Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter XIV
CHAPTER XIV
THE LIFE OF POLITICAL EXILES
IN the city of Tomsk, where we spent more time than in any other West-Siberian town, we had an opportunity to become well acquainted with a large colony of political exiles, and greatly to extend our knowledge of political exile life. We met there, for the first time, men and women who had taken part in the so-called "propaganda" of 1872-75, who had been banished by sentence of a court, and who might fairly be called revolutionists. They did not differ essentially from the administrative exiles in Semipalátinsk, Ulbínsk and Ust Kámenogórsk, except that they had been longer in exile and had had a much wider range of experience. Solomon Chudnófski, for example, a bright and talented publicist, about thirty-five years of age, told me that he was arrested the first time at the age of nineteen, while in the university; and that he had been under police surveillance, in prison, or in exile nearly all his life. He was held four years and three months in solitary confinement before trial, and spent twenty months of that time in a casemate of the Petropávlovsk fortress. For protesting against illegal treatment in that great state-prison, and for insisting pertinaciously upon his right to have pen, ink, and paper, in order that he might address a complaint to the Minister of the Interior, he was tied hand and foot, and was finally put into a strait-jacket. He thereupon refused to take food, and starved himself until the prison surgeon reported that his condition was becoming critical. The warden, Colonel Bogaródski, then yielded, and furnished him with writing materials, but no reply was ever made to the complaint that he drew up. He was finally tried with "the 193," in 1878, upon the charge of importing pernicious books, was found guilty, and was sentenced to five years of penal servitude, with deprivation of all civil rights. In view, however, of the length of time that he had already been held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial—four years and three months—the court recommended to the Tsar that his sentence be commuted to exile in Western Siberia for life.[1]
Most men would have been completely broken down by nearly five years of solitary confinement and seven years of exile; but Mr. Chudnófski's energy and courage were invincible. In spite of the most disheartening obstacles he completed his education, and made a name and career for himself even in Siberia. He is the author of the excellent and carefully prepared history of the development of educational institutions in Siberia, published in the "Official Year Book" of the province of Tomsk for 1885; he has made two scientific expeditions to the Altái under the auspices of the West-Siberian Branch of the Imperial Geographical Society; he has been an indefatigable contributor to the Russian periodical press; and his book upon the Siberian province of Yeniséisk took the prize offered by the Krasnoyársk city council for the best work upon that subject.[2] Mr. Chudnófski impressed me as a man who, if he had been born in America, might have had a career of usefulness and distinction, and might have been an honor to the state. He happened to be born in Russia, and was therefore pre-destined to imprisonment and exile.
Among the most interesting of the newly arrived political exiles in Tomsk was Mr. Constantine Staniukóvich, the editor and proprietor of the Russian magazine Diélo,
whose history I gave briefly in Chapter XI ["Exile by Administrative Process," p. 243]. He was a close and accurate observer of Russian social life, a talented novelist, a writer of successful dramas, and a man of great force, energy, and ability. His wife, who had accompanied him to Siberia, spoke English fluently with the least perceptible accent, and seemed to me to be a woman of more than ordinary culture and refinement. They had one grown daughter, a pretty, intelligent girl seventeen or eighteen years of age, as well as two or three younger children, and the whole family made upon us an extremely pleasant impression. Some of the most delightful evenings that we had in Tomsk were spent in their cozy little parlor, where we sometimes sat until long after midnight listening to duets sung by Miss Staniukóvich and Prince Kropótkin; discussing Russian methods of government and the exile system; or comparing our impressions of London, Paris, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco. Both Mr. and Mrs. Staniukóvich had traveled in the United States, and it seemed not a little strange to find in their house in Siberia visiting-cards of such well-known American officers as Captain James B. Eads and Captain John Rodgers, a photograph of President Lincoln, and Indian bead and birch-bark work in the shape of slippers and toy canoes brought as souvenirs from Niagara Falls. We had not expected to find ourselves linked to political exiles in Siberia by such a multitude of common experiences and memories, nor to be shown in their houses such familiar things as bead-embroidered moccasins and birch-bark watch-pockets made by the Tonawanda Indians. Mr. Staniukóvich was struggling hard, by means of literary work, to support his family in exile; and his wife, who was an accomplished musician, aided him as far as possible by giving music lessons.
I am glad to be able to say that, since my return to the United States, Mr. Staniukóvich has completed his term of exile, has left the empire, and when I last heard of him was in Paris. He continues to write indefatigably for the Russian periodicals, and has recently published a volume of collected sketches entitled "Stories of the Sea."
Another political exile in whom I became deeply interested at Tomsk was Prince Alexander Kropótkin, brother of the well-known author and socialist who now resides in London. As his history clearly illustrates certain phases of political exile life I will briefly relate it.
Although banished to Siberia upon the charge of disloyalty Kropótkin was not a nihilist, nor a revolutionist, nor even an extreme radical. His views with regard to social and political questions would have been regarded in America, or even in western Europe, as very moderate, and he had never taken any part in Russian revolutionary agitation. He was, however, a man of impetuous temperament, high standard of honor, and great frankness and directness of speech; and these characteristics were perhaps enough to attract to him the suspicious attention of the Russian police.
"I am not a nihilist nor a revolutionist," he once said to me indignantly, "and I never have been. I was exiled simply because I dared to think, and to say what I thought, about the things that happened around me, and because I was the brother of a man whom the Russian Government hated."
