# Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 2/Chapter VII

Siberia and the Exile System Volume 1
CHAPTER VII
STATE CRIMINALS AT KARÁ
ON the morning after my first visit to the political convicts of the free command I called again at the little cabin of the Armfeldts, taking Mr. Frost with me. Major Pótulof was expected back from list Kará that night, and I knew his return would put a stop to my operations. It was important, therefore, that I should make the best possible use of the twelve or fourteen hours of freedom that still remained to me. I did not expect to be able, for any great length of time, to conceal from the authorities my intercourse with the political convicts. I was well aware that it must, sooner or later, be discovered, and all that I hoped to do was to get as much information as possible before the inevitable interference should come. There was some risk, of course, in visiting the houses of the free command openly by daylight; but we could not afford to waste any time in inaction, and I had promised Miss Armfeldt that I would return early that forenoon if not prevented by some unforeseen complication or embarrassment.
A brisk walk of fifteen or twenty minutes brought us to our destination, and we were admitted to the house by Miss Armfeldt herself. In the searching light of a clear, cold, winter morning, the little cabin, with its whitewashed log walls, plank floor, and curtainless windows, looked even more bare and cheerless than it had seemed to me when I first saw it. Its poverty-stricken appearance, moreover, was emphasized, rather than relieved, by the ​presence, in the middle of the room, of a large, rudely fashioned easel, upon which stood an unframed oil painting. There seemed to me something strangely incongruous in this association of art with penal servitude, this blending of luxury with extreme destitution, and as I returned Miss Armfeldt's greeting I could not help looking inquiringly at the picture and then at her, as if to ask, "How did you ever happen to bring an oil-painting to the mines of Kará?" She understood my unspoken query, and, turning the easel half around so that I could see the picture, said: "I have been trying to make a portrait of my mother. She thinks that she must go back to Russia this year on account of her other children. Of course I shall never see her again, — she is too old and feeble to make another journey to Eastern Siberia, — and I want something to recall her face to me when she has gone out of my life. I know that it is a bad portrait, and I am almost ashamed to show it to you; but I wish to ask your help. I have only a few colors, I cannot get any more, and perhaps Mr. Frost may be able to suggest some way of using my scanty materials to better advantage."
I looked at the wretched, almost ghastly, portrait in silence, but with a heart full of the deepest sympathy and pity. It bore a recognizable resemblance to the original, and showed some signs of artistic talent and training; but the canvas was of the coarsest and most unsuitable quality; the colors were raw and crude; and it was apparent, at a glance, that the artist had vainly struggled with insuperable difficulties growing out of a scanty and defective equipment. With the few tubes of raw color at her command she had found it impossible to imitate the delicate tints of living flesh, and the result of her loving labor was a portrait that Mr. Frost evidently regarded with despair, and that seemed to me to be little more than a ghastly caricature. It was pitiful to see how hard the daughter had tried, with wholly inadequate means of execution, to make for herself a likeness of the mother whom she was so ​soon to lose, and it was even more pitiful to think that before the close of another year the daughter would be left alone at the mines with this coarse, staring, deathlike portrait as her only consolation. I looked at the picture for a moment in silence, unable to think of any comment that would not seem cold or unsympathetic. Its defects were glaring, but I could not bring myself to criticise a work of love executed under such circumstances and in the face of such disheartening difficulties. Leaving Mr. Frost to examine Miss Armfeldt's scanty stock of brushes and colors, I turned to Mrs. Armfeldt and asked her how she had summoned up resolution enough, at her age, to undertake such a tremendous journey as that from St. Petersburg to the mines of Kará.
"I could not help coming," she said simply. "God knows what they were doing to people here. Nathalie was beaten by soldiers with the butt-ends of guns. Others were starving themselves to death. I could get only vague and alarming reports in St. Petersburg, and so I came here to see for myself. I could not bear to think of Nathalie living alone in the midst of such horrors."
"When did these things happen?" I inquired.
"In 1882 and 1883," she replied. "In May, 1882, eight prisoners made their escape, and after that the life of all the political convicts was made so hard that they finally declared a hunger-strike and starved themselves thirteen days."
While Mrs. Armfeldt and I were talking, Victor Castiúrin, Madam Kolénkina, and two or three other political convicts entered the room, Miss Armfeldt brought out the samovár and gave us all tea, and the conversation became general. I should be glad, if I had the requisite space, to repeat in detail the interesting and vivid account of life in the Kará prisons that was given me at Miss Armfeldt's house that day; but six or eight hours' conversation cannot be put into a chapter or two, and I must content myself with a brief narrative of my personal experience, and a short outline ​sketch of the life of political convicts at the mines of Kará between the years 1880 and 1885.
I made my last call at the house of the Armfeldts on the afternoon of November 7th, just twenty-four hours after I first entered it. I was well aware that the return of Major Pótulof that night would put a stop to my visits, and that, in all probability, I should never see these unfortunate people again; while they, knowing that this was their last opportunity to talk with one who was going back to the civilized world and would meet their relatives and friends, clung to me with an eagerness that was almost pathetic. I promised the Armfeldts that I would call upon Count Leo Tolstói and describe to him their life and circumstances, left my address with them so that they might communicate with me should they ever have an opportunity to write, and took letters from them to their relatives in European Russia. It may perhaps seem to the reader that in carrying letters to and from political convicts in Siberia I ran an unnecessary and unjustifiable risk, inasmuch as the act was a penal offense, and if discovered would probably have led to our arrest, to the confiscation of all our papers, and, at the very least, to our immediate expulsion from the Empire under guard. I fully appreciated the danger, but, nevertheless, I could not refuse to take such letters. If you were a political convict at the mines, and had a wife or a mother in European Russia to whom you had not been allowed to write for years, and if I, an American ​traveler, should come to you and ask you to put yourself in my power and run the risk of recommittal to prison and leg-fetters by telling me all that I wanted to know, and if I should then refuse to carry a letter to your mother or your wife, you would think that I must be either very cowardly or very hard-hearted. I could not refuse to do it. If they were willing to run the risk of writing such letters, I was willing to run the risk of carrying them. I always consented, and sometimes volunteered to take them, although I was perfectly well aware that they would cause me many anxious hours.
