Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter XV
CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT SIBERIAN ROAD
ON Friday, August 28th, after bidding good-by to the political exiles in Tomsk and making final calls upon Colonel Yágodkin and two or three other officers who had been particularly kind and hospitable to us, Mr. Frost and I procured a fresh padorózhnaya, climbed once more into our old tárantás, and set out, with a tróika of good post-horses, for Irkútsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, which was distant from Tomsk 1040 miles. Governor Petukhóf had promised that he would send us an open letter directing all convoy officers within his jurisdiction to allow us to inspect étapes; but he had forgotten it, or had reconsidered his promise after finding the political exiles in our room at the European Hotel, and we were left to gain admission to étapes as best we could. Our journey of 260 miles to Áchinsk, the first town in Eastern Siberia, was not marked by any noteworthy incident. The part of the province of Tomsk through which we passed was generally rolling, or broken by ranges of low hills, and in appearance it suggested at times the thinly settled forest region of eastern Maine, and at others the fertile farming country of western New York. In some places we rode for hours through a dense second growth of birches, poplars, and evergreens, which hid from sight everything except the sky and the black muddy road, and then, a dozen miles farther on, we would come out into an extensive open prairie embroidered with daisies, or cross a wide shallow valley whose bottom and sloping sides were covered with an irregular patchwork of cultivated fields. The weather was cool and fall-like, but the mosquitos were still troublesome, and the flowers continued to be abundant. On the 6th of September I counted thirty-four different kinds of flowers in blossom beside the road, including wild roses, forget-me-nots, crane's-bill, two or three species of aster, goldenrod, wild mustard, monk's-hood, spirea, buttercups, fireweed, bluebells, vase pinks, and Kírghis caps. Many of them were blooming out of their proper season and were represented by only a few scattered specimens; but of others we might have picked millions. The most attractive and highly cultivated region that we saw was that lying between the post-stations of Itátskaya and Bogotólskaya, about fifty miles west of Áchinsk. The weather was warm and pleasant, and the picture presented by the fertile rolling country with its rich autumnal coloring, the clumps of silver birch and poplar here and there in the flowery meadows, the extensive fields of ripe yellow wheat which stretched away up the gentle sunny slopes of the hills, and the groups of men and women in scarlet or blue shirts who were harvesting the grain with clumsy sickles, or eating their noonday lunch in the shade of a frost-tinted birch by the roadside, was not unworthy of an artist's pencil, nor of comparison with any rural landscape of like character in the world.
The villages, however, in this part of Siberia were less deserving of commendation than was the scenery. They consisted generally of a double line of gray, unpainted log houses extending sometimes for two or three versts along the miry, chocolate-colored road, without the least sign anywhere of foliage or vegetation, except, perhaps, the leafy branch of a tree nailed up at the door of one of the numerous kabáks, "Rhine cellars," "drinking establishments," pitéini doms or optóvi sklads, which in every Siberian village bring revenue to the Government and demoralization to the peasants. These bush-decorated houses are of many different sorts and go by many different names; but they all sell vódka, and, to a great extent, they are responsible for the dirty, slovenly, and poverty-stricken appearance of the peasant villages on the great Siberian road. There are thirty rum-shops to every school throughout Western Siberia, and thirty-five rum-shops to every school throughout Eastern Siberia; and in a country where there exists such a disproportion between the facilities for education and the facilities for intoxication, one cannot reasonably expect to find clean, orderly, or prosperous villages.
The graveyards belonging to the Siberian settlements sometimes seemed to me much more remarkable and noteworthy than the settlements themselves. Near one of the villages that we passed in this part of our journey, I noticed a cemetery in which nearly half the graves were marked by jet-black, three-armed, wooden crosses, covered with narrow A-shaped roofs, and surrounded by red, green, blue, and yellow picket-fences. Some of the peculiar black crosses bore the English letters "I. H. S." on one of the arms, while others had painted on them in white the figure of Christ crucified—the legs being made extraordinarily long and thin so as to occupy the whole length of the upright shaft. Anything more remarkable than one of these ghastly white figures, on a black cross, under a gable roof, with a cheerful red, white, and blue picket-fence around it, I could hardly imagine; but it furnished a striking proof that the Russian love for crude color triumphs even over death. I do not remember to have seen bright colors used in a graveyard in any other part of the world or among any other people.