Prince Kropótkin was arrested the first time in 1858, while a student in the St. Petersburg University, for having in his possession a copy in English of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and refusing to say where he obtained it. The book had been lent to him by one of the faculty, Professor Tikhonrávof, and Kropótkin might perhaps have justified himself and escaped unpleasant consequences by simply stating the fact; but this would not have been in accordance with his high standard of personal honor. He did not think it a crime to read Emerson, but he did regard it as cowardly and dishonorable to shelter himself from the consequences of any action behind the person of an instructor. He preferred to go to prison. When Professor Tikhonrávof heard of Kropótkin's arrest he went at once to the rector of the university, and admitted that he was the owner of the incendiary volume, and the young student was thereupon released.
After his graduation from the university Kropótkin went abroad, studied science, particularly astronomy, and upon his return to Russia made a number of important translations of French and English scientific works into his native language. Finally he entered the Government service, and for a time previous to his exile held an important place in the Russian telegraph department. This place, however, he was forced to resign in consequence of a collision with the Minister of the Interior. The latter ordered Kropótkin one day to send to him all the telegrams of a certain private individual that were on file in his office. Kropótkin refused to obey this order upon the ground that such action would be personally dishonorable and degrading. Another less scrupulous officer of the department, however, forwarded the required telegrams and Kropótkin resigned. After this time he lived constantly under the secret supervision of the police. His brother Peter had already become prominent as a revolutionist and socialist; he himself was under suspicion; his record, from the point of view of the Government, was not a good one; he probably injured himself still further by frank but injudicious comments upon public affairs; and in 1876 or 1877 he was arrested and exiled to Eastern Siberia upon the vague but fatal charge of "political untrustworthiness." There were no proofs against him upon which a conviction could be had in a court of justice, and he was therefore banished by administrative process.
His place of exile was a small town called Minusínsk, situated on the Yeniséi River in Eastern Siberia, more than 3000 miles from St. Petersburg, and about 150 miles from the boundary line of Mongolia. Here, with his young wife, who had voluntarily accompanied him into exile, he lived quietly four or five years, devoting himself chiefly to reading and scientific study. There were in Minusínsk at that time no other political exiles, but Kropótkin found there, nevertheless, one congenial companion in the person of a Russian naturalist named Martiánof, with whom he wandered about the country making botanical and geological collections and discussing scientific questions. To Martiánof s enthusiasm and energy and Kropótkin's sympathy and encouragement, Minusínsk is indebted for its really excellent museum, an institution which not only is the pride of all intelligent Siberians, but is becoming known to naturalists and archæologists in Europe and the United States.
During the long series of tragic events that culminated in the assassination of Alexander II., Siberia filled up rapidly with political exiles, and the little town of Minusínsk had to take its quota. With the arrival of these new-comers began a stricter system of police supervision. As long as Kropótkin was the only political exile in the place, he was allowed a good deal of freedom, and was not harassed by humiliating police regulations; but when the number of politicals increased to twenty, the difficulty of watching them all became greater, and the authorities thought it necessary, as a means of preventing escapes, to require every exile to report himself at stated intervals to the chief of police and sign his name in a book kept for the purpose. To this regulation Kropótkin refused to submit. "I have lived here," he said to the isprávnik, "nearly five years and have not yet made the first attempt to escape. If you think that there is any danger of my running away now, you may send a soldier or a police officer to my house every day to watch me; but after being unjustly exiled to Siberia I don't propose to assist the Government in its supervision of me. I will not report at the police office." The isprávnik conferred with the governor of the province, who lived in Krasnoyársk, and by the latter's direction told Kropótkin that if he refused to obey the obnoxious regulation he would be banished to some place lying farther to the northward and eastward, where the climate would be more severe and the life less bearable. Kropótkin, however, adhered to his determination, and appealed to General Sheláshnikof, who was at that time the acting governor-general of Eastern Siberia and who had been on terms of personal friendship with Kropótkin before the latter's banishment. General Sheláshnikof replied in a cool, formal note, insisting upon obedience to the regulation, and warning Kropótkin that further contumacy would have for him disastrous consequences. While this appeal was pending, General Anúchin was appointed governor-general of Eastern Siberia, and, as a last resort, Kropótkin wrote to his aged mother in St. Petersburg to see Anúchin previous to the latter's departure for his new post and present to him a petition in her son's behalf. When the aged and heart-broken mother appeared with her petition in General Anúchin's reception-room she was treated with insulting brutality. Without reading the petition Anúchin threw it violently on the floor, asked her how she dared to come to him with such a petition from a traitor to his country, and declared that if her son "had his deserts he would be cleaning the streets in some Siberian city under guard, instead of walking about at liberty."
By this time all of the other political exiles in Minusínsk had submitted to the new regulation and were reporting at the police office, and Kropótkin was notified by the ispávnik that if within a stated time he did not follow their example he would be banished to Túrukhánsk, a wretched settlement of twelve or fifteen houses, situated in the province of Yeniséisk, near the coast of the arctic ocean. Kropótkin, however, still adhered to his resolution, and after a terribly trying interview with his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached, he succeeded in extorting from her a promise to return to European Russia with their young child, and let him go to Túrukhánsk alone. What this promise cost them both in misery I could imagine from the tears which suffused their eyes when they talked to me about it. At the last moment, however, while Mrs. Kropótkin was making preparations to return to European Russia, she happened to see in the Siberian Gazette a letter from some correspondent—a political exile, I think—in Túrukhánsk, describing the loneliness, dreariness, and unhealthfulness of the settlement, the arctic severity of the climate, the absence of all medical aid for the sick, and the many miseries of life in such a place. This completely broke down the wife's fortitude. She went to her husband, convulsed with sobs, and told him that she would send her child to European Russia, or leave it with friends in Minusínsk, but go with him to Túrukhánsk she must and should—to let him go there alone was beyond her strength. "After this," said Prince Kropótkin, "there was nothing for me to do but put a pistol to my head, or yield, and I yielded. I went to the police office, and continued to report there as long as I remained in Minusínsk."