Just before dark I bade the Armfeldts and the other members of the free command good-by, telling them that I should try to see them once more, but that I feared it would be impossible. Major Pótulof did not return until midnight, and I did not see him until the next morning. We met for the first time at breakfast. He greeted me courteously, but formally, omitting the customary handshake, and I felt at once a change in the social atmosphere. After bidding me good-morning, he sat for ten or fifteen minutes looking moodily into his tea-cup without speaking a word. I had anticipated this situation and had decided upon a course of action. I felt sincere regard for Major Pótulof, he had treated us very kindly, I understood perfectly that I had placed him in an awkward and unpleasant position, and I intended to deal with him frankly and honestly. I therefore broke the silence by saying that, during his absence, I had made the acquaintance of the political convicts of the free command.
"Yes," he said, without raising his eyes from his tea-cup, "I heard so; and," he continued, after a moment's pause, "it is my duty to say to you that you have acted very rashly."
"Why?" I inquired.
"Because," he replied, "the Government looks with great suspicion upon foreigners who secretly make the acquaintance of the political convicts. It is not allowed, and you will get yourself into serious trouble."
​"But," I said, "no one has ever told me that it was not allowed. I can hardly be supposed, as a foreigner, to know that I have no right to speak to people who are practically at liberty, and whom I am liable to meet any day in the village street. The members of the free command are not in prison; they are walking about the settlement in freedom. Everybody else can talk to them; why cannot I?"
"I received a telegram," he said gravely, "from Governor Barabásh" (the governor of the territory of the Trans-Baikál in which the mines of Kará are situated) "saying that you were not to be allowed to see the political prison, and, of course, it was the governor's intention that you should not see the political convicts."
"You did not tell me so," I replied. "If you had told me that you had received such a telegram from the governor, it would have had great weight with me. I cannot remember that you ever intimated to me that I could not visit the members of the free command."
"I did not know that you were thinking of such a thing," he rejoined. "You said nothing about it. However," he continued, after a moment's pause, "it is Captain Nikólin's affair; he has the politicals in charge. All that I have to do is to warn you that you are acting imprudently and running a great risk."
I then explained to Major Pótulof frankly why I had said nothing to him about my intentions, and why I had taken advantage of his absence to carry them into effect. If I had said to him beforehand that I wished or intended to see the political convicts, he would have been obliged either to approve or to disapprove. If he had disapproved, I, as his guest, should have been bound in honor to respect his wishes and authority; while, if he had approved, he would have incurred a responsibility for my illegal action that I did not wish to throw upon him. I admitted knowledge of the fact that my intercourse with the politicals would not have been permitted if it had been foreseen, and told him that my only reasons for making their acquaintance secretly ​in the way I had were first, to avoid interference, and secondly, to relieve him as far as possible from any suspicion of complicity. "Nobody now," I said, "can accuse you of having had anything to do with it. You were not here, and it is perfectly evident that I waited for the opportunity that your absence gave me." My explanation seemed to mollify him a little, and his old cordial manner gradually returned; but he warned me again that secret intercourse with political convicts, if I continued it, would almost certainly get me into trouble.
An hour or two after breakfast I was surprised and a little startled by the sudden reappearance of Captain Nikólin, the gendarme commandant of the political prison. He desired to see Major Pótulof on business, and they were closeted together for half or three-quarters of an hour in the major's writing-room. I was, at the time, in another part of the house trying to write up my notes; but Mr. Frost was at work upon a crayon portrait of the major's children in the drawing-room, off which the writing-room opened. At the first opportunity after Captain Nikólin's departure Mr. Frost came to me in some anxiety and whispered to me that he had accidentally overheard a part of the conversation between Captain Nikólin and Major Pótulof in the writing-room, and that it indicated trouble. It related to my intercourse with the political convicts, and turned upon the question of searching our baggage and examining my papers and note-books. As Mr. Frost understood it, Captain Nikólin insisted that such an investigation was proper and necessary, while Major Pótulof defended us, deprecated the proposed search, and tried to convince the gendarme officer that it would be injudicious to create such a scandal as an examination of our baggage would cause. The discussion closed with the significant remark from Nikólin that if the search were not made in Kará it certainly would be made somewhere else. Mr. Frost seemed to be much alarmed, and I was not a little troubled myself. I did not so much fear a search, — at least while we ​remained in Major Pótulof's house, — but what I did fear was being put upon my word of honor by Major Pótulof himself as to the question whether I had any letters from the political convicts. I thought it extremely probable that he would come to me at the first opportunity and say to me good-humoredly, "George Ivánovich, Captain Nikólin has discovered your relations with the political convicts; he knows that you spent with them the greater part of one night, and he thinks that you may have letters from them. He came here this morning with a proposition to search your baggage. Of course, as you are my guests, I defended you and succeeded in putting him off; but I think under the circumstances it is only fair you should assure me, on your word of honor, that you have no such letters."
