Through Siberia

Old Finnish prisons.—Model Petersburg prison.—Officers.—Contraband importations.—Russian prisons of six kinds.—Siberian prisons of three kinds: their number, location, structure, furniture.—Prisoners: their classification.—Kansk statistics.—Method of trial.—Remands.—Exchanging names and punishments.

The prisons of Russia occupy a position midway between the dungeons of the Middle Ages and the modern cellular abodes for criminals of the nineteenth century. A few of them, however, approach very near these extremes on either side. With regard to Finland, it is hardly fair to hold the Russian Government responsible for the condition of its prison affairs, because, although the Emperor is Grand Duke of that country, he allows these liege subjects to make their own laws. Nevertheless, I can never forget the vividness with which my boyhood’s reading came back to me or Robin Hood and the dungeons of Nottingham Castle, when I first visited the old prisons of Åbo and Wiborg. The descent by steps with candles to prisoners in the lower rooms, the dim light entering by windows in walls ten feet thick, the clanking of chains, the like to which I have seen in no other country except perhaps Mongolia—these things spoke more eloquently than a visit to the former prison of Sir Walter Raleigh, or even the unused Ratisbon chamber for the torture of Protestant heretics; and that because these northern prisons were inhabited by living men. The majority of the Finnish prisons, however, and certainly all the new ones, are better than the two I have mentioned; though, unless a change has taken place since 1876, the Finns still have and use sets of irons nearly ten times the weight of any others I have seen in Europe. To pass to the other extreme. One sees in Petersburg a brand-new prison, which may be supposed to represent the very beau ideal of what a house of detention ought to be.

It is only right to say, however, before going further, that the condition of prisons and criminals in Russia is in a transitional state. The authorities have seen the necessity for reforms for at least 20 years, and great pains have been taken that these reforms should be made judiciously and effectively. Deputies have been sent to visit the prisons of other countries and report thereon; a commission has been appointed to receive the reports, to consider and debate, and so thoroughly to “shed upon the question the light of science.” All this has been done, and the reforms are yearly expected to take place, pecuniary reasons alone delaying the change for the better. Meanwhile a model prison has been built in the capital, and those who wish to see what Russia can do should visit this house of detention for persons awaiting their trial. It is built in the shape of a right angle, having two long corridors four storeys high. There are 285 separate cells for men, 32 for women, others for confinement in common, as well as places for associated and solitary exercise. Into cell No. 227 the late Emperor once entered, of which they keep up the remembrance by allowing no one to be confined therein. No expense appears to have been spared in building the prison. The floors are of asphalte, and the door of each cell is of solid oak. Within are iron bedsteads, made to fold and hook up neatly against the wall. The tables and seats are of sheet iron, with hinges; and, both within the cells and without, every article and fitting of brass is rubbed to a high degree of polish. The officers move about noiselessly in felt shoes, so that they can unexpectedly and at any moment observe a prisoner through the wire-covered inspection-holes. In the infirmary are 10 cells for those who are to be kept apart, and 32 beds for those who live in common. There is likewise a room in which 40 men may mingle by day, and a general sleeping apartment with 36 bedsteads, across each of which wire is stretched, making for the prisoner a hard but clean, and, I should imagine, not uncomfortable bed. There is also a room for bookbinding, where a few can work.

The building contains three places of worship, for Russians, Roman Catholics, and Protestants respectively, the Russian having a very handsome ikonostasis and chandelier; and I was pleased to find that, if a man can read, he has always a New Testament in his cell, and further that, by asking, he can obtain from the library other books in addition. This is as it should be.

In the female division we found for warders superior-looking young women dressed in uniform, the insignia of office on their collars being a pair of crossed keys. Some of the women prisoners, as with the men, are placed together in common, and in some cases they have their choice of solitary or social life. This is true in a sense other than that which first appears; for one lady prisoner, a criminal condemned to Siberia, was about to take to herself a husband before proceeding thither, and the happy event was to be celebrated in the prison on the morning after my visit. Peeping through the food aperture of one of the doors was the face of a pretty young woman, a political prisoner, in whose possession had been found suspicious books. There was a women’s reception-room, having a bath warmed by gas; but as it was found to cost about five shillings to heat, it is not surprising that this particular bath is seldom used.

