# Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter X

Siberia and the Exile System Volume 2
CHAPTER X
TWO COLONIES OF POLITICAL EXILES
FEW pages in my Siberian note-books are more suggestive of pleasant sensations and experiences than the pages that record the incidents of our life in the mountains of the Altái. As I now turn over the flower-stained leaves dated "Altái Station, August 5, 1885," every feature of that picturesque Cossack village comes back to me so vividly that, if for a moment I close my eyes, I seem to hear again the musical plash and tinkle of the clear, cold streams that tumble through its streets; to see again the magnificent amphitheater of flower-tinted slopes and snowy peaks that encircles it; and to breathe once more the fresh, perfumed air of the green alpine meadow upon which it stands. If the object of our Siberian journey had been merely enjoyment, I think we should have remained at the Altái Station all summer; since neither in Siberia nor in any other country could we have hoped to find a more delightful place for a summer vacation. The pure mountain air was as fragrant and exhilarating as if it had been compounded of perfume and ozone; the beauty and luxuriance of the flora were a never-failing source of pleasure to the eye; the clear, cold mountain streams were full of fish; elk, argali, wild goats, bears, foxes, and wolves were to be found by an enterprising hunter in the wooded ravines and the high mountain valleys south of the station; troops of Kírghis ​horsemen were ready to escort us to the Mongolian boundary post, to the beautiful alpine lake of Márka Kul, or to the wild, unexplored fastnesses of the Chinese Altái; and Captain Maiéfski, the hospitable commandant of the post, tempted us to prolong our stay, by promising to organize for us all sorts of delightful excursions and expeditions. The season of good weather and good roads, however,
was rapidly passing; and if we hoped to reach the mines of Kará before winter should set in, we had not a day to spare. It was already the first week in August, and a distance of 2500 miles lay between us and the head-waters of the Amúr.
Our next objective point was the city of Tomsk, distant from the Altái Station about 750 miles. In order to reach it we should be obliged to return over a part of the road that we had already traversed, and to descend the Írtish as far as the station of Píanoyarófskaya. At that point the road to Tomsk leaves the Semipalátinsk road, and runs northward through the great Altái mining district and the city of Barnaül. There were two colonies of political exiles on our route—one of them at the Cossack station of Ulbínsk, 160 miles from the Altái Station, and the other in the town of Ust Kámenogórsk. In each of these places, therefore, we purposed to make a short stay.
On the morning of Thursday, August 6th, we packed our baggage in the tárantás, ordered horses from the post station, took breakfast for the last time with Captain Maiéfski and his wife, whose kindness and warm-hearted ​hospitality had made their house seem to us like a home, and after drinking to the health of all our Altái friends, and bidding everybody good-by three or four times, we rode reluctantly out of the beautiful alpine village and began our descent to the plains of the Írtish.
It is not necessary to describe our journey down the valley of the Búkhtarmá and across the gray, sterile steppes of the upper Írtish. It was simply a reversal of the experience through which we had passed in approaching the Altái Station three weeks before. Then we were climbing from the desert into the alps, while now we were descending from the alps to the desert.
At six o'clock Friday afternoon we reached the settlement of Búkhtarmá, where the Írtish pierces a great outlyiug spur of the Altái chain, and where the road to Ust Kámenogórsk leaves the river and makes a long détour into the mountains. No horses were obtainable at the post station; the weather looked threatening; the road to Alexandrófskaya was said to be in bad condition owing to recent rains; and we had great difficulty in finding a peasant with "free" horses who was willing to take our heavy tárantás up the steep, miry mountain road on what promised to be a dark and stormy night. With the coöperation of the station master, however, we found at last a man who was ready, for a suitable consideration, to make the attempt, and about an hour before dark we left Búkhtarmá for Alexandrófskaya with four "free" horses. We soon had occasion to regret that we had not taken the advice of our driver to stop at Búkhtarmá for the night and cross the mountains by daylight. The road was worse than any neglected wood-road in the mountains of West Virginia; and before we had made half the distance to Alexandrófskaya, night came on, with a violent storm accompanied by lightning, thunder, and heavy rain. Again and again we lost the road in the darkness; two or three times we became almost hopelessly mired in bogs and sloughs; and finally our tárantás capsized, ​or partly capsized, into a deep ditch or gully worn