In such an exigency as that I should have to do one of two things — either lie outright, upon my word of honor, to the man in whose house I was a guest, or else betray people who had trusted me, and for whom I had already come to feel sincere sympathy and affection. Either alternative was intolerable — unthinkable — and yet I must decide upon some course of action at once. The danger was imminent, and I could not bring myself to face either of the alternatives upon which I should be forced if put upon my word of honor. I might perhaps have had courage enough to run the risk, so far as my own papers were concerned, but I knew that the letters in my possession, if discovered, would send Miss Armfeldt and all the other writers back into prison; would leave poor, feeble Mrs. Armfeldt alone in a penal settlement with a new sorrow; and would lead to a careful examination of all my papers, and thus bring misfortune upon scores of exiles and officers in other parts of Siberia who had furnished me with documentary materials. All the rest of that day I was in a fever of anxiety and irresolution. I kept, so far as possible, out of Major Pótulof's way; gave him no opportunity to speak to me alone; went to bed early on plea of a headache; and spent a wretched and sleepless night trying to decide upon a ​course of action. I thought of a dozen different methods of concealing the letters, but concealment would not meet the emergency. If put upon my word of honor I should have to admit that I had them, or else lie in the most cowardly and treacherous way. I did not dare to mail them, since all the mail matter from the house passed through Major Pótulof's hands, and by giving them to him I might precipitate the very inquiries I wished to avoid. At last, just before daybreak, I decided to destroy them. I had no opportunity, of course, to consult the writers, but I felt sure that they would approve my action if they could know all the circumstances. It was very hard to destroy letters upon which those unfortunate people had hung so many hopes, — letters that I knew would have such priceless value to fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers in Russia, — but there was nothing else to be done. The risk of keeping them had become too great to be justifiable.
As soon as I had come to a decision, I was confronted by the question, "How are the letters to be destroyed?" Since the discovery of my secret relations with the political convicts I had been more closely watched than ever. My room had no door that could be closed, but was separated from the hall, and from Major Pótulof's sitting-room, merely by a light portière. Its large curtainless window was almost on a level with the ground, and an armed sentry, who stood night and day at the front entrance of the house, could see through it. If I tore the letters into small bits, they might be found and pieced together. If I burned them, the odor of the burning paper would be at once diffused through the house; and, besides that, I was likely to be caught in the act, either by the sentry, or by Major Pótulof himself, who, on one pretext or another, was constantly coming into my room without knock or announcement. There happened to be in the room a large brick oven, and about half an hour after I got up that morning a soldier came in to make a fire in it. The thought at once occurred to me that by watching for a favorable ​opportunity, when Major Pótulof was talking with Mr. Frost in the sitting-room and the sentry was out of sight, I could throw the letters unobserved into this fire. As I walked out into the hall to see that the coast was clear there, I noiselessly unlatched the iron door of the oven and threw it ajar. Then returning and assuring myself that the sentry was not in a position to look through the window, I tossed the letters quickly into the oven upon a mass of glowing coals. Five minutes later there was not a trace of them left. I then erased or put into cipher many of the names of persons in my note-books and prepared myself, as well as I could, for a search.
There were two things in my personal experience at the mines of Kará that I now particularly regret, and one of them is the burning of these letters. I did not see the political convicts again, I had no opportunity to explain to them the circumstances under which I acted, and explanations, even if I could make them, are now, in many cases, too late. Miss Nathalie Armfeldt died of prison consumption at the mines a little more than a year after I bade her good-by; her old mother soon followed her to the grave, and the letters that I destroyed may have been the last that they had an opportunity to write. I was not put upon my word of honor, I was not searched, and I might have carried those letters safely to their destination, as I afterward carried many others.
The next unfortunate thing in my Kará experience was my failure to see Dr. Orest E. Véimar, one of the most distinguished political convicts in the free command, who, at the time of our visit, was dying of prison consumption. He was a surgeon, about thirty-five years of age, and resided, before his exile, in a large house of his own on the Névski Prospékt near the Admiralty Place in St. Petersburg. He was a man of wealth and high social standing, occupied an official position in the medical department of the Ministry of the Interior, and was, at one time, a personal friend of her Majesty, the present Empress. He was ​in charge of her field-hospital throughout the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, was made a cavalier of the order of St. Anne for distinguished services in that campaign, received
the cross of Vladímir and the cross of Stánislaus "with swords" for gallantry on the field of battle, and was greatly beloved by General Gurkó, with whom he made the passage of the Balkans.
​He was arrested in St. Petersburg on April 2, 1879, and was thrown into one of the casemates of the fortress of Petropávlovsk. He lay there, in the strictest solitary confinement, until May, 1880 — almost a year — and was then tried by court-martial upon the charge of political conspiracy. He pleaded not guilty, and declared that he had never had any relations with the revolutionary party; but he was convicted, nevertheless, upon fragmentary and misinterpreted circumstantial evidence, and condemned to fifteen years of penal servitude with deprivation of all civil rights and banishment to Siberia for life. At the time of his trial the London Times, in a column editorial upon his case, said:
Our correspondent at St. Petersburg, in a dispatch we publish this morning, telegraphs the sentences passed yesterday on the prisoners charged with participation in the Nihilist conspiracy. Western observers can see in these state trials at St. Petersburg nothing but a shameful travesty of justice. The whole of these proceedings are an example of the way in which any one can govern by the aid of a state of siege. Military justice has had, as a rule, the merit of being sharp and sudden, but the military justice of the Russian courts has been as cruel in its dilatoriness as grossly illogical in its methods and terribly severe in its sentences. ... Among the accused who were condemned yesterday, Dr. Véimar was in every way a man of whom his country seemed to have reason to be proud. He is in personal bearing a gallant gentleman. As a physician he has devoted his time and skill to the service of his suffering countrymen. He is (or was till yesterday, for to-day he is a drudge in the deadly mines) decorated with Russian and Roumanian orders, and with the medal for the Turkish war. He was with the troops who crossed the Balkans under Gurkó — a splendid feat of arms. The charges against this gentleman, the way in which the case was got up and pressed, would seem exaggerated in the wildest burlesque. The humors of injustice were never earned so far, if ​we may trust the reports of the trial, by Bunyan's Mr. Justice Hate-good or Rabelais's Grippeminaud. ... Witnesses were brought for- ward to speak to the character of Dr. Véimar. Their testimony was a shower of praises, both as to his moral character and his bravery in war. This was inconvenient for the prosecution. Sup- posing the charges against Dr. Véimar true, it would appear that an exemplary citizen so despaired of the condition of his country that he conspired with miscreants like Solivióf and aided other dastardly assassins. It might have been surmised that the prosecu- tion would bring evidence to damage the character of the accused, or at least to show that the praise heaped on him was undeserved. Nothing of the sort. The prosecutor said, "Gentlemen, I could have produced a series of witnesses whose testimony would have been quite the reverse. Unfortunately, all of them are absent." A military court could hardly avoid taking the word of the presiding general, but the whole proceeding, the whole conception of testi- mony and justice, are only to be paralleled in the burlesque trial witnessed by Alice in Mr. Carroll's fairy tale. ... No case could bear more direct evidence to the terrible condition of Russian society and Russian justice. Either a man who seems to have been an exemplary citizen in other respects was driven by despotism into secret and dastardly treason, or Dr. Véimar is falsely condemned and unjustly punished. In either alternative, if the reports of his trial are correct, that trial was a scandal even to military law.
