Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter VII

by George Kennan

CHAPTER VII

THE GREAT KÍRGHIS STEPPE

Omsk, which is a city of about 30,000 inhabitants, is the capital of the óblast of Akmolínsk, and the seat of government of the steppe territories.^[1] It is an administrative rather than a commercial or a manufacturing town, and its population is largely composed of officials and clerks employed in the various Government bureaus and departments. It has a few noticeable public buildings, among which are the enormous white "cadet school," the house of the governor-general, the police station,—a rather picturesque log building, surmounted by a fire-alarm tower,—and the krépast, or fortress. The streets of the city are wide and unpaved; the dwelling-houses are made generally of logs; there is the usual number of white-walled churches and cathedrals with green, blue, or golden domes; and every building that would attract a traveler's attention belongs to the Government. If I were asked to characterize Omsk in a few words, I should describe it as a city of 30,000 inhabitants, in which the largest building is a military academy and the most picturesque building a police station; in which there is neither a newspaper nor a public library, and in which one-half the population wears the Tsar's uniform and makes a business of governing the other half. The nature of the relations between the latter half and the former may be inferred from the fact that an intelligent and reputable citizen of this chinóvnik-dominated city, who had been kind and useful to us, said to me, when he bade me good-by, "Mr. Kennan, if you find

POLICE STATION AND FIRE TOWER IN OMSK.

it necessary to speak of me by name in your book, please don't speak of me favorably."

"For Heaven's sake, why not?" I inquired.

"Because," he replied, "I don't think your book will be altogether pleasing to the Government; and if I am mentioned favorably in it, I shall be harried by the officials here more than I am now. My request may seem to you absurd, but it is the only favor I have to ask."^[2]

We found in Omsk very little that was either interesting or instructive. The city was the place of exile of a well-known and talented Russian author named Petropávlovski, but as we were not aware of the fact we missed an opportunity to make the acquaintance of a man whose wide and thorough knowledge of Russian life, as well as of the exile system, might have been in the highest degree useful to us.^[3] The only letter of introduction that I had to deliver in Omsk was a brief note from the editor of a newspaper in St. Petersburg to Colonel Paivtsóf, president of the West Siberian branch of the Imperial Geographical Society. The latter received me very cordially, gave me some useful information with regard to the comparative merits of different routes from Semipalátinsk to Tomsk, and went with me to see the little museum connected with the Geographical Society, which, apparently, was the only evidence of culture that the city afforded. Mr. Frost, meanwhile, made explorations in the neighborhood; discovered and sketched a wretched suburb north of the river Om, which seemed to be inhabited chiefly by poor, common criminal exiles, and made the drawing of the police station that is reproduced on page 141. I tried to find the ostróg^[4] where the gifted Russian novelist Dostoyéfski spent so many years of penal servitude and where, according to the testimony of his fellow prisoners, he was twice flogged^[5] but I was told that it had long before been torn down.

I did not wonder that the Government should have

THE EXILE SUBURB—OMSK.

wished to tear down walls that had witnessed such scenes of misery and cruelty as those described in Dostoyéfski's "Notes from a House of the Dead." There was one other building in Omsk that we desired to inspect, namely, the prison that had taken the place of the old ostróg; but we were treated with such contemptuous discourtesy by the governor of the territory when we called upon him and asked

A KÍRGHIS ENCAMPMENT.

permission to examine it, that we could only retire without even having taken seats in his High Excellency's office.

On Wednesday, July 8th, having fully recovered from the fatigue of our journey from Tiumén, we left Omsk with three post horses and a Cossack driver for Semipalátinsk. The road between the two cities runs everywhere along the right bank of the Írtish through a line of log villages which do not differ essentially in appearance from those north of Omsk, but which are inhabited almost exclusively by Cossacks. Whenever the Russian Government desires to strengthen a weak frontier line so as to prevent the incursions of hostile or predatory natives, it forcibly colonizes along that line a few hundred or a few thousand families of armed Cossacks. During the last century it formed in this way the "armed line of the Térek," to protect southeastern Russia from the raids of the Caucasian mountaineers, and a similar armed line along the Írtish, to hold in check the Kírghis. The danger that was apprehended from these half-wild tribes long ago passed away, but the descendants of the Cossack colonists still remain in the places to which their parents or their grandparents were transported. They have all the hardy virtues of pioneers and frontiersmen, are ingenious, versatile, and full of resources, and adapt themselves quickly to almost any environment. There are thirty or forty settlements of such Cossacks along the line of the Írtish between Omsk and Semipalátinsk, and as many more between Semipalátinsk and the Altái.

