Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 2/Chapter XI
CHAPTER XI
THE GREAT SIBERIAN ROAD IN WINTER
IT is customary in Siberia, when traveling by post, to ride night and day, without other rest than that which can be obtained in one's sleigh; but when we reached the great Siberian road at the station of Cherómka I was still suffering from the results of the previous night's exposure to storm and cold in the mountains of the Angará, and at every respiration was warned by a sharp, cutting pain in one lung that it would be prudent to seek shelter and keep warm until I should be able to breathe freely. But it was very difficult to keep warm in that post-station. Almost every hour throughout the night travelers stopped there to change horses or to drink tea, and with every opening of the door a cold wind blew across the bare floor where we lay, condensing the moisture of the atmosphere into chilly clouds of vapor, and changing the temperature of the room from twenty to thirty degrees in as many seconds. I had taken the precaution, however, to bring our large sheepskin bag into the house, and by burying myself in the depths of that I not only escaped being chilled, but succeeded, with the aid of medicinal remedies, in getting into a profuse perspiration. This soon relieved the pleuritic pain in my side, and in the morning I felt able to go on. Neither of us had had any sleep, but to the experienced Siberian traveler deprivation of sleep for a night or two is a trifling hardship. I do not think that Mr. Frost had two consecutive hours of sleep in the whole week that we spent on the road between the Alexandrófski central prison and Krasnoyársk; but when we reached the latter place he went to bed, with his clothes on, and slept sixteen hours without waking.
The route that we intended to follow on our return journey to St. Petersburg differed a little from that which we had pursued in coming into Siberia, and included two important towns that we had not yet visited, namely, Minusínsk and Tobólsk. The former we expected to reach by making a detour of about four hundred miles to the southward from Krasnoyársk, and the latter by taking a more northerly route between Omsk and Tiumén than the one over which we had passed on our way eastward. Our equipment for the long and difficult journey that lay before us consisted of a strongly built pavóska, or seatless traveling-sleigh, with low runners, wide outriggers, and a sort of carriage-top which could be closed with a leather curtain in stormy weather; a very heavy sheepskin bag six feet wide and nine feet long in which we could both lie side by side at full length; eight or ten pillows and cushions of various sizes to fill up chinks in the mass of baggage and to break the force of the jolting on rough roads; three overcoats apiece of soft shaggy sheepskin, so graded in size and weight that we could adapt ourselves to any temperature from the freezing-point to eighty degrees below; very long and heavy felt boots known in Siberia as válinki; fur caps, mittens, and a small quantity of provisions consisting chiefly of tea, sugar, bread, condensed milk, boiled ham, frozen soup in cakes, and a couple of roasted grouse. Our heavy baggage had been packed as carefully as possible in the bottom of the pavóska, so as to make a comparatively smooth and level foundation; the interstices had been stuffed with pillows and cushions; the somewhat lumpy surface had then been covered to a depth of twelve or fourteen inches with straw; and, finally, over all had been spread our spare overcoats, blankets, and the big sheepskin bag, with a quantity of pillows at the back.
For a day or two after we crossed the Angará we saw nothing of particular interest. In several villages through which we passed between Cherómka and Nízhni Údinsk the étapes were evidently occupied by exile parties; but we did not happen to see such a party on the march until Wednesday, and it came upon us then very suddenly and unexpectedly. The day was cold and stormy, with a high wind and flying snow, and we were lying half buried in our sheepskin bag, watching for the next verst-post. The atmosphere was so thick with snowflakes that we could not see the road distinctly for a greater distance than seventy-five or one hundred yards, and the party of exiles was fairly upon us before we discovered that it was not — as we at first supposed — a train of obózes, or freight-sleighs. I was not absolutely sure of its nature until the head of the column was so near us that I could make out the muskets of the advance-guard of Cossacks and hear the familiar clinking of the prisoners' leg-fetter chains. I then ordered our yamshchík to drive out into the deep snow at one side of the road and there stop. The general appearance of the party, as it passed us, was very different from the appearance of the similar party whose departure from Tomsk we had watched in August. Then the convicts were all in their light summer costume of gray, their faces were black with sunburn, and they were enveloped in a cloud of fine yellow dust raised by their shuffling, slipper-clad feet from the powdery road. The exiles before us were all dressed in reddish pólu-shúbas, or short overcoats of sheepskin, and bródnias, or high-topped leather boots; their faces were pallid from long confinement in the Tomsk forwarding prison, and they were wading slowly and laboriously through fresh-fallen snow. The order of march was the same as in the summer, but on account of the storm and the condition of the road there seemed to be some relaxation of discipline, and a good deal of straggling and disorder. The dress of the marching convicts consisted of the usual gray Tam o' Shanter cap, with a handkerchief, a ragged tippet, or an old stocking tied over it in such a way as to protect the ears; a pólu-shúba, with the reddish tanned side out; long, loose leather boots, which had been stuffed around the feet and ankles with hay to make them warmer; woolen trousers, foot-wrappers, or short woolen stockings, and big leather mittens. The leg-fetters, in most cases, were worn inside the boots, and the chain that united them was looped up in the middle by means of a strap attached to the leather waist-belt. From this point of support it hung down to the ankle on each side between the tucked-in trouser-leg and the boot. With some slight changes—such, for example, as the substitution of a fur hood for the flimsy Tam o'Shanter cap—the dress, it seemed to me, would afford adequate warmth in ordinary winter weather to men whose blood was kept in vigorous circulation by exercise; but it was by no means sufficient for the protection of sick or disabled convicts who were exposed in open vehicles for eight or ten hours at a stretch to all sorts of weather. I noticed a number of such incapables lying in the shallow, uncomfortable one-horse sleighs at the rear of the column, and clinging or crouching together as if to seek warmth in mutual contact. They all seemed to be half frozen to death.