Harvesting was in progress all along the road between Tomsk and Áchinsk, and in many places the whole population, with the exception of the post-station-master and three or four drivers, had gone to the fields. In one village the only inhabitant whom we saw was a flaxen-haired child about five years of age, dressed in a dirty homespun shirt, wearing on a string about its neck a huge cow-bell, and gnawing contentedly at a big raw turnip, as it paddled along the deserted street half-way up to its knees in mud. Whether the cow-bell was one of the child's playthings, or whether the mother had made use of it as a means of finding her offspring when she should return from the harvest field, I do not know; but the combination of child, turnip, and cow-bell, in a village that did not appear to contain another living inhabitant, was novel enough to attract my attention.
In the outskirts of another settlement we were reminded once more that we were in a penal colony by the sight of a handcuffed horse grazing peacefully by the roadside. I knew that the Russian Government had once flogged and exiled to Siberia a free-thinking and insubordinate church-bell[1] because it had not self-control enough to hold its tongue when turned upside down; but I was a little startled, nevertheless, by the idea, which at once suggested itself to me, that the Government had taken to exiling and handcuffing "untrustworthy" horses. Upon making inquiries of the station-master, I was gratified to learn that this was not a horse that had behaved in a manner "prejudicial to public tranquillity" by refusing to neigh upon the accession to the throne of Alexander III., but was merely an animal addicted to vagrancy, whose owner had hobbled him with an old pair of Government handcuffs in order to prevent him from straying. The peasant to whom he belonged had unfortunately lost the key to the handcuffs, and for two or three months the horse had been as useless for all practical purposes as a spiked cannon.
Between the post-stations of Krasnorechínskaya and Bieloyárskaya, about twenty miles west of Áchinsk, we crossed the boundary line between the provinces of Tomsk and Yeniséisk, and entered the vast region known as Eastern Siberia. The boundary was marked by two brick columns about two feet square and seven feet high, which bore on their eastern and western sides the coats of arms of the two coterminous provinces. The rate of postal transportation changed at this point from one and a half kopéks to three kopéks per verst for every horse, and our
traveling expenses were thus almost doubled, without any commensurate increase in comfort or in speed. The reason assigned for this change in rate is the higher cost of forage and food in Eastern Siberia; but the Government, in dealing with its exiles, does not apparently give any weight to this consideration. If the necessaries of life are so high in Eastern Siberia as to justify the doubling of the rate for postal transportation, it would seem to follow that they are high enough to require some increase in the ration allowance of the exiles on the road; but no such increase is made. No matter whether it is in Western Siberia or in Eastern Siberia, whether black bread costs two kopéks a pound or seven kopéks a pound, the exile receives neither more nor less than ten kopéks a day. The result of this is that in Western Siberia he generally has enough food to sustain his strength, while in Eastern Siberia, and particularly in the Trans-Baikál, he often suffers from hunger.