Almost immediately after leaving Omsk we noticed a great change in the appearance of the country. The steppe, which in the province of Tobólsk had been covered either with fresh green grass or with a carpet of flowers, here became more bare and arid, and its vegetation was evidently withering and drying up under the fierce heat of the midsummer sun. Flowers were still abundant in low places along the river, and we crossed now and then wide areas of grass that was still green, but the prevailing color of the high steppe was a sort of old-gold—a color like that of ripe wheat. The clumps of white-stemmed birch trees, that had diversified and given a park-like character to the scenery north of Omsk, became less and less frequent; cultivated fields disappeared altogether, and the steppe assumed more and more the aspect of a Central Asiatic desert.

A few stations beyond Omsk, we saw and visited for the first time an aül [encampment] of the wandering Kírghis, a pastoral tribe of natives who roam with their flocks and herds over the plains of southwestern Siberia from the Caspian Sea to the mountains of the Altái, and who make up more than three-fourths of the population of the steppe territories. The aül consisted of only three or four small kibítkas, or circular tents of gray felt, pitched close together at a distance from the road in the midst of the great ocean-like expanse of dry, yellowish grass which stretched away in every direction to the horizon. There was no path leading to or from the encampment, and the little gray tents, standing alone on that boundless plain, seemed to be almost as much isolated, and as far removed from all civilized human interests, as if they were so many frail skin coracles floating in the watery solitude of the Pacific.

It was evident from the commotion caused by our approach that the encampment had not often been visited. The swarthy, half-naked children, who had been playing out on the grass, fled in affright to the shelter of the tents as they saw our tárantás coming towards them across the steppe; women rushed out to take a startled look at us and then disappeared; and even the men, who gathered in a group to meet us, appeared to be surprised and a little alarmed by our visit. A few words in Kírghis, however, from our Cossack driver reassured them, and upon the invitation of an old man in a red-and-yellow skull-cap, who seemed to be the patriarch of the band, we entered one of the kibítkas. It was a circular tent about fifteen feet in diameter and eight feet high, made by covering a dome-shaped framework of smoke-blackened poles with large overlapping sheets of heavy gray felt. The slightly curved rafters which formed the roof radiated like the spokes of a wheel from a large wooden ring in the center of the dome, and were supported around the circumference of the tent by a skeleton wall of wooden lattice-work in which there was a hinged door. The ring in the center of the dome outlined the aperture left for the escape of smoke and the admission of air, and directly under this aperture a fire was smoldering on the ground inside a circle of flat stones, upon which

INTERIOR OF A KÍRGHIS KIBÍTKA.

stood a few pots, kettles, and other domestic utensils. The furniture of the tent was very scanty, and consisted of a narrow, unpainted bedstead opposite the door, two or three cheap Russian trunks of wood painted blue and decorated with strips of tin, and a table about four feet in diameter and eight inches high, intended evidently to be used by persons who habitually squatted on the ground. Upon the table were a few dirty wooden bowls and spoons and an antique metal pitcher, while here and there, hanging against the lattice wall, were buckets of birch bark, a harness or two, a flint-lock rifle, a red-white-and-golden saddle of wood with silver-inlaid stirrups, and a pair of carpet saddle-bags.

