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
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.