As the straggling column passed us, a convict here and there left the ranks, apparently with the permission of the guard, and, approaching our pavóska with bared head and extended cap, begged us, in the peculiar, half- wailing chant of the milosérdnaya,[1] to "pity the unfortunate" and to "have mercy on the poor and needy, for Christ's sake." I knew that money given to them would probably be used in gambling or go to the maidánshchik[2] in payment for vódka; but the poor wretches looked so cold, tired, hungry, and miserable, as they tramped past us through the drifting snow on their way to the distant mines of the Trans-Baikál, that my feelings ran away with my prudential philosophy, and I put a few kopéks into every gray cap that was presented to me. The convicts all stared at us with curiosity as they passed; some greeted us pleasantly, a few removed their caps, and in five minutes they were gone, and a long, dark, confused line of moving objects was all that I could see as I looked after them through the white drift of the storm.
After we passed the party of convicts our monotonous life of night-and-day travel was not diversified by a single noteworthy incident. Now and then we met a rich merchant or an army officer posting furiously towards Irkútsk, or passed a long caravan of rude one-horse sledges laden with hide-bound chests of tea for the Nízhni Nóvgorod fair, but we saw no more exiles; the country through which we passed was thinly settled and uninteresting, and the wretched little villages where we stopped to change horses, or to refresh ourselves with tea, were literally buried in drifts of snow. At the post-station of Kamishétskaya, five hundred and thirty versts west of Irkútsk, we overtook two political offenders named Shamárin and Peterson who had just finished their terms of administrative exile in Eastern Siberia, and were on their way back to European Russia. We had made their acquaintance some weeks before in Irkutsk, and had agreed to travel with them, if possible, as far as Krasnoyársk; but our route differed somewhat from theirs at the outset, and, owing to our detention at the Alexandrófski central prison, and to our various mishaps on the Angará, we had fallen a little behind them. They greeted us joyously, shared their supper with us, and after an hour or two of animated conversation, in which we
related to one another our several adventures and experiences, we put on our heavy shúbas, again climbed into our respective pavóskas, and with two tróikas of horses went on together.
As we approached the town of Kansk, Thursday, January 14th, the sky cleared and the weather suddenly became colder. The thermometer fell that night to thirty degrees below zero, and on the following night to forty degrees below. We continued to travel without stop, but suffered intensely from cold, particularly during the long hours between midnight and dawn, when it was impossible to get any warm food at the post-stations, and when all our vital powers were at their lowest ebb. More than once, notwithstanding the weight and warmth of our outer clothing, we became so stiff and chilled between stations that we could hardly get out of our pavóska. Sleep, of course, was out of the question. Even if the temperature had not made it perilous, the roughness of the road would have rendered it impossible. Under the conjoint action of a dozen howling arctic gales, and four or five thousand pounding freight-sledges, the deep snow that lay on this part of the road had drifted, and had packed into a series of huge transverse waves, known to travelers in Siberia as ukhábi. These billows of solidified snow measured four or five feet vertically from trough to summit, and fifteen or twenty feet horizontally from crest to crest, and the jolting and banging of our heavy pavóska, as it mounted the slope of one wave and plunged into the hollow of the next, jarred every bone and shocked every nerve-ganglion in one's body. I finally became so much exhausted, as a result of cold, sleeplessness, and jolting, that at every post-station, particularly in the night, I would throw myself on the floor, without blanket or pillow, and catch five or ten minutes' sleep while the horses were being harnessed. At the lonely post-station of Kuskúnskaya, about eleven o'clock one night, I threw myself down in this way on a narrow plank bench in the travelers' room, fell asleep, and dreamed that I had just been invited to make an extempore address to a Sunday-school. The school was in the church of a religious denomination called the "Holy Monopolists." I inquired who the "Holy Monopolists" were, and was informed that they were a new sect consisting of people who believed in only one thing. I wanted very much to ask what that one thing was, but felt ashamed to do so, because it seemed to me that I ought to know without asking. I entered the Sunday-school room,