The first duty that hospitality requires of a Kírghis host is the presentation of kúmis to his guests, and we had no sooner taken seats on a sheet of gray felt beside the fire than one of the women went to the kúmis churn,—a large, black, greasy bag of horse-hide hanging against the lattice wall,—worked a wooden churn-dasher up and down in it vigorously for a moment, and then poured out of it into a greasy wooden bowl fully a quart of the great national Kírghis beverage for me. It did not taste as much like sour milk and soda-water as I expected that it would. On the contrary, it had rather a pleasant flavor; and if it had been a little cleaner and cooler, it would have made an agreeable and refreshing drink. I tried to please the old Kírghis patriarch and to show my appreciation of Kírghis hospitality by drinking the whole bowlful; but I underestimated the quantity of kúmis that it is necessary to imbibe in order to show one's host that one does n't dislike it and that one is satisfied with one's entertainment. I had no sooner finished one quart bowlful than the old patriarch brought me another; and when I told him that a single quart was all that I permitted myself to take at one time, and suggested that he reserve the second bowlful for my comrade, Mr. Frost, he looked so pained and grieved that in order to restore his serenity I had to go to the tárantás, get my banjo, and sing "There is a Tavern in the Town." Mr. Frost, meanwhile, had shirked his duty and his kúmis by pretending that he could not drink and draw simultaneously, and that he wanted to make a likeness of the patriarch's six-year-old son. This seemed to be a very adroit scheme on Mr. Frost's part, but it did not work as well as he had expected. No sooner had he begun to make the sketch than the boy's mother, taking alarm at the peculiar, searching way in which the artist looked at his subject, and imagining perhaps that her offspring was being mesmerized, paralyzed, or bewitched, swooped down upon the ragged little urchin, and kissing him passionately, as if she had almost lost him forever, carried him away and hid him. This untoward incident cast such a gloom over the subsequent proceedings that after singing four verses of "Solomon Levi," in a vain attempt to restore public confidence in Mr. Frost, I put away my banjo and we took our departure. I should like to know what traditions are now current in that part of the Kírghis steppe with regard to the two plausible but designing giaours who went about visiting the aüls of the faithful, one of them singing unholy songs to the accompaniment of a strange stringed instrument, while the other cast an "evil eye" upon the children, and tried to get possession of their souls by making likenesses of their bodies.

Day after day we traveled swiftly southward over a good road through the great Kírghis steppe, stopping now and then to pick snowy pond-lilies in some reed-fringed pool, or to visit an aül and drink kúmis with the hospitable nomads in their gray felt tents. Sometimes the road ran down into the shallow valley of the Írtish, through undulating seas of goldenrod and long wild grass, whose wind-swept waves seemed to break here and there in foaming crests of snowy spirea; sometimes it made a long détour into the high, arid steppe back from the river, where the vegetation had been parched to a dull uniform yellow by weeks of hot sunshine; and sometimes it ran suddenly into a low, moist oasis around a blue steppe lake, where we found ourselves in a beautiful natural flower-garden crowded with rose-bushes, hollyhocks, asters, daisies, fringed pinks, rosemary, flowering pea, and splendid dark-blue spikes of aconite standing shoulder high.

Animals and birds were much more plentiful than they had been in the province of Tobólsk, and were, moreover, remarkably tame. Magnificent eagles perched upon the telegraph poles and did not fly away until we were almost opposite them; slate-colored steppe quails with tufted heads ran fearlessly along the very edge of the road as we passed, and even the timid little jerboa that the Cossacks call tarbogán stopped every now and then to look at us as it hopped away into the dry grass.

As we went farther and farther from Omsk the steppe became more and more sea-like in its appearance, until, shortly after we passed the post-station of Piatorízhskaya Thursday afternoon, it looked like a great yellow ocean extending in every direction to the smooth horizon line. Its peculiar old-gold color was given to it apparently by the prevailing species of grass which, as it gradually dried up in the hot sunshine, turned from green through reddish-brown to the color of dead-ripe wheat. In places where the soil happened for any reason to be moist, as in the vicinity of small brackish ponds and lakes, the grass was still fresh and was sprinkled with flowers; but the steppe, as a rule, presented the appearance of a boundless ocean of wheat stubble, deepening here and there into the rich orange of goldenrod.

Just before sunset we passed at a distance of two or three hundred yards a lonely Kírghis cemetery, and, as we had never before seen a burial-place of this nomadic tribe, we stopped to examine it. It consisted of a few low, bare mounds of various shapes and dimensions, and three or four large, rectangular, fort-like structures of sun-dried bricks. The high walls of the latter had raised corners, and were pierced with square portholes through which, I presume, the bodies of the dead were carried into the inclosure for burial. Inside of each of these adobe forts were two or more grave-shaped hillocks, and at the head of every hillock stood a stick or pole with a small quantity of sheep's wool wrapped around it. There were no inscriptions or pictographs in or about these mortuary inclosures, and, apart from the wrappings of wool, I could discover nothing that seemed likely to have significance. The sun was just setting as we finished our inspection and resumed our journey,

A KÍRGHIS CEMETERY.

and twenty minutes later, when I looked back at the lonely, abandoned cemetery, its orange-tinted walls made the only break in the vast, curving horizon line of the Sea of Grass.

