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

Siberia and the Exile System Volume 1
CHAPTER X
ADVENTURES IN EASTERN SIBERIA
THE Sávenski mine was the last one that we visited in Eastern Siberia. Monday afternoon, November 23d, we drove to the Nérchinski Zavód, or Nérchinsk Works, a large village about ten miles from Górni Zerentúi, and Tuesday morning we set out on our return journey to the Shílka River and the town of Nérchinsk, distant about two hundred
miles. It is not necessary to describe in detail our long, tedious, and exhausting ride. The country through which we passed was a dreary desert of low, rolling mountains, thinly covered with snow; the thermometer ranged constantly from zero to twenty-seven degrees below; the roads ​were generally rough, hard-frozen, and bare; the telégas and tárantáses furnished us were the worst and most uncomfortable vehicles of their kind in all Eastern Siberia; and we suffered from cold, hunger, jolting, and sleeplessness until we were reduced to a state of silent, moody, half-savage exasperation, in which life — or at least such a life — seemed no longer worth living, and we were ready to barter all our earthly rights and possessions for a hot bath, a good dinner, and twelve hours of unbroken sleep in a warm, clean bed.
At four o'clock Thursday morning, a little more than forty hours after leaving the Nérchinski Zavód, we reached the post-station of Biankínskaya, on the bank of the Shílka River, and, transferring our baggage for the first time from a wheeled vehicle to a sledge, we continued our journey to Nérchinsk over the ice in a temperature of twenty degrees below zero. We had had for several days very little to eat, and in the absence of nourishing food the intense cold forced me to put on, one over another, no less than three heavy sheepskin shúbas, which extended from my neck to my heels and transformed me into a huge perambulating cotton bale surmounted by a fur cap and a dirty, unshaven, frost-bitten face. Even under all my furs I was cold to the very marrow of my bones; and Mr. Frost, who had only two warm coats and wore only one, suffered much more than I did. When we reached Nérchinsk, late that forenoon, we found that there was no snow in the streets, and as our underfed and feeble horses could not drag us over bare ground, we alighted from our sledge and waddled ingloriously behind it into the city, like stiff-jointed arctic mummies marching after the hearse in a funeral procession.
At Nérchinsk, for the first time in a month, we stopped in a hotel; but in point of cleanliness and comfort it was far inferior to the zémski kvartírs in which we had slept at the mines. It was, in fact, the very worst hotel that we had seen in Siberia. The main hall, which divided the ​one-story log building into halves, was dark and dirty, and had been fitted up with shelves in order that it might serve also as a butler's pantry; the room to which we were shown was chilly and bare, and its stale, heavy atmosphere was pervaded by a faint odor of ugár, or charcoal gas; half of the paper had fallen or been torn from the walls and was hanging here and there in ragged strips; yellow, dirt-incrusted paint was peeling in flakes from window-sashes and casings that apparently had never been dusted or washed; the rough, uncovered plank floor was not only dirty, but had sunk unevenly in places and was full of rat-holes; cockroaches were running briskly over the tea-stained, crumb-besprinkled cotton cloth that covered the only table in the room; there was no bed upon which the tired wayfarer might repose, nor mirror in which he might have the melancholy satisfaction of surveying his frost-bitten countenance. The only servant in the establishment was a half-grown boy in top-boots and a red flannel shirt; and the greenish-yellow brass pan that he brought us to wash our hands and faces over had evidently been used habitually for another and a much more ignoble purpose, and had never been rinsed or cleaned. Tired, cold, and hungry, and accustomed as we were to dirt, disorder, and discomfort, we regarded this cheerless, neglected hotel with dismay; but it was the only one that the place afforded, and we were compelled to make the best of it. The proprietor was an exiled Pole named Klementóvich, and I could not help thinking that if he kept in Poland such a hotel as he maintained in Nérchinsk, there were reasons enough, based upon sound public policy and a due regard for the general welfare, to justify his banishment by administrative process to the most remote part of Siberia, regardless of his political opinions. After a breakfast of tea, sour rye-bread, and greasy pancakes, we set our dress to rights as well as we could before a diminutive mirror that the proprietor finally brought us, and walked out ​to take a look at the town and deliver one or two letters of introduction.
The town of Nérchinsk, which has about 4000 inhabitants, is situated on the left bank of the Nércha River, two or three miles above the junction of the latter with the Shílka, and about 4600 miles east of St. Petersburg. In point of culture and material prosperity it seemed to me to compare favorably with most East-Siberian towns of its class. It ​has a bank, two or three schools, a hospital with twenty beds, a library, a museum, a public garden with a fountain, and fifty or sixty shops, and its trade in furs and manufactured goods from European Russia amounts to about $1,000,000 per annum. The most striking feature of the town to a new-comer is the almost palatial residence of the wealthy mining proprietor Bútin, which would compare favorably not only with any house in Siberia, but with most houses in the capital of the Empire. The Bútin brothers were in financial difficulties at the time of our visit to Nérchinsk, and all of their property was in the hands of a receiver; but we had a note of introduction to the latter from the younger member of the firm, and upon presentation of it we were allowed to inspect the deserted but still beautiful mansion. Going into it from Klementóvich's hotel was like going into Aladdin's palace from an East-Siberian étape; and as I entered the splendid ball-room, and caught the full-length reflection of my figure in the largest mirror in the world, I felt like rubbing my eyes to make sure that I was awake, One does not expect to find in the wilds of Eastern Siberia, nearly 5000 miles from St. Petersburg, a superb private residence with hardwood marquetry floors, silken curtains, hangings of delicate tapestry, stained-glass windows, splendid chandeliers, soft Oriental rugs, white-and-gold furniture upholstered with satin, old Flemish paintings, marble statues, family portraits from the skilful brush of Makófski, and an extensive conservatory filled with palms, lemon-trees, and rare orchids from the tropics. Such luxury would excite no remark in a wealthy and populous European city; but in the snowy wilderness of the Trans-Baikál, 3000 miles from the boundary-line of Europe, it comes to the unprepared ​traveler with the shock of a complete surprise. The house had not been occupied for several months, and of course did not appear at its best; but it seemed to me that I had rarely seen more evidences of wealth, refinement, and cultivated taste than were to be found within its walls. The ball-room, which was the largest room in the house, was about sixty-five feet in length by forty-five in width, and over it, in a large semicircular gallery reached by a grand stairway, there was an orchestrion, as big as a church organ, which played sixty or seventy airs and furnished music for the entertainments that the Bútins, in the days of their prosperity, were accustomed to give to the people of the town. The library, which was another spacious apartment, was filled with well-selected books, newspapers, and magazines, in three or four languages, and contained also a large collection of Siberian minerals and ores. Adjoining the house were the offices and shops where the Bútins carried on the various branches of their extensive and diversified business, and where they had accumulated the wealth that the house partly represented or embodied. In addition to gold-mining, they were engaged in trading, distilling, iron-manufacturing, and the construction of steamers, and their business operations extended to all parts of Eastern Siberia, and gave employment to many hundreds of men.