which was an amphitheater of seats with a low platform in the middle, and saw, standing on the platform and acting in the capacity of superintendent, a well-known citizen of Norwalk, Ohio, whom I had not seen since boyhood. THE GREAT SIBERIAN ROAD IN WINTER 363 All the scholars of the Sunday-school, to my great surprise, were standing in their places with their backs to the plat- form. As I came in, however, the superintendent said, " You will now please resume your seats," and the boys and girls all turned around and sat down. The superintendent then gave out a hymn, and while it was being sung I made a few notes on the back of an envelope to aid me in the ex- tempore address that I was about to deliver. I decided to give the scholars a talk on the comparative merits of Bud- dhism and Mohammedanism, and I was just considering the question whether I should not also include fetishism when the hymn came to an end. The superintendent then announced, "We will now proceed to the lessons of the day." " Good!" I said to myself ; "that will give me time to think up my speech." As the recitation began I noticed, to my surprise, that all the scholars held in their hands big, round soda-biscuits, which they looked at now and then as if they were lesson- books. I did not have time, however, to investigate this remarkable phenomenon, because it was urgently necessary that I should get my extempore remarks into some sort of shape before the superintendent should call upon me to speak. I paid no heed, therefore, to the questions that he was propounding to the scholars until he came to one that nobody, apparently, could answer. He repeated it solemnly several times, pausing for a reply, until at last it attracted my attention. It was, "Who was the first progressive-euchre player that after his death was brought back from Alaska amid the mourning of a nation?" As I glanced around at the faces of the scholars I could see that everybody had given up this extraordinary conundrum, and I turned with interest to the superintendent, expecting that he would in- form us who this lamented Alaskan euchre-player was. Instead of doing so, however, he bowed towards me and said, "The distinguished friend whom we have with us to- day will please tell us who was the first progressive-euchre player that after his death was brought back from Alaska amid the mourning of a nation." A cold chill ran down my spine. It suddenly flashed upon me that this must be an elementary fact that even school-children were expected to know — and I was so ignorant that I had never even heard of an Alaskan euchre-player. In order to gain a mo- ment's time in which to collect my faculties I said, "Show me the question." The superintendent handed me a big, hot soda-biscuit, as if it were a book. I examined it care- fully on both sides, but could not find on it anything that looked like printing. The superintendent thereupon pulled the two halves apart, and showed me the question stamped in Thibetan characters around the inside of the biscuit about half an inch from the edge. I found in the queer- looking letters no clue to the answer, and in an agony of shame at being forced to confess to a Sunday-school of "Holy Monopolists" that I did not know who was the first progressive-euchre player that died in Alaska and was brought back amid the mourning of a nation I awoke. For a moment I could not recover my mental hold upon life. I was apparently in a place where I had never yet been, and over me were standing two extraordinary figures that I could not remember ever before to have seen. One of them, a tall, powerful man with black, bushy, Circassian- like hair, and blazing blue eyes, was dressed in a long, spotted reindeer-skin kukhlánka1 and high fur boots, while the other, who seemed to be an official of some kind, had on a blue uniform with a double row of brass buttons down the front of his coat, and was holding over my head a kero- sene lamp. "What 's the matter, Mr. Kennan?" inquired the figure in the reindeer-skin kukhlánka. "You have been moaning as if you were in pain."
As memory slowly resumed its throne I recognized in the speaker my exile traveling companion Peterson, and in
1 A very heavy fur blouse or overshirt covering the body from the neck to the calf of the leg, and confined about the waist with a sash. the official the post-station master. "I have had a bad dream," I replied. "How long have I been asleep?"
"We have been here only ten minutes," replied Peterson, looking at his watch, "and I don't think you have been asleep more than five. The horses are ready."
With stiff and aching limbs I hobbled out to the pavóska, crept into the sheepskin bag beside Mr. Frost, and began another long, cold, and dreary night-ride.
Between Kuskúnskaya and Krasnoyársk we experienced the lowest temperature of the winter, — forty-five degrees below zero, — and had an opportunity to observe again the phenomena of extreme cold. Clouds of vapor rose all the time from the bodies of our horses; the freight-wagon caravans were constantly enshrouded in mist, and frequently, after passing one of them, we would find the road foggy with frozen moisture for a distance of a quarter of a mile. When we opened the door of a station-house a great volume of steam seemed to rush into it ahead of us; little jets of vapor played around the holes and crevices of the windows and doors; and in a warm room white frost accumulated to a thickness of nearly half an inch upon the inner ends of iron bolts that went through the window-casings to the outside air. Throughout Friday and Saturday, January 15th and 16th, we stopped to drink tea at almost every post-station we passed, and even then we were constantly cold. This was due partly to the extreme severity of the weather, and partly to the fact that we were compelled, every five or ten miles, to get out of our pavóska and help the horses to drag it through the deep soft snow at the side of the road, where we had been forced to go in order to get past a long train of freight-sledges. Sunday, January 17th, nine days after our departure from Irkútsk, we drove into the provincial town of Krasnoyársk, having made, with forty-three relays of post-horses, a journey of about seven hundred miles. Mr. Frost and I took up our quarters in the same hotel at which we had stopped on our way into Siberia the previous summer, and Messrs. Shamárin and Peterson went to the house of an acquaintance.