The road everywhere between Omsk and Semipalátinsk was hard and dry, and so smooth that we were scarcely conscious of being jolted. We slept every night in our tárantás while going at the rate of eight miles an hour, and if it had not been necessary to get out at the stations in order to show our padarózhnaya and see to the harnessing of fresh horses, we might have slept all night without waking.

Very soon after we began to travel at night in Western Siberia, our attention was attracted and our curiosity excited by the peculiar throbbing beat of an instrument that we took to be a watchman's rattle, and that we heard in every village through which we passed between sunset and dawn. It was not exactly like any sound that either of us had ever heard before, and we finally became very curious to see how it was made. It suggested, at times, the shaking of a billiard ball in a resonant wooden box; but the throbs were too clear-cut and regular to be made in that way, and I concluded at last that they must be produced by beating rapidly some sort of rude wooden drum. No night-watchman ever happened to come near us until we approached Pávlodár, a little town midway between Omsk and Semipalátinsk. About two o'clock that morning, while it was still very dark, we stopped to change horses at the post station of Chernoyárskaya. While a sleepy Kírghis hostler was harnessing fresh horses under the supervision of a large-bodied, sharp-tongued woman with a lantern in her hand and a lighted cigarette in her mouth, we were suddenly startled by the hollow staccato beat of a night-watchman's drum coming out of the darkness behind us and only a few feet away. "Now," I said to Mr. Frost, "I'll see what that thing is," and springing from the tárantás I called the watchman and asked him to show me his kolotúshka [literally "hammerer"]. It proved to be the simplest sort of a noise-producing instrument. If the reader will take a wooden box about the size of a common brick, knock out the two narrow sides, attach a wooden spool to one end by means of a four-inch cord and fasten a clothes-brush handle to the other, he will have a fairly good imitation of a Siberian night-watchman's rattle. When this instrument is shaken vigorously and rhythmically from side to side, as if it were a heavy palm-leaf fan, the clapper, which is attached to the upper end and which is represented by the spool, swings back and forth, striking the box first on one side and then on the other, and producing a series of rapid staccato beats that can be heard on a still night at a distance of two miles.

After a little argument and persuasion the Chernoyárskaya night-watchman consented to sell me his rattle, as a curiosity, for the sum of ten cents: but he soon had reason to regret the transaction. No sooner had he parted with the insignia of office than the sharp-tongued and misanthropic postmistress, who was leaning against the court-yard gate, and whose face I could just make out by the glow of her cigarette, opened upon him a hot fire of sarcastic and contemptuous remarks. "A fine night-watchman you are!" she said with scornful irony. "What are you good for now? There was nothing of you before but your breeches and your rattle—and now you've sold your rattle!"

"I can make another to-morrow," replied the night-watchman in a deprecating tone.

"Make another!" retorted the postmistress contemptuously. "There 's no use in making another if you don't shake it oftener than you have to-night. Where have you been all night anyhow—drunk again with the priest?"

"Yei Bókhu matushka! [Before God, my little mother] I have n't taken a drop on my tongue to-night!" protested the night-watchman solemnly. "Of course you don't hear my rattle when you're asleep—God forgive you for what you say!" and the watchman, as if to appease the woman's wrath, began to help the Kírghis hostler harness the horses—but it was of no use.

"What are you trying to do now?" inquired the postmistress fiercely—"harness those horses up goose-fashion?^[6] "Nyet brátushka" [No, my little brother], you may walk goose-fashion with the priest when you and he go on a spree, but you can't harness my horses goose-fashion. Go curl up in the sand somewhere until the Kabák^[7] opens or the priest gets up. Now that you 've sold the best part of yourself for twenty kopéks you 're of no use to anybody. A night-wa-a-tchman! that sells his r-r-attle!! and harnesses a tróika goose-fashion!!!" she concluded with immeasurable and inexpressible contempt. A moment passed—two minutes—but there was no reply. The discomfited night-watchman had slunk away into the darkness.