After thanking the receiver, Mr. Pomázkin, for his courtesy in going through the house with us, we returned to the hotel, and later in the afternoon called upon Messrs. Charúshin and Kuznetsóf, two political exiles who had served out terms of hard labor at the mines, and had then been sent as forced colonists to Nérchinsk, where they were living with their families in comparative comfort. We found them both to be intelligent, cultivated, and very companionable men, and during our three-days' stay in the town we passed with them many pleasant hours. They had had a very hard experience at the mines of Kará, but after their arrival at Nérchinsk they had been treated with reasonable ​ADVENTURES IN EASTERN SIBERIA 325 courtesy and consideration, and had even been permitted to engage in branches of business, such as teaching and photography, that by law are closed to political offend- ers. All of their correspondence was still "under control" — that is, subject to official supervision and censorship — but they were not constantly watched, regulated, and harassed by the police, as political exiles are in so many other parts of Siberia, and it seemed to me that their life, although hard and lonely, was perfectly tolerable. Mr. Cham- shin, before his banishment, spent four years and a half in solitary confinement, and for two years and a half lay in one of the bomb-proof casemates of the Petropavlovski for- tress. His offense was carrying on a revolutionary propa- ganda among the factory operatives in one of the suburbs of St. Petersburg. When he was finally sent to Siberia, in 1878, his wife voluntarily accompanied him, and at the mines of Kara she lived alone in a wretched little cabin at the Lower Diggings until, upon the expiration of his term of probation, Mr. Charushin was permitted to join her. He was one of the nine political convicts of the free command sent back to prison by order of Loris-Melikof on the 1st of January, 1881, and it was in his house that poor Eugene Semyonofski committed suicide on the eve of that day. Sunday morning, November 29th, after bidding good-by with sincere regret to Mr. and Mrs. Chaiushin, whose warm hearts and lovable characters had won our affection and es- teem, we left Nerchinsk in a sleigh for Chita, the capital of the Trans-Baikal. The icicles that hung from the nostrils of our frost- whitened horses, the sharp metallic creaking of the crisp snow under our sledge-runners, the bluish, opalescent tints of the distant mountains, and the high, slender columns of smoke that stood, without waver or tremble, over the chim- neys of the houses were all evidences of a very low, if not an arctic, temperature; and I was not surprised, when I looked at our thermometer, to find the mercury stationary ​at twenty-seven degrees below zero. As night came on, the intensity of the cold increased until it was all that we could do to endure it from one post-station to another. We drank three or four tumblers of hot tea every time we stopped to change horses; but in the long, lonely hours between midnight and morning, when we could get no warm food and when all our vital powers were usually at their lowest ebb, we suffered very severely. We had no difficulty in getting post-horses until just before dark Monday even- ing, when we reached the station of Turinopovorotnaya, about fifty miles from Chita, and found the whole village in a state of hilarious intoxication. Sleighs filled with young men and boys were careering hither and thither with wild whoops and halloos; long lines of peasant girls in bright- colored calico dresses were unsteadily promenading back and forth in the streets with their arms around one another and singing khórovód songs; the station-house was filled with flushed and excited people from neighboring settle- ments, who had evidently been participating in a celebra- tion of some kind and were about starting for their homes; the station-master, who perhaps had not finished his cele- bration, was nowhere to be found; there was not a driver about the stables; and the stárosta,1 a short, fat old man, who looked like a burgher from Amsterdam, was so drunk that even with the aid of a cane he could hardly stand on his feet. In vain we tried to ascertain the reasons for this surprising epidemic of inebriation. Nobody was sober enough to explain to us what had happened. From the excited and more or less incoherent conversation of the intoxicated travelers in the station-house, I learned that even the village priest was so drunk that he had to be taken home in a sleigh by the soberest of his parishioners. If the station-master, the stárosta, the village priest, the drivers, and all of the inhabitants were drunk, there was evidently no prospect of our being able to get horses. In fact we
1 A stárosta, or elder, is the head of a Siberian village. ​ADVENTURES IN EASTERN SIBERIA 327 •could not find anybody who seemed sober enough to know the difference between a horse and his harness. We there- fore brought our baggage into the crowded station-house, and sat down in an unoccupied corner to study intoxicated humanity and await further developments. Every person in the house was drunk, except ourselves and one small baby in arms. The father of this baby, a good-looking young Russian officer in full uniform, wandered unsteadily about the room, animated apparently by a hazy idea that he ought to be collecting his scattered baggage so as to be in readiness for a start; but the things that he picked up in one place he dropped feebly in another, and every minute or two he would suspend operations to exchange with his intoxicated companions fragmentary reminiscen- ces of the day's festivity. Finally he seemed to be struck by a happy thought, and, making his way in a devious •course to one corner of the room, he took up his saber, which was leaning against the wall, and, carrying it to his intoxicated wife, committed it solemnly to her care with directions to take it out to the sleigh. She was sober •enough to remark, with some asperity, that as she had a young baby in her arms, and as the temperature out-of- doors was twenty degrees below zero, he had better take the saber to the sleigh himself. At this he clasped the sheathed weapon dramatically to his breast, rolled his eyes in a fine frenzy upward, and declared with emotion that the saber was his first bride, that he never would forsake it, and that, in