out in the mountain-side by falling water. The driver shouted, cursed, and lashed his dispirited horses, while Mr. Frost and I explored the gully with lighted wisps of hay, and lifted, tugged, and pulled at the heavy vehicle until we were tired out, drenched with rain, and covered from head to foot with mud; but all our efforts were fruitless. The tárantás could not be extricated. From this predicament we were finally rescued by the drivers of three or four telégas, who left Búkhtarmá with the mail shortly after our departure and who overtook us just at the time when their services were most needed. With their aid we righted the capsized vehicle, set it again on the road, and proceeded. The lightly loaded telégas soon left us behind, and knowing that we could expect no more help from that source, and that another capsize would probably end our travel for the night, I walked ahead of our horses in the miry road for half or three-quarters of an hour, holding up a white handkerchief at arm's-length for the guidance of our driver, and shouting directions and warnings to him whenever it seemed necessary. Tired, at last, of wading through mud in Cimmerian darkness, and ascertaining the location of holes, sloughs, and rocks by tumbling into or over them, I climbed back into the tárantás and wrapped myself up in a wet blanket, with the determination to trust to luck. In less than fifteen minutes our vehicle was again on its side in another deep gully. After making a groping investigation by the sense of touch, we decided that the situation this time was hopeless. There was nothing to be done but to send the driver on horseback in search of help, and to get through the night as best we could where we were. It was then about eleven o'clock. The wind had abated, but the rain was still falling, and the intense darkness was relieved only by an occasional flash of lightning. Cold, tired, and hungry, we crawled into our capsized vehicle, which still afforded us some little shelter from the rain, and sat there ​in sleepless discomfort until morning. Just before daylight our driver returned with a Cossack from Alexandrófskaya,
bringing lanterns, ropes, crowbars, and fresh horses, and with these helps and appliances we succeeded in righting the tárantás and dragging it back to the road.
​We reached Alexandrófskaya in the gray light of early dawn, and after drinking tea and sleeping two hours on the floor of the post station, we resumed our journey with eight horses and three drivers. The road from Alexandrófskaya to Séivernaya runs for five or six miles up the steep, wild ravine that is shown in the illustration on page 231. It then crosses a series of high, bare ridges running generally at right angles to the course of the Írtish, and finally descends, through another deep, precipitous ravine, into the valley of Ulbínsk, which it follows to Ust Kámenogórsk. The mountains which compose this spur, or outlying branch, of the Altái system are not high, but, as will be seen from the illustration on page 235, they are picturesque and effective in outlining and grouping, and are separated one from another by extremely beautiful valleys and ravines.
Owing to the bad condition of the roads and the mountainous nature of the country, we were more than ten hours in making the nineteen miles between Séivernaya and Ulbínsk, although we had eight horses on the first stretch and five on the second. The slowness of our progress gave us an opportunity to walk now and then, and to make collections of flowers, and we kept the tárantás decorated all day with goldenrod, wild hollyhocks, long blue spikes of monk's-hood, and leafy branches of zhímolost or Tatár honeysuckle, filled with showy scarlet or yellow berries.
Late Saturday afternoon, as the sun was sinking behind the western hills, we rode at a brisk trot down the long, beautiful ravine that leads into the valley of the Ulbá, and before dark we were sitting comfortably in the neat waiting-room of the Ulbínsk post station, refreshing ourselves with bread and milk and raspberries.
Among the political exiles living in Ulbínsk at that time were Alexander L. Blok, a young law student from the city of Sarátof on the Vólga; Apollo Karélin, the son of a well-known photographer in Nízhni Nóvgorod; Séiverin Gross, ​a young lawyer from the province of Kóvno, and Mr. Vítort, a technologist from Ríga.
Mr. Karélin had been accompanied to Siberia by his wife, but the others were, I believe, unmarried. I had
learned the names, and something of the histories, of these exiles from the politicals in Semipálatinsk, and there were several reasons why I particularly wished to see them and to make their acquaintance. I had an idea that perhaps the politicals in Semipalátinsk were above the average level of administrative exiles in intelligence and education​—that they were unusually favorable specimens of their class,—and it seemed to me not improbable that in the wilder and remoter parts of Western Siberia I should find types that would correspond more nearly to the conception of nihilists that I had formed in America.