I have related this incident in Prince Kropótkin's Siberian life partly because it seems to have first suggested suicide to him as a means of escape from an intolerable position, and partly because it is in many ways an index to his character. He was extremely sensitive, proud, and high-spirited, and often made a fight upon some point which a cooler, more philosophic man would have taken as one of the natural incidents of his situation.
About two years ago Prince Kropótkin was transferred from Minusínsk to Tomsk, a change which brought him a few hundred miles nearer to European Russia, but which in other respects was not perhaps a desirable one. When I saw him in February he was living simply but comfortably in a rather spacious log house, ten minutes' drive from the European Hotel, and was devoting himself to literary pursuits. He had a good working library of two or three hundred volumes, among which I noticed the astronomical works of Professors Newcomb and Holden, Stallo's "Concepts of Science," of which he expressed a very high opinion, several volumes of "Smithsonian Reports," and forty or fifty other American books. His favorite study was astronomy, and in this branch of science he would probably have distinguished himself under more favorable circumstances. After his exile, however, he was not only deprived of instruments, but had great difficulty in obtaining books; his private correspondence was under control, and he was more or less constantly disquieted and harassed by police supervision and searches of his house; so that his completed scientific work was limited to a few articles upon astronomical subjects, written for French and German periodicals. He was a fine linguist, and wrote almost equally well in French, German, and Russian. English he read easily but could not speak.
On the last day before my departure from Tomsk he came to my room, bringing a letter which I had promised to carry for him to one of his intimate friends in western Europe. With the keen sense of honor which was one of his distinguishing characteristics, he brought the letter to me open, so that I might assure myself by reading it that it contained nothing which would compromise me in case the Russian police should find it in my possession. I told him that I did not care to read it, that I would run the risk of carrying anything that he would run the risk of writing—his danger in any case would be greater than mine. He thereupon seated himself at my writing-table to address the envelope. We happened at the moment to be talking of his brother, Pierre Kropótkin, and his pen, taking its suggestion from his thoughts, wrote automatically upon the envelope his brother's name instead of the name of the person for whom the letter was intended. He discovered the error almost instantly, and tearing up the envelope and throwing the fragments upon the floor, he addressed another. Late that evening, after I had gone to bed, there came a knock at my door. I opened it cautiously, and was confronted by Prince Kropótkin. He was embarrassed and confused, and apologized for calling at that late hour, but said that he could not sleep without finding and destroying every fragment of the envelope upon which he had inadvertently written the name of his brother. "This may seem to you," he said, "like absurd timidity, but it is necessary. If the police should discover, as they probably will, that I visited you to-day, they would not only examine the servants as to everything which took place here, but would collect and fit together every scrap of waste paper found in your room. They would thus find out that I had addressed an envelope to my brother, and would jump at the conclusion that I had written him a letter, and had given it to you for delivery. How this would affect you I don't know, but it would be fatal to me. The least I could expect would be the addition of a year to my term of exile, or banishment to some more remote part of Siberia. I am strictly forbidden to communicate with my brother, and have not heard directly from him or been able to write to him in years." I was familiar enough with the conditions of exile life in Siberia to see the force of these statements, and we began at once a search for the fragments of the envelope. Every scrap of paper on the floor was carefully examined, but the pieces that bore the dangerous name, "Pierre A. Kropótkin," could not be found. At last my traveling companion, Mr. Frost, remembered picking up some torn scraps of paper and throwing them into the slop-basin. We then dabbled in the basin for twenty minutes until we found and burned every scrap of that envelope upon which there was the stroke of a pen, and only then could Prince Kropótkin go home and sleep. "Two years hence," he said to me as he bade me good-night, "you may publish this as an illustration of the atmosphere of suspicion and apprehension in which political exiles live. In two years I hope to be beyond the reach of the Russian police." Poor Kropótkin! In less than two years his hope was realized, but not in the way we then anticipated. I had hardly returned to my home in the United States when the Eastern Review of St. Petersburg, a newspaper devoted to the interests and the news of Asiatic Russia, made the following brief announcement:
"On the 25th of July, about nine o'clock in the evening, Prince A. A. Kropótkin committed suicide in Tomsk by shooting himself with a revolver. He had been in administrative exile about ten years, and his term of banishment would have expired on the 9th of next September. He had begun to make arrangements for returning to Russia, and had already sent his wife and his three children back to his relatives in the province of Kharkóf. He was devotedly attached to them, and soon after their departure he grew lonely and low-spirited, and showed that he felt very deeply his separation from them. To this reason for despondency must also be added anxiety with regard to the means of subsistence. Although, at one time, a rather wealthy landed proprietor, Prince Kropótkin, during his long period of exile in Siberia, had expended almost his whole fortune; so that on the day of his death his entire property did not amount to three hundred rubles [$150]. At the age of forty-five, therefore, he was compelled, for the first time, seriously to consider the question how he should live and support his family—a question which was the more difficult to answer for the reason that a scientific man, in Russia, cannot count upon earning a great deal in the field of literature, and Prince Kropótkin was not fitted for anything else. While under the disheartening influence of these considerations he received, moreover, several telegrams from his relatives which he misinterpreted. Whether he committed suicide as a result of sane deliberation, or whether a combination of circumstances superinduced acute mental disorder, none who were near him at the moment of his death can say." Eastern Review, No. 34, St. Petersburg, August 21, 1886.