In the course of the three days that we spent in Krasnoyársk we renewed our acquaintance with Mr. Innokénti Kuznetsóf, the wealthy mining proprietor at whose house we had been so hospitably entertained on our way eastward five months before; took breakfast with Mr. Sávenkof, the director of the Krasnoyársk normal school, whose collection of archæological relics and cliff pictographs greatly interested us; and spent one afternoon with Colonel Zagárin, inspector of exile transportation for Eastern Siberia. With the permission of the latter we also made a careful examination on Wednesday of the Krasnoyársk city prison, the exile forwarding prison, and the prison hospital; and I am glad to be able to say a good word for all of them. The prisons were far from being model institutions of their kind, of course, and at certain seasons of the year I have no doubt that they were more or less dirty and overcrowded; but at the time when we inspected them they were in better condition than any prisons that we had seen in Siberia, except the military prison at Ust Kámenogórsk and the Alexandrófski central prison near Irkútsk. The hospital connected with the Krasnoyársk prisons seemed to me to be worthy of almost unqualified praise. It was scrupulously clean, perfectly ventilated, well supplied, apparently, with bed-linen, medicines, and surgical appliances, and in irreproachable sanitary condition generally. It is possible, of course, that in the late summer and early fall, when the great annual tide of exiles is at its flood, this hospital becomes as much overcrowded and as foul as the hospital of the forwarding prison at Tomsk; but at the time when we saw it I should have been willing, if necessary, to go into it for treatment myself.
The Krasnoyársk city prison was a large two-story building of stuccoed brick resembling in type the forwarding prison at Tiumén. Its kámeras, or common cells, were rather small, but none of them seemed to be crowded, and the inscriptions over their doors, such as "murderers," "passportless," and "politicals," showed that an attempt at least had been made to classify the prisoners and to keep them
properly separated. There were wheel-ventilators in most of the cell-windows and ventilating-pipes in the walls; the stone floors of the corridors were clean; the closet fixtures and plumbing were in fairly good condition; and although the air in some of the cells was heavy and lifeless, and had the peculiar characteristic prison odor, it could be breathed without much discomfort, and without any of the repulsion and disgust that we had felt in the overcrowded cells of the prisons in Tiumén, Tomsk, Irkútsk, and at the mines. The exile forwarding prison, which stood near the city prison in a stockaded yard, consisted of three large one-story log buildings of the Tomsk type, and presented to the eye nothing that was particularly interesting or new. It did not contain more than half the number of prisoners that, apparently, could be accommodated in it; some of the kámeras were entirely empty, and the air everywhere was fresh and good.
By a fortunate chance we reached this prison just in time to see the departure of a marching party of two hundred and seventy male convicts destined for the province of Yakútsk and the mines and prisons of the Trans-Baikál. It was a bitterly cold morning, and two-thirds of the mustered party were walking back and forth in the prison yard, trying, by means of physical exercise, to keep themselves warm while waiting for the medical examination of the other third. After watching them for a moment we entered a large new log building standing a little apart from the prison proper, where we found the prison surgeon, an intelligent, kindly looking man, engaged in making a physical examination of seventy-five or eighty convicts who had declared themselves unable to march. To my inexperienced eye all of them looked thin, pallid, and miserable enough to be excused from a march of twenty miles in such weather and over such a road; but the doctor, after a brief examination by means of scrutiny, touch, and the stethoscope, dismissed as imaginary or frivolous the complaints of nine men out of every ten, and ordered sleighs for the rest. In less than half an hour all was in readiness for a start. The soldiers of the convoy, with shouldered rifles, formed a cordon outside the gate to receive the party; the prison blacksmith made his appearance with hammers, rivets, and
Marching parties of exiles leave Tomsk and Krasnoyársk every week throughout the winter, and go through to their destination without regard to weather, and with no more regard to the condition of the road than is necessary to determine whether it is passable or absolutely impassable. It would be perfectly easy, by making use of horses and vehicles, to transport the whole annual contingent of exiles from Tomsk to Irkútsk during the summer months, and thus relieve them from the suffering that they now endure as the necessary result of exposure to winter cold and winter storms; but for some unknown reason the Government has always persistently refused to take this step in the direction of humane reform. It cannot explain nor defend its refusal by pleading considerations of expense, because the cost of transporting ten thousand exiles from Tomsk to Irkútsk with horses would actually be much less than the cost of sending them on foot. Before me, as I write, lies an official report of Colonel Vinokúrof, inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia, in which that officer shows that if all the convicts for the whole year were despatched from Moscow in the summer, and were carried from Tomsk to Áchinsk in one-horse wagons instead of being forced to walk, the expense of delivering them in the latter place would be reduced by almost 50,000 rúbles.[3]
The late Colonel Zagárin, inspector of exile transportation for Eastern Siberia, told me in the course of a long conversation that we had on the subject in Krasnoyársk, that in 1882 or 1883 he made a detailed report to Governor-general Anúchin in which he set forth the evils of the present system of forwarding exiles on foot the year round at the rate of only one party a week, and recommended that the Government restrict the deportation of criminals to the summer months, and then forward them swiftly to their destinations in wagons with relays of horses at the rate of a party every day. He showed conclusively to the governor-general, he said, by means of official statistics and contractors' estimates, that the cost of carrying the annual quota of exiles in wagons from Áchinsk to Irkútsk [780 miles] during the summer months would be fourteen rúbles less per capita, and more than 100,000 rúbles less per annum, than the cost of sending them over the same distance on foot in the usual way. Besides this lessening of expense, there would be a saving, he said, of at least sixty days in the time occupied by the journey, to say nothing of the economy of human life that would be effected by shortening the period of confinement in the forwarding prisons and étapes, and by making the season of exile-travel coincide with the season of good weather and good roads. The overcrowding of the Tomsk forwarding prison, with its attendant suffering and mortality, would at once be relieved by the daily shipment of exiles eastward in wagons; the periodical epidemics of typhus fever, due chiefly to overcrowding, would cease; the corrupting influence of étape life upon first offenders and upon the innocent families of banished criminals would be greatly weakened; and, finally, the exiles would reach their destination in a state of comparative health and vigor, instead of being broken down on the road by the hardships and exposures of a thousand-mile winter march.