view of all the circumstances, he tvould take it out to the sleigh himself. A moment later, however, he dropped it, and but for the supervision of his second bride would have forgotten it altogether. About eight o'clock, after watching for an hour or two such performances as these, I succeeded in capturing the stdrosta, and addressing to him some very energetic re- marks I sobered him sufficiently to make him understand that we must have horses at once or there would be trouble. ​While I stood over him with a verbal club, he entered us in the station-house book as "Mr. Kennan and companion, citizens of Neighboring States"; and then going out on the front steps he shouted, as every sleigh-load of drunken men went past, "Andréi! Nikolái! Loshedéi sei chas!" [Horses, this moment!] The only replies that he received were wild howls of derision. At every such outburst of hilarious contempt for authority, he would raise his shaking hands as high as his head with a feeble and comical gesture of helplessness and despair, and exclaim in maudlin tones: "Fsei pyánni! Shto prikázhtie dyálat? Chisto nakazánia!" [They 're all drunk! What are you going to do about it? It 's a regular punishment!]
About nine o'clock the noise, tumult, and shouting in the village streets began to subside; the station-master, whose intoxication had taken the form of severe official dignity, suddenly appeared, and in a tone of stem menace wanted to know where the post-drivers were and what all this disorder meant; the young Russian officer, who by this time had reached the affectionate stage of inebriation, kissed all the women in the room, crossed himself devoutly, and meandered out to the sleigh, followed by his wife with the baby and the saber; two intoxicated priests in long gowns, and high, cylindrical, brimless hats draped with black crape, alighted from a dróshky, in front of the door, allowed their hands to be reverently kissed by the inebriated young officer and his friends, and then rode off in a post-sleigh driven by a peasant who could hardly keep his seat on the box; and finally, when we had almost abandoned the hope of ever getting away, a really sober man in a ragged sheepskin coat emerged from the darkness and reported in a business-like manner to the station-master that the horses were ready for us. The drunken and irate official, who seemed desirous of vindicating his dignity and authority in some way,
1 The Russian words for "neighboring" and "united" bear a superficial resemblance to each other, and the poor intoxicated stárosta had never heard, evidently, of such a country as the United States. ​overwhelmed the unfortunate driver with abuse, and ended by fining him fifty kopéks — whether for being sober or for having the horses ready, I do not know. We piled our baggage into the sleigh, climbed in upon it, and rode out of the intoxicated settlement with thankful hearts. As the last faint sounds of revelry died away in the distance be- hind us, I said to the driver: "What 's the matter with everybody in this village? The whole population seems to be drunk."
"They 've been consecrating a new church," said the driver, soberly.
"Consecrating a church!" I exclaimed in amazement. "Is that the way you consecrate churches?"
"I don't know," he replied. "Sometimes they drink. After the services they had a guláinia [a sort of holiday promenade with music and spirituous refreshments], and some of them crooked their elbows too often."
"Some of them!" I repeated. "All of them, you mean. You 're the only sober man I've seen in the place. How does it happen that you 're not drunk?"
"I'm not a Christian," he replied, with quiet simplicity. "I'm a Buriát."
As a Christian — if not a member of the Holy Orthodox Church — I was silenced by the unconscious irony of the re- ply. The only sober man in a village of three or four hun- dred inhabitants proved to be a pagan, and he had just been fined fifty kopéks by a Christian official for not get- ting drunk with other good citizens, and thus showing his respect for the newly consecrated edifice and his apprecia- tion of the benign influence of the Holy Orthodox Faith!
About ten o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, December 1st, we drove into the town of Chíta, and took up our quarters in a small, one-story log hotel kept by a man named Biáchinski and known as the "Hotel Vládivostók." There was in Chíta, as I have said in a previous chapter, a tolerably ​large and very interesting colony of political exiles. We had made their acquaintance and had had some conversation with them on our outward journey; but as we were then making every effort to reach the mines of Kará before the setting in of winter, we could not spend as much time with them as we wished to spend, and we therefore decided to stop for ten days or two weeks in Chíta on our return. Most of these exiles were forced colonists who had already served out terms of hard labor at the mines and who belonged to the class that the Government regarded as particularly dangerous. In view of this fact, and of the official attention that our investigations had already attracted at Kará, it seemed to me necessary to proceed with more than ordinary caution and to cultivate the most friendly possible relations with the authorities. It was more than likely that Captain Nikólin, the gendarme commandant at the mines of Kará, had informed the acting-governor at Chíta of our surreptitious visits to the politicals of the free command; and, if so, it was quite probable that our later movements would be watched. What would be the result of a discovery that we were visiting the politicals in Chíta every day I did not know; but as we were still apprehensive of a police search it seemed prudent to take every possible precaution. I called at once upon Colonel Svechín, who was then acting as governor in the absence of General Barabásh, gave him a tolerably full account of our experience at the mines, — omitting, of course, the episode with the political convicts, — and outlined to him our plans for the future. He was very pleasant and courteous, asked no inconvenient questions, and when I bade him good day and bowed myself out of his reception-room I felt quite reassured. Either he was not aware of the extent of our intercourse with the political exiles in his province, or he regarded such intercourse with indifference as a matter of little consequence.
