Through Siberia

Province of Irkutsk.—The capital.—Its markets.—Telegraph officers.—Visit to the Governor.—Ruins of the city.—Attempt to establish a Bible depôt.—Supposed incendiarism.—Benevolent arrangements of authorities.—Wife-beating.—Servility of Russian peasants.—Visit to a rich merchant.—Ecclesiastical affairs.—Visit to the acting Governor-General.—The prisons.—A prisoner’s view of them.—Prison committee.—Distribution of books.—Visit to inspector of schools.—Change of route.

The city of Irkutsk is the capital of a government of the same name,⁠[1] and was founded in 1680. Its population in 1879 was 33,000. About 4,000 gold-miners spend their winter and their money in the city, often mentioned as a cheerful place of rest for travellers coming from China, or proceeding eastward. It is 1,360 feet above the sea, and has a climate which even in winter is well spoken of, though, in the late autumn, and previous to the freezing of the Angara, the fogs from the river bring rheumatism and diseases of the throat and lungs. Little wind blows, storms are less frequent than at Petersburg or Moscow, and the snows are not superabundant. Whether in winter or summer, the panorama of Irkutsk and its surroundings is one of beauty. Of its 20 churches, several were planned and constructed by two Swedish engineer officers captured at Pultava, and sent into exile by the great Peter.

The markets of Irkutsk are well supplied. Fish and game are plentiful. Beef is abundant and good, and costs about 2d. a pound. Pork, veal, and mutton are also cheap, especially in winter, when everything that can be frozen succumbs to the frost. Frozen chickens, partridges, and other game are often thrown together in heaps like bricks or fire-wood. Butchers’ meat defies the knife, and some of the salesmen place their animals in fantastic positions before freezing them. Frozen fish are piled in stacks, and milk is offered for sale in cakes or bricks. A stick or string is generally congealed into a corner of the mass to facilitate carrying, so that a wayfarer can swing a quart of milk at his side, or wrap it in his handkerchief at discretion. Whilst the products of the country are thus cheap, it should be observed that everything brought from beyond the Urals is expensive on account of the long land carriage. Champagne, for example, costs 12s. or 14s. a bottle, and porter and ale 7s. 6d.; the lowest price of sugar is 8d. a pound, while sometimes it costs 1s.; and as much as 2s. 6d. may occasionally be given for a lemon.

Much of this, however, I had to learn by report or reading; for, at the time of our visit, the Sunday’s fire had upset everything, and it became a serious question on Monday morning as to what we should do. Many of the telegraph clerks in Siberia are Danes, and speak several languages. We found that we had one of them, Mr. Larsen, for a near neighbour; for the telegraph office had been burnt, and he had come to our side of the river to take shelter in the next house, where, having no electric battery, he had tapped the Verchne Udinsk wire, and was trying in this way, though without success, to communicate intelligence. He had had nothing to eat for 24 hours, and possessed only the clothes in which he stood; so it was quite a charity to take him a glass of tea to his temporary office in the open air, after which he dined with us. Mr. Larsen, to whom we had an introduction, had been a telegraphist in London, and spoke English fluently, so that we were able to discuss our prospects to advantage. It was of prime importance for us that we should see the Governor of the province and the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia as quickly as possible, for it was not hard to perceive that what provisions had escaped the fire would be sold at famine prices; lawlessness, it was rumoured, might get the upper hand; and it seemed better that we should leave the place without much delay. Our adviser feared, however, and reasonably so, that we should be able to get no attention from the higher officials in the present state of excitement, seeing the embers of the city were still smoking, and the authorities would naturally have more important business than ours to attend to. Mr. Larsen, however, kindly offered to accompany me over the river to see if anything could be done. Accordingly we crossed, and, walking along the broad road by the side of the Angara, the ashes of the fire scorched our faces.

We now saw something of the condition of the people who had fled to the bank of the river on the previous day, with such effects as they could save. Here were gentlefolks “camped out” under chests of drawers, tables, and boxes, arranged in the best manner possible in the open air—sheets being used for walls, and curtains for coverings. Ikons from churches were lying about; likewise tables, heaped with philosophical instruments from the high school; and carts filled with movables. The instruments from the telegraph station were standing by a post, to which paper streamers were fastened to intimate that this was the temporary telegraph office. The people’s demeanour, however, was in strange contrast with their pitiable condition; for many, having saved their samovars, were drinking afternoon tea, and on all sides were joking and laughing at their comical situation.

We found many of his friends among those beside the river, and each began good-humouredly to ask what the other lost in the fire, and what had been saved. Nobody seemed inclined to be at all dull over the matter, and the same thing was apparent with the Deputy-Governor Ismailoff, upon whom we called. “What have you lost?” said the General to my companion. He lightly threw open his coat, and intimated that that was all he had saved. At this the General laughed heartily, and said that he was not so well off, for that the very shirt on his back was a borrowed one! Yet the Governor had lost in the fire a brand-new house, upon which he had spent many thousands of roubles.

Contrary to our expectation, it was arranged for us to see the acting Governor-General next morning, and meanwhile we had time to look at the ruins of the city. People had taken refuge with their effects in the large squares, as well as on the banks and islands of the river. Many had fled into the neighbouring villages. The suburbs had escaped the fire, as well as many of the houses standing in spacious grounds. A few of the churches also were untouched. The large hospital was safe, likewise the usine for smelting gold, and the Governor-General’s house, but many of the public buildings had perished; amongst these the museum, in which I expected to find a good ethnographical collection. I should judge about three-fourths of the city were destroyed, and that the best part of the town; and so complete was the wreck that the isvostchiks with their droshkies hardly knew their way about the blackened streets.

We met a few of the higher class of exiles living free in Irkutsk, and, on asking them what they would do, received for reply, “We do not know. We have been earning something by teaching, but now our patrons will leave us. