Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 2/Chapter V
CHAPTER V
THE CONVICT MINES OF KARÁ
THE mines of Kará are distant from Chíta, the capital of the Trans-Baikál, about 300 miles; but for more than 200 miles the traveler in approaching them follows a fairly good post-road, which runs at first through the valley of the Ingodá and then along the northern or left bank of the Shílka River, one of the principal tributaries of the Amúr. At a small town called Strétinsk, where the Shílka first becomes navigable, this post-road abruptly ends, and beyond that point communication with the Kará penal settlements is maintained by boats in summer and by sledges drawn over the ice in winter. For two or three weeks in autumn, while the ice is forming, and for a somewhat shorter period in the spring, after the river breaks up, the Kará mines are virtually isolated from all the rest of the world, and can be reached only by a difficult and dangerous bridle path, which runs for a distance of seventy or eighty miles, parallel with the river, across a series of steep and generally forest-clad mountain ridges. We hoped to reach Strétinsk in time to descend the Shílka to the Kará River in a boat; and when we left Chíta, on Saturday, October 24th, there seemed to be every probability that we should succeed in so doing. The weather, however, turned suddenly colder; snow fell to a depth of an inch and a half or two inches; and Wednesday morning, when we alighted from our teléga on the northern bank of the Shílka opposite Strétinsk, winter had set in with great severity. The mercury in our thermometer indicated zero (Fahr.); our fur coats and the bodies of our horses were white with frost; and the broad, rapid current of the Shílka was so choked with masses of heavy ice as to be
almost, if not quite, impassable. A large open skiff was making a perilous attempt to cross from Strétinsk to our side of the river, and a dozen or more peasants, who stood shivering around a small camp-fire on the beach, were waiting for it, with the hope that it would come safely to land and that the ferrymen might be persuaded to make a return trip with passengers. After watching for a quarter of an hour the struggles of this boat with the ice, Mr. Frost and I decided that it would be hazardous to attempt, in an open skiff, the passage of a rapid and ice-choked river half a mile wide, even if the boatman were willing to take us; and we therefore sought shelter in the small log house of a young Russian peasant named Záblikof, who good-humoredly consented to give us a night's lodging provided we had no objection to sleeping on the floor with the members of his family. We were too much exhausted and too nearly frozen to object to anything; and as for sleeping on the floor, we had become so accustomed to it that we should have felt out of place if we had tried to sleep anywhere else. We therefore had our baggage transported to Záblikof's house, and in half an hour were comfortably drinking tea in the first decently clean room we had seen since leaving Nérchinsk.
We devoted most of the remainder of the day to a discussion of our situation and of the possibility of reaching the Kará mines at that season of the year by an overland journey across the mountains.
Descending the river in a boat was manifestly impracticable on account of the great quantity of running ice; we could not waste two or three weeks in inaction, and the horseback ride to the mines over the mountains seemed to be the only feasible alternative. There were, on our side of the river, a few horses that Záblikof thought might be hired; but they belonged to a merchant who lived in Strétinsk, and in order to get permission to use them, as well as to obtain the necessary saddles and equipments and secure the services of a guide, it would be necessary to cross the Shílka to the town. This, in the existing condition of the river, was a somewhat perilous undertaking; but Záblikof offered to accompany me with two or three of his men, and early Thursday morning we carried his light, open skiff down to the beach for the purpose of making the attempt. The weather had moderated a little, but it was still very cold; the river had become an almost continuous field of swiftly moving ice, intersected by narrow lanes of black open water; and a belt of fixed ice extended from the shore a distance of forty or fifty yards, becoming thinner and thinner as it approached the water's edge. Out over this treacherous surface we cautiously pushed our skiff, holding ourselves in readiness to spring into it quickly all together at the instant when the ice should give way under our feet. Four or five yards from the black, eddying current the ice yielded, we felt a sudden sinking sensation, and then, with a great confused crash, we went into the water, Záblikof shouting excitedly, "Now! Into the boat!" The skiff gave a deep roll, first to one side and then to the other, as we all sprang into it; but fortunately it did not capsize, and in another moment we were whirled away and swept rapidly down-stream amid huge grinding ice-tables, which we fended off, as well as we could, with oars and boat-hooks. As soon as the first excitement of the launch was over, two of the men settled down to steady rowing, while Záblikof, boat-hook in hand, stood in the bow as pilot, and guided our frail craft through the narrow lanes of water between the swiftly running ice-floes. We were carried down-stream about half a mile before we could reach the opposite shore, and when we did reach it the making of a landing on the thin, treacherous edge of the fast ice proved to be a more difficult and dangerous task than even the launching of the skiff. Three or four times while we were clinging with boat-hooks to the crumbling edge of the ice-foot I thought we should certainly be crushed or capsized by the huge white fields and tables that came grinding down upon us from above; but we finally broke our way into the stationary ice-belt far enough to get shelter. Záblikof sprang out upon a hummock and made fast a line, and after being immersed in the freezing water up to my hips as the result of an awkward jump, I gained a footing upon ice that was firm enough to sustain my weight. The weather was so cold that getting wet was a serious matter; and leaving Záblikof and the men to pull out the boat, I started at a brisk run for the town and took refuge in the first shop I could find. After drying and warming myself I sent a telegram to Mr. Wurts, the Secretary of the United States Legation in St. Petersburg, to apprise him of our whereabouts; found the owner of the horses and made a bargain with him for transportation to the first peasant village down the river in the direction of the mines; hired an old guide named Nikífer; procured the necessary saddles and equipments, and late in the afternoon made, without accident, the perilous return trip across the river to Záblikof's house.
As early as possible on Friday we saddled our horses and set out for the mines, taking with us nothing except our blanket rolls and note-books, a bag of provisions, the camera, and about a dozen dry plates. The weather had again moderated and our thermometer indicated a temperature of eighteen degrees above zero; but the sky was dark and threatening, a light snow was falling, and as we rode up on the summit of the first high ridge and looked ahead into the wild, lonely mountainous region that we were to traverse, I felt a momentary sinking of the heart. I was still weak from my sickness in Tróitskosávsk, winter had set in, and I feared that my slender stock of reserve strength would not carry me through a ride of eighty miles on horseback over such a trail as this was represented to be. Moreover, our winter equipment was scanty and not at all adapted to such a journey. Presuming that we should be able to descend the Shílka in a boat, we had not provided ourselves with fur sleeping-bags; our sheepskin overcoats were not long enough to protect our knees; we had not been able to obtain fur hoods; and our felt boots were so large and heavy that they would not go into our stirrups, and we were forced either to ride without them or to dispense with the support that the stirrups might afford. Fortunately the trail that we followed was at first fairly good, the weather was not very cold, and we succeeded in making a distance of twenty miles without a great deal of suffering. We stopped for the night in the small log village called Lómi, on the bank of the Shílka, slept on the floor of a peasant's house, in the same room with two adults and five children, and Saturday morning, after a breakfast of tea, black bread, and cold fish-pie, resumed our journey, with fresh horses and a new guide. The weather had cleared off cold during the night, and our thermometer, when we climbed into our saddles, indicated a temperature of eight degrees below zero. The bodies of the horses were white and shaggy with frost, icicles hung from their nostrils, and they seemed as impatient to get away as we were. With our departure from Lómi began the really difficult part of our journey. The trail ran in a tortuous course across a wilderness of rugged mountains, sometimes making long detours to the northward to avoid deep or precipitous ravines; sometimes climbing in zigzags the steep sides of huge transverse ridges; and occasionally coming out upon narrow shelf-like cornices of rock, high above the dark, ice-laden waters of the Shílka, where a slip or stumble of our horses would unquestionably put an end to our Siberian investigations. That we did not meet with any accident in the course of this ride to Kará seems to me a remarkable evidence of good luck. Our horses were unshod, and the trail in many places was covered with ice formed by the overflow and freezing of water from mountain springs, and then hidden by a thin sheet of snow, so that it was impossible to determine from the most careful inspection of a steep and dangerous descent whether or not it would afford secure foothold for our horses. Throughout Saturday and Sunday we walked most of the time; partly because we were too nearly frozen to sit in the saddle, and partly because we dared not take the risks of the slippery trail. Three days of riding, walking, and climbing over rugged mountains, in a temperature that ranged from zero to ten degrees below, finally exhausted my last reserve of strength; and when we reached the peasant village of Shílkina at a late hour Sunday night, a weak and thready pulse, running at the rate of 120, warned me that I was near
the extreme limit of my endurance. Fortunately the worst part of our journey was over. Ust Kará, the most southerly of the Kará penal settlements, was distant from Shílkina only ten or twelve miles; the trail between the two places presented no unusual difficulties; and about noon on Monday we dismounted from our tired horses in the large village at the mouth of the Kará River, hobbled with stiffened and benumbed legs into the house of a peasant known to our guide, and threw ourselves down to rest.
The mines of Kará, which are the private property of his Imperial Majesty the Tsar, and are worked for his benefit, consist of a series of open gold placers, situated at irregular intervals along a small rapid stream called the Kará River, which rises on the water-shed of the Yáblonoi mountains, runs in a southeasterly direction for a distance of forty or fifty miles, and finally empties into the Shílka between Strétinsk and the mouth of the Argún. The name "Kará," derived from a Tatár adjective meaning "black," was originally used merely to designate this stream; but it is now applied more comprehensively to the whole chain of prisons, mines, and convict settlements that lie scattered through the Kará valley. These prisons, mines, and convict settlements, taking them in serial order from south to north, are known separately and distinctively as Ust Kará or Kará mouth, the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kará, Upper Kará, and the Upper or Amúrski Prison. The administration of the whole penal establishment centers in the Lower Diggings, where the governor of the common-criminal prisons resides, and where there is a convict settlement of two or three hundred inhabitants and a company or two of soldiers in barracks. It seemed to me best to make this place our headquarters; partly because it was the residence of the governor, without whose consent we could do nothing, and partly because it was distant only about a mile from the political prison in which we were especially interested. We therefore left our horses and our guide at Ust Kará with orders to wait for us, and after dining and resting for an hour or two, set out in a teléga for the Lower Diggings. The road ran up the left bank of the Kará River through a shallow valley averaging about half a mile in width, bounded by low hills that were covered with a scanty second growth of young larches and pines, and whitened by a light fall of snow. The floor of the valley was formed by huge shapeless mounds of gravel and sand, long ago turned over and washed in the
We reached the settlement at the Lower Diggings just before dark. It proved to be a spacious but straggling Siberian village of low whitewashed cabins, long unpainted log barracks, officers' tin-roofed residences, with wattle-inclosed yards, and a black, gloomy, weather-beaten log prison of the usual East-Siberian type. The buildings belonging to the Government were set with some show of regularity in wide open spaces or along a few very broad streets; and they gave to the central part of the village a formal and official air that was strangely at variance with the disorderly arrangement of the unpainted shanties and dilapidated driftwood cabins of the ticket-of-leave convicts which were huddled together, here and there, on the outskirts of the settlement or along the road that led to Ust Kará. On one side of an open square, around which stood the prison and the barracks, forty or fifty convicts in long gray overcoats with yellow diamonds on their backs were at work upon a new log building, surrounded by a cordon of Cossacks in sheep-skin shúbas, felt boots, and muff-shaped fur caps, who stood motionless at their posts, leaning upon their Berdan rifles and watching the prisoners. At a little distance was burning a camp-fire, over which was hanging a tea-kettle, and around which were standing or crouching a dozen more Cossacks, whose careless attitudes and stacked rifles showed that they were temporarily off duty. In the waning light of the cold, gloomy autumnal afternoon, the dreary snowy square, the gray group of convicts working listlessly as if hopeless or exhausted, and the cordon of Cossacks leaning upon their bayoneted rifles made up a picture that for some reason exerted upon me a chilling and depressing influence. It was our first glimpse of convict life at the mines.
We drove at once to the house of the governor of the prisons, for the purpose of inquiring where we could find shelter for the night. Major Pótulof, a tall, fine-looking, soldierly man about fifty years of age, received us cordially, and said that he had been apprised of our coming by a telegram from the acting governor in Chíta; but he did not really expect us, because he knew the Shílka was no longer navigable, and he did not believe foreign travelers would
undertake, at that season of the year, the difficult and dangerous journey across the mountains. He expressed great pleasure, however, at seeing us, and invited us at once to accept the hospitalities of his house. I told him that we did not intend to quarter ourselves upon him, but merely wished to inquire where we could find shelter for the night. He laughed pleasantly, and replied that there were no hotels or boarding-houses in Kará except those' provided by the Government for burglars, counterfeiters, and murderers; and that he expected us, of course, to accept his hospitality and make ourselves at home in his house. This was not at all in accordance with our wishes or plans. 
MAJOR PÓTULOF. We had hoped to find some place of abode where we should not be constantly under official surveillance; and I did not see how we were secretly to make the acquaintance of the political convicts if we consented to become the guests of the governor of the prisons. As there did not, however, seem to be any alternative, we accepted Major Pótulof's invitation, and in ten minutes were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easy-chairs, and a piano.
The Kará prisons and penal settlements at the time of our visit contained, approximately, 1800 hard-labor convicts.[1] Of this number about one-half were actually in close confinement, while the remainder were living in barracks, or in little cabins of their own, outside the prison walls.
The penal term of a Russian convict at the mines is divided into two periods or stages. During the first of these periods he is officially regarded as "on probation," and is held in prison under strict guard. If his conduct is such as to merit the approval of the prison authorities, he is released from confinement at the end of his probationary term and is enrolled in a sort of ticket-of-leave organization known as the "free command." He is still a hard-labor convict; he receives his daily ration from the prison, and he cannot step outside the limits of the penal settlement without a permit; but he is allowed to live with other "reforming" criminals in convict barracks, or with his family in a separate house of his own; he can do extra work for himself in his leisure hours, if he feels so disposed, and he enjoys a certain amount of freedom. At the end of this second or "reforming" period he is sent as a "forced colonist" to some part of Eastern Siberia for the remainder of his life.
The prisons connected with the Kará penal establishment at the time of our visit were seven in number, and were scattered along the Kará River for a distance of about twenty miles. The slow but steady movement of the working convict force up-stream in the search for gold had left the Lower Diggings and Ust Kará prisons so far behind that their inmates could no longer walk in leg-fetters to and from the placers, and a large number of them were therefore living in enforced idleness. The direct supervision of the common-criminal prisons was intrusted to smatrítels, or wardens, who reported to Major Pótulof; and the prison buildings were guarded by detachments of Cossacks from the Kará battalion, which numbered about one thousand men. The two political prisons — one at the Lower Diggings for men, and the other at Ust Kará for women — were not under the control of Major Pótulof, but were managed by a gendarme officer named Captain Nikólin. who bad been sent out from St. Petersburg for this particular duty, and who was at the head of a carefully selected prison guard of 140 gendarmes. The political prisons had also their free command, which at the time of our visit consisted of twelve or fifteen men and women, who had finished their terms of probation and were living in little huts or cabins of their own on the outskirts of the Lower Diggings. All of these facts were known to us long before we reached the mines, and we shaped our course in accordance with them.
The objects that we had in view at Kará were, first, to go through the common-criminal prisons and see the criminals actually at work in the mines: secondly, to make the acquaintance of the political convicts of the free command: and thirdly, to visit the political prison and see how the condemned revolutionists lived, even if we were not permitted to talk with them. That we should succeed in attaining the first of these objects I felt confident, of the second I was not at all sure, and of the third I had little hope: but I determined to try hard for all. What instructions Major Pótulof had received with regard to us I did not know; but he treated us with great cordiality, asked no awkward questions, and when, on the day after our arrival. I asked permission to visit the prisons and mines, granted it without the least apparent surprise or hesitation, ordered out his horses and dróshky, and said that it would give him great pleasure to accompany us.
It is not my purpose to describe minutely all of the prisons in Kará that we were permitted to inspect, but I will sketch hastily the two that seemed to me to be typical, respectively, of the worst class and of the best.
The Ust Kará prison, which, in point of sanitary condition and overcrowding, is perhaps the worst place of confinement in the whole Kará valley, is situated on low, marshy ground in the outskirts of the penal settlement of the same name, near the junction of the Kará River with the Shílka. It was built nearly half a century ago, when the Government first began to work the Kará gold placers with convict labor. As one approaches it from the south it looks like a long, low horse-car stable made of squared but unpainted logs, which are now black, weather-beaten, and decaying from age. Taken in connection with its inclosed yard it makes a nearly perfect square of about one hundred feet, two sides of which are formed by the prison buildings and two sides by a stockade about twenty-five feet in height, made of closely set logs, sharpened at the top like colossal lead-pencils. As we approached the courtyard gate, an armed Cossack, who stood in the black-barred sentry-box beside it, presented arms to Major Pótulof and shouted, "Stárshe!" — the usual call for the officer of the day. A Cossack corporal ran to the entrance with a bunch of keys in his hand, unlocked the huge padlock that secured the small door in the larger wooden gate, and admitted us to the prison courtyard. As we entered three or four convicts, with half-shaven heads, ran hastily across the yard to take their places in their cells for inspection. We ascended two or three steps incrusted with an indescribable coating of filth and ice an inch and a half thick, and entered, through a heavy plank door, a long, low, and very dark corridor, whose broken and decaying floor felt wet and slippery to the feet, and whose atmosphere, although warm, was very damp, and saturated with the strong peculiar odor that is characteristic of Siberian prisons. A person who has once inhaled that odor can never forget it: and yet it is so unlike any other bad smell in the world that I hardly know with what to compare it. I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp, decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement—and still you will have no adequate idea of it. To unaccustomed senses it seems so saturated with foulness and disease as to be almost insupportable. As we entered the corridor, slipped upon the wet, filthy
floor, and caught the first breath of this air, Major Pótulof turned to me with a scowl of disgust, and exclaimed, "Atvratítelni tiurmá!" [It is a repulsive prison!]
The Cossack corporal who preceded us threw open the heavy wooden door of the first kámera and shouted, "Smirno!" [Be quiet!] the customary warning of the guard to the prisoners when an officer is about to enter the cell. We stepped across the threshold into a room about 24 feet long, 22 feet wide, and 8 feet high, which contained 29 convicts. The air here was so much worse than the air in the corridor that it made me faint and sick. The room was lighted by two nearly square, heavily grated windows with double sashes, that could not be raised or opened, and there was not the least apparent provision anywhere for ventilation. Even the brick oven, by which the cell was warmed, drew its air from the corridor. The walls of the kámera were of squared logs and had once been white-washed; but they had become dark and grimy from lapse of time, and were blotched in hundreds of places with dull red blood-stains where the convicts had crushed bedbugs; the floor was made of heavy planks, and, although it had recently been swept, it was incrusted with dry, hard-trodden filth. Out from the walls on three sides of the room projected low, sloping wooden platforms about six feet wide, upon which the convicts slept, side by side, in closely packed rows, with their heads to the walls and their feet extended towards the middle of the cell. They had neither pillows nor blankets, and were compelled to lie down upon these sleeping-benches at night without removing their clothing, and without other covering than their coarse gray overcoats. The cell contained no furniture of any kind except these sleeping-platforms, the brick oven, and a large wooden tub. When the door was locked for the night each one of these 29 prisoners would have, for 8 or 10 hours' consumption, about as much air as would be contained in a packing-box 5 feet square and 5 feet high. If there was any way in which a single cubic foot of fresh air could get into that cell after the doors had been closed for the night I failed to discover it.