Two or three days after our arrival, a wealthy merchant of the town, named Némerof, whose acquaintance I had ​made through a casual call at his place of business, invited us to go with him to an amateur theatrical entertainment to be given for some benevolent object in the small theater connected with the official club. Hoping to make a few useful acquaintances, and desirous, at the same time, of showing ourselves in public as much as possible with "trustworthy" people, we accepted the invitation. Between the acts of the rather clever and creditable performance we promenaded in one of the lobbies, made the acquaintance of a number of civil and military officials, received a pleasant greeting from the acting-governor, and attracted general attention as "distinguished Americans," well known to the higher authorities of the place and upon friendly terms even with the acting-governor and chief of staff. No one, we hoped, would suspect that these distinguished foreigners had stopped in Chíta for the express purpose of extending their acquaintance with political convicts, nihilists, and terrorists.
Among the army officers to whom I was introduced between the acts was a certain Colonel Nóvikof, who, accompanied by several other officers in full uniform, was walking back and forth in the lobby. As soon as he caught my name he looked at me curiously, and, without any preliminary leading up to the subject, said, "I hear that you have been at the mines of Kará."
"Yes," I replied, with some surprise and uneasiness; "I have just come from there."
"What did you find good there!" he inquired, looking sharply into my face.
I hardly knew what reply to make to such a question as this; but I thought that it would be safe at least to speak well of the officials, so far as I could conscientiously do so, and I therefore replied promptly that I found a good man, namely, Major Pótulof.
"Humph!" grunted the colonel, contemptuously. "I suppose he showed you everything in the most favorable light."
"There are some things that cannot be shown in a very ​favorable light," I replied, feeling more and more uneasiness, but determined to take the bull by the horns.
"Did you go through the prisons?" he demanded.
"Yes," I said, "we saw most of them."
"Did they show you the 'naked command'?"
"No; I don't even know what you mean by the 'naked command.'"
"I mean a cell full of prisoners without clothing. When I first went to Kará and made a visit of inspection to the prisons, I found a kámera in which there were twenty-five convicts stark naked. This body of men was then known as the 'naked command.'"
"What was the explanation of it?" I inquired.
"I don't know," replied the officer with a shrug. "They simply had n't any clothes to wear. Did your good man [a contemptuous reference to Major Pótulof] show you the solitary-confinement cells in the Middle Kará prison?"
"He did not," I replied. "What is there remarkable about them?"
"Oh, nothing," said the colonel, with assumed indifference, "except that they are not high enough to stand up in nor long enough to lie down in. You evidently did n't see anything except what they wanted you to see. I wish that I had been there; I would have shown you things as they are, not as your liubéznoi khozáin [amiable host] showed them to you."
By this time I was in a state of some bewilderment and perplexity. Could Colonel Nóvikof be sincere? Or was he merely laying a trap for me in order to ascertain what I ​really thought of the Kará prisons and the prison administration? I hardly dared say anything, for fear of making a mistake. Without waiting, however, for any remarks from me, Colonel Nóvikof said, "I lived at Kará as commander of the Cossack battalion for three years and a half; and when I was finally relieved from duty there, a few months ago, I was so glad that I had a special thanksgiving service read in the church.
"Do you see my beard?" he demanded abruptly after a moment's pause. "It is all sprinkled with gray, is n't it? That 's the result of the human misery that I was compelled to witness at the mines. When I went there, there was n't a white hair in it. How old do you think I am?"
I replied that I should take him to be about fifty-five.
"I am only forty-five," he said bitterly; "and when I went to Kará I was as young-looking a man as you are."
He paused for a moment, as if in gloomy retrospection, and I ventured to ask him what was the nature of the mis- ery to which he referred.
"Misery of all kinds," he replied. "The wretched convicts are cruelly treated, flogged with rods and the plet [a sort of heavy cat], and worked for the benefit of their overseers, who enrich themselves at the convicts' expense. As for the suffering and injustice, I will give you an instance of it. While I was there the wife of the warden of one of the prisons accidentally discovered that her lover — a convict of the free command — was carrying on an intrigue with one of her servants, a good-looking girl belonging also to the criminal class. Enraged by jealousy, she made such representations to her husband the warden as to induce him to have the servant-girl flogged. The girl received 150 blows with the stick on her bare body, and then when she went to the zavéduyushchi [the governor of the penal establishment] and complained of the cruel treatment to which she had been subjected, she got ninety blows more with the plet, — 240 blows in all, — and I stood by and saw ​those executions carried out. Do you think that 's a pleasant thing? I have n't much hair left [stroking the top of his head], but all that I have has stood on end at the sights I have been forced to witness at those accursed mines. To see what one must see there one ought to have nerves of iron wire."
The reader must not suppose that these extraordinary statements were made to me quietly and confidentially in a corner. We were walking back and forth in the crowded lobby of a theater with three or four other officers, and Colonel Nóvikof talked excitedly and loudly enough to be heard not only by them, but by any one who cared to listen. It may seem strange that a Cossack officer of Colonel Nóvikof's prominence should make, voluntarily, to a stranger and foreigner, such damaging admissions with regard to the working of the Russian penal system; but this was not the only time that I was surprised and puzzled by such frankness. At a later hour that same evening another officer came to me between the acts, introduced himself, and began to question me about our experience at the mines of Kará. In less than five minutes he made the same inquiry that Colonel Nóvikof had made, viz: whether we had seen the solitary-confinement cells in the Middle Kará prison. I replied as before in the negative, whereupon he gave me the same information with regard to their dimensions that I had already received, and added that these horrible cells ​had been used as places of confinement for political offenders, and even for cultivated women. Madam Róssikova, he said, had languished in one of those dungeons until the prison surgeon had pronounced her dying. He invited me
to call upon him, and said that if I was interested in prisons and the exile system he thought he could furnish me with some material. I am not at liberty to name this officer, nor to indicate the position that he held; but I can say, ​without breach of confidence, that I did call upon him, and that I am indebted to him for many of the facts set forth in the four preceding chapters. He confirmed most of the statements made to me by the political convicts at Kará, gave me an account of the shooting of Governor Ilyashévich that did not differ in any essential respect from the narrative of Madam Kutitónskaya herself, and permitted me to see official documents of the utmost interest and value. If he had in view any other object than the establishment of the truth, I do not know what it was.