AN OASIS IN THE KÍRGHIS STEPPE.

After we had passed the little Cossack town of Pavlodár on Friday, the weather, which had been warm ever since our departure from Omsk, became intensely hot, the thermometer indicating ninety-one degrees Fahrenheit at 1 p. m. As we sat, without coats or waistcoats, under the sizzling leather roof of our tárantás, fanning ourselves with our hats, panting for breath, fighting huge green-eyed horseflies, and looking out over an illimitable waste of dead grass which wavered and trembled in the fierce glare of the tropical sunshine, we found it almost impossible to believe that we were in Siberia.

Many of the Cossack villages along this part of our route were situated down under the high, steep bank of the Írtish at the very water's edge, where the soil was moist enough to support a luxuriant vegetation. As a result of such favorable situation, these villages were generally shaded by trees and surrounded by well-kept vegetable and flower gardens. After a ride of twenty miles over an arid steppe in the hot, blinding sunshine of a July afternoon, it was indescribably pleasant and refreshing to come down into one of these little oases of greenery, where a narrow arm of the Írtish flowed tranquilly under the checkered shade of leafy trees; where the gardens of the Cossack housewives were full of potato, cucumber, and melon vines, the cool, fresh green of which made an effective setting for glowing beds of scarlet poppies; and where women and girls with tucked-up skirts were washing clothes on a little platform projecting into the river, while half-naked children waded and splashed in the clear, cool water around them.

We made the last stretches of our journey to Semipalátinsk in the night. The steppe over which we approached the city was more naked and sterile than any that we had crossed, and seemed in the faint twilight to be merely a desert of sun-baked earth and short, dead grass, with here and there a ragged bush or a long, ripple-marked dune of loose, drifting sand. I fell asleep soon after midnight, and when I awoke at half-past two o'clock Sunday morning day was just breaking, and we were passing a large white building with lighted lanterns hung against its walls, which I recognized as a city prison. It was the tiurémni zámok, or "prison castle" of Semipalátinsk. In a few moments we entered a long, wide, lonely street, bordered by unpainted log-houses, whose board window-shutters were all closed, and whose steep, pyramidal roofs loomed high and black in the first gray light of dawn. The street was full of soft, drifted sand, in which the hoofs of our horses fell noiselessly, and through which our tárantás moved with as little jar as if it were a gondola floating along a watery street in Venice.

WASHING CLOTHES IN THE ÍRTISH.

There was something strangely weird and impressive in this noiseless night ride through the heart of a ghostly and apparently deserted city, in the streets of which were the drifted sands of the desert, and where there was not a sound to indicate the presence of life save the faint, distant throbbing of a watchman's rattle, like the rapid, far-away beating of a wooden drum. We stopped at last in front of a two-story building of brick, covered with white stucco, which our driver said was the hotel Sibír. After pounding vigorously for five minutes on the front door, we were admitted by a sleepy waiter, who showed us to a hot, musty room in the second story, where we finished our broken night's sleep on the floor.

The city of Semipalátinsk, which has a population of about 15,000 Russians, Kírghis, and Tatárs, is situated on the right bank of the river Írtish, 480 miles southeast of Omsk and about 900 miles from Tiumén. It is the seat of government of the territory of Semipalátinsk, and is commercially a place of some importance, owing to the fact that it stands on one of the caravan routes to Tashkénd and Central Asia, and commands a large part of the trade of the Kírghis steppe. The country tributary to it is a pastoral rather than an agricultural region, and of its 547,000 inhabitants 497,000 are nomads, who live in 111,000 kíbítkas or felt tents, and own more than 3,000,000 head of live stock, including 70,000 camels. The province produces annually, among other things, 45,000 pounds of honey, 370,000 pounds of tobacco, 100,000 bushels of potatoes, and more than 12,000,000 bushels of grain. There are held every year within the limits of the territory eleven commercial fairs, the transactions of which amount in the aggregate to about $1,000,000. Forty or fifty caravans leave the city of Semipalátinsk every year for various points in Mongolia and Central Asia, carrying Russian goods to the value of from $150,000 to $200,000.

