from 30 to 60 feet, with a uniform width of 30 feet and a height of about 7. One of these cabins was occupied by the women and children, and the others were given up to the men. Through the center of each cabin ran longitudinally two tiers of double sleeping-platforms, precisely like those in the Tiumén prison kámeras, upon which the exiles lay athwart-ship in four closely packed rows, with their heads together over the line of the keel. Along each side of the barge ran two more tiers of nári, upon which the prisoners lay lengthwise head to feet, in rows four or five wide. A reference to the plan and section of the barge will, I think, render this description of the interior of the sleeping-cabins fairly intelligible. The vessel had been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected after its return from a previous trip to Tomsk, and the air in the cabins was pure and sweet.
The barge lay at a floating landing-stage of the type with which we had become familiar on the rivers Vólga and Káma, and access to it was gained by means of a zigzag wooden bridge sloping down to it from the high bank of the river. When we reached the landing, a dense throng of exiles, about one-third of whom were women, were standing on the bank waiting to embark. They were surrounded by a cordon of soldiers, as usual, and non-commissioned officers were stationed at intervals of twenty or thirty feet on the bridge leading down to the landing-stage. I persuaded Colonel Vinokúrof, inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia, to delay the embarkment a little, in order that we might take photographs of the exiles and the barge. As soon as this had been accomplished the order was given to "Let them go on board," and the prisoners, shouldering their gray bags, walked one by one down the sloping bridge to the landing-stage. More than three-fourths of the men were in leg-fetters, and for an hour there was a continuous clinking of chains as the prisoners passed me on their way to the barge. The exiles, although uniformly clad in gray, presented, from an ethnological point of view, an extraordinary diversity of types, having been collected evidently from all parts of the vast empire. There were fierce, wild-looking mountaineers from Daghestán and Circassia, condemned to penal servitude for murders of blood-revenge; there were Tatárs from the lower Vólga, who had been sunburned until they were almost as black as negroes; Turks from the Crimea, whose scarlet fezzes contrasted strangely with their gray convict overcoats; crafty-looking Jews from Podólia, going into exile for smuggling; and finally, common peasants in great numbers from all parts of European Russia. The faces of the prisoners generally were not as hard, vicious, and depraved as the faces of 
or malignant. At last all were on board; the sliding doors of the network cages were closed and secured with heavy padlocks, and a regular Russian bazar opened on the landing-stage. Male and female peddlers to the number of forty or fifty were allowed to come down to the side of the barge to sell provisions to the prisoners, most of whom seemed to be in possession of money. In one place might be seen a half-grown girl passing hard-boiled eggs one by one through the interstices of the network; in another, a gray-haired old woman was pouring milk through a tin tube into a tea-pot held by a convict on the inside of the cage; and all along the barge men were buying or bargaining for loaves of black rye-bread, salted cucumbers, pretzels, and fish turnovers. The peddlers seemed to have perfect trust in the convicts, and often passed in food to them before they had received pay for it. The soldiers of the gnard, who were good-looking, fresh-faced young fellows, facilitated the buying and selling as far as possible by handing in the provisions and handing out the money, or by opening the sliding doors for the admission of such bulky articles as loaves of bread, which could not be passed through the network.
While we stood looking at this scene of busy traffic, a long-haired Russian priest in a black gown and a broad-brimmed felt hat crossed the landing-stage and entered one of the deck-houses, followed by an acolyte bearing his robes and a prayer-book. In a few moments, having donned his ecclesiastical vestments, he entered the women's cage, with a smoking censer in one hand and an open book in the other, and began a molében, or service of prayer. The women all joined devoutly in the supplications, bowing, crossing themselves, kneeling, and even pressing their foreheads to the deck. The priest hurried through the service, however, in a perfunctory manner, swung the censer back and forth a few times so as to fill the compartment with fragrant smoke, and then went into the men's cage. There much less interest seemed to be taken in the services. The convicts and soldiers removed their caps, but only a few joined in the prayer, and buying and selling went on without interruption all along the side of the barge. The deep-voiced chanting of the priest mingling with the high-pitched rattle of chains, the chaffering of peddlers, and the shouting of orders to soldiers on the roof of the cage produced a most strange and incongruous
effect. Finally, the service ended, the priest took off his vestments, wished the commanding officer of the convoy a pleasant voyage, and returned to the city, while Mr. Frost and I walked back and forth on the landing-stage studying the faces of the prisoners. With few exceptions the latter seemed cheerful and happy, and in all parts of the cage we could hear laughter, joking, and animated conversation. Mr. Frost finally began making sketches in his note-book of some of the more striking of the convict types on the other side of the network. This soon attracted the attention of the prisoners, and amidst great laughter and merriment they began dragging forward and arranging, in what they regarded as artistic poses, the convicts whom they thought most worthy of an artist's pencil. Having selected a subject,
they would place him in all sorts of studiously careless and negligent attitudes, comb and arrange the long hair on the unshaven side of his head, try the effect of a red fez or an embroidered Tatar cap, and then shout suggestions and directions to the artist. This arranging of figures and groups for Mr. Frost to draw seemed to afford them great amusement, and was accompanied with as much joking and laughter as if they were school-boys off for a picnic, instead of criminals bound for the mines.
At last, just after sunset, a steamer made fast to the barge, the order was given to cast off the lines, the exiles all crowded against the network to take a parting look at Tiumén, and the great black-and-yellow floating prison moved slowly out into the stream and began its long voyage to Tomsk.
- ↑ All children twelve years of age and upward, without regard to sex, are expected to march if well. Children less than twelve years of age are carried in rude one-horse carts.
- ↑ I shall describe fully in a later chapter the life of marching exile parties on the road. I did not have a favorable opportunity to study it until I reached Tomsk.
- ↑ A few were taken or left every year at Tobólsk and other way places.