We remained in the first kámera only two or three minutes. I think I was the first to get out into the corridor, and I still vividly remember the sense of relief with which I drew a long breath of that corridor air. Heavy and vitiated as it had seemed to me when I first entered the prison, it was so much better than the atmosphere of the overcrowded cell that it gave me an impression of freshness and comparative purity. We then went through hastily, one after another, the seven kámeras that composed the prison. They all resembled the first one except that they varied slightly in dimensions, in shape, or in the number of prisoners that they contained. In the cell shown in the illustration on page 146 I noticed a shoemaker's bench on the sleeping-platform between the windows, and the foulness of the air was tempered and disguised, to some extent, by the fresh odor of leather. Even in this kámera, however, I breathed as little as possible, and escaped into the corridor at the first opportunity. The results of breathing such air for long periods of time may be seen in the Kará prison hospital, where the prevalent diseases are scurvy, typhus and typhoid fevers, anæmia, and consumption. No one whom we met in Kará attempted to disguise the fact that most of these cases of disease are the direct result of the life that the convicts are forced to live in the dirty and overcrowded kámeras. The prison surgeon admitted this to me frankly, and said: "We have more or less scurvy here all the year round. You have been through the prisons, and must know what their sanitary condition is. Of course such uncleanliness and overcrowding result in disease. We have 140 patients in the hospital now; frequently in spring we have 250."[2]
Most of these cases come from a prison population of less than one thousand; and the hospital records do not, by any means, represent the aggregate of sickness in the Kará penal settlements. Many convicts of the free command lie ill in their own little huts or cabins, and even in the prison kámeras there are scores of sick whose cases are not regarded as serious enough to necessitate their removal to a hospital that is perhaps overcrowded already. A convict in the early stages of scurvy may therefore lie in a prison kámera for a week or two, poisoning with his foul, diseased breath the air that must be breathed by men who are still comparatively well.
After visiting all the kámeras in the men's prison, we came out at last into the pure, cold, delicious air, crossed the courtyard, went through another gate in the stockade, and entered the women's prison — a similar but smaller log building, which contained two large cells opening into each other. These rooms were well warmed and lighted, were higher than the cells in the men's prison, and had more than twice as much air space per capita; but their sanitary condition was little, if any, better. The air in them had perhaps been less vitiated by repeated respiration, but it was so saturated with foul odors from a neglected water-closet that one's senses could barely tolerate it. The floor was uneven and decayed, and in places the rotten planks had either settled or given way entirely, leaving dark holes under which there was a vacant space between the floor and the swampy ground. Into these holes the women were evidently in the habit of throwing slops and garbage. I went and stood for a moment over one of them, but I could see nothing in the darkness beneath; and the damp air, laden with the effluvium of decaying organic matter that was rising from it, seemed to me so suggestive of typhoid fever and diphtheria that I did not venture to take a second breath in that vicinity. The kámeras in the women's prison had no furniture of any kind except the plank sleeping-platforms, which, of course, were entirely destitute of bedding. I did not see in either room a single pillow or blanket. In these two cells were imprisoned forty-eight girls and women, six or seven of whom were carrying in their arms pallid, sickly looking babies.
At every step in our walk through the two prisons Major Pótulof was besieged by unfortunate convicts who had complaints to make or petitions to present. One man had changed names with a comrade on the road while intoxicated, and had thus become a hard-labor convict when he should have been merely a forced colonist, and he wanted his case investigated. Another insisted that he had long since served out his full prison term and should be enrolled in the free command. Three more declared that they had been two months in prison and were still ignorant of the nature of the charges made against them. Many of the convicts addressed themselves eagerly to me, under the impression, apparently, that I must be an inspector sent to Kará to investigate the prison management. In order to save Major Pótulof from embarrassment and the complainants from possible punishment, I hastened to assure them that we had no power to redress grievances or to grant relief; that we were merely travelers visiting Kará out of curiosity. The complaints and the manifestly bad condition of the prisons seemed to irritate Major Pótulof, and he grew more and more silent, moody, and morose as we went through the kámeras. He did not attempt to explain, defend, or excuse anything, nor did he then, nor at any subsequent time, ask me what impression the Ust Kará prisons made upon me. He knew very well what impression they must make.
In another stockaded yard, adjoining the one through which we had passed, stood the political prison for women; but Major Pótulof could not take us into it without the permission of the gendarme commandant, Captain Nikólin. From all that I subsequently learned with regard to this place of punishment, I have little doubt that, while it is cleaner and less overcrowded than the common-criminal prisons, it does not rank much above the latter in comfort or in sanitary condition.
Early Tuesday afternoon we visited the Middle Kará prison, which was perhaps the best one we inspected at the mines. It was distant from the Lower Diggings about three miles, and was reached by a road that ran up the right bank of the Kará River through a desolate, snowy valley, dotted here and there with the dilapidated huts and cabins of the free
command. More wretched and cheerless places of abode than these can hardly be imagined. Readers who remember the so-called "shanties on the rocks" in the upper part of New York City can form, perhaps, with the aid of the illustration on this page, some faint idea of their appearance. The best of them could hardly bear comparison with the poorest of the Irish laborers' houses that stand, here and there, along our railroads, while the worst of them were mere dog-kennels of driftwood and planks, in which it was almost incredible that human beings could exist throughout a Siberian winter.