It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to call the attention of persons who think that all of Siberia is an arctic waste to the fact that honey and tobacco are not arctic products, and that the camel is not a beast of burden used by Eskimos on wastes of snow. If Mr. Frost and I had supposed the climate of southwestern Siberia to be arctic in its character, our minds would have been dispossessed of that erroneous idea in less than twelve hours after our arrival in Semipalátinsk. When we set out for a walk through the city about one o'clock Sunday afternoon, the thermometer indicated eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, with a north wind, and the inhabitants seemed to regard it as rather a cool and pleasant summer day. After wading around in the deep sand under a blazing sun for an hour and a half, we were more than ready to seek the shelter of the hotel and call for refrigerating drinks. The city of Semipalátinsk fully deserves the nickname that has been given to it by the Russian officers there stationed, viz., "The Devil's Sand-box." From almost any interior point of view it presents a peculiar gray, dreary appearance, owing partly to the complete absence of trees and grass, partly to the ashy, weather-beaten aspect of its unpainted log-houses, and partly to the loose, drifting sand with which its streets are filled. We did not see in our walk of an hour and a half a single tree, bush, or blade of grass, and we waded a large part of the time through soft, dry sand which was more than ankle-deep, and which in places had been drifted, like snow, to a depth of four or five feet against the walls of the gray log-houses. The whole city made upon me the impression of a Mohammedan town built in the middle of a north African desert. This impression was deepened by the Tatár mosques here and there with their brown, candle-extinguisher minarets; by the groups of long-bearded, white-turbaned mullas who stood around them; and by the appearance in the street now and then of a huge double-humped Bactrian camel, ridden into the city by a swarthy, sheepskin-hooded Kírghis from the steppes.

Monday morning I called upon General Tseklínski, the governor of the territory, presented my letters from the Russian Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Foreign

A STREET IN SEMIPALÁTINSK.

Affairs, and was gratified to find that he had apparently received no private instructions with regard to us and knew nothing whatever about us. He welcomed me courteously, granted me permission to inspect the Semipalátinsk prison, said he would send the chief of the police to take us to the mosques and show us about the city, and promised to have prepared for us an open letter of introduction to all the subordinate officials in the Semipalátinsk territory.

From the house of the governor I went, upon his recommendation, to the public library, an unpretending log-house in the middle of the town, where I found a small anthropological museum, a comfortable little reading-room supplied with all the Russian newspapers and magazines, and a well-chosen collection of about one thousand books, among which I was somewhat surprised to find the works of Spencer, Buckle, Lewes, Mill, Taine, Lubbock, Tylor, Huxley, Darwin, Lyell, Tyndall, Alfred Russell Wallace, Mackenzie Wallace, and Sir Henry Maine, as well as the novels and stories of Scott, Dickens, Marryat, George Eliot, George Macdonald, Anthony Trollope, Justin McCarthy, Erckmann-Chatrian, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bret Harte. The library was particularly strong in the departments of science and political economy, and the collection of books, as a whole, was in the highest degree creditable to the intelligence and taste of the people who made and used it. It gave me a better opinion of Semipalátinsk than anything that I had thus far seen or heard.^[8]

A CAMEL TEAM CROSSING THE FORD.

From the library I strolled eastward along the bank of the Írtish to the pendulum ferry by which communication is maintained between Semipalátinsk and a Kírghis suburb on the other side of the river. The ferry-boat starts from a wooded island in mid-stream, which is reached either by crossing a foot-bridge, or by fording the shallow channel that separates it from the Semipalátinsk shore. Just ahead of me were several Kírghis with three or four double-humped camels, one of which was harnessed to a Russian teléga. Upon reaching the ford the Kírghis released the draught camel from the teléga, lashed the empty vehicle, wheels upwards, upon the back of the grunting, groaning animal, and made him wade with it across the stream. A Bactrian camel, with his two loose, drooping humps, his long neck, and his preposterously conceited and disdainful expression of countenance, is always a ridiculous beast, but he never looks so absurdly comical as when crossing a stream with a four-wheeled wagon lashed bottom upward on his back. The shore of the Írtish opposite Semipalátinsk is nothing more than the edge of a great desert-like steppe which stretches away to the southward beyond the limits of vision. I reached there just in time to see the unloading of a caravan of camels which had arrived from Tashkénd with silks, rugs, and other Central Asiatic goods for the Semipalátinsk market.