Of course the editor of the Eastern Review was not allowed by the censor to say even one last kind word of the innocent man who had been driven to self-destruction by injustice and exile; but I will say—and say it with all my heart—that in Prince Kropótkin's death Russia lost an honest man, a cultivated scholar, a true patriot, and a most gallant gentleman.
To me perhaps the most attractive and sympathetic of the Tomsk exiles was the Russian author Felix Volkhófski, who was banished to Siberia for life in 1878, upon the charge of "belonging to a society that intends, at a more or less remote time in the future, to overthrow the existing form of government." He was about thirty-eight years of age at the time I made his acquaintance, and was a man of cultivated mind, warm heart, and high aspirations. He knew English well, was familiar with American history and literature, and had, I believe, translated into Russian many of the poems of Longfellow. He spoke to me with great admiration, I remember, of Longfellow's "Arsenal at Springfield," and recited it to me aloud. He was one of the most winning and lovable men that it has ever been my good fortune to know; but his life had been a terrible tragedy. His health had been shattered by long imprisonment in the fortress of Petropávlovsk; his hair was prematurely gray, and when his face was in repose there seemed to be an expression of profound melancholy in his dark-brown eyes. I became intimately acquainted with him and very warmly attached to him; and when I bade him good-by for the last time on my return from Eastern Siberia in 1886, he put his arms around me and kissed me, and said, "George Ivánovich, please don't forget us! In bidding you good-by, I feel as if something were going out of my life that would never again come into it."
A little more than a year after my return to the United States, Volkhófski wrote me a profoundly sad and touching letter, in which he informed me of the death of his wife by suicide. He himself had been thrown out of employment by the suspension of the liberal Tomsk newspaper, the Siberian Gazette; and his wife, whom I remember as a pale, delicate, sad-faced woman, twenty-five or thirty years of age, had tried to help him support their family of young children by giving private lessons and by taking in sewing. Anxiety and overwork had finally broken down her health; she had become an invalid, and in a morbid state of mind, brought on by unhappiness and disease, she reasoned herself into the belief that she was an incumbrance, rather than a help, to her husband and her children, and that they would ultimately be better off if she were dead. On the 7th of December, 1887, she put an end to her unhappy life by shooting herself through the head with a pistol. Her husband was devotedly attached to her; and her death, under such circumstances and in such a way, was a terrible blow to him. In his letter to me he referred to a copy of James Russell Lowell's poems that I had caused to be sent to him, and said that in reading "After the Burial" he vividly realized for the first time that grief is of no nationality: the lines, although written by a bereaved American, expressed the deepest thoughts and feelings of a bereaved Russian. He sent me with his letter a small, worn, leather match-box, which had been given by Prince Pierre Kropótkin to his exiled brother Alexander; which the latter had left to Volkhófski; and which Volkhófski had in turn presented to his wife a short time before her death. He hoped, he said, that it would have some value to me, on account of its association with the lives of four political offenders, all of whom I had known. One of them was a refugee in London, another was an exile in Tomsk, and two had escaped the jurisdiction of the Russian Government by taking their own lives.
I tried to read Volkhófski's letter aloud to my wife; but as I recalled the high character and lovable personality of the writer, and imagined what this last blow of fate must have been to such a man,—in exile, in broken health, and with three helpless children wholly dependent upon him,—the written lines vanished in a mist of tears, and with a choking in my throat I put the letter and the little match-box away.
By means of secret prearranged addresses in Russia and in the United States, I succeeded in maintaining a desultory and precarious correspondence with Mr. Volkhófski until 1889. In the spring of that year I received from him two short letters filled with tidings of misfortune, and then—nothing more. The two letters were, in part, as follows:
My dear George Ivánovich:
I write you a few lines first to tell you how weary I am of waiting for a letter from you (although I know that you have not written on account of my warning), and second to give you notice that I sent you some time since a manuscript addressed … so that if you have not received it you may make inquiries about it.
You have probably heard before this time of the final suppression of the Siberian Gazette.[3] It is hard and it is shameful! You need not hesitate any longer to write whatever you like about it for publication. You will not injure the paper because there is no hope of its resurrection. . . .
My youngest daughter is still sick and has grown so thin that it is painful to look at her. She sleeps badly and often I have to be up all night taking care of her. This, together with constant fear for her life, disorders my nerves terribly, and undermines what health I have left. I am greatly disheartened, too, by loneliness, notwithstanding my children and my friends. The affectionate tenderness of a beloved wife is a thing that some natures find it difficult to do without, no matter what else they may have. It is very hard, sometimes, my dear fellow, to live in this world!
Since it became apparent that I should no longer be able to support myself by newspaper work,[4] I have been looking for some other occupation or place; but, unfortunately, the present governor[5] is expelling political exiles from all public positions, and even debarring them, to some extent, from private employment, by showing such hostility to them that private individuals dare not give them work for fear of getting into trouble. I do not know how it will all end. I have sent four manuscripts to St. Petersburg, but none of them has been published.