During our stay of nearly two weeks in Chíta I spent a large part of every day with "trustworthy" citizens and officials in order to avert suspicion, and then devoted the greater part of every night to the political convicts. We met the latter, as a rule, in a carpenter-shop maintained by some of them as a means of self-support in a large two-story log house once occupied by the famous Decembrist exiles of 1825. About nine o'clock every evening, ten or fifteen politicals would assemble in a spacious upper room over this carpenter-shop, and there, at a somewhat later hour, Mr. Frost and I would join them. Fanny Morénis, a bright and very pretty girl about twenty years of age, generally acted as hostess; Madam Géllis presided over the samovár; and by half-past ten o'clock every evening we were all grouped about a big table on one side of the room, smoking, drinking tea, relating our adventures, and discussing all sorts of social and political questions. Among the exiles in Chíta were some of the brightest, most cultivated, most sympathetic men and women that we had met in Eastern Siberia; and I still remember, with mingled feelings of pleasure and sadness, the hours that we spent with them. We were not always depressed and gloomy, nor did we always look on the dark penal side of Russian life. Sometimes Mr. Lázaref, or Mr. Valúief, would take up an old battered guitar, and sing, to its accompaniment, a ​melodious Russian romance; sometimes Mr. Frost and I gave the exiles a spirited if not a finished rendering of "Bingo," "The Bull-dog," "Solomon Levi," or some other rollicking college melody: and sometimes we all sang in chorus the
stirring words and music of the "Little Russian Marseillaise," the quasi-revolutionary and prohibited song "On the Volga there is a Cliff," or the martial strains of "John Brown."
Sooner or later, however, we invariably reverted to the topics that most interested us all—the condition of Russia, ​the Russian revolutionary movement, and the life of political exiles in prison, on the road, or at the mines. Here I obtained many of the facts that I have set forth in previous chapters, and here I heard, for the first time, the terrible history of the Kharkóf central prison, and the narrative of the desperate hunger-strike of the four women in the prison at Irkútsk. Stories more ghastly and pathetic I had never read nor imagined; and night after night I went back to the hotel in a state of emotional excitement that made it impossible for me to sleep, and equally impossible to turn my thoughts into any other channel. All that I could do was to lie for hours on the floor, picturing to myself in imagination the scenes and events that had been described or related to me with such torturing vividness. It is one thing to read in cold, expressionless type such narratives of suffering, injustice, and bereavement as those that I have tried to reproduce in the preceding chapters; it is another and quite a different thing to hear them from the trembling lips of the men and women who have been actors in the tragedies described, and who have themselves gone down into the valley of the shadow of death. If, while listening to such stories, my eyes filled with tears and my hands were clenched in fierce though silent and helpless indignation, I am not ashamed of it — it would have been a relief to me sometimes if I could have cried.
The emotional strain of our East-Siberian experience was perhaps harder to bear than the mere physical suffering. One can endure cold, hunger, jolting, and fatigue with a certain philosophic cheerfulness; but emotional excitement — the constant appeal made by suffering to sympathy — exhausts nervous strength with great rapidity and eventually depresses all the vital powers. In our case there was not only the emotional strain, but the strain of constant anxiety and apprehension. We were liable, at almost any moment, to be arrested and searched; and what the ​consequences of such a misfortune would be we could only conjecture. No attempt had yet been made to watch or follow us, so far as we were aware; but the room adjoining ours in the hotel was occupied by four officers, including a captain or colonel of gendarmes, and Mr. Frost thought that he had more than once heard, through the thin intervening partition, a conversation among these men with regard to the real object of our Siberian journey, and a discussion of methods by which our papers might be secured, or at least subjected to police inspection. One night, during our second week's stay in Chíta, I came back to the hotel about two o'clock in the morning from a visit to the political exiles' carpenter-shop. There was not a sound nor a suggestion of life in the deserted streets of the little provincial town, the windows of the hotel were all dark, the servant who admitted me was only half awake, Mr. Frost was slumbering peacefully on a wooden bench in our room, and perfect stillness prevailed throughout the building. Apparently, everybody had been asleep for horns. The room occupied by the four officers was separated from ours only by a thin lath-and-paper wall through which there happened to be an intercommunicating door. Under this door was a vacant space of three or four inches, which, with the flimsiness of the partition, permitted sounds to pass from room to room with almost perfect freedom. Excited by the ghastly story of the murder of the political offender Sómof in the Odéssa prison, which I had just heard from one of the exiles, I could not sleep, and lighting a candle, I lay down on the floor with my head to the partition wall and tried to divert my thoughts by reading. For at least half an hour the only sound that came to my ears was Mr. Frost's soft, regular breathing. Suddenly the stillness, which was so profound as to be almost oppressive, was broken by the loud "Bang!" of a revolver almost opposite my head, on the other side of the partition. Surprised and startled, I raised myself on one elbow and listened. Nothing could be heard except a ​faint rustle, made apparently by plaster-dust falling from the partition wall where the bullet had pierced it. Mr. Frost, roused from sound sleep, sat up and inquired, "What was that?"