"Why in the name of all that is reasonable has not this change been made?" I said to Colonel Zagárin when he finished explaining to me the nature of his report. "If it would be cheaper, as well as more humane, to forward the exiles only in summer and in wagons, why does n't the Government do it? Who can have any interest in opposing a reform that is economical as well as philanthropical!"
"You had better inquire when you get to St. Petersburg," replied Colonel Zagárin, shrugging his shoulders. "All that we can do here is to suggest."
The reason why changes that are manifestly desirable, that are in the direction of economy, and that, apparently, would injure no one, are not made in Russia is one of the most puzzling and exasperating things that are forced upon a traveler's attention. In every branch of the administration one is constantly stumbling upon abuses or defects that have long been recognized, that have been commented upon for years, that are apparently prejudicial to the interests of everybody, and that, nevertheless, continue to exist. If you ask an explanation of an official in Siberia, he refers you to St. Petersburg. If you inquire of the chief of the prison department in St. Petersburg, he tells you that he has drawn up a "project" to cope with the evil, but that this "project" has not yet been approved by the Minister of the Interior. If you go to the Ministry of the Interior, you learn that the "project" requires a preliminary appropriation of money, — even although its ultimate effect may be to save money, — and that it cannot be carried into execution without the assent and coöperation of the Minister of Finance. If you follow the "project" to the Ministry of Finance, you are told that it has been sent back through the Minister of the Interior to the chief of the prison department for "modification." If you still persist in your determination to find out why this thing is not done, you may chase the modified "project" through the prison department, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Finance to the Council of the Empire. There you discover that, inasmuch as certain cross-and-ribbon-decorated senators and generals, who barely know Siberia by name, have expressed a doubt as to the existence of the evil with which the "project" is intended to deal, a special "commission" [with salaries amounting to twenty thousand rúbles a year and mileage] has been appointed to investigate the subject and make a report. If you pursue the commission to Siberia and back, and search diligently in the proceedings of the Council of the Empire for its report, you ascertain that the document has been sent to the Ministry of the Interior to serve as a basis for a new "project," and then, as ten or fifteen years have elapsed and all the original projectors are dead, everything begins over again. At no stage of this circumrotatory process can you lay your hand on a particular official and say, "Here! You are responsible for this — what do you mean by it?" At no stage, probably, can you find an official who is opposed to the reform or who has any personal interest in defeating it; and yet the general effect of the circumrotatory process is more certainly fatal to your reformatory project than any amount of intelligent and active opposition. The various bureaus of the provincial governor-general's office, the chief prison department, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice, the Council of Ministers, and the Council of the Empire constitute a huge administrative maelstrom of ignorance and indifference, in which a "project" revolves slowly, month after month and year after year, until it is finally sucked down out of sight, or perhaps thrown by a fortuitous eddy of personal or official interest into the great gulf-stream current of real life.[4]
On the occasion of our first visit to Krasnoyársk, in the summer, we had not been able to find there any political exiles, or even to hear of any; but under the guidance of our new traveling companions, Shamárin and Peterson, we discovered three: namely, first, Madam Dubróva, wife of a Siberian missionary whose anthropological researches among the Buriáts have recently attracted to him some attention; secondly, a young medical student named Urúsof, who, by permission of Governor Pedashénko, was serving as an assistant in the city hospital; and, thirdly, a lady who had been taken to that hospital to recover from injuries that she had received in an assault made upon her by a drunken soldier. The only one of these exiles whose personal acquaintance we made was Madam Dubróva, who, in 1880, before her marriage, was exiled to Eastern Siberia for making an attempt, in connection with Madam Róssikova, to rob the Khersón Government Treasury. After the adoption of the so-called "policy of terror" by the extreme section of the Russian revolutionary party in 1878, some of the terrorists advocated and practised a resort to such methods of waging war as the forgery of Imperial manifestos as a means of inciting the peasants to revolt, and the robbery of Government mails and Government treasuries as a means of procuring money to relieve the sufferings and to facilitate the escape of political exiles in Siberia. These measures were disapproved and condemned by all of the Russian liberals and by most of the cool-headed revolutionists; but they were defended by those who resorted to them upon the ground that they [the terrorists] were fighting against tremendous odds, and that the unjust, treacherous, and ferociously cruel treatment of political prisoners by the Government was enough to justify any sort of reprisals. Among the terrorists of this class was Madam Dubróva, or, as she was known before her marriage, Miss Anna Alexéiova. In conjunction with Madam Róssikova, a school-teacher from Elizabethgrad, and aided by an escaped convict from Siberia, Miss Alexéiova made an attempt to rob the Khersón Government Treasury by means of a tunnel driven secretly at night under the stone floor of the vault in which the funds of the institution were kept. Judged from any point of view this was a wild scheme for young and criminally inexperienced gentlewomen to undertake; and that it ever succeeded at all is a striking evidence of the skill, the energy, the patience, and the extraordinary daring that were developed in certain classes of Russian society at that time by the conditions of revolutionary life. Young, refined, and educated women, in all parts of the Empire, entered upon lines of action, and devised and executed plots that, in view of the inevitable consequences, might well have daunted the bravest man. The tunnel under the Khersón Government Treasury was successfully driven without detection, entrance to the vault was obtained by removing one of the heavy stone slabs in the floor, and the young women carried away and concealed a million and a half of rúbles in available cash. Before they could remove the stolen money to a place of perfect safety, however, and make good their own escape, they were arrested, together with their confederate, the runaway convict, and thrown into prison. The confederate turned state's evidence and showed the police where to find the stolen money, and the amateur burglars were sent to Siberia. Madam Róssikova, as the older woman and the originator of the plot, was condemned to penal servitude at the mines, while Miss Alexéiova was sentenced merely to forced colonization with deprivation of certain civil rights. After her marriage in Siberia to the missionary Dubróf, she was permitted to reside, under police supervision, in Krasnoyársk.