After sentence had been pronounced, Dr. Véimar was taken back to the fortress, and lay there, in what is known as "the penal servitude section," for nine months more. The dampness and bad sanitary condition of his cell fi- nally broke down his health, and in February, 1881, he was found to be suffering from pleurisy and scurvy, and was removed to the House of Preliminary Detention. At last, in August, 1881, after more than two years of soli- tary confinement, he was sent, still sick, to the mines of Kará.
The Crown Princess Dagmár (now the Empress), whose hospital Dr. Véimar had managed during the Russo-Turkish war, took a deep personal interest in him, and was a firm believer in his innocence; but even she could not save him. When she came to the throne, however, as Empress, in ​1881, she sent Colonel Nord to the mines of Kará to see Dr. Véimar and offer him his freedom upon condition that he give his word of honor not to engage in any activity hostile to the Government. Dr. Véimar replied that he would not so bind himself while he was in ignorance of the state of affairs under the new Tsar (Alexander III.). If the Government would allow him to return to St. Petersburg, on parole or under guard, and see what the condition of Russia then was, he would give them a definite answer to their proposition; that is, he would accept freedom upon the terms offered, or he would go back to the mines. He would not, however, bind himself to anything until he had had an opportunity to ascertain how Russia was then being governed. Colonel Nord had a number of interviews with him, and tried in every way to shake his resolution, but without avail.
When Mr. Frost and I reached the mines of Kará, Dr. Véimar had been released from prison on a ticket of leave, but was dying of consumption brought on by the intolerable conditions of Siberian prison life. The political convicts wished and proposed to take me to see him the night that I was at Miss Armfeldt's house, but they represented him as very weak, hardly able to speak aloud, and likely at any moment to die; and after I saw the effect that my sudden appearance produced upon Miss Armfeldt and the other politicals who were comparatively well, I shrank from inflicting upon a dying man, at midnight, such a shock of surprise and excitement. I had occasion afterward bitterly to regret my lack of resolution. Dr. Véimar died before I had another opportunity to see him, and six months later, when I returned to St. Petersburg on my way home from Siberia, I received a call from a cultivated and attractive young woman to whom, at the time of his banishment, he was engaged. She had heard that I was in Kará when her betrothed died, and she had come to me hoping that I had brought her a letter, or at least some farewell message from him. She was making preparations, in November of ​the previous year, to undertake a journey of four thousand miles alone, in order to join him at the mines and marry him, when she received a telegram from Captain Nikólin briefly announcing his death. Although more than six months had elapsed since that time, she had heard nothing else. Neither Dr. Véimar before his death, nor his convict friends after his death, had been permitted to write to her, and upon me she had hung her last hopes. How hard it was for me to tell her that I might have seen him — that I might have brought her, from his death-bed, one last assurance of love and remembrance, — but that I had not done so, the reader can perhaps imagine. I have had some sad things to do in my life, but a sadder duty than this never was laid upon me.
I afterward spent a whole evening with her at her house. She related to me the story of Dr. Véimar's heroic and self-sacrificing life, read me letters that he had written to her from battlefields in Bulgaria, and finally, with a face streaming with tears, brought out and showed to me the most sacred and precious relic of him that she had — a piece of needlework that he had made in his cell at the mines, and had succeeded in smuggling through to her as a little present and a token of his continued remembrance and love. It was a strip of coarse cloth, such as that used for convict shirts, about three inches wide and nearly fifty feet in length, embroidered from end to end in tasteful geometrical patterns with the coarsest and cheapest kind of colored linen thread.
"Mr. Kennan," she said to me, trying in vain to choke down her sobs, "imagine the thoughts that have been sewn into that piece of embroidery!"
We remained at the mines of Kará four or five days after our last visit to the house of the Armfeldts, but as we were constantly under close surveillance, we could accomplish nothing. All that there is left for me to do, therefore, is to throw into systematic form the information that I obtained there, and to give a few chapters ​from the long and terrible history of the Kara penal establishment.
The Russian Government began sending state criminals to the mines of Kara in small numbers as early as 1873, but it did not make a regular practice of so doing until 1879. Most of the politicals condemned to penal servitude before the latter date were held either in the "penal-servitude section" of the Petropávlovsk fortress at St. Petersburg, or in the solitary confinement cells of the central convict prison at Kharkóf. As the revolutionary movement, however, grew more and more serious and widespread, and the prisons of European Russia became more and more crowded with political offenders, the Minister of the Interior began to transfer the worst class of hard-labor state criminals to the mines of Kará, where they were imprisoned in buildings intended originally for common felons. In December, 1880, there were about fifty political convicts in the Kará prisons, while nine men who had finished their term of probation were living outside the prison walls in ​little huts and cabins of their own. Most of the male prisoners were forced to go with the common felons to the gold placers; but as the hours of labor were not unreasonably long, they regarded it as a pleasure and a privilege, rather than a hardship, to get out of the foul atmosphere of their prison cells and work six or eight hours a day in the sunshine and the open air.