"Somebody has just fired a revolver through our partition," I replied in a low tone.
"What time is it?"
"About half-past two. Keep quiet and listen."
With strained attention we waited fully two minutes without hearing the faintest sound. The hotel had become as still as before, and yet I knew that there were four men in the room from which the pistol-shot had come. If one of them had committed suicide — which was the first thought that flashed through my mind — why did not the others get up and strike a light? The report of the revolver was loud enough to rouse the whole hotel, and the perfect stillness that followed it was even more extraordinary and mysterious than the shot itself.
"Let's call to them and find out what the matter is," whispered Mr. Frost.
"No," I replied in an undertone; "let somebody else find out. We're not hurt."
I had great fear of becoming involved in some mystery or tragedy that would give the police an excuse for taking us into custody and overhauling our baggage or summoning us as witnesses, and it seemed to me best to "lie stiller than water and lower than grass," as the Russian peasants say, and await developments. Whatever might be the significance of the pistol-shot, it was none of our business unless the weapon had been aimed at us — and that seemed extremely improbable.
After the lapse of perhaps three minutes, I heard in the officers' room the clicking made by the cocking and uncocking of a revolver, followed in a few seconds by low whispering. Then one man in an undertone asked another how many more cartridges he had. Some inaudible reply was made, ​after which there was whispering again for a moment or two, and finally silence. We did not hear another sound from the officers' room that night. Why that revolver-shot was fired through our partition from a perfectly dark and still room at half-past two o'clock in the morning we never ascertained. My own impression is that somebody desired to experiment upon us for fun; and if any one had questioned me about the incident on the following day, I should have said that pistol-shots in the night were so common in American hotels as to excite little or no remark, and that the only thing that surprised us was the absence of a dead body in the morning.
Whether or not the police discovered, during our stay in Chíta, that we were visiting the political convicts every day I have no means of knowing. That they became aware of it afterward I infer from the fact that the only letter I subsequently received from there, a perfectly innocent communication from the merchant Némerof, was delivered to me open — the end of the envelope having been cut off with a pair of scissors.
Up to the time of our arrival in Chíta I had carried the most important and compromising of my papers and documents in a leathern belt around my body; but they finally became so bulky and burdensome that it seemed necessary to make some other disposition of them, and in view of the possibility, if not the probability, of a police search, I determined to conceal them. The greater part of them I put into the hollow sides of a wooden box that I made for the purpose, and that was ostensibly intended to keep our dishes and tea-things in. Such a box I could carry from our sleigh to the house at every post-station without appearing to set any particular value upon it, and I could thus keep it constantly under my eye without exciting either the suspicion of the police or the cupidity of thieves. All travelers carried such boxes, and it was highly improbable that anybody would ever wonder what was in it. It explained ​itself. The remainder of my documents, and a few letters from political exiles to their relatives in European Russia, I bound into the covers of books. As we were traveling with very little baggage, I had no books of my own; but the exiles in Chíta furnished me with an English copy of "David Copperfield," a bound volume of a Russian magazine which contained an article upon the exile system, and an old book of logarithms. SIBERIAN FREIGHT-SLEDGES. We felt sure that "David Copperfield" and the logarithms would excite no suspicion, even if our baggage were overhauled, and we hoped that the article upon the exile system would carry the Russian magazine. Finally, I put one very important letter into a small square piece of board, upon which was mounted an oil portrait of one of the Decembrist exiles of 1825. This portrait had been found in one of the houses of the Decembrists at Chíta, and as I was a collector of curious and interesting relics, it was natural enough that I should be in possession of it. Altogether it seemed to me that my papers were very skil-. fully and successfully hidden. The police certainly could not find them without breaking or tearing to pieces nearly everything that I had.
Wednesday night, December 9th, we sang with the political exiles in Chíta for the last time the plaintive but beautiful song of the Russian revolutionists, "On the Volga there is a Cliff," distributed among them as mementos all the trinkets and small articles of value that we had, and then, with ​deep and sincere regret, bade them good-by forever. Twelve hours later we were posting furiously towards Irkútsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia. For five days and nights we traveled westward at the rate of eight miles an hour, stopping only to change horses, and suffering from cold, hunger, and sleeplessness until it seemed to me that I could endure no more. We found Lake Baikál still open, but the last steamer for the season had gone, and we were forced to take the high, picturesque cornice road around the lake at its southern end. Monday evening, December 14th, we were stopped only fifty or sixty miles from Irkútsk by the absence of post-horses. For almost three months we had been cut off from all communication with the civilized world, for ten weeks we had not received a letter nor read a newspaper, and furious with impatience at finding ourselves stopped so near the capital, we hired a peasant to carry us and our baggage on a low freight-sledge to the next station. We little knew what a night of misery we were preparing for ourselves. The cold was intense; the road ran across a series of high, massive, and densely wooded mountain-ridges; the peasant's horses proved to be half dead from starvation, and after the first three miles absolutely refused to draw us up hill; we walked almost the whole distance in a temperature of twenty degrees below zero, and finally reached the next station, more dead than alive, at two o'clock in the morning. If I fell down once I fell down twenty times from weakness and exhaustion on the slippery slopes of the last hills. Tuesday, December 15th, we reëntered the city of Irkútsk, drove to the post-office and then to the Moscow Hotel, and, without waiting to wash our hands, change our dress, or refresh ourselves with food, sat down to read forty or fifty letters from home. The most recent of them were two and a half months old, and the earliest in date nearly six.