Late in the afternoon I retraced my steps to the hotel, where I found Mr. Frost, who had been sketching all day in the Tatár or eastern end of the town. The evening was hot and sultry, and we sat until eleven o'clock without coats or waistcoats, beside windows thrown wide open to catch every breath of air, listening to the unfamiliar noises of the Tatár city. It was the last night of the great Mohammedan fast of Ramazan, and the whole population seemed to be astir until long after midnight. From every part of the town came to us on the still night air the quick staccato throbbing of watchmen's rattles, which sounded like the rapid beating of wooden drums, and suggested some pagan ceremony in central Africa or the Fiji Islands. Now and then the rattles became quiet, and then the stillness was broken by the

A KÍRGHIS HORSEMAN IN GALA DRESS.

longdrawn, wailing cries of the muezzins from the minarets of the Tatár mosques.

Tuesday morning when we awoke we found the streets full of Tatárs and Kírghis in gala dress, celebrating the first of the three holidays that follow the Mohammedan Lent. About noon the chief of police came to our hotel, by direction of the governor, to make our acquaintance and to show us about the city, and under his guidance we spent two or three hours in examining the great Tatár mosque and making ceremonious calls upon mullas and Tatár officials. He then asked us if we would not like to see a Tatár and Kírghis wrestling match. We replied, of course, in the affirmative, and were driven at once in his droshky to an open sandy common at the eastern end of the city, where we found a great crowd assembled and where the wrestling had already begun. The dense throng of spectators—mostly Kírghis and Tatárs—was arranged in concentric circles around an open space twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter. The inner circle was formed by two or three lines of men, squatting on their heels; then came three or four lines of standing men, and behind the latter was a close circle of horsemen sitting in their saddles, and representing the gallery. The chief of police made a way for us through the crowd to the inner circle, where we took orchestra seats in the sand under a blazing sun and in a cloud of fine dust raised by the wrestlers. The crowd, as we soon discovered, was divided into two hostile camps, consisting respectively of Kírghis and Tatárs. Ours was the Kírghis side, and opposite us were the Tatárs. There were four masters of ceremonies, who were dressed in long green khaláts, and carried rattan wands. The two Tatár officials would select a champion in their corner, throw a sash over his head, pull him out into the arena, and then challenge the Kírghis officials to match him. The latter would soon find a man about equal to the Tatár champion in size and weight, and then the two contestants would prepare for the struggle. The first bout after we arrived was between a good-looking, smooth-faced young Kírghis, who wore a blue skull-cap and a red sash, and an athletic, heavily built Tatár, in a yellow skull-cap and a green sash. They eyed each other warily

A WRESTLING MATCH.

for a moment, and then clinched fiercely, each grasping with one hand his adversary's sash, while he endeavored with the other to get an advantageous hold of wrist, arm, or shoulder. Their heads were pressed closely together, their bodies were bent almost into right angles at their waists, and their feet were kept well back to avoid trips. Presently both secured sash and shoulder holds, and in a bent position backed each other around the arena, the Kírghis watching for an opportunity to trip and the Tatár striving to close in. The veins stood out like whipcords on their foreheads and necks, and their swarthy faces dripped with perspiration as they struggled and manœuvered in the scorching sunshine, but neither of them seemed to be able to find an opening in the other's guard or to get any decided advantage. At last, however, the Tatár backed away suddenly, pulling the Kírghis violently towards him; and as the latter stepped forward to recover his balance, he was dexterously tripped by a powerful side-blow of the Tatár's leg and foot. The trip did not throw him to the ground, but it did throw him off his guard; and, before he could recover himself, the Tatár broke the sash and shoulder hold, rushed in fiercely, caught him around the body, and, with a hip-lock and a tremendous heave, threw him over his head. The unfortunate Kírghis fell with such violence that the blood streamed from his nose and mouth and he seemed partly stunned; but he was able to get up without assistance and walked in a dazed way to his corner, amidst a roar of shouts and triumphant cries from the Tatár side.