I had seen in Siberia, long before my arrival at Krasnoyársk, almost every variety of political offender from the shy and timid school-girl of sixteen to the hardened and embittered terrorist; but I had never before happened to make the acquaintance of a political treasury robber, and when Mr. Shamárin proposed to take me to call upon Madam Dubróva, I looked forward to the experience with a good deal of curiosity. She had been described to me by Colonel Nóvikof, in Chíta, as nothing more than a common burglar who had assumed the mask of a political offender with the hope of getting a lighter sentence; but as Colonel Nóvikof was both ignorant and prejudiced, and as, moreover, pretending to be a political with a view to getting a lighter sentence for burglary would be very much like pleading guilty to murder in the hope of getting a lighter sentence for simple trespass, I did not place much confidence in his statements.[5]
Shamárin, Peterson, and I went to see Madam Dubróva the night after our arrival in Krasnoyársk, and found her living in one half of a very plainly furnished house in a respectable but not fashionable part of the town, about half a mile from our hotel. She was a lady perhaps thirty years of age, with dark hair, large dark eyes, regular features, clear complexion, and a frank, pleasant manner. Ten years earlier she must have been a very attractive if not a beautiful young girl; but imprisonment, exile, disappointment, and suffering had left unmistakable traces in her face. She greeted us cordially, expressed particular pleasure at meeting a traveler from the United States, regretted that her husband was absent from home, and began at once to question me about the political situation in Russia, and to make inquiries concerning certain of her exiled friends whom I had met in other parts of Eastern Siberia. A general conversation followed, in the course of which I had an opportunity to form a hasty but fairly satisfactory judgment with regard to her character. It was in almost all respects a favorable judgment. No one that was not hopelessly blinded by political hatred and prejudice could fail to see that this was a type of woman as far removed from "common burglars and thieves" as Charlotte Corday was removed from common murderers. You might possibly describe her as misguided, fanatical, lacking in sound judgment, or lawless; but you could class her with common criminals only by ignoring all the characteristics that distinguish a man like John Brown, for example, from a common brigand. The law may deal primarily with actions, and pay little attention to motives, but in estimating character from the historical point of view motives must be taken fully into account. Madam Dubróva was arrested the first time — before she was eighteen years of age — for going with Madam Róssikova into a peasant village on an errand that was as purely and generously philanthropic as that of the educated young women from New England who went South during the reconstruction era to teach in negro schools. From that time forward she was regarded as a political suspect, and was harried and harassed by the authorities, and exasperated by unjust treatment of herself and her friends until, under the dominating influence of Madam Róssikova — a character of the true John Brown type — she became a terrorist. Like many other young Russians of ardent nature and imperfect acquaintance with the history of man's social and political experiments, she acted sometimes upon erroneous conceptions of duty or mistaken ideas of moral justification; but for this again the Russian Government itself is responsible. Upon the pretense of guarding the moral character of its young people and shielding them from the contagion of "seditious" ideas, it deprives them of the knowledge that is necessary to guide them in dealing with the problems of life, sets them an example of lawlessness by punishing them for social activity that is perfectly innocent and legal, and then, having exasperated them into crime by injustice and cruelty, holds them up to the world as monsters of depravity. I have been accused by Russian officials of idealizing the characters of the political exiles; but when the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century shall have been written, it will be found, I think, that my portraits of the Russian revolutionists, necessarily imperfect and sketchy as they must be, are much more like the originals than are the caricatures of human beings left on record by the prosecuting attorneys of the Crown in their political speeches and indictments.
On the second day after our arrival in Krasnoyársk we narrowly escaped getting into what might have been serious trouble as the result of an unexpected perquisition in the house of the acquaintance with whom Shamárin and Peterson were staying. This acquaintance, it seemed, was under suspicion, and late in the evening, during the absence of the two young men from their quarters, the police suddenly appeared with orders to make a house-search. The search was duly made, but nothing of a suspicious nature was found except the two locked trunks of Shamárin and Peterson. In reply to a question as to what was in them the proprietor of the house said that he did not know, that they were the property of two of his acquaintances who had stopped for a few days with him on their way from Irkútsk to St. Petersburg. Upon being asked where these acquaintances were, he replied that he did not know, that they usually went out after dinner and returned between eleven and twelve o'clock. After a brief consultation the police officers decided that as they had no orders to search the personal baggage of the house-owner's guests they would not force the locks of the trunks, but would merely cord and seal them so that the contents could not be tampered with, and leave them until morning.