It was late in the Siberian winter when we reached Irkútsk, and the thermometer had indicated temperatures ​as low as thirty and thirty-five degrees below zero; but the Angará River was still open in the middle, and as there was no bridge, and the ferry-boats had ceased running, we could not get across. For more than three weeks we waited impatiently for the rapid stream to close; but as it then showed SIBERIAN PAVÓSKA OR TRAVELING-SLEIGH no disposition to do so, we resolved to descend its right, or eastern, bank to a point about a hundred miles nearer the arctic ocean, where, according to the reports of the peasants, a gorge had occurred and an ice bridge had formed. On Friday, January 8th, having sold our old tárantás and purchased with the proceeds a comfortable pavóska, or winter traveling-sleigh, like that shown in the illustration on this page, we sent to the post-station for a tróika of horses and set out by way of the Alexandrófski central prison for the ice bridge across the Angará.
The Alexandrófski central prison, which at the time of our visit had the reputation of being one of the best as well as one of the largest institutions of its kind in Eastern Siberia, is situated on the right bank of the Angará River about forty miles below Irkútsk, and was built and occupied for a time as a distillery. It was remodeled and turned into a prison in 1874, and since then has been used as a place of confinement and of nominal hard labor for about a thousand convicts. I was particularly anxious to see it, because Acting-governor Petróf in Irkútsk had described it tome as "almost a model prison," and I had not thus far seen any prisons in Siberia to which such a description ​would apply. After a pleasant and comfortable ride of eight hours from Irkútsk we reached the prison settlement about half-past nine o'clock Friday night, drove at once
to the post-station, and, having warmed ourselves with three or four tumblers of hot tea, went to bed on the floor, as usual.
Saturday morning we called upon the prison warden, Mr. Sipiágin, who had already received notice of our coming from the authorities in Irkútsk, and asked permission to go through the institution of which he was in command. Mr. Sipiágin, a pleasant, intelligent, cultivated officer, thirty-five ​or forty years of age, received us with the most cordial hospitality, insisted upon our taking a late breakfast with him, and after we had refreshed ourselves with tea, bread and butter, and delicious cutlets served with gravy and delicately browned potatoes, he went with us to the prison.
The Alexandrófski central prison is a large, two-story brick building with a tin roof, standing in a spacious inclosure formed by a high buttressed brick wall. It is somewhat irregular in form, but its greatest length is about 300 feet and its greatest width about 100, with a rather spacious courtyard in the middle. It contains fifty-seven general kámeras, in which a number of prisoners are shut up together, ten solitary-confinement cells, and five "secret" cells, intended for the isolation of particularly important or dangerous criminals. It contained at the time of our visit 992 convicts, while about 900 more, who had finished their terms of probation, were living outside the prison walls in the free command. We were taken first to the mills, which were large vaulted apartments in the first story, where 75 or 100 convicts were grinding rye into meal for their own use. The air here was fresh and good; the labor, although hard, was not excessive; and the men who turned the cranks of the clumsy machines were relieved by others as fast as they became tired. This, the warden informed me, was the only hard labor that the inmates of the prison were required to perform, and it occupied only three or four hours a day. From the mills we went to the kámeras, which filled the greater part of the large building, and which were occupied by from 15 to 75 men each. They varied greatly in size and form, but all were large enough for the number of convicts that they contained; the ceilings in them were high; the air everywhere was good; the floors and sleeping-benches were scrupulously clean; and nothing seemed to call for unfavorable criticism except perhaps the lack of bedding. In all the cells I noticed ventilators, but some of them had been stopped up with rags or articles of ​clothing by the prisoners themselves. The corridors into which the kámeras opened were high, spacious, and fairly well
lighted, and the air in them seemed to be almost as pure as that out-of-doors. From the kámeras we went to the ​kitchens, where food was prepared every day for more than a thousand men, and where I could discover nothing that was out of harmony with the neatness and good order that prevailed in other parts of the building. I tasted some of the bread and soup furnished to the prisoners and found both palatable and good. The convict ration, Mr. Sipiágin informed me, consisted of three pounds of rye bread, about seven ounces of meat, and three ounces of barley per day, with potatoes or other vegetables occasionally. Tea and sugar were not supplied by the Government, but might be purchased by the prisoners with their own money. When we came out of the kitchens the warden asked us if we would not like to see the school-room. I replied that we certainly should, inasmuch as we had never seen such a thing as a school-room in a Russian prison, and did not suppose that such a thing existed. Mr. Sipiágin laughed, and conducted us to a clean, well-lighted apartment in the second story, which had been fitted up by the convicts themselves with rude desks of domestic manufacture, and had been furnished by the prison authorities with a black-board, a large globe, a wall map of Siberia and another of the Holy Land, and a few cheap lithographs. There were no scholars in the room at the time of our visit to it, but the warden said that the convicts frequently came there to read, sing, or listen to instructive talks from the priest. They were greatly in need of books. They had a few tracts and testaments, left there some years before by the Rev. Mr. Lansdell, but they wanted school-books and a library. From the school-room we went to the shops, where 25 or 30 tailors, shoemakers, and carpenters were hard at work, and where the air was filled with the pleasant odors of fresh pine shavings and Russia leather. The convicts were at liberty, the warden said, to do any work that they were capable of doing, and they received two-thirds of all the ​money that they earned. One-third was turned over to them, or held by the warden subject to their order, at the
time payment was received for the products of their industry; one-third was withheld, to be given to them at the expiration of their terms of probation; and one-third was retained by the Government. After paying a visit to the hospital, which contained only forty-two patients and which ​was clean, well ventilated, and in perfect order, we expressed ourselves as satisfied with our inspection of the prison, and returned to Mr. Sipiágin's house. The warden seemed to be very much gratified when I said to him frankly and honestly that I had inspected fifteen prisons in Eastern Siberia, that the one under his command was by far the best of them all, and that I did not see how anything more could be done by local and personal effort to make it better. It was not a "model prison," but at least it would serve as a model for the rest of Siberia.