We passed the town of Áchinsk on Tuesday, September 1st, and entered upon the most difficult and exhausting part of our journey. The country suddenly became wilder and more mountainous in its character; the road, for a distance of sixty or seventy miles, ran across a series of high wooded ridges, separated one from another by swampy ravines; rain fell almost incessantly; and it was all that five powerful horses could do to drag our heavy tárantás up the steep hills and through the abysses of tenacious semi-liquid clay in the intervening valleys. Even where the road was comparatively hard, it had been cut into deep ruts and hollows by thousands of obózes, or freight wagons; the attempts that had been made here and there to improve it by throwing tree-trunks helter-skelter into the sloughs and quagmires had only rendered it worse; and the swaying, banging, and plunging of the tárantás were something frightful. An American stage-coach would have gone to pieces on such a road before it had made a single station. In the course of the first night after leaving Áchinsk, I was thrown violently against the sides or the roof of our tárantás at least three or four hundred times. This incessant jolting, added to sleeplessness and fatigue, brought on a racking headache; I was in a shiver most of the night from cold and lack of nourishing food; and when we reached the station of Ibrúlskaya early Wednesday morning, after having made in twenty hours and with four changes of horses a distance of only fifty miles, I felt as if I had been beaten from head to foot with a club and left for dead. Mr. Frost was sick, and had had three severe chills in the night, and he looked so worn and haggard that I became seriously alarmed about him. He did not wish, however, to stop in the post-station of Ibrúlskaya, which was already full of travelers sleeping on benches or on the floor, and after refreshing ourselves with tea, we pushed on towards Krasnoyársk.
I cannot remember, in all Siberia, a worse road for wheeled vehicles than that between Áchinsk and Krasnoyársk. I have never, in fact, seen a worse road in my life, and it was not at all surprising that Mr. Frost was prostrated by the jolting, the consequent sleeplessness, and the lack of substantial food. We had been able to get meat at the post-stations only once in four days; we had lived almost entirely upon the bread and tea that we carried with us; and for ninety-six hours we had had only such snatches of sleep as we could get in the tárantás at intervals on short stretches of smooth road, or on benches in the station-houses while waiting for horses. It was some satisfaction to learn, at Ustanófskaya, that General Ignátief, the newly appointed governor-general of Eastern Siberia, who passed over the road between Áchinsk and Krasnoyársk a few days before us, was so exasperated by its condition that he ordered the immediate arrest of the contractor who had undertaken to keep it in repair, and directed that he be held in prison to await an investigation. Mr. Frost and I agreed that it was a proper case for the exercise of despotic power.
We arrived in Krasnoyársk late on the evening of Wednesday, September 2d, after a journey from Tomsk of 370 miles, which had occupied a little more than five days of incessant travel. An abundant supper and a good night's rest in a small hotel near the post-station restored our tired bodies to something like their normal condition, and Thursday afternoon we changed our travel-stained clothing and called upon Mr. Leo Petróvitch Kuznetsóf, a wealthy gold-mining proprietor to whom we had brought a letter of introduction from St. Petersburg. We little anticipated the luxurious comfort of the house and the delightful social atmosphere of the home circle to which this letter would admit us. The servant who came to the door in response
to our ring showed us into one of the most beautiful and tastefully furnished drawing-rooms that we had seen in Russia. It was fully fifty feet in length by thirty-five feet in width and twenty feet high; its inlaid floor of polished oak was hidden here and there by soft oriental rugs; palms, luxuriant ferns, and pots of blossoming plants occupied the lower portions of the high, richly curtained windows; the apparent size of the spacious apartment was increased by long pier-glasses interposed between the masses of greenery and flowers; a cheerful fire of birch wood was burning in an open fireplace under a massive mantel of carved marble; cabinets of polished cherry, filled with rare old china, delicate ivory carvings, bronze Buddhist idols, and all sorts of bric-à-brac, stood here and there against the walls; large oil-paintings by well-known Russian, French, and English artists occupied places of honor at the ends of the room; and at our right, as we entered, was a grand piano, flanked by a carved stand piled high with books and music.
We had hardly had time to recover from the state of astonishment into which we were thrown by the sight of so many unexpected evidences of wealth, culture, and refinement in this remote East Siberian town when a slender, dark-haired, pale-faced young man in correct afternoon dress entered the drawing-room, introduced himself as Mr. Innokénti Kuznetsóf, and welcomed us in good English to Krasnoyársk. We were soon made acquainted with the whole Kuznetsóf family, which consisted of three brothers and two sisters, all unmarried, and all living together in this luxurious house. Mr. Innokénti Kuznetsóf and his sisters spoke English fluently; they had traveled in America, and had spent more or less time in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Saratoga, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. Mr. Innokénti Kuznetsóf's personal acquaintance with the United States was more extensive, indeed, than my own, inasmuch as he had twice crossed the continent; had hunted buffalo on our Western prairies; had met General Sheridan, Buffalo Bill, Captain Jack, and other frontier notables, and had even visited regions as remote as Yellowstone Park and the "Staked Plains."