Dark cells were shown to us, in which a prisoner may not be put for more than six successive days. The place where prisoners were allowed to converse with their friends was dark, which is not usual; and I observed in it no place for an officer to sit between the parties whilst they were speaking.

The attempts of the authorities to keep the prisoners from intercourse with one another, and with the outer world, do not yet appear to be perfectly successful.

The Polish prisoners in Warsaw, according to M. Andreoli, had a plan by which they could pass news in a couple of hours to all the prisoners in the fortress. A square was divided into 25 spaces for the 25 letters of the Polish alphabet. One knock was understood to mean A, two knocks B, and so on; or, again, these signals might be changed by one knock, signifying V, and so forth; this dumb speech being kept up by tapping on the walls. This, however, is only one method.

In the chapel of the model prison at Petersburg are 24 boxes for prisoners whom they wish to keep from holding communication with each other, even by a look. But the partitions which separate them are only of wood, and I observed that those I entered had been furtively bored with small holes, through which conversation could be held. Again, the prisoners are allowed to receive food from their friends outside, and, although it is first examined by the officials, the friends manage sometimes to introduce for the prisoners some strange culinary concoctions. There were brought to a man, for instance, one day 230 roubles in a basin of buttermilk. Again, another man was frequently found the worse for drink in his cell. Milk was regularly brought to him, and duly tasted by the authorities; but still the man got drunk. At last they discovered that the jug in which the milk was brought had a false bottom with an aperture in the handle, and so the mystery was solved. What will not topers do to procure drink? On arriving at Werchne Udinsk, we heard that a drunken woman had just been detected in trying to smuggle spirits into the prison in a pig’s entrails!

I saw quite a collection of contraband articles at Petersburg, which had been found in the possession of prisoners. Among them were knives (one ingeniously made from a steel pen), playing cards, and dominoes—all of them of original and unique, if not of artistic, character; also a file, for which a prisoner had given a warder 50 shillings. The man, too, had made busy use of his purchase. He set his mind upon breaking loose, and thought to file through a bar of iron an inch or more thick that confined him. But he could do his work only during the time that the warders were at dinner and at supper, and then not too loudly, giving 200 strokes of the file at dinner and 100 at supper time. He went on thus for three months, and then managed to break the iron. But he was detected, and condemned to Siberia, whither he had already been sent before, and whence he had managed to escape. There he has probably by this time found less costly and well-built prisons from which to break loose.

Before speaking, however, of the prisons of Siberia, it may be well to observe that in European Russia there are at least six various kinds of prisons. There is, first, the fortress—such as that at Schlüsselburg, in which it is generally supposed are confined grave offenders, especially the political and revolutionary. I have not visited one of these. Next there are military prisons, in which severity of discipline is said to be similar to that of the fortress. Then there are hard-labour prisons, in which long-term convicts work out their sentences. There are also houses of correction, where short-term prisoners do the same; likewise houses of detention, in which persons are kept awaiting their trial. I heard also of “houses of industry,” which, unless I am mistaken, are somewhat like our reformatories; and, lastly, there are buildings in which prisoners on their march to distant places stay temporarily—some only for a few days, others for weeks. These nice distinctions, however, can be drawn only in large towns in European Russia. In Siberia, especially in small towns, the same building serves for all classes of prisoners, the best arrangement practicable being made for special cases. Speaking generally, and from my own observation rather than from accurate information upon the subject, there appeared to me to be in Siberia three classes of buildings which the English would call by the general name of prisons. There is, first, the étape, in which exiles on the march rest for a night or two; next, the perisylnie prison, in which, for various reasons, exiles may have to wait—it may be during the winter, or until the ice be broken up on the rivers; and, thirdly, the ostrog, which means a stronghold, and is a prison in general, where a man may be simply confined, work at a trade, or eat and sleep after working outside in the fields or mines. I have no statistics of the total number of prisons of all sorts in Siberia, but suppose it cannot be less than 300, which may be roughly computed thus: Nikolaefsk is more than 9,000 versts from Tiumen, and, supposing that convicts walk 30 versts a day, they would require 300 resting-places for that route alone. Some parts of the way, it is true, are traversed in summer by river communication; but no notice has been taken in my estimate of off-lying routes north and south, as, for instance, to Yakutsk, Barnaul, etc. The expenses, therefore, of building and keeping in repair this vast number of prisons must be very considerable.