The ostensible object of organizing a free command in connection with the Kará prisons was to encourage reformation among the convicts by holding out to them, as a reward for good behavior, the hope of obtaining release from confinement and an opportunity to better their condition. It does not seem to me, however, that this object has been attained. The free command is a demoralizing rather than a reforming agency; it promotes rather than discourages drunkenness and licentiousness; it does not guarantee, even to criminals who are actually reforming, any permanent amelioration of condition; and every decade it is the means of turning loose upon the Siberian population three or four thousand common criminals of the worst class. The custom of allowing the wives and children of convicts to accompany them to Siberia, and to live — sometimes alone and unprotected — in the free command, results necessarily in great demoralization. Such wives and children are supported — or at least aided to exist — by the Government, with the hope that they will ultimately exert a beneficial domestic influence over their criminal husbands and fathers; but the results rarely justify official anticipations. The women and girls in a great majority of cases go to the bad in the penal settlements, even if they have come uncorrupted through two or three hundred overcrowded étapes and forwarding prisons. There is little inducement, moreover, for a convict in the free command to reform and establish himself with his family in a comfortable house of his own, because he knows that in a comparatively short time he will be sent away to some other part of Siberia as a "forced colonist," and will lose all the material results of his industry and self-denial. He generally tries, therefore, to get through his term in the free command with as little labor and as much vicious enjoyment as possible. Hundreds, if not thousands, of convicts look forward with eagerness to enrolment in the free command merely on account of the opportunities that it affords for escape. Every summer, when the weather becomes warm enough to make life out of doors endurable, the free command begins to overflow into the forests; and for two or three months a narrow but almost continuous stream of escaping convicts runs from the Kará penal settlements in the direction of Lake Baikál. The signal for this annual movement is given by the cuckoo, whose notes, when first heard in the valley of the Kará, announce the beginning of the warm season. The cry of the bird is taken as an evidence that an escaped convict can once more live in the forests; and to run away, in convict slang, is to "go to General Kukúshka for orders." [Kukúshka is the Russian name for the cuckoo.] More than 200 men leave the Kará free command every year to join the army of "General Kukúshka"; and in Siberia, as a whole, the number of runaway exiles and convicts who take the field in response to the summons of this popular officer exceeds 30,000. Most of the Kará convicts who "go to General Kukúshka for orders" in the early summer come back to the mines under new names and in leg-fetters the next winter; but they have had their outing, and have breathed for three whole months the fresh, free air of the woods, the mountains, and the steppes. With many convicts the love of wandering through the trackless forests and over the great plains of Eastern Siberia becomes a positive mania. They do not expect to escape altogether; they know that they must live for months the life of hunted fugitives, subsisting upon berries and roots, sleeping on the cold and often water-soaked ground, enduring hardships and miseries innumerable, and facing death at almost every step. But, in spite of all this, they cannot hear in early summer the first soft notes of the cuckoo without feeling an intense, passionate longing for the adventures and excitements that attend the life of a brodyág [a vagrant or tramp].
"I had once a convict servant," said a prison official at Kará to me, "who was one of these irreclaimable vagrants, and who ran away periodically for the mere pleasure of living a nomadic life. He always suffered terrible hardships; he had no hope of escaping from Siberia; and he was invariably brought back in leg-fetters, sooner or later, and severely punished; but nothing could break him of the practice. Finally, after he had become old and gray-headed, he came to me one morning in early summer — he was then living in the free command — and said to me, 'Bárin, I wish you would please have me locked up.' 'Locked up!' said I. 'What for? What have you been doing?' 'I have not been doing anything,' he replied, 'but you know I am a brodyág. I have run away many times, and if I am not locked up I shall run away again. I am old and gray-headed now, I can't stand life in the woods as I could once, and I don't want to run away; but if I hear General Kukúshka calling me I must go. Please do me the favor to lock me up, your High Nobility, so that I can't go.' I did lock him up," continued the officer, "and kept him in prison most of the summer. When he was released the fever of unrest had left him, and he was as quiet, contented, and docile as ever."
There seems to me something pathetic in this inability of the worn, broken old convict to hear the cry of the cuckoo without yielding to the enticement of the wild, free, adventurous life with which that cry had become associated. He knew that he was feeble and broken; he knew that he could no longer tramp through the forests, swim rapid rivers, subsist upon roots, and sleep on the ground, as he once had done; but when the cuckoo called he felt again the impulses of his youth, he lived again in imagination the life of independence and freedom that he had known only in the pathless woods, and he was dimly conscious that if not prevented by force he "must go." As Ulysses had himself bound in order that he might not yield to the
voices of the sirens, so the poor old convict had himself committed to prison in order that he might not hear and obey the cry of the cuckoo, which was so intimately associated with all that he had ever known of happiness and freedom.
It may seem to the reader strange that convicts are able to escape from penal settlements garrisoned and guarded by a force of a thousand Cossacks, but when one knows all the circumstances this ceases to be a matter for surprise. The houses of the ticket-of-leave convicts in the free command are not watched; there is no cordon of soldiers around the penal settlements; and it is comparatively an easy matter for a convict who is not under personal restraint to put into a gray bag a small quantity of food saved from his daily ration, tie a kettle to his belt, take an ax in his hand, and steal away at night into the trackless forest. It is a well-known fact, moreover, that many prison officials wink at escapes because they are able to turn them to pecuniary account. This they do by failing to report the runaways as "absent," by continuing to draw for weeks or months the clothing and the rations to which such runaways would be entitled if present, and by selling to the local representatives of Jewish speculators the food and garments thus acquired. Not infrequently these speculators have contracts to furnish prison supplies, and they fill them by reselling to the Government at a high price the very same flour and clothing that have just been stolen from it by its own officials. To an unscrupulous prison warden every dead or runaway convict is a source of steady revenue so long as his death or flight can be concealed and his name carried on the prison rolls. Under such circumstances, energetic measures to prevent the escape of criminals or to secure their recapture could hardly be expected.