How pleasant it was, after months of rough life in dirty post-stations or vermin-infested hotels, to come suddenly into such a house as that of the Kuznetsófs; to find ourselves surrounded by flowers, books, pictures, and innumerable other evidences of cultured taste; to hear good music; to talk with intelligent men and women who did not tell us harrowing stories of imprisonment and exile—all this the
reader can hardly imagine. We dined with the Kuznetsófs every day that we spent in Krasnoyársk, and met at their table some very attractive and cultivated people. Among the latter I remember particularly Mr. Iván Sávenkof, the director of the Krasnoyársk normal school, who had just returned from an archæological excursion up the Yeniséi, and who showed us some very interesting tracings and water-color copies of the prehistoric sketches and inscriptions that abound on the "pictured rocks" along that river. Mr. Innokénti Kuznetsóf shared Mr. Sávenkof's interest in archæology, and both gentlemen had valuable collections of objects dating from the stone or the bronze age that had been taken from kurgáns or tumuli in various parts of the province.
Thursday evening, after dinner, we all drove up the left bank of the river to an old monastery about six versts from the city, where the people of Krasnoyársk are accustomed to go in summer for picnics. The road, which was a noteworthy triumph of monastic engineering, had been cut out in the steep cliffs that border the Yeniséi, or had been carried on trestle-work along the faces of these cliffs high above the water, and at every salient angle it commanded a beautiful view of the majestic river, which, at this point, attains a width of more than a mile and glides swiftly past, between blue picturesque mountains, on its way from the wild fastnesses of Mongolia to the barren coast of the arctic ocean.
Our friends in Krasnoyársk tempted us to remain there a week or two with promises of all sorts of delightful excursions, but at that late season of the year we could not spare the time. It required not a little resolution to turn our backs on picnic parties and boating parties, on archæological excursions up the Yeniséi, on such congenial society as we found in the hospitable homes of Mr. Sávenkof and the Kuznetsófs, and to face again the old miseries of jolting, sleeplessness, cold, hunger, and fatigue
on the road; but it was important that we should reach the mines of the Trans-Baikál before winter set in, and we had yet 1200 miles to go.
Saturday afternoon, September 5th, we reluctantly ordered post-horses; provided ourselves with a fresh supply of bread, tea, and copper money; repacked our baggage in the old, battered, mud-splashed tárantás, which we were beginning to dread as a once-tortured criminal dreads the rack; and crossing the Yeniséi on a pendulum ferry-boat, resumed our journey to Irkútsk. The weather was once more pleasant and sunshiny, but the changing colors of the dying leaves showed that fall was at hand. Many of the poplars had already turned a deep brilliant red, and nearly half of the birches were solid masses of canary yellow, which, when seen against the dark background of the somber evergreens, suggested foliage in a state of incandescence. The vast fields of wheat in the valley of the Yeniséi and on the lower slopes of the hills in the neighborhood of Krasnoyársk were apparently dead ripe, and hundreds of men and women with horse-hair mosquito-protectors over their heads were reaping the grain with sickles, binding it into sheaves, and stacking the sheaves by fives in long rows.
We traveled without rest Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, but on Wednesday morning, at the station of Kamishétskaya, about 350 miles from Irkútsk, we were forced to stop in order to have repairs made to our tárantás. We found the village blacksmith in a little shop near the post-station, where, with the aid of his daughter, a robust young woman eighteen or twenty years of age, he was engaged in shoeing a horse. One might infer, from the elaborate precautions taken to prevent the animal from injuring himself or anybody else while being shod, that Siberian horses were more than usually fractious, or Siberian blacksmiths more than usually careless in driving nails. The poor beast had been hoisted into the air by means of two broad belly-bands, and suspended from a stout frame so that he could not touch the ground; three of his legs had then been lashed to an equal number of posts so that he could neither kick nor struggle, and the daring blacksmith was fearlessly putting a shoe on the only hoof that the wretched and humiliated animal could move. We learned, upon inquiry, that Siberian horses are always shod in this way, and we concluded that Siberian blacksmiths must be regarded by accident insurance companies as extra-safe and very desirable risks.