The officer in command of the Kará penal establishment at that time was Colonel Kononóvich, a highly educated, humane, and sympathetic man, who is still remembered by many a state criminal in Eastern Siberia with gratitude and respect. He was not a revolutionist, nor was he in sympathy with revolution; but he recognized the fact that many of the political convicts were refined and cultivated men and women, who had been exasperated and frenzied by injustice and oppression, and that although their methods might be ill-judged and mistaken, their motives, at least, were disinterested and patriotic. He treated them, therefore, with kindness and consideration, and lightened so far as possible for every one of them the heavy burden of life. There were in the Kará prisons at that time several state criminals who, by order of the gendarmerie and as a disciplinary punishment, had been chained to wheelbarrows. Colonel Kononóvich could not bear to see men of high character and education subjected to so degrading and humiliating a punishment; and although he could not free them from it without authority from St. Petersburg, he gave directions that they should be released from their wheelbarrows whenever he made a visit of inspection to ​the prison, so that at least he should not be compelled to see them in that situation. The humane disposition and sensitiveness to human suffering of which this is an illustration characterized all the dealings of Colonel Kononóvich with the political convicts; and so long as he was permitted to treat them with reasonable kindness and consideration he did so treat them, because he recognized the fact that their life was hard enough at best. Late in the year 1880, however, the Minister of the Interior began to issue a series of orders intended, apparently, to restrict the privileges of the state criminals and render their punishment more severe. They were forbidden, in the first place, to have any written communication whatever with their relatives. To such of them as had wives, children, fathers, or mothers in European Russia, this of itself was a terrible as well as an unjustifiable privation. Then they were forbidden to work in the gold placers, and were thus deprived of the only opportunity they had to see the outside world, to breathe pure, fresh air, and to strengthen and invigorate their bodies with exercise. Finally, about the middle of December, 1880, the governor received an order to abolish the free command, send all its members back into prison, half shave their heads, and put them again into chains and leg-fetters. Colonel Kononóvich regarded this order as unnecessarily and even brutally severe, and tried in every way to have it rescinded or modified. His efforts, however, were unavailing, and ​on the 28th of December he called the members of the free command together, read the order to them, told them that he had failed to obtain any modification of it, but said that he would, on his own personal responsibility, allow them three days more of freedom in which to settle up their domestic affairs. On the morning of January 1, 1881, they must report at the prison. To all the members of the free command this order was a terrible blow. For two years they had been living in comparative freedom in their own little cabins, many of them with their wives and children, who had made a journey of five thousand miles across Siberia in order to join them. At three days' warning they were to be separated from their families, sent back into prison, and put again into chains and leg-fetters. Some of them were leaving their wives and children alone and unprotected in a penal settlement, some of them were broken in health and could not expect to live long in the close confinement of a prison kámera, and all of them looked forward with dread to the chains, leg-fetters, foul air, vermin, and miseries innumerable of prison life.
In the free command, at that time, was living a young lawyer, thirty-three years of age, named Eugene Semyónofski. He was the son of a well-known surgeon in Kiev, and had been condemned to penal servitude for having been connected in some way with the "underground" revolutionary journal Onward. He was a man of high character and unusual ability, had had a university training, and at the time of his arrest was practising law in St. Petersburg. After four or five years of penal servitude at the mines his health gave way, and in 1879 he was released from prison and enrolled in the free command. At the last meeting of the political convicts and their wives, on New Year's Eve, it was noticed that Semyónofski seemed to be greatly depressed, and that when they parted he bade his comrades good-by with unusual manifestations of emotion and affection. About two o'clock that morning Mr. Charúshin, a political convict in whose little cabin Semyónofski was ​living, was awakened by the report of a pistol, and rushing into the room of Semyónofski found that the latter had shot himself through the head. He was still living, but he did not recover consciousness, and died in about an hour. On the table lay a letter addressed to his father, with a note to Charúshin asking him to forward it, if possible, to its destination. The letter was as follows:
Mines of Kará,
Night of December 31, January 1, 1880-1.
My Dear Father: I write you just after my return from watching the old year out and the new year in with all my comrades. We met, this New Year, under melancholy and disheartening circumstances. You have probably received a letter from the wife of one of my comrades, whom I requested to inform you that we had been forbidden thenceforth to write letters to any one—even our parents. Senseless and inhuman as that prohibition was, there awaited us something much worse—something that I knew nothing about when that letter was written. Ten days or so after we received notice of the order forbidding us to write letters, we were informed that we were all to be returned to prison and confined in chains and legfetters. There are nine men of us, namely: Shishkó, Charúshin, Kviatkóvski, Uspénski, Soyúzof, Bogdánof, Teréntief, Tévtul, and I; and we have all been living about two years in comparative freedom outside the prison. We expected something of this kind from the very day that we heard of the order of Lóris-Mélikof prohibiting our correspondence; because there was in that order a paragraph which led us to fear that we should not be left in peace. To-morrow we are to go back to prison. But for the faith that Colonel Kononóvich has in us we should have been arrested and imprisoned as soon as the order was received; but he trusted us and gave us a few days in which to settle up our affairs. We have availed ourselves of this respite to meet together, for the last time in freedom, to watch the old year out and the new year in. I shall avail myself of it for yet another purpose. I do not know whether the carrying out of that purpose will, or will not, be a betrayal of the confidence that Colonel Kononóvich has reposed in us; but even if I knew that it would be such a betrayal I should still carry out my purpose.
It may be that some one who reads the words "they are going back to prison" will compare us to sheep, submissively presenting their throats to the knife of the butcher; but such a comparison ​would be a grievously mistaken one. The only means of escape from such a situation as ours is in flight—and how and whither could we fly, in a temperature of thirty-five degrees below zero, and without any previous preparation for such an undertaking? The reason why no preparations have been made you know, if you received the letter that I wrote you last August.