The prison of Middle Kará, which is situated in the penal settlement of the same name, is a one-story log building of medium size, placed in such a way that one of its longer sides stands flush with the line of the street, while the other is inclosed by a high stockade so as to form a nearly square yard. It did not seem to me to differ much in appearance or plan from the prison at Ust Kará; but it was in better sanitary condition than the latter, and was evidently of more recent construction. As most of the prisoners that belonged there were at work in the upper gold placer when we arrived, I could not determine by inspection whether or not the building would be overcrowded at night. Major Pótulof told me, in reply to a question, that the number of criminals confined in it was 107. At the time of our visit, however, its kámeras contained only a few men, who had been excused from hard labor on account of temporary disability, or who had been assigned to domestic work, such as sweeping or cooking. The atmosphere of the kámeras was heavy and lifeless, but it seemed to be infinitely better than the air in the Ust Kará prison, and I could breathe it without much repugnance. By fastening against the walls over the sleeping-platforms large fresh boughs of hemlock and pine, an attempt had apparently been made to disguise the peculiar odor that is characteristic of Siberian prisons. Between these boughs in some of the kámeras I noticed, tacked against the logs, rectangular cards about twenty inches long by twelve inches wide, bearing in large printed letters verses from the New Testament. The only ones that I can now remember were: "Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out," and "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Whence these scriptural cards came I do not know, but there seemed to me to be a strange and almost ghastly incongruity between the dark, grimy prison walls and the festal decorations of aromatic evergreens — between the rough plank sleeping-benches infested with vermin and the promise of rest for the weary and heavy-laden. How great a boon even bodily rest would be to the hard-labor convicts was shown in the pitiful attempts they had made to secure it by spreading down on the hard sleeping-benches thin patchwork mattresses improvised out of rags, cast-off foot-wrappers, and pieces cut from the skirts of their gray overcoats. Not one of these mattresses contained less than twenty scraps and remnants of old cloth, while in some of them there must have been a hundred. They all looked like dirty "crazy-quilts" made out of paper-rags in a poor-house, and they could hardly have made any appreciable difference in the hardness of the plank sleeping-platforms. A man might as well seek to obtain a comfortable night's rest on a front door-step by interposing between it and his tired body a ragged and dirty bath-towel. There can be no reasonable excuse, it seems to me, for the failure of the Russian Government to provide at least beds and pillows of straw for its hard-labor convicts. Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs; but the Russian Government forces men to work for ten or twelve hours a day in its East-Siberian mines; compels them after this exhausting toil to lie down on a bare plank; and then, to console them in their misery, tacks up on the grimy wall over their heads the command and the promise of Christ, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Mr. Frost and I made a careful examination of ten prisons in the province of the Trans-Baikál, and in none of them — with the single exception of the new central prison in Vérkhni Údinsk — did we find a bed, a pillow, or a blanket. Everywhere the prisoners lay down at night in their gray overcoats on bare planks, and almost everywhere they were tortured by vermin, and were compelled to breathe the same air over and over again until it seemed to me that there could not be oxygen enough left in it to support combustion in the flame of a farthing rush-light. If any one who can read Russian thinks that these statements exaggerate the facts, I beg him to refer to the description of the convict prison at the Kará Lower Diggings in Maxímof's "Siberia and Penal Servitude," Vol. I, pages 100–103; to the description of the old Vérkhni Údinsk prison in Orfánof's "Afar," pages 220–222; and to the statements of the latter author with regard to East-Siberian prisons and prison management generally in the second part of his book.[3] I am not saying these things for the first time; they have been said before, in Russia and by Russians. I do not repeat them because I like to do it; but because they ought to be repeated until the Russian Government shows some disposition to abate such evils.
After we had finished our inspection of the cells in the Middle Kará prison, we made an examination of the kitchen. Hard-labor convicts at Kará receive a daily ration consisting of three pounds of black rye-bread; about four ounces of meat, including the bone; a small quantity of barley, which is generally put into the water in which the meat is boiled for the purpose of making soup, and a little brick tea. Occasionally they have potatoes or a few leaves of cabbage; but such luxuries are bought with money made by extra work, or saved by petty "economies" in other ways. This ration seemed to me ample in quantity, but lacking in variety and very deficient in vegetables. The bread, which I tasted, was perhaps as good as that eaten by Russian peasants generally; but it was very moist and sticky, and pieces taken from the center of the loaf could be rolled back into dough in one's hands. The meat, which I saw weighed out to the convicts after it had been boiled and cut up into pieces about as large as dice, did not have an inviting appearance, and suggested to my mind small refuse scraps intended for use as soap-grease. The daily meals of the convicts were arranged as follows: in the morning, after the roll-call or "verification," breakfast, consisting of brick tea and black rye-bread, was served to the prisoners in their cells. The working parties then set out on foot for the gold placers, carrying with them bread and tea for lunch. This midday meal was eaten in the open air beside a camp-fire, regardless of weather, and sometimes in fierce winter storms. Late in the afternoon the convicts returned on foot to their cells and ate on their sleeping-platforms the first hearty and nourishing meal of the day, consisting of hot soup, meat, bread, and perhaps a little more brick tea. After the evening verification they were locked up for the night, and lay down to sleep in closely packed rows on the nári, or sleeping-benches, without removing their clothing, and without making any preparations for the night beyond bringing in the paráshas, or excrement buckets, spreading down their thin patchwork crazy-quilts, and rolling up some of their spare clothing to put under their heads. The clothing furnished to a hard-labor convict at Kará consists — or should, by law, consist — of one coarse linen shirt and one pair of linen trousers every six months; one cap, one pair of thick trousers, and one gray overcoat every year; a pólushúba, or outer coat of sheepskin, every two years; one pair of bródni, or loose leather boots, every three and a half months in winter; and one pair of káti, or low shoes, every twenty-two days in summer. The quality of the food and clothing furnished by the Government may be inferred from the fact that the cost of maintaining a hard-labor convict at the mines is about $50 a year, or a little less than fourteen cents a day.[4]
After having examined the Middle Kará prison as carefully as time and circumstances would permit, we proceeded up the valley to a point just beyond the penal settlement of Upper Kará, and, leaving our vehicles there, walked down towards the river to the mines.