While we were waiting for the repairs to our tárantás we were overtaken by the Moscow post. The Russian mails
are carried in Siberia in leathern bags or pouches as with us, and are forwarded in telégas under guard of an armed postilion, changing horses and vehicles at every station. There is no limit, so far as I know, to the weight or size of packages that may be sent by post,—I myself mailed a box weighing forty pounds,—and the mails are consequently very bulky and heavy, filling sometimes a dozen telégas. Irkútsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, has a mail from Moscow every day and returns it three times a week; and as the imperial post takes precedence over private travelers, the latter are often forced to wait for hours at post-stations because the last horses have been taken by the Government postilion. Such was our fate at Kamishétskaya. The repairs to our tárantás were soon made, but in the mean time we had been overtaken by the post, and we were obliged to wait for horses until two o'clock in the afternoon.
From Kamishétskaya to Irkútsk we traveled night and day, stopping only now and then to inspect an étape, or to watch the progress of an exile party, as, with a dismal clinking of chains, it made its way slowly along the road, in a pouring rain, towards the distant mines of the Trans-Baikál.
This ride from Tomsk to Irkútsk was in some respects a harder and more exhausting journey than that from Tiumén to the mountains of the Altái. Long-continued rain had spoiled the road and rendered it in places almost impassable. The jolting of our heavy tárantás through deep ruts and over occasional stretches of imperfect corduroy gave us violent headaches and prevented us from getting any restful sleep; warm, nourishing food was rarely to be obtained at the post-stations; we had not yet provided ourselves with winter clothing, and suffered more or less every night from cold; and finally, we were tormented constantly by predatory insects from the roadside prisons and étapes. No single hardship connected with our investigation of the exile system was more trying to me than the utter impossibility of escaping from parasitic vermin. Cold, hunger, sleeplessness, and fatigue I could bear with reasonable patience and fortitude; but to be forced to live for weeks at a time in clothing infested with fleas, lice, or bedbugs from the unclean bodies of common criminal convicts not only seemed to me intolerable in itself, but gave me a humiliating
sense of physical defilement that was almost as bad as a consciousness of moral degradation. We tried in every possible way to rid ourselves of these parasitic prison insects, but without success. The older and more neglected étapes along the road were swarming with vermin of all sorts, and whenever we examined one of these places we came away from it with a small but varied entomological collection in our clothing. The insects soon secured lodgment in our blankets and pillows as well as in the crevices and lining of our tárantás, and then it was impossible either to exterminate or to escape them. After throwing away successively two or three suits of underclothing, I abandoned all hope of relief and reconciled myself to the inevitable as best I could. There were insects on my body or in my clothing during the greater part of four months, and when I was able to undress for the first time after our nine-days' journey from Krasnoyársk to Irkútsk, I found myself spotted and blotched from head to foot as if I were suffering from some foul eruptive disease. It is not pleasant, of course, to go into these details, but I wish the reader to understand clearly and definitely what life in an étape is, and what Siberian exile means to a cultivated human being.[2]
I do not know that it is possible to get rid entirely of obnoxious insects in old and sometimes half-decayed buildings through which pass every year thousands of criminals from the lowest social classes. It is possible, however, to keep the étapes decently clean and to provide the exiles, both in the forwarding prisons and on the road, with proper facilities for bathing and for changing and washing their clothing. How far these things are done now I shall try to show in the next chapter.