As to the location of the prisons. The étapes are found all along the road from Tiumen to the Amur. There will also be found a prison or lock-up in most of the principal towns. But of the larger buildings there is one at Tiumen for the reception of all the ordinary exiles as they come from Russia, and from which, as already stated, they are distributed over Siberia. At Tobolsk are three hard-labour prisons, with about 1,000 convicts, in which prisoners often spend part of their terms before going further east. The next building of similar dimensions is called the Alexandreffsky central prison, about 50 miles from Irkutsk, where are some 1,500 hard-labour convicts. Continuing east, there were formerly some large hard-labour prisons at Chita and Nertchinsk, tidings from which, in years gone by, have caused many an ear to tingle; but since the Russians have gained the Amur, and many of the mines have passed from Government into private hands, the great bulk of the convicts have been sent further east. At Kara, on the Shilka, for instance, is a large penal colony, where there are upwards of 2,000 convicts living in and about six prisons, the men being supposed to work in the gold-mines. After Kara, the next large colony is on the island of Sakhalin, which represents the utmost bound of Russian penal life. I have said nothing of the prisons in the provinces of Akmolinsk and Semipolatinsk, as I did not go there. There is or was a large prison at Omsk, through which exiles used formerly to pass; but, now their route has been changed, it serves only for local purposes. They have no prisons in these provinces, I believe, of considerable dimensions.

Some of the larger prisons in Siberia, especially those of stone, were not originally built for their present purpose. There are certain features, however, about the others which are more or less common to all. The Siberian prison, like the houses of the Siberian people, is usually built of logs calked with moss to keep out the cold. Near the principal building, but generally detached, are the kitchen, the bath-house, exercise-yard, stores for provisions, out-houses, etc., and enclosing the whole is a high palisade of wooden poles pointed at the top. From the fact that almost all the new prisons of Europe are built upon the cellular plan, the detained being kept solitary, it appears to have been recognised as a principle that the old method of herding prisoners together is a bad one. The same principle would seem to have been adopted also by Russia, in that the plan of the new house of detention in the capital is in the main cellular. In Siberia, however, the old plan continues, and usually the prisons inside are divided into large rooms or wards, in each of which the principal feature is an inclined wooden plane, resembling that of a guard-room bed, upon which the prisoners sit and lounge by day, and sleep by night. If the room be square, this divan or platform is placed against three of the walls, or, if it be oblong, there may be a passage up the centre, from which the sleeping places ascend to the walls on either side; or, lastly, if the room be very large, there are two platforms meeting like a low gable in the centre of the room, and two others against the walls. Thus space is economised, and as many as 40 or 50 men (once I found 100) are packed in a room. There are usually a few separate cells for political or special offenders, and one or two for punishment.

Connected with the large prisons are usually a hospital, one or more chapels, sometimes a school-room, and a few workshops.

The large rooms or wards have little or no furniture. Each is provided with an ikon, or sacred picture, and sometimes with a shelf on which the inmates may put their spoons, combs, and other table and toilet requisites with which they provide themselves.

Concerning the prisoners, it has been already intimated that those belonging to the upper classes are kept apart. There is a further classification in some of the large prisons according to the crimes committed: a room for murderers; a second for forgers and utterers of base money; a third for thieves, and generally two or three for “vagabonds”—that is, not merely for vagrants in the English sense of the word, but generally for persons who have run away from supervision, who have no papers, and can give no good account of themselves.⁠[1]

The number of persons in Siberian prisons awaiting their trial, or the confirmation of their sentences, is very considerable. This leads me to speak of the courts, the judges, and their mode of trial. Since November 20th, 1860, law reforms were begun in Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa, with their respective districts; and the new method of trial resembles that of England, with a mixture of certain French elements and some local introductions from Russia. Under the new régime in European Russia there are three courts, namely: those of the Judge of the Peace; the Assizes; and the Senate. A Judge of the Peace tries civil cases involving interests up to £50, and criminal cases involving a year’s punishment or less. Appeal from his decision may be made to a periodical meeting of Judges of the Peace for the district. At the court of Assizes, which consists of from three to nine persons with a president, trial is made by jury. The names of persons liable to serve are put into an urn, from which 36 are drawn by lot. From these the procureur, who is the public prosecutor, may, without assigning any reason, strike off eight, and likewise the prisoner’s advocate a greater number, bringing them down to 14. Then, if this jury decide that the prisoner be guilty, the opinion is asked of both procureur and advocate as to what punishment, according to the code, in their opinion should be inflicted; after which the president gives the decision of the court. The Senate is simply a court of appeal—does not re-try cases, but merely judges whether or not in the lower court the law has been rightly administered.