The auriferous sand in the valley of the Kará lies buried under a stratum of clay, gravel, or stones, varying in thickness from ten to twenty feet. The hard labor of the
The first placer that we visited is shown in the illustration on page 163. The day was cold and dark, a light powdery snow was falling, and a more dreary picture than that presented by the mine can hardly be imagined. Thirty or forty convicts, surrounded by a cordon of Cossacks, were at work in a sort of deep gravel pit, the bottom of which was evidently at one time the bed of the stream. Some of them were loosening with pointed crowbars the hardpacked clay and gravel, some were shoveling it upon small hand-barrows, while others were carrying it away and dumping it at a distance of 150 or 200 yards. The machine was not in operation, and the labor in progress was nothing more than the preliminary "stripping," or laying bare of the gold-bearing stratum. The convicts, most of whom were in leg-fetters, worked slowly and listlessly, as if they were tired out and longed for night; the silence was broken only by the steady clinking of crowbars, a quick, sharp order now and then from one of the overseers, or the jingling of chains as the convicts walked to and fro in couples carrying hand-barrows. There was little or no conversation except that around a small camp-fire a few yards away, where half a dozen soldiers were crouching on the snowy ground watching a refractory tea-kettle, and trying to warm their benumbed hands over a sullen, fitful blaze. We watched the progress of the work for ten or fifteen minutes, and then, chilled and depressed by the weather and the scene, returned to our vehicle and drove back to the Lower Diggings.
The amount of gold extracted from the placers annually is eleven puds, or about four hundred pounds, all of which goes into the private purse of his Majesty the Tsar. The actual yield of the mines is probably a little more than this, since many of the convicts of the free command surreptitiously wash out gold for themselves and sell it to dealers in that commodity, who smuggle it across the Chinese frontier. To have "golden wheat," as the convicts call it, in one's possession at all in Siberia is a penal offense; but the profits of secret trade in it are so great that many small speculators run the risk of buying it from the convicts, while the latter argue that "the gold is God's," and that they have a perfect right to mine it for themselves if they can do so without too much danger of detection and punishment. The cost of maintaining the Kará penal establishment was estimated by Major Pótulof at 500,000 rúbles, or about $250,000 a year. What proportion of this expense is borne by the Tsar, who takes the proceeds of the convicts' labor, I could not ascertain. He receives from all his gold-mines in Eastern Siberia — the "cabinet mines," as they are called — about 3600 pounds of pure gold per annum.
- ↑ According to the annual report of the Chief Prison Administration the number of convicts in the Kará prisons and penal settlements on the 1st of January, 1886,—about two months after our visit,—was 2507. This number, however, included 600 or 800 women and children who had come to the mines voluntarily with their husbands and fathers. (See Report of the Chief Prison Administration for 1886, pp. 46, 47. St. Petersburg: Press of the Ministry of the Interior, 1888.)
- ↑ In 1857, when the famous, or infamous, Razgildéief undertook to get for the Tsar out of the Kará mines 100 puds (about 3600 pounds) of gold, more than 1000 convicts sickened and died in the Kará prisons from scurvy, typhus fever, and overwork. Alexander the the Liberator was then Tsar, and it might be supposed that such awful misery and mortality in his own mines would inevitably attract his attention, and that he would devote at least a part of the gold bought with a thousand men's lives to the reformation of such a murderous penal system. Nothing, however, was done. Ten years passed, and at the expiration of that time, according to Maxímof, there were at the Kará mines "the same order of things, the same prisons, and same scurvy." (See "Siberia and Penal Servitude," by S. Maxímof, Vol. I, p. 102. St. Petersburg: 1871.) Nearly twenty more years had elapsed when we visited the mines in 1885, and the report still was, "We have more or less scurvy here all the year round."
- ↑ "Siberia and Penal Servitude," by S. Maxímof. St. Petersburg, 1871. "Afar," by M. I. Orfánof. Moscow, 1883.
Mr. Orfánof says, for example,—and says it in italics, — that in the course of nine years' service in Siberia, he "never saw a prison in which there were less than twice the number of prisoners for which it was intended." (Page 233.) See also Appendix F.
- ↑ This was the estimate given me by Major Pótulof.