Before we had been in the village an hour, two of the exiles—Messrs. Blok and Gross—called upon us and introduced themselves. Mr. Blok won my heart from the very first. He was a man twenty-six or twenty-eight years of age, of medium height and athletic figure, with light-brown hair, blue eyes, and a beardless but strong and resolute face, which seemed to me to express intelligence, earnestness, and power in every line. It was, in the very best sense of the word, a good face, and I could no more help liking and trusting it than I could help breathing. Marcus Aurelius somewhere says, with coarse vigor of expression, that "a man who is honest and good ought to be exactly like a man who smells strong, so that the bystander, as soon as he comes near, must smell, whether he choose or not." Mr. Blok's honesty and goodness seemed to me to be precisely of this kind, and I found myself regarding him with friendly sympathy, and almost with affection, long before I could assign any reason for so doing. Mr. Gross was a rather handsome man, perhaps thirty years of age, with brown hair, full beard and mustache, gray eyes, and clearly cut, regular features. He talked in an eager, animated way, with an affectionate, caressing modulation of the voice, and had a habit of unconsciously opening his eyes a little more widely than usual as an expression of interest or emotion. Both of the young men were university graduates; both spoke French and German, and Mr. Gross read English; both were particularly interested in questions of political economy, and either of them might have been taken for a young professor, or a post-graduate student, in the Johns Hopkins University. I had not talked with them an hour before I became satisfied that in intelligence and culture ​they were fully abreast of the Semipalátinsk exiles, and that I should have to look for the wild, fanatical nihilists of my imagination in some part of Siberia more remote than Ulbínsk.
We talked in the post station until about nine o'clock, and then, at Mr. Blok's suggestion, made a round of calls
upon the other political exiles in the village. They were all living in wretchedly furnished log houses rented from the Ulbínsk Cossacks, and were surrounded by unmistakable evidences of hardship, privation, and straitened circumstances; but they seemed to be trying to make the best of their situation, and I cannot remember to have heard anywhere that night a bitter complaint or a single reference to ​personal experience that seemed to be made for the purpose of exciting our sympathy. If they suffered, they bore their suffering with dignity and self-control. All of them seemed to be physically well except Mrs. Karélin, who looked thin, pale, and careworn, and Mr. Vítort, who had been three times in exile and ten years in prison or in Siberia, and who, I thought, would not live much longer to trouble the Government that had wrecked his life. Although only forty-five years of age, he seemed greatly broken, walked feebly with a cane, and suffered constantly from rheumatism contracted in damp prison cells. He was one of the best-informed exiles that I met in Western Siberia, and was the first to tell me of the death of General Grant. We had a long talk about the United States, in the course of which he asked many questions concerning our civil war, the constitutional amendments adopted after the war, the balance of parties in Congress, and the civil service reform policy of President Cleveland, which showed that he had more than a superficial acquaintance with our political history. In the houses of all the exiles in Ulbínsk, no matter how wretchedly they might be furnished, I found a writing-desk or table, books, and such magazines as the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Rússki Véistnik, or Russian Messenger. In the house of Mr. Blok there was a small but well-selected library, in which I noticed, in addition to Russian books, a copy of Longfellow's poems, in English; Maine's "Ancient Law," and "Village Communities"; Bain's "Logic"; Mill's "Political Economy"; Lecky's "History of Rationalism" (an expurgated Russian edition); Spencer's "Essays: Moral, Political, and Esthetic," and his "Principles of Sociology"; Taine's "History of English Literature"; Laboulaye's "History of the United States," and a large number of French and German works on jurisprudence and political economy. I need hardly call attention, I think, to the fact that men who read and carry to Siberia with them such books as these are not wild fanatics, ​nor "ignorant shoemakers and mechanics," as they were once contemptuously described to me by a Russian officer, but are serious, cultivated, thinking men. If such men are in exile in a lonely Siberian village on the frontier of Mongolia, instead of being at home in the service of the state—so much the worse for the state!
We spent with the political exiles in Ulbínsk the greater part of one night and a day. I became very deeply interested in them, and should have liked to stay there and talk with them for a week; but our excursion to the Katúnski Alps had occupied more time than we had allotted to it, and it was important that we should, if possible, reach the convict mines of Eastern Siberia before the coming on of winter. Sunday afternoon at four o'clock we set out for Ust Kámenogórsk. Messrs. Blok and Karélin accompanied us on horseback as far as the ferry across the Ulbá, and then, after bidding us a hearty and almost affectionate good-by, and asking us not to forget them when we should return to "a freer and happier country," they remounted their horses and sat motionless in their saddles, watching us while we were being ferried over the river. When we were ready to start on the other side, a quarter of a mile distant, they waved their handkerchiefs, and then, taking off their hats, bowed low towards us in mute farewell as we dashed away into the forest. If these pages should ever be read in one of the lonely cabins of the political exiles in Ulbínsk, the readers may feel assured that "in a freer and happier country" we have not forgotten them, but think of them often, with the sincerest esteem and the most affectionate sympathy.