My own personal determination was to attempt an escape if the order for our return to prison should come in the spring, when it would be possible to escape, and to do it, not on the spur of the moment, but after serious preparation. It has not, however, happened so. In the meantime I feel that my physical strength is failing day by day. I know that my weakness must soon have its effect upon my mental powers, and that I am threatened with the danger of becoming a complete imbecile—and all this while I am living outside the prison. The question arises, what would become of me in prison? My whole life rests on the hope of returning some time to Russia and serving, with all my soul, the cause of right and justice to which I long ago devoted myself; but how can that cause be served by a man who is mentally and physically wrecked? When the hope of rendering such service is taken away from me, what is there left? Personal self-justification? But before the moment comes for anything like complete satisfaction of that desire, they can put me ten times to the torture. I have, therefore, come to the conclusion that there is no longer anything to live for—that I have earned the right, at last, to put an end to sufferings that have become aimless and useless. I have long been tired—deathly tired—of life; and only the thought of home has restrained me, hitherto, from self-destruction. I know that I am about to cause terrible grief, Sásha, to you, and to all who love me; but is not your love great enough to forgive the suicide of a man tortured to the last extremity? Understand that, for God's sake! I have been literally tortured to death during these last years. For the sake of all that you hold dear. I beseech you to forgive me! You must know that my last thoughts are of you—that if I had a little more strength I would live out my life, if only to save you from further suffering; but my strength is exhausted. There is nothing left for me to do but to go insane or die; and the latter alternative is, after all, better than the former.
Good-by, forever, my dear, kind, well-remembered father and friend! Good-by, Sasha, and you my younger brother, whom I ​know so little. Remember that it is better to die, even as I die y than to live without being able to feel one's self a man of principle and honor.
Eugene.
All that was mortal of Eugene Semyónofski now lies in the political convicts' burying-ground on a lonely hill known as "The Convict's Head" in Eastern Siberia. The unpainted wooden cross that marks his grave will soon decay, and then nothing will remain to show where lie the ashes of a man whose brilliant talents, high standards of duty, and intense moral earnestness might have made him an honor to his country and an invaluable worker in the cause of freedom and humanity.
member of the city council of Odéssa, and who was generally respected and esteemed. They lived together happily and had one child — a little girl whom they named "Hallie."
I will not now attempt to trace the series of steps by which Madam Kavaléfskaya passed from the position of a ​moderate liberal to the position of a revolutionist. After trying, again and again, by peaceful and legal methods, to remedy some of the evils that she saw about her, and after being opposed and thwarted at every step by the censorship of the press, the police, and the Russian bureaucratic system, she became satisfied that nothing could be done without a change in the existing form of government; and she therefore joined one of the secret revolutionary circles, in Kiev. This circle was surprised and captured by the police in February, 1879, and Madam Kavaléfski was condemned as a revolutionist to thirteen years and four months of penal servitude, with exile to Siberia for life and deprivation of all civil rights. Professor Kavaléfskaya was not present at the meeting that was broken up by the police, and there was no proof that he had taken any active part in the revolutionary movement; but he was exiled by administrative process, nevertheless, to the little town of Minusínsk, in Eastern Siberia, nearly a thousand miles distant from the mines to which his wife was sent. Their little daughter Hallie was left in Kiev in the care of one of Madam Kavaléfskaya's sisters.
The long and terrible journey of nearly 5000 miles to the mines of Kará, the separation from her husband and child, and the hardships and loneliness of penal servitude broke down Madam Kavaléfskaya's health and strength; and in the autumn of 1880 she began to show signs of mental alienation. She had been allowed, up to that time, to correspond with her family; and I happen to have in my possession a copy of one of the letters that she received from her little daughter Hallie, who was then at school in Kiev. I have not space to describe the way in which this letter, with other documents, was smuggled out of Madam Kavaléfskaya's cell and put into my hands; but I will quote it, in order to show how, by means of such letters, the bleeding wounds of the poor woman's life were kept open until her brain could no longer bear the torture. If you will imagine Madam Kavaléfskaya in penal servitude at the ​mines of Kará, separated forever from her only child, and yet receiving from the latter such letters as this, you will understand, perhaps, how she was, at last, driven insane. To what extent the little girl Hallie realized the situation of her mother sufficiently appears from the naïve, childish letter that she wrote her. It is as follows:
My dearly loved precious Mother: I wish you could see how pleasant the weather is here. I walk out every day, all along the bank of the river, and I enjoy it so much! You ask me to tell you about the other children. Well, first, there is Sásha. He is rather fat and good-looking, and he has nice eyes; but I think he is spoiled by petting. Then there is Dúnia. She is not very pretty, but she is a nice girl and I like her very much. The baby is only a year old. He creeps all over the floor; but he can walk holding on to somebody's hand, and he can say 'Papa,' 'Mama,' and 'Niánya' [nurse). I love him most of all.
I am getting along in my studies pretty well. In history I am 5, grammar 5, German 4, and French 5; but, my dear mother, I must give you some sad news. In arithmetic I could n't do the sum that was given me, and so was marked 3, and did n't get the reward, which I hoped so to get because I knew how it would please aunt and you.
My dear mother, it is terrible to think how far you are from me — but how glad I am that you love me so. When I grow up and have children I will love them as you love me, and as I love you. My dearest little mother, my darling, my soul, I love you so much!
Hallie.
Imagine Madam Kavaléfskaya in penal servitude at the mines, five thousand miles from her home, in shaken health, with no hope of ever returning to European Russia, with little hope even of living out her thirteen-year sentence, and in receipt of such a letter as this from her only child! I have often pictured to myself the contrast between what the child thought was "sad news" — that she could not do her sum in arithmetic — and the awful tragedy in the life of the mother.
In 1881, soon after the return of the free command to prison, Madam Kavaléfskaya went insane, shrieked ​constantly, broke the windows of her cell, and became so violent that it was necessary to put her into a strait-jacket. A short time afterward, however, upon the intercession of a humane officer — I think of Colonel Kononóvich himself — she was permitted to join her husband in Minusínsk; and there, under more favorable conditions of life, she recovered her reason. About a year later she was regarded as sane enough to be again subjected to torture, and she was therefore returned to the mines. When she became once more "insubordinate" and unmanageable there, she was brought back to the Irkútsk prison, where, with Mesdames Róssikova, Kutitónskaya, and Bogomólets, she engaged in a hunger-strike that lasted sixteen days, and that brought all four of the women very near to death. Some time in 1887 Madam Kavaléfskaya was sent for the third time to the mines, and in November, 1889, after the flogging to death of Madam Sigída, she committed suicide by taking poison.