At a late hour Sunday night Mr. Sipiágin, Captain Makófski, the prison surgeon, Mr. Frost, and I went through the prison again to see what was the state of things after the prisoners had retired. The convicts were lying asleep in rows on the plank nári without pillows or bed-clothing, and as we entered their dimly lighted cells many of them started up in surprise and alarm, as if afraid that we were about to drag somebody out to execution; but none of them spoke, and we went through six or seven kámeras in silence. There were paráshas, or excrement-buckets, in all the cells, and the air seemed more contaminated than it had been in the daytime; but even at its worst it was better than in any other prison we had visited. Taken altogether, the Alexandrófski prison seemed to me to be in the highest degree creditable to its warden, Mr. Sipiágin, and not discreditable to the Russian prison administration. It gives me great pleasure to say this, because I did not find much to approve in Siberian prisons generally, and I am glad to have an opportunity to praise where praise is deserved.
Monday morning, after having thanked Mr. Sipiágin and his bright, intelligent wife for their courtesy and hospitality, we bade them good-by and resumed our journey. The road, which lay along the edge of the river, under the high, abrupt hills that bound the Angará on the east, had been overflowed by the backing up of the water due to the formation of the ice gorge, and it was with the greatest ​difficulty that we could make our way at all over the huge cakes of ice with which it was bestrewn, or along the steep hillside above it. The slope of the bank finally became so steep that our horses could no longer stand upon it, and
we were forced to drive out upon the thin, treacherous ice of the half-frozen river. While we were going at a brisk trot just beyond the village of Olón, the ice suddenly gave way under us, and, with a great crash, horses, sleigh, and all went through into the deep, swift current of the river. Fortunately, the widely extended outriggers of our sleigh ​prevented it from sinking at once, and by the exercise of agility and good judgment we all succeeded in getting out of it and seeming a foothold on the solid ice. We cut our horses free from their harness, dragged them out one by one, hauled out our sledge with fresh horses, and returned to Olón to repair damages. After consultation with the villagers we decided that it would not be prudent to continue our journey down the river in that way. Night was coming on, the river road was impassable, and if we should break through the ice again, in the darkness and away from help, the consequences might be more serious. Late in the evening a good-looking young peasant, tempted by an offer of fifteen rúbles, which was about five times the usual rate, agreed to take us to the next village below by a circuitous and difficult route over the mountains. There was no road; but as the snow was not very deep, he thought he could make his way through, and at half-past ten o'clock we started. In all our East-Siberian experience I remember no night more full of hardship, anxiety, and suffering than the one that followed. About midnight a storm came on with high wind, flying snow, and a temperature of fifteen or twenty degrees below zero; we lost our way in the darkness, capsized into ravines, floundered for hours in deep snow-drifts, and lifted and tugged at our heavy, unwieldy sleigh until we were utterly exhausted and half frozen. About four o'clock in the morning I began to feel, at every respiration, a sharp, cutting pain in my right lung, and in less than half an hour I found myself completely disabled. Leaving Mr. Frost and the driver to struggle with the snow-drifts and the exhausted, dispirited horses, I crawled back into the half-capsized sleigh, pulled the sheepskin robe over my shivering body, and gave myself up to gloomy forebodings of pneumonia. What happened between that time and morning I do not remember. Just before daybreak I was aroused by the barking of dogs, and, looking out, was gladdened by ​
the sight of fire-lighted smoke and sparks from the chimneys of three or four log houses. It was the small peasant ​
village of Páshka. After warming and refreshing ourselves with tea, we pushed on to the settlement of Kámenka, and late in the afternoon crossed the ice bridge over the Angará, and stopped for the night in the comfortable post-station house on the great Siberian road.
* ↑ This huge pier-glass was bought by Mr. Bútin at the Paris Exposition in 1878, and was then said to be the largest mirror in existence. It was taken half around the world by sea to the East-Siberian port of Nikoláievsk, and was thence transported up the rivers Amúr and Shílka to Nérchinsk in a barge made expressly for the purpose. It is now in the ball-room of Mr. Bútin's house, and does not look at all out of place or out of harmony with its surroundings.
* ↑ 1
* ↑ The natives in Siberia known as Buriáts are nearly all Lamaists.
* ↑ I subsequently learned that the "naked command" was composed of convicts who made a regular practice of selling the clothing furnished them by the Government, in order to get money with which to gamble and buy liquor. As a punishment for this offense they had been shut up together in a large cell and deprived of clothing altogether. Of course the prisoners could not have disposed of their garments and bought liquor with the proceeds unless they had been aided in so doing by the prison officials. The existence of a naked command, therefore, showed the corruptibility, rather than the cruelty, of the prison administration. Colonel Nóvikof seemed desirous of giving me a contrary impression.
* ↑ I think I quote Colonel Nóvikof's words with almost perfect accuracy. They made upon me, of course, a very deep impression, and I wrote them down in my note-book as soon as I returned from the theater. Some allowance must be made, however, for personal animus on the part of the speaker. His relations with other officers at the mines, and particularly with Major Pótulof, had evidently been unpleasant, if not hostile, and he may have exaggerated, or thrown into undue prominence, evils for which they were responsible. The remarks that I have quoted are, nevertheless, interesting and significant as coming from an officer of high rank who had the best possible means of knowing the truth, and I give them for what they may be worth. Colonel Nóvikof is the same officer who told me that he would punish political offenders with the shpitzruten — a barbarous running of the gantlet, in the course of which the sufferer receives from two thousand to seven thousand blows from light rods.
* ↑ Mr. Lázaref has since escaped from Siberia and is now in Milwaukee, Wis.
* ↑ Mesdames Kaválskaya, Róssikova, Bogomólets, and Kutitónskaya.
* ↑ This was the only place in Siberia where I found any trace of the books and tracts that Mr. Lansdell distributed.