My dear George Ivánovich, may you be well and happy! I am impatiently awaiting your photograph and hope that it will have your autograph on it. With most cordial remembrances to your wife, I am Yours, Felix. My dear good Friend:
How long it is since I last received a line from you, and how much I have needed your letters! They bring to me all the mental refreshment and all the gladness that life has for me, and at times I am sorely in need of them. Fate has dealt me another blow. My youngest daughter Katie died a month or two since of pneumonia. She had an attack of bronchitis winter before last which developed into chronic inflammation of the lungs; but in the spring of 1888 I took her into the country, where she grew better and began to run about and play. Unfortunately, however, she was exposed there to whooping-cough, took the infection, and it ended in acute pneumonia and death, She was about three years old—and such a dear lovable child! But whose child is not dear and lovable? At any rate—
No! I can't write any more about it! This is the second time within a few days that I have tried to write you of her—but I cannot—it hurts me too much! As long as I am busy and can talk or write of other things, it seems as if the wound were healed; but let my thoughts once go to her, and I feel such grief and pain that I don't know what to do with myself.
I must explain to you how I happen to be in Irkútsk. It is a very simple story. Thanks to the recommendation of some of my Irkútsk friends I was offered here a place that was suited to my tastes and abilities, and I hastened to migrate. They will always know my address here at the post-office.[6]
All of your Irkútsk friends send you their regards. I could and would write you a great deal more, but I don't want to detain this letter and will therefore postpone the rest until next time. My warmest regards to your wife. Write me!After the receipt of this letter I wrote Mr. Volkhófski twice, but I heard from him no more. What had happened to him I could only conjecture; but as month after month passed without bringing any news from him, I felt more and more apprehensive that the sorrows and hardships of his life had been too great for his strength and that the next tidings of him would be the news of his death. At last, in November, 1889, when I had almost given up hope, I was astonished and delighted to receive one day a letter addressed in his familiar handwriting, but stamped with a Canadian stamp and postmarked "Vancouver."
"How did he ever get a letter mailed at Vancouver?" I said to myself, and hastily tearing open the envelope I read the first three lines. They were as follows:
"My dear George Ivánovich: At last I am free! I am writing this letter to you not from that land of exile, Siberia, but from free America."
If I had suddenly received a letter postmarked "Zanzibar" from a friend whom I believed to be dead and buried in Minnesota, I could hardly have been more astonished or excited. Volkhófski free and in British Columbia! It seemed utterly incredible; and in a maze of bewilderment I stopped reading the letter to look again at the postmark. It was unquestionably "Vancouver," and as I stared at it I came slowly to a realization of the fact that, in some extra-ordinary and incomprehensible way, Volkhófski had not only escaped, but had crossed the Pacific and was within a few days' journey of New York. His letter, which was brief and hurried, merely announced his escape from exile by way of the Amúr River, Vládivostók, and Japan, and his intention of coming to me in Washington as soon as he could be sure of finding me there. In the mean time I need not, he said, feel any anxiety about him, because he still had sixty Mexican silver dollars left, and was with a steamer acquaintance who had taken a warm and generous interest in his fortunes.
At the time when I received this letter I was lecturing six nights a week in New York and New England; but I telegraphed and wrote Volkhófski that I would meet him at the Delavan House in Albany on the morning of Sunday, December 8th. I spoke Saturday night in Utica, took the night express for Albany, and reached the Delavan House about two o'clock. Volkhófski had not yet arrived, and as it was uncertain when he would come I went to bed. Early in the morning a bell-boy knocked loudly at my door and handed me a slip of paper upon which, in Volkhófski's hand-writing, were the words, "My dear fellow, I am here."
If any of the guests of the Delavan House happened to be passing through that corridor on their way to breakfast three minutes later, they must have been surprised to see, at the door of No. 90, a man with disheveled hair and nothing on but his night-shirt locked in the embrace of a traveler who had not had time to remove his Pacific-coast sombrero and heavy winter overcoat.
Volkhófski was in better health than I had expected to see him, but his face was worn and haggard, and at times there was a peculiar anxious hunted expression in his eyes which showed that he had recently been under great mental and emotional strain. We talked almost without intermission for twelve hours, and he related to me at length the story of his escape. When he wrote me the last time from Siberia in May, 1889, he was living with his little daughter Véra in Irkútsk, where he had found congenial employment, and where he was trying, by means of hard work, to lighten the sense of loneliness and bereavement that he had felt since the death of his wife and his daughter Katie. Hardly had his life begun to seem once more bearable when there came upon him a new misfortune in the shape of an order from the governor-general[7] to leave the city. He had committed no new offense, and there was no reason, so far as he was aware, for this arbitrary and imperative order; but General Ignátief seemed to be of opinion that the presence of a liberal author and journalist, and moreover a "political," in the city of Irkútsk would be "prejudicial to public tranquillity," and Volkhófski was therefore directed to "move on." Leaving his little daughter Véra with acquaintances in Irkútsk, he proceeded to Tróitskosvásk, a small town on the frontier of Mongolia, where one of his friends, a political exile named Charúshin, had for some time been living. The police there, however, had been apprised of his expulsion from Irkútsk, and assuming, of course, that he must be a very dangerous or a very troublesome man, they hastened to inform him that he could not be permitted to take up his residence in Tróitskosávsk. They did not care whither he went, but he must go somewhere beyond the limits of their jurisdiction. Indignant and disheartened, Volkhófski then resolved to abandon temporarily his little daughter Véra, whom he had left in Irkútsk, and make his escape, if possible, to the United States by way of the Pacific Ocean. He had a little money derived from the sale of a small volume of poems which he had published before leaving Tomsk[8], and if that should fail before he reached his destination, he determined to work as a stevedore, or a common laborer of some sort, until he should earn enough to go on. His objective point was the city of Washington, where he expected to find me. The nearest seaport on the Pacific where he could hope to get on board a foreign steamer was Vládivostók, about 2800 miles away. The distance to be traversed under the eyes of a suspicious and hostile police was immense; but Volkhófski was cautious, prudent, and experienced, and assuming the character of a retired army officer he set out, with "free" horses, for the head waters of the Amúr River, where he expected to take a steamer. I cannot, of course, go into the details of his difficult and perilous journey from Tróitskosávsk to Strétinsk, from Strétinsk down the Amúr by steamer to Khabarófka, and from Khabarófka up the Ússurí and across Lake Khánka to Vládivostók. It was a journey full of adventures and narrow escapes, and nothing but the coolness, courage, and good fortune of the fugitive carried him through in safety. There were four foreign vessels in the port of Vládivostók at that time, and one of them, a coal steamer, was flying the flag of Great Britain. Volkhófski went on board, ascertained that the steamer was bound for Japan, and asked the captain if he would take a passenger who had neither passport nor official permission to leave the empire. The captain hesitated at first, but when Volkhófski related his story, said that he was able and willing to pay for his passage, and exhibited my photograph and letters as proofs of his trustworthiness, the captain consented to take him. A hiding-place was soon found for him, and when the Russian officials came on board to clear the vessel, he was nowhere to be seen. A few hours later the steamer was at sea, and the escaping political exile, as he stood on the upper deck and watched the slow fading of the Siberian coast in the west, drew a long deep breath of relief, and turned his face, with reviving hope, towards the land where a personal opinion concerning human affairs is not regarded as "prejudicial to public tranquillity," and where a man who tries to make the world better and happier is not punished for it with seven years of solitary confinement, eleven years of exile, and the loss of more than half his family.
After having paid his steamer fare from Vládivostók to Nagasaki, and from Nagasaki to Yokohama, Volkhófski found himself in the latter place with hardly money enough to get across the Pacific, and not half enough to reach Washington. He made inquiries concerning vessels about to sail for the western coast of America, and found that the English steamer Batavia was on the point of clearing for Vancouver, British Columbia. Going at once on board he asked the purser what the fare to Vancouver would be in the steerage. The officer looked at him for a moment, saw that, although a foreigner, he was unmistakably a gentleman, and then replied, bluntly but not unkindly, "You can't go in the steerage—it's jammed full of Chinese emigrants. Nobody ever goes in the steerage except Chinamen; it's no place for you." Volkhófski replied that the case was urgent—that he must get to British Columbia at once—and as he had not money enough to pay even for a second-class passage, there was nothing for him to do but go third class. The purser finally sold him a steerage ticket, but declared, nevertheless, that a white man could not possibly live for three weeks with opium-smoking Chinese coolies, and that he should put him in some other part of the vessel as soon as possible after leaving port.
Until the Batavia had actually sailed and was out of the harbor, Volkhófski did not dare to let the passengers, or even the officers, of the steamer know who he really was and whence he had come. The Japanese were in the habit of giving up Siberian refugees to the Russian authorities; and if it should accidentally become known that he was an escaping political exile, he might be arrested, even in Yokohama, and put on board a Russian man-of-war. He believed that he had narrowly escaped detection and capture in Nagasaki, and he did not intend to run any more risks that could be avoided. At last, however, when the Batavia was far at sea, and the coast of Japan had sunk beneath the rim of the western horizon, he told his story to the officers of the ship, and afterward admitted to the passengers with whom he became acquainted that he was an escaped political exile from Siberia. The interest and sympathy excited by his narrative deepened as the officers and passengers became better acquainted with him, and long before the Batavia reached Vancouver, he had so completely won the hearts of the whole ship's company that they took up a collection for the purpose of providing him with transportation from Vancouver to the city of Washington. To this collection every soul on board contributed, from the captain down to the steward, the cook, and the boy who cleaned the ship's lamps.[9] More than enough money was obtained to defray his expenses across the continent, and when he left the steamer he had not only the sixty Mexican silver dollars about which he wrote me, but a first-class ticket to Washington, and a cordial invitation from one of the passengers—Mr. Allan Huber of Berlin, Ontario—to stay at his house until my whereabouts could be ascertained.
When Volkhófski met me in Albany, he was terribly anxious with regard to the safety of his nine-year-old daughter Véra, whom he had left with friends in the capital of Eastern Siberia. He feared that, as soon as his escape should become known, the Government would seize the little girl, and either use her as a means of compelling him to return or put her into a state asylum, where she would virtually be lost to him forever.
"If I can only get my little girl," he said to me, "I shall feel as if I had strength and spirit enough to begin a new life; but if I lose her, I may as well give up the struggle."
"We'll get your little girl," I replied, "if we have to resort to fraud, violence, false passports, and kidnapping"—and we did get her. In June, 1890, Volkhófski went to London, so as to be nearer the field of operations, and six weeks later I received from him a cablegram saying, "Hurrah! my child has arrived."
In a recent letter to a friend in Buffalo, New York, the well-known English novelist, Hesba Stretton, speaks of Volkhófski and his daughter as follows:
"Volkhófski, who escaped from Siberia rather more than a year ago, has been lecturing in England all winter. He has a charming little daughter ten years old who was born in exile. She has been staying for a fortnight with my married sister and her two daughters, and they are quite delighted with her; she is so original and affectionate, and she has had so much tragedy in her short life, which she speaks of now and then as if horrors were a natural part of existence to her. She was brought through Siberia and Russia disguised as a boy. We hope to wean her thoughts from these terrible subjects and give her something of the ordinary joys of girlhood. But her destiny must be a sad one, for she will surely [and quite rightly] throw in her lot with the revolutionists of Russia, and unless the revolution comes soon our little Véra will spend much of her life in prison and in exile. She was showing Annie how the orthodox Russians hold their thumbs and two fingers pressed together to represent the Trinity during their worship, and then she said, 'But God does n't mind how we hold our fingers, does he?' She was moaning in her sleep one night, and when Daisy woke her she said, 'I dreamed there were spies in the room, and I pretended to be asleep till they went to sleep, and then I got up and crept to the cot where my baby brother was. I said, "Hush! don't make a noise, for there are spies in the room," and I took him up and went to the door watching the spies all the time, and I opened the door and there were some men hung up, and my father's head lay on the ground and his body was a little way off covered with a white cloth.' Think of that for the dream of a child of ten years, and think how countless are the sorrows and wrongs inflicted by the Czar of Russia and his Government! And they say he is a humane, Christian man. Alas! what horrible things are said to be Christian."
Mr. Volkhófski is now editing in London the newspaper Free Russia, the organ of the English society known as "The Friends of Russian Freedom."
The extension of our acquaintance in Tomsk, on one side with Government officials, and on the other with political exiles, led now and then to peculiar and embarrassing situations. A day or two before our departure for Irkútsk, while two of the politicals—Messrs. Volkhófski and Chudnófski—were sitting in our room at the European Hotel, a servant suddenly knocked, threw open the door, and announced his Excellency Actual State Councilor Petukhóf, the governor pro tem. of the province. My heart, as the Russians say, went into my fingers' ends. I did not know what relations existed between the banished revolutionists and Vice-governor Petukhóf. We had called several times upon the latter without referring in any way to our acquaintance with this class of criminals; and in all our intercourse with the Tomsk officials we had treated the subject of political exile with studied indifference, in order to avert suspicion and escape troublesome inquiries. To be then surprised by the vice-governor himself while two prominent politicals were sitting in our room and writing at our table was, to say the least, embarrassing. I had just had time to ask Volkhófski and Chudnófski whether or not I should introduce them to the vice-governor, when the latter, in full uniform, entered the room. There was a curious expression of surprise in his good-humored face as he took in at a glance the situation; but the removal of his heavy overcoat and galoshes gave him an opportunity to recover himself, and as he came forward with outstretched hand to greet Mr. Frost and me there was nothing in his manner to indicate the least annoyance or embarrassment. He shook hands cordially with the two political exiles who had been condemned by a court of justice to penal servitude; began at once a conversation in which they could join, and behaved generally with so much tact and courtesy, that in five minutes we were all chatting together as unceremoniously as if we were old acquaintances who had met accidentally at a club. It was, however, a strangely constituted group: an American newspaper man; an American artist; two political exiles who had been punished with solitary confinement, leg-fetters, and the strait-jacket; and, finally, the highest provincial representative of the Government that had so dealt with these exiles—all meeting upon the common footing of personal character, and ignoring, for the time, the peculiar network of interrelations that united them. Whether or not Vice-governor Petukhóf reported to the Minister of the Interior that we had made the acquaintance of the political criminals in Tomsk, I do not know—probably not. He seemed to me to be a faithful officer of the Crown, but, at the same time, a man of culture, ability, and good sense; and while he doubtless disapproved of the revolutionary movement, he recognized the fact that among the banished revolutionists were men of education, refinement, and high personal character, who might, naturally enough, attract the attention of foreign travelers.
The number of politicals in Tomsk, at the time of our visit, was about thirty, including six or eight women. Some of them were administrative exiles, who had only just arrived from European Russia; some were poseléntsi, or forced colonists, who had been banished originally to "the most remote part" of Siberia, but who had finally been allowed to return in broken health to a "less remote part"; while a few were survivors of the famous "193," who had languished for years in the casemates of the Petropávlovsk fortress, and had then been sent to the plains of Western Siberia.
I was struck by the composure with which these exiles would sometimes talk of intolerable injustice and frightful sufferings. The men and women who had been sent to the province of Yakútsk for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., and who had suffered in that arctic wilderness all that human beings can suffer from hunger, cold, sickness, and bereavement, did not seem to be conscious that there was anything very extraordinary in their experience. Now and then some man whose wife had committed suicide in exile would flush a little and clinch his hands as he spoke of her; or some broken-hearted woman whose baby had frozen to death in her arms on the road would sob at intervals as she tried to tell me her story; but, as a rule, both men and women referred to injustice and suffering with perfect composure, as if they were nothing more than the ordinary accidents of life. Mr. Volkhófski showed me one day, I remember, a large collection of photographs of his revolutionary friends. Whenever a face struck me as being noteworthy, on account of its beauty or character, I would ask whose it was.
"That," he would say quietly, "is Miss A, once a teacher in a peasant school; she died of prison consumption in Kiev three years ago. The man with the full beard is B, formerly a justice of the peace in N; he was hanged at St. Petersburg in 1879. The thin-faced girl is Miss C, one of the so-called propagandists; she went insane in the House of Preliminary Detention while awaiting trial. The pretty young woman with the cross on the sleeve of her dress is Madame D, a Red Cross nurse in one of the field hospitals during the late Russo-Turkish war; she was sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude and is now at the mines of Kará. The lady opposite her on the same page is Miss E, formerly a student in the Beztúzhef medical school for women in St. Petersburg; she cut her throat with a piece of broken glass, after two years of solitary confinement in the fortress."
In this way Mr. Volkhófski went through his whole collection of photographs, suggesting or sketching hastily in a few dry, matter-of-fact words the terrible tragedies in which the originals of the portraits had been actors. He did not show the least emotional excitement, and from his manner it might have been supposed that it was the commonest thing in the world for one's friends to be hanged, sent to the mines, driven insane by solitary confinement, or tortured into cutting their throats with broken glass. His composure, however, was not insensibility, nor lack of sympathy. It was rather the natural result of long familiarity with such tragedies. One may become accustomed in time even to the sights and sounds of a field hospital, and the Russian revolutionists have become so accustomed to injustice and misery that they can speak without emotional excitement of things that made my face flush and my heart beat fast with indiguation or pity.
"Twice in my life," said a well-known Russian liberal to me," I have fully realized what it means to be a free citizen. The first time was when I returned to Russia from the United States in 187-, and noticed at the frontier the difference between the attitude taken by the gendarmes towards me and their attitude towards Englishmen who entered the empire with me. The second time was just now, when I saw the effect produced upon you by the story that Mr. B was relating to you. That story seemed to you—as I could plainly see from the expression of your face—something awful and almost incredible. To me it was no more surprising or extraordinary than an account of the running-over of a man in the street. As I watched the play of expression in your face—as I was forced to look at the facts, for a moment, from your point of view—I felt again, to the very bottom of my soul, the difference between a free citizen and a citizen of Russia."
In Tomsk we began to feel for the first time the nervous strain caused by the sight of irremediable human misery. Our journey through southwestern Siberia and the Altái had been off the great exile route; the politicals whose acquaintance we had made in Semipalátinsk, Ulbínsk, and Ust Kámenogórsk were fairly well treated and did not seem to be suffering; and it was not until we reached Tomsk that we were brought face to face with the tragedies of exile life. From that time, however, until we recrossed the Siberian frontier on our way back to St. Petersburg, we were subjected to a nervous and emotional strain that was sometimes harder to bear than cold, hunger, or fatigue. One cannot witness unmoved such suffering as we saw in the balagáns and the hospital of the Tomsk forwarding prison, nor can one listen without the deepest emotion to such stories as we heard from political exiles in Tomsk, Krasnoyársk, Irkútsk, and the Trans-Baikál. One pale, sad, delicate woman, who had been banished to Eastern Siberia, and who had there gone down into the valley of the shadow of death, undertook, one night, I remember, to relate to me her experience. I could see that it was agony for her to live over in narration the sufferings and bereavements of her tragic past, and I would gladly have spared her the self-imposed torture; but she was so determined that the world should know through me what Russians endure before they become terrorists, that she nerved herself to bear it, and between fits of half-controlled sobbing, during which I could only pace the floor, she told me the story of her life. It was the saddest story I had ever heard. After such an interview as this with a heart-broken woman—and I had many such—I could neither sleep nor sit still; and to the nervous strain of such experiences, quite as much as to hardship and privation, was attributable the final breaking down of my health and strength in the Trans-Baikál.
Before I left the city of Tomsk for Eastern Siberia, most of my long-cherished opinions with regard to nihilists and the working of the exile system had been completely overthrown. I could not, by any process of readjustment or modification, make my preconceived ideas fit the facts as I found them. In a letter written from Tomsk to the President of The Century Company on the 26th of August, 1885, I indicated the change that had taken place in my views as follows:
- ↑ Sentence in the trial of "the 193," pp. 5, 11, and 16. An official copy of the document is in my possession.
- ↑ "The Province of Yeniséisk, a Statistical and Politico-Economical Study," by S. Chudnófski, 195 pages. Press of the Siberian Gazette, Tomsk, 1885.
The value of Mr. Chudnófski's book was greatly impaired by censorial mutilation, and the last two chapters could not be printed at all; but even in its expurgated form it is acknowledged to be one of the most important works of the kind that Siberia has yet produced.
- ↑ The Siberian Gazette, the only liberal and progressive newspaper in Western Siberia, was suspended for eight months on the 3d of April, 1887, as the result of a secret report made by the Governor of Tobólsk to the Minister of the Interior. It survived this blow, but was finally suppressed altogether in the latter part of 1888. The only reasons assigned for this persecution of an able and honorable newspaper were first, the use by it of news and literary material furnished by political exiles, and second, the publication by it of an obituary notice of a political exile named Zabalúief, whose life and character had won the respect of everybody in Tomsk.
- ↑ On account of the suppression of the Siberian Gazette. Mr. Volkhófski had conducted the department of city news.
- ↑ Governor Bulubásh, formerly vice-governor of the province of Taurida. His predecessor, Governor Laks, was a comparatively liberal and enlightened man.
- ↑ When political offenders sentenced merely to "domestication" [na zhityó] or colonization [na poselénie] have been ten years in exile, and have behaved during that time in a manner satisfactory to the authorities, it is customary to give them more freedom of movement. They are still kept under police surveillance, but are allowed to go anywhere within the limits of certain provinces. After I returned to the United States, Mr. Volkhófski received a "ticket of leave" of this kind.
- ↑ Governor-general Ignátief, brother of the well-known diplomatist. He is now governor-general of Kiev.
- ↑ "Siberian Echoes," by Iván Brut [a pseudonym]. Mikháilof and Mákushin, Tomsk, 1889.
- ↑ The steward became so much attached to Volkhófski, in the course of the voyage, that long afterward, in Montreal, he came to call upon me for the purpose of making inquiries about him.