When Madam Kavaléfskaya went insane in 1881, Colonel Kononóvich was still governor of the Kará penal establishment; the free command had just been returned to prison, and Semyónofski had just shot himself in the house of his friend Charúshin. Of course, Colonel Kononóvich was greatly shocked both by Semyónofski's suicide and by Madam Kavaléfskaya's insanity, but these were not the only tragedies that resulted from an enforcement of the Government's orders concerning the treatment of the political convicts. Soon after the self-destruction of Semyónofski, Uspénski, another political who had been sent back into prison, hanged himself in the prison bathhouse, while Ródin poisoned himself to death by drinking water in which he had soaked the heads of matches.
Colonel Kononóvich was too warm-hearted and sympathetic a man not to be profoundly moved by such terrible evidences of human misery. He determined to resign his position as governor of the Kará penal establishment, ​whatever might be the consequences; and in pursuance of this determination he wrote to the governor-general of Eastern Siberia and to the Minister of the Interior a very frank and bold letter, in which he said that he regarded the late instructions of the Government concerning the treatment of the political convicts as not only impolitic but cruel. If they wanted an officer who would treat the politicals in accordance with the spirit of such instructions, they had best send a hangman there. He, himself, was not a hangman; he could not enforce such orders without doing violence to all his feelings, and he must therefore ask to be relieved of his command. The resignation was accepted, and in the summer of 1881 Colonel Kononóvich left the mines of Kará, and some time afterwards returned to St. Petersburg. As he passed through Irkútsk he had an interview with Governor-General Anúchin, in the course of which the latter said to him, rather coldly and contemptuously, "Of course, Colonel Kononóvich, a man holding such views as you do could not be expected to act as governor of the Kará prisons and mines, and I doubt whether such a man can hold any position whatever in the Government service."
"Very well," replied Kononóvich, "then I will get out of it."
conscience, and I am not willing to do anything that would lose me its approval. The Government, by its orders, made it impossible for me to serve as governor of the Kará prisons and at the same time keep an approving conscience, and I therefore asked to be relieved. If I should be ordered there again I would act in precisely the same way."
The subsequent history of the Kará penal establishment must have made Mr. Dúrnovo think many times of these brave, frank words.
​I have not been able to speak favorably of many Siberian prisons, nor to praise many Siberian officials; but it affords me pleasure to say that of Colonel Kononóvich I heard little that was not good. Political convicts, honest officers, and good citizens everywhere united in declaring that he was a humane, sympathetic, and warm-hearted man, as well as a fearless, intelligent, and absolutely incorruptible official. Nearly all the improvement that has been made in the Kará penal establishment within the past quarter of a century was made during Colonel Kononóvich's term of service as governor. In view of these facts I regret to have to say that he was virtually driven out of Siberia by the worst and most corrupt class of Russian bureaucratic officials. He was called "weak" and "sentimental"; he was accused of being a "socialist"; he was said to be in sympathy with the views of the political convicts; and the isprávnik of Nérchinsk openly boasted, in the official club of that city, that he would yet "send Colonel Kononóvich to the province of Yakútsk with a yellow diamond on his back." How ready even high officers of the Siberian administration were to entertain the most trivial charges against him may be inferred from the following anecdote. During the last year of his service at Kará there came to the mines a political convict, hardly out of his teens, named Bíbikof. As a consequence of long-continued suffering and ill-treatment on the road, this young man was as wild, suspicious, and savage as a trapped wolf. He seemed to regard all the world as his enemies, and glared at every officer as if he expected a blow, was half afraid of it, but was prepared to die fighting. Colonel Kononóvich received him courteously and kindly; sent the wife of one of the political exiles to him with clean fresh underclothing; attended generally to his physical needs, and finally said to him, "Remember that nobody here will insult you or ill-treat you." The young convict was greatly surprised by such a reception, and in a letter that he subsequently wrote to a friend in European Russia he said, "I am glad to know, from the ​little acquaintance I have had with Kononóvich, that a Russian colonel is not necessarily a beast." This letter fell into the hands of the police in European Russia, was forwarded through the Ministry of the Interior to General Ilyashévich, the governor of the Trans-Baikál, and was sent by that officer to Colonel Kononóvich with a request for an "explanation." It seemed to be regarded as documentary evidence that the governor of the Kará prisons was on suspiciously friendly terms with the political convicts. Kononóvich paid no attention to the communication. Some months later he happened to visit Chíta on business, and Governor Ilyashévich, in the course of a conversation about other matters, said to him, "By the way, Colonel Kononóvich, you have never answered a letter that I wrote you asking for an explanation of something said about you in a letter from one of the political convicts in your command. Did you receive it?"
"Yes," replied Kononóvich, "I received it; but what kind of answer did you look for? What explanation could I give? Did you expect me to excuse myself because somebody regarded me as a human being and not a beast? Was I to say that the writer of the letter was mistaken in supposing me to be a human being — that in reality I was a beast, and that I had never given him or anybody else reason to suppose that a Russian colonel could be a human being?"
This presentation of the case rather confused the governor, who said that the demand for an explanation had been written by his assistant, that it had been stupidly expressed, and that after all the matter was not of much consequence. He then dropped the subject.