As the excitement increased new champions offered themselves, and in a moment two more contestants were locked in a desperate struggle, amidst a babel of exclamations, suggestions, taunts, and yells of encouragement or defiance from their respective supporters. The hot air was filled with a dusty haze of fine sand, which was extremely irritating to the eyes; our faces and hands burned as if they were being slowly blistered by the torrid sunshine; and the odors of horses, of perspiration, and of greasy old sheepskins, from the closely packed mass of animals and men about us, became so overpowering that we could scarcely breathe; but there was so much excitement and novelty in the scene, that we managed to hold out through twelve or fifteen bouts. Two police officers were present to maintain order and prevent fights, but their interference was not needed. The wrestling was invariably good-humored, and the vanquished retired without any manifestations of ill-feeling, and often with laughter at their own discomfiture. The Kírghis were generally overmatched. The Tatárs, although perhaps no stronger, were quicker and more dexterous than their nomadic adversaries, and won on an average two falls out of every three. About five o'clock, although the wrestling still continued, we made our way out of the crowd and returned to the hotel, to bathe our burning faces and, if possible, get cool.

 

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1. The larger administrative divisions of the Russian empire are of two kinds and are known as gubérnie [governments] and óblasti [territories]. As the English word "government" already has more than one meaning, I shall use "province" in this work to denote the organized political division called in Russia a gubérnia, and "territory" to designate the comparatively unorganized division known as an óblast. The distinction between them is very much like that between our states and territories.
2. This was said to me upon our return from Eastern Siberia in the following winter, and was called out by an account which I had given to Mr. X—— of our experience and the results of our observations. I should be glad to give some illustrations of the "harrying" to which Mr. X—— referred, if I could do so without disclosing his identity.
3. Mr. Petropávlovski has written a great deal for the Atéchestvenia Zapíski and other Russian magazines under the pen-name of "Karónin," and a volumeof his collected stories was published in Moscow in 1890. His field as a writer is the Russian village and the everyday life of the Russian peasant, and he has shown in that field not only great accuracy of observation and faithfulness of portrayal, but a sympathetic comprehension of all the sufferings that the common people are forced to endure as one of the results of a bad system of government. I do not know for what specific reason he was banished to Siberia, but I presume that his writings were regarded by the censor as "pernicious in tendency."
4. The word ostróg meant originally a stockaded entrenchment and was applied to the rude forts built by the Cossacks as they marched eastward into Siberia three centuries ago. The custom of confining criminals in these forts finally gave to ostróg the meaning of "prison," and up to the present century nearly all of the prisons in Siberia were known as ostrógs.
5. A touching account of this part of Dostoyéfski's life, by a convict named Rozhnófski who occupied the same cell with him in the Omsk ostróg, has recently been published in the Tiflis newspaper Kavkáz. Rozhnófski says that Dostoyéfski was flogged the first time for making complaint, in behalf of the other prisoners, of a lump of filth found in their soup. His second punishment was for saving a fellow-prisoner from drowning when the major in command of the ostróg had ordered him not to do so. The flogging in each ease was so brutally severe that the sufferer had to be taken to the hospital, and after the second "execution," Rozhnófski says, the convicts generally regarded Dostoyéfski as dead. When he reappeared among them, after lying six weeks in the hospital, they gave him the nick-name pokóinik [the deceased]. For further particulars of Dostoyéfski's trial, condemnation, and life in penal servitude see Atéchestvenia Zapiski [Annals of the Fatherland], Feb. 1881, and March, 1882.
6. Tandem.
7. Dram-shop.
8. Most of the works of the scientific authors above named were expurgated Russian editions. Almost every chapter of Lecky's "History of Rationalism" had been defaced by the censor, and in a hasty examination of it I found gaps where from ten to sixty pages had been cut out bodily. Even in this mutilated form, and in the remote Siberian town of Semipalátinsk, the book was such an object of terror to a cowardly Government, that it had been quarantined by order of the Tsar, and could not be issued to a reader without special permission from the Minister of the Interior. A similar taboo had been placed upon the works of Spencer, Mill, Lewes, Lubbock, Huxley, and Lyell, notwithstanding the fact that the censor had cut out of them everything that seemed to him to have a "dangerous" or "demoralizing" tendency. I subsequently ascertained that these volumes, with more than 100 others, had been put into the index expurgatorius, and that every public librarian in the empire had been forbidden to issue them to readers. A complete list of the books thus placed under the ban will be found in Appendix B.