When Shamárin and Peterson returned to their quarters about midnight they found their trunks corded and sealed so that they could not be opened. In one of them were many letters from political exiles and convicts in Eastern Siberia to friends and relatives in European Russia — letters describing my investigations and the nature of the material that I was collecting, and asking the friends and relatives in European Russia to coöperate with me — and a photograph of myself that I had given to Shamárin with a dedication or inscription on the back that would reveal to any intelligent police officer the intimate nature of my relations with political convicts. What was to be done? To break a police seal under such circumstances would be a penal offense and would probably lead to imprisonment and an investigation. To leave the letters and photograph in the trunk would be to insure their discovery and confiscation on the following morning, and that might create a very embarrassing situation for me, as well as for the authors of the letters and their friends. The two young men finally concluded to make an attempt to get the trunk open without removing the cords or breaking the seals, and as the letters and photograph were near the bottom, and as the lid could not be raised even if the trunk were unlocked, they decided to take out a part of the bottom and afterward replace it. By working all the rest of the night they succeeded in getting out one of the bottom boards, obtained the dangerous letters and the photograph, put the board back without disturbing any of the seals, and when the police came in the morning stood by with unruffled serenity and saw the trunk searched. Of course nothing more dangerous than a hair-brush, and nothing more incriminating than a hotel-bill could be found.
There was another little episode at Krasnoyársk which gave us some uneasiness, and that was the offensive behavior of two unknown men towards us one night in a bookstore. The reader will perhaps remember the mysterious pistol-shot that was fired through the partition of our room late one night in Chíta. That incident first suggested to me the possibility of becoming accidentally involved in some sort of affray or mystery that would give the police a plausible excuse for taking us temporarily into custody and making an examination of our baggage. I knew that, on account of the nature of the papers and documents that I had in my possession, such a search would be absolutely fatal, and I resolved to be extremely careful not to fall into any snare of that kind should it be set for me. I even refrained, on one occasion, from going to the aid of a woman who was being cruelly and brutally beaten late at night in the other half of a house where I was calling upon a political convict. I felt sure that her screams would soon bring the police, and I not only did not dare to be found by them in that place, but I did not dare to be connected with an affair that would lead to a police investigation. But it was very hard to hear that woman's screams and not to go to her relief.
The Krasnoyársk incident to which I refer was as follows: Frost and I early one evening went into the principal bookstore of Krasnoyársk to buy some provincial maps, writing-materials, note-books, and other things of that kind which we happened to need. We were followed into the house by two men in plain citizen's dress whom I had never before seen, and to whom at first I paid little attention. In a few moments, however, I discovered that one of them had attached himself to me and the other to Mr. Frost, and that they were mimicking or caricaturing, in a very offensive way, everything that we did. They were not intoxicated, they did not address any of their remarks to us; in fact they did not make any original remarks at all. They simply mimicked us. If I asked to see a map of the province of Yeniséisk, the man by my side also asked to see a map of the province of Yeniséisk, and did so with an elaborate imitation of my manner. If I went to another part of the store and expressed a desire for writing-paper, he went to the same part of the store and also expressed a desire for writing-paper. The intention to be offensive was so unmistakable, and the manifestation of it so extraordinary and deliberate, that I at once suspected some sort of police trap. No two sane and sober private citizens would follow perfect strangers into a bookstore and behave towards them in this studied and evidently preconcerted manner without some definite object. I could imagine no other object than the provocation of a fight, and as I could not afford just at that time to engage in a fight, there was nothing left for me to do but to transact my business as speedily as possible and to get out of the store. The men followed us to the sidewalk, but did not speak to us, and we lost sight of them in the darkness. When I asked the proprietor of the store the next day if he
knew the men he replied that he did not. In view of the mass of documents, letters, and politically incendiary material of all sorts that we had concealed about our persons and in our baggage, and in view of the tremendous interests that we had at stake generally, such episodes as these, whatever their significance may have been, were very disquieting. Long before I reached the frontier of European Russia I became so nervous, and so suspicious of everything unusual, that I could hardly sleep at night.
