Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/529

SIBERIA 513 II To the Editor op the Pall Mall Gazette. Sir : In the number of the Gazette issued Wednesday, September 24, 1890, there appears a letter from Mr. H. De Windt, the explorer of the desert of Gobi, in which that gentleman describes a visit made by him to the Tomsk prison, in Western Siberia, and in which, referring to my Siberian investigations, he says, " Mr. Kennan will doubtless be glad to hear that the Tomsk prison, as graphically described in the pages of the Century Magazine, does not exist." WU1 you kindly grant me space enough to correct an error into which Mr. de Windt has inadvertently fallen "? If the distinguished explorer will consult the latest report of the Russian prison administration, which is in print, and which may be obtained without difficulty, he will find that there are two prisons in the city of Tomsk, one called the "gubernski," or provincial prison, and the other the "perisilni," or exile-forwarding prison. The former is used almost exclusively as a place of detention or confinement for local offenders, while the latter is the great forwarding depot through which pass all exiles and convicts destined for central and Eastern Siberia. The prison described by me in the Century Magazine is the exile forwarding-prison, which receives and despatches eastward from 10,000 to 12,000 criminals every year. The prison visited and described by Mr. de Windt is a mere place of confinement for local provincial offenders, and does not contain as many hundreds of inmates as the forwarding prison contains thou- sands. It is a remarkable and significant fact that whenever a badly in- formed and credulous traveler arrives in the Siberian city of Tomsk, and expresses a desire to inspect the Tomsk prison, he is conducted by the amiable officials, not to the exile-forwarding prison, which, perhaps, is the thing that he really wishes and means to see, but to the " gubernski," or provincial prison, which is nothing more than a local gaol. This was the course pursued with the Rev. Henry Lansdell, and this seems to be the plan that was adopted by the Tomsk officials in their dealings with Mr. de Windt. If either of these gentlemen, however, had taken the trouble to make even the most superficial inquiry in the city, outside the circle of the officials, he would have been made acquainted with the dis- tinction between the city gaol and the forwarding prison, and would doubtless have asked to see the latter. Mr. de Windt declares positively that the " Tomsk pi-ison, as graphi- cally described in the pages of the Century Magazine, does not exist." His letter bears the somewhat vague date " Tomsk, September," without specification of day or year, but from internal evidence it appears that it was written in September, 1889. On the 3d of that same month and year the Russian Gazette, one of the strongest and most influential news- papers in Moscow, devoted a long editorial to the condition of the Tomsk II 33