Trial by jury is not yet introduced into Siberia, but offenders are judged by a tribunal consisting of odd numbers, of not more than seven nor less than three. The tribunal is a standing institution, the members of which are paid according to their grade—from about £70 to £100 a year. A procureur (who is an officer of the Government) prosecutes; and a barrister, retained by the prisoner, defends. Witnesses are called on both sides, and the tribunal decides by a majority of votes whether the prisoner be guilty or not. In case of even numbers being present, or of equal voting, the president has a vote and a half; but should the president be absent, and there be an even number for and against the prisoner, then the defendant in this and all similar cases has the benefit of the doubt. Should a verdict of guilty be returned, the tribunal decides the punishment according to the regulation of the code. In capital or important cases, however, in Siberia, such as murder, the judgment of the tribunal must be confirmed by the Governor-General; and hence, when the vastness of the country is considered, it will be seen why prisoners sometimes wait so long uncondemned. Suppose, for instance, a man commits a murder in a place which happens to be at a distance from the town where a tribunal sits. Some one goes to the authorities, deposes that a murder has been committed, gives evidence in writing, and the culprit is arrested. If the culprit can find bail he may remain free till wanted (in Russia it is enough for this purpose to deposit, as a guarantee of returning, a certain sum of money); but if unable to find bail he must go to prison till he can be sent, suppose, to Nikolaefsk. If it be winter, it would be too costly—the Amur being frozen—to send him by horses; he must therefore wait till the following June for the opening of the navigation. Then, having proceeded to Nikolaefsk, he is tried, perhaps within a week, found guilty, and his punishment determined, after which it is necessary that the papers concerning his case be sent to the Governor-General at Irkutsk, a distance, there and back, of 5,000 miles; and so the prisoner must wait till his sentence is confirmed. Meanwhile he is supplied with a paper, which is, I presume, his ticket of indictment.⁠[2]

Whether, when the case is fully ended, the prisoner keeps this or a similar paper, I am not quite sure. I am under the impression that he does, at all events whilst he is on the road to his destination; and, further, that these papers serve as capital on which the prisoners exercise their ingenuity for their mutual convenience. I mean in this fashion: Ivan Nepomnoostchi has a ticket condemning him to five years’ labour in the coal-mines of Sakhalin, whilst the ticket of Augustus Poniatowski condemns him for a similar time to the gold-mines of Kara. For reasons best known to themselves, the one prefers country life and a cottage or prison near a wood, whilst the other inclines to a residence at the sea-side. So they change their tickets, their names, and, as far as they can, their beings, and sometimes manage in this way to effect what they wish. I have even heard of prisoners inducing those who are free to exchange places with them, the bargain being effected of course by money, and carried out whilst a gang of several hundreds is marching on to a steamer, for instance, where heads are counted, but where they cannot recognize faces. Goryantchikoff represents the “changing of names” as taking place in the presence of prisoner witnesses, and when several of the party are more or less intoxicated, the price given being sometimes as much as 30 or 40 roubles. All are bound to secrecy by esoteric law, and as the man receiving the money generally spends it quickly in drink and so cannot restore it, he not infrequently finds, when too late, that he has sold his liberty, or exchanged a lighter to receive a heavier punishment for a few glasses of brandy. This is dangerous work, however, for at some of the jails they take down a full description of the prisoners, though they do not usually photograph them, as in England. At Alexandreffsky, for instance, they have a large book, the pages of which are filled with columns headed as follows:—Name, age, crime, and punishment; from whence; appearance; term of punishment; arrival; single or married; religion; date of sentence; from what prison in Russia; remarks, etc.

I am not sure that I have given all the process by which they manage the transfer of tickets, but what is written may perhaps render intelligible the crime charged upon a roomful of prisoners at Irkutsk, who, we were told, had been “changing their names.”

The present state of things, however, as regards prisons and exiles, must, as already stated, be regarded as temporary, since the reforms of 1860 have been now extended as far as the Urals, and it is only a question of money when they shall be spread to Siberia also.