After resigning his position at the mines of Kará, Colonel Kononóvich, who was a Cossack officer, went to Nérchinsk, where he took command of the Cossack forces of the Trans-Baikál. He soon discovered that a small knot of officers, including the isprávnik, were engaged in selling immunity ​from conscription — or, in other words, releasing, for two or three hundred rúbles, per capita, young men who had been legally drawn as conscripts and who should render military service. He undertook to bring the corrupt officials to justice; but they had strong and highly placed friends in Irkútsk, they trumped up a set of counter charges, packed the investigating commission with their own associates, and came very near sending Colonel Kononóvich to the province of Yakútsk "with a yellow diamond on his back," in fulfilment of the isprávnik's boast. Fortunately Kononóvich had influential friends in St. Petersburg. He telegraphed to them and to the Minister of the Interior, and finally succeeded in securing the appointment of another commission, in having the isprávnik and some of his confederates thrown into prison, and in obtaining documentary evidence of their guilt. The conspirators then caused his house to be set on fire in the middle of a cold winter night, and nearly burned him alive with all his family. He escaped in his night-clothing, and, as soon as he had gotten his wife and children out, rushed back to try to save the papers in the pending case against the isprávnik, but it was too late. He was driven out by smoke and flames, and most of the proofs were destroyed. Colonel Kononóvich then "shook his hand" against Siberia — to use a Russian expression — and went to St. Petersburg. He did not want to live any longer, he said, in a country where an honest man could not do his duty without running the risk of being burned alive. In St. Petersburg he was given another position, as representative on the general staff of the Cossack forces of the Trans-Baikál, and he lived there quietly until the summer of 1888, when he was promoted to the rank of general and appointed to command the largest and most important penal establishment in Siberia; namely, that on the island of Saghalín. This appointment is in the highest degree creditable to the Russian Government, and, taken in connection with the erection of ​the new prison in Vérkhni Údinsk, furnishes a gratifying proof that the Tsar is not wholly indifferent to the sufferings of Siberian exiles and convicts. As long as General Kononóvich remains in command of the Saghalín prisons and mines there is every reason to believe that they will be intelligently, honestly, and humanely managed.
* ↑ I kept this promise, and told Count Tolstói all that he seemed to care to hear with regard to the Armfeldts' situation. He manifested, however, a disinclination to listen to accounts of suffering among the political convicts in Eastern Siberia; would not read manuscripts that I brought expressly to show him; and said distinctly that while he felt sorry for many of the politicals he could not help them, and was not at all in sympathy with their methods. They had resorted, he said, to violence, and they must expect to suffer from violence. I was told in Moscow that when Madam Uspénskaya, wife of one of the political convicts at Kará, went to Count Tolstói to solicit a contribution of money to be used in ameliorating, as far as possible, the condition of politicals at the mines, she met with a decided refusal. The Count was not willing, apparently, to show even a benevolent and charitable sympathy with men and women whose actions he wholly disapproved.
* ↑ The official report of the trial of Dr. Véimar, and a number of other political offenders arraigned with him, will be found in the St. Petersburg newspaper Gólos for May, 1880, numbers 133-138. It was the opinion of all the officers of the exile administration who knew Dr. Véimar in Siberia that he was an innocent man unjustly condemned. Major Pótulof and Colonel Nóvikof expressed this belief to me very strongly.
* ↑ Nearly all of the statements made in this and the following chapter have been carefully verified, and most of them rest upon unimpeachable official testimony. There may be trifling errors in some of the details, but, in the main, the story can be proved, even in a Russian court of justice. The facts with regard to Colonel Kononóvich and his connection with the Kará prisons and mines were obtained partly from political convicts and partly from officials in Kará, Chíta, Irkútsk, and St. Petersburg. The letter in which Kononóvich resigned his position as governor of the Kará penal establishment is still on file in the Ministry of the Interior, and all the circumstances of his retirement are known, not only to the political convicts, but to many of the officials with whom I have talked. I regret that I am restrained by prudential and other considerations from citing my authorities. I could greatly strengthen my case by showing — as I might show — that I obtained my information from persons fully competent to furnish it, and persons whose positions were a sufficient guarantee of impartiality.
* ↑ The political prison was not in existence at that time, and the state criminals were distributed among the common-criminal prisons, where they occupied what were called the "secret" or solitary-confinement cells. At a somewhat later period an old detached building in Middle Kará was set apart for their accommodation, and most of them lived together there in a single large kámera. They were treated in general like common convicts, were required to work every day in the gold placers, and at the expiration of their term of probation were released from confinement and enrolled in the free command.
* ↑ This is a punishment still authorized by law, and one still inflicted upon convicts who are serving out life senfences. The prisoner is fastened to a small miner's wheelbarrow by a chain, attached generally to the middle link of his leg-fetter. This chain is long enough to give him some freedom of movement, but he cannot walk for exercice, nor cross his cell, without trundling his wheelbarrow before him. Even when he lies down to sleep, the wheelbarrow remains attached to his feet. Four politicals have been chained to wheelbarrows at Kará, namely: Popko, Berezniúk, Fomíchef, and Shehedrín. The last of them was not released until 1884. Whether or not any have been thus punished since that time I do not know.
* ↑ All of these orders were issued while the Liberal Lóris-Mélikof was Minister of the Interior, and I have never been able to get any explanation of the inconsistency between his general policy towards the Liberal party and his treatment of condemned state criminals. Some of the officials whom I questioned in Siberia said without hesitation it was the minister's intention to make the life of the political convicts harder; while others thought that he acted without full information and upon the assumption that modern politicals were no more deserving of sympathy than were the Decembrists of 1825. The Decembrist conspirators — although high nobles — were harshly treated, therefore Nihilists should be harshly treated. Many of the political exiles whom I met in Siberia regarded Lóris-Mélikof's professions of sympathy with the Liberal and reforming party as insincere and hypocritical; but my own impression is that he acted in this case upon somebody's advice, without giving the matter much thought or consideration.
* ↑ "Sásha" was Semyónofski's brother Alexander
* ↑ Mr. Vorontsóf is the author of "The Destiny of Capital in Russia," and of a large number of articles upon political economy in the Russian magazines European Messenger, Annals of the Fatherland, and Russian Thought.
* ↑ This hunger-strike was a protest against cruel treatment at the hands of the Irkútsk chief of police.