We reached Ust Kámenogórsk before dark Sunday afternoon and took up our quarters in the post station. The town, which contains about 5000 inhabitants, is a collection of 600 or 800 houses, built generally of logs, and is situated in the midst of a treeless plain on the right bank of the Írtish, just where the latter is joined by its tributary the ​Ulbá. It contains one or two Tatár mosques, two or three Russian churches with colored domes of tin, and an ostrog,
or fortress, consisting of a high quadrangular earthen wall or embankment, surrounded by a dry moat, and inclosing a white-walled prison, a church, and a few Government buildings. The mosques, the white-turbaned mullas, the ​hooded Kírghis horsemen in the streets, the morning and evening cry of the muezzins, and the files of Bactrian camels, which now and then come pacing slowly and solemnly in from the steppe, give to the town the same Oriental appearance that is so noticeable in Semipalátinsk, and that suggests the idea that one is in northern Africa or in Central Asia, rather than in Siberia.
While we were drinking tea in the post station we were surprised by the appearance of Mr. Gross, who had come from Ulbínsk to Ust Kámenogórsk that morning, and had been impatiently awaiting our arrival. He had hardly taken his seat when the wife of the station-master announced that a Russian officer had come to call on us, and before I had time to ask Mr. Gross whether his relations with the Russian authorities were pleasant or unpleasant, the officer, dressed in full uniform, had entered the room. I was embarrassed for an instant by the awkwardness of the situation. I knew nothing of the officer except his name, and it was possible, of course, that upon finding a political exile there he might behave towards the latter in so offensive a manner as to make some decisive action on my part inevitable. I could not permit a gentleman who had called upon us to be offensively treated at our table, even if he was officially regarded as a "criminal" and a "nihilist." Fortunately my apprehensions proved to be groundless. Mr. Shaitánof, the Cossack officer who had come to see us, was a gentleman, as well as a man of tact and good breeding, and whatever he may have thought of the presence of a political exile in our quarters so soon after our arrival, he manifested neither surprise nor annoyance. He bowed courteously when I introduced Mr. Gross to him, and in five minutes they were engaged in an animated discussion of bee-keeping, silk-worm culture, and tobacco-growing. Mr. Shaitánof said that he had been making some experiments near Ust Kámenogórsk with mulberry trees and Virginian and Cuban tobacco, and had been so successful ​that he hoped to introduce silk-worm culture there the next vear, and to substitute for the coarse native tobacco some of the finer sorts from the West Indies and the United States.
After half an hour of pleasant conversation Mr. Shaitánof bade us good-night, and Mr. Gross, Mr. Frost, and I went to call on the political exiles. In anticipation of our coming, ten or fifteen of them had assembled in one of the large upper rooms of a two-story log building near the center of the town, which served as a residence for one of them and a place of rendezvous for the others. It is, of course, impracticable, as well as unnecessary, to describe and characterize all of the political exiles in the Siberian towns and villages through which we passed. The most that I aim to do is to give the reader a general idea of their appearance and behavior, and of the impression that they made upon me. The exiles in Ust Kámenogórsk did not differ essentially from those in Ulbínsk, except that, taken as a body, they furnished a greater variety of types and represented a larger number of social classes. In Ulbínsk there were only professional men and students. In Ust Kámenogórsk there was at one end of the social scale a peasant shoemaker and at the other a Caucasian princess, while between these extremes were physicians, chemists, authors, publicists, university students, and landed proprietors. Most of them were of noble birth or belonged to the privileged classes, and some of them were men and women of high cultivation and refinement. Among those with whom I became best acquainted were Mr. Kanoválof, who read English well but spoke it imperfectly; Mr. Milinchúk, a dark-haired, dark-bearded Georgian from Tiflís; and Mr. Adam Bialovéski, a writer and publicist from the province of Mohílef. The last-named gentleman, who was a graduate of the university of Kíev, impressed me as a ​man of singular ability, fairness, and breadth of view. He was thoroughly acquainted with Russian history and jurisprudence, as well as with the history and literature of the west European nations; and, notwithstanding the fact that he had been in prison or in exile most of the time since his graduation from the university, he regarded life and its problems with undiminished cheerfulness and courage. I had a long talk with him about the Russian situation, and was very favorably impressed by his cool, dispassionate review of the revolutionary movement and the measures taken by the Government for its suppression. His statements were entirely free from exaggeration and prejudice, and his opinions seemed to me to be almost judicially fair and impartial. To brand such a man as a nihilist was absurd, and to exile him to Siberia as a dangerous member of society was simply preposterous. In any other civilized country on the face of the globe except Russia he would be regarded as the most moderate of liberals.
* ↑ I brought back with me from the Altái an herbarium consisting of nearly a thousand species of flowering plants.
* ↑ Mr. Kanoválof committed suicide in Ust Kámenogórsk about six months after we left there.