As we approached the East-Siberian capital, towards the end of the second week in September, the weather finally cleared up, and upon the southeastern horizon, far away in the distance, we caught sight of the blue, ethereal, snow-crowned peaks of Tunká, situated on the frontier of Mongolia near the southern end of Lake Baikál. They were evidence that Irkútsk was near. When the morning of Sunday, September 13th, dawned cool and bright we found ourselves riding over a good road, along the swift but tranquil current of the river Angará, and through a country the extensive cultivation and prosperous appearance of which indicated its proximity to a market. About two o'clock in the afternoon we stopped to change horses at the last post-station, and with inspiriting anticipations of rest, sleep, clean linen, and letters from home we entered the travelers' waiting-room and read, in the official distance-table hanging against the wall, the significant words and figures:
POST-STATION OF BOKÓFSKAYA.
DISTANT
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From St. Petersburg
....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
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5601 versts. |
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From Irkútsk
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13 versts. |
You may subtract thirteen from 5601, or divide 5601 by thirteen, or put the two numbers through any other mathematical process that you choose, but you will never fully appreciate the difference between them until you have traveled 5601 versts in the Russian Empire and have only thirteen versts more to go.
As soon as fresh horses could be harnessed we dashed away up the Angará towards Irkútsk, looking eagerly forward to catch the first possible glimpse of its gilded domes and its snowy cathedral walls. I had not seen the city in eighteen years, and meanwhile it had been almost entirely destroyed by fire, and had been rebuilt. I feared, therefore, that it would not present so beautiful and striking an appearance as it did when I saw it first, in the winter of 1867. About five versts from the city we passed the picturesque white-walled monastery of Vosnesénsk, with a throng of dirty, ragged, long-haired pilgrims gathered about its principal entrance, and beyond it we began to meet unarmed soldiers, peasants, peddlers, tramps, and nondescript vagabonds of all sorts who had been spending the Sabbath-day in the city and were straggling back on foot to their respective places of abode in the suburban villages. Nearly half of them were more or less intoxicated, and the number of open kabáks, or drinking-places, that we saw by the road seemed fully adequate to explain if not to excuse their condition.
We crossed the swift current of the Angará by means of a "swing," or pendulum, ferry, and drove up from the landing into the streets of the city. I was somewhat disappointed in its appearance. Its gilded or colored domes, white belfries, and scattered masses of foliage, when seen from the opposite side of the river, give to it a certain half-oriental picturesqueness; but to an observer in its streets it presents itself as a large, busy, thriving, but irregularly built and unattractive Russian provincial town. After unsuccessfully seeking shelter in the new and pretentious Moscow House and in the Siberian Hotel, we finally went to the Hotel Dekó, where, as we were informed, Lieutenants Harber and Schuetze stayed when they passed through the city in 1882 on their way to the Lena Delta. An elderly and rather talkative servant who brought our luggage to our room introduced himself by saying that he always used to wait on Mr. Harber and Mr. Schuetze, and that the former loved him so that he called him "Zhan" (John). He seemed to think that "Zhan" was an American nickname expressive of the tenderest and most affectionate regard, and that he needed no other recommendation than this to an American traveler. I told him that if he would take care of us properly we also would call him "Zhan," at which he seemed very much gratified. From the frequency and the pride with which he afterwards referred to this caressing nickname, I feel confident that when he comes to die, and a tombstone is placed over his mortal remains, no possible enumeration thereon of his many virtues will give to his freed spirit half so much pleasure as the simple epitaph,
THE AMERICANS CALLED HIM "ZHAN."
- ↑ The celebrated bell of Uglich. It is now in Tobólsk.
- ↑ A common method of gambling among criminal convicts in Siberian étapes is to spread down an overcoat or a dirty linen foot-wrapper on the floor of the kámera, and guess at the number of fleas that will jump upon it within a certain length of time. Every convict, of course, backs his guess with a wager. Another method, equally common, is to draw two small concentric circles on one of the sleeping-platforms, put a number of lice simultaneously within the inner circle, and then give all the money that has been wagered on the event to the convict whose louse first crawls across the line of the outer circle. Exiles on the road are not supposed to have playing-cards, but facilities for gambling in the manner above described are never lacking.