Wednesday, January 20th, having spent as much time in Krasnoyársk as we thought we could spend there profitably, and having recovered from the fatigue of the journey from Irkútsk, we set out for the town of Minusínsk, which is situated on the northern watershed of the Altái and Sayán mountains, near the Mongolian frontier, in what is half seriously and half jocosely called "The Siberian Italy." The distance from Krasnoyársk to Minusínsk is about two hundred miles, and the road between the two places in winter runs on the ice up the great river Yeniséi. It is not a regular post-route, but the well-to-do and enterprising peasants who live along the river are accustomed to carry travelers from village to village at the established Government post-rate, and there is no more delay than on the great Siberian road itself. The weather, when we left Krasnoyársk, was cold and stormy, and the snow was drifting so badly on the ice that beyond the second station it became necessary to harness the three horses tandem and to send a fourth horse ahead with a light sledge to break a track. As the road was perfectly level, and the motion of the pavóska steady, Frost and I buried ourselves in the depths of our sheepskin bag as night came on and went to sleep, leaving our drivers to their own devices. All that I remember of the night's travel is waking up and getting out of the pavóska at intervals of three or four hours and going into some peasant's house to wait for the harnessing of fresh horses. Thursday we traveled slowly all day up the river through deep soft snow in which the pavóska sank to its outriggers and the horses to their knees. The banks of the river became higher as we went southward, and finally assumed a wild mountainous character, with splendid ramparts here and there of cliffs and stratified palisades. Upon these cliffs Mr. Sávenkof, the accomplished director of the Normal School in Krasnoyársk, found the remarkable inscriptions and pictographs of which he has so large a collection. There are many evidences to show that the basin of the Yeniséi
was the home of a great and prosperous nation. On Friday, after leaving the seventh station from Krasnoyársk, we abandoned the river for a time and rode through a shallow, grassy, and almost snowless valley which was literally a great cemetery. In every direction it was dotted with innumerable gravestones, inclosing burial-mounds like those shown in the illustration THE GREAT SIBERIAN ROAD IN WINTER 385 on page 396. It is not an exaggeration, I think, to say that there were thousands of them, and throughout the whole day they were the most prominent features of every land- scape. Before daylight, Saturday morning, January 23d, we reached our proximate destination, the town of Minusinsk, and found shelter in a two-story log house that for many years was the home of the distinguished political exile, Prince Alexander Kropotkin. II 25
- ↑ The exiles' begging song, which I have already described and translated.
- ↑ The maidánshchik occupies something like the same position in a convict party that a sutler occupies in a regiment of soldiers. Although a prisoner himself, he is allowed, by virtue of long-established custom, to keep a small stock of such luxuries as tea, sugar, and white bread for sale to his fellow-prisoners; and at the same time, with the aid of the soldiers of the convoy whom it is not difficult to bribe, he deals surreptitiously in tobacco, playing-cards, and vodka.
- ↑ The part of the great Siberian road that lies between Tomsk and Áchinsk, 260 miles in extent, is the only part of the exile marching route over which Colonel Vinokúrof has jurisdiction, and for that reason his figures and estimates relate to it alone. In the report to which I refer he makes an itemized statement of the cost of sending 9417 exiles on foot from Tomsk to Áchinsk in the year 1884, and says: "It thus appears that the expense of forwarding 9417 exiles from Tomsk to Áchinsk — on the basis of a twenty-one days' trip — is not less than 130,342 rúbles. This is at the rate of thirteen rúbles and seventy-five kopéks for every marching prisoner, while the cost of a pair of post-horses from Tomsk to Áchinsk, at the regular established rate, is only eleven rúbles and sixty-four kopéks." In other words, according to Colonel Vinokúrof's figures, it would be actually cheaper to hire relays of post-horses for every convict and to send him to his destination as if he were a private traveler — or even a Government courier — than to march him across Siberia "by étape" in the usual way. Colonel Vinokúrof then makes an itemized statement of the expense of carrying 9417 exiles from Tomsk to Áchinsk in wagons with relays of horses, and shows that it would not exceed 80,817 rúbles. The saving that would be effected, therefore, by the substitution of this method of deportation for the other would be 49,525 rúbles, or about $25,000 per annum, on a distance of only 260 miles, At the same rate the saving for the distance between Tomsk and the mines of Kará would be more than $175,000 per annum, provided all the prisoners went through.
- ↑ This natural history of a Russian "project" is not imaginary nor conjectural. A plan for the transportation of exiles in wagons between Tomsk and Irkútsk has been gyrating in circles in the Sargasso Sea of Russian bureaucracy for almost thirty years. The projected reform of the exile system has been the rounds of the various circumlocution offices at least half a dozen times since 1871, and has four times reached the "commission" stage and been reported to the Council of the Empire. (The commissions were under the presidency respectively of Sollohub, Frisch, Zubóf, and Grot. See Eastern Review, No. 17, July 22, St. Petersburg, 1882.) Mr. Kokóftsef, assistant chief of the Russian prison department, announced, in a speech that he made to the International Prison Congress at Stockholm in 1878, that his Government recognized the evils of the exile system and was about to abolish it. (See "Report of the International Prison Congress of Stockholm," by E.C. Wines, United States Commissioner, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1879.) That was thirteen years ago, and my latest Russian newspapers contain the information that the "project" for the reform of the exile system has been found "unsatisfactory" by the Council of the Empire, and has been sent back through the Ministry of the Interior to the chief of the prison department for "modification." In other words, this "project" in the course of thirteen years has progressed four stages backward on the return gyration.
- ↑ Colonel Nóvikof sat as one of the judges in the court-martial that tried Madam Róssikova and Miss Alexéiova, but he was either incapable of understanding the characters of such women or he was trying to deceive me when he described them to me as "nothing but common burglars and thieves." Madam Róssikova was represented to me by all the political exiles who knew her as a woman of high moral standards and self-sacrificing life. She was one of the young women who took part in the quixotic, but generous movement known as "going to the people," and lived for seven or eight months like a common peasant woman in a peasant village merely in order to see how that class of the people could best be reached and helped. As a revolutionary propagandist she was very successful, particularly among the Stúndists or Russian Baptists. She opposed terrorism for a long time, but finally became a terrorist herself under the influence of letters from her exiled friends in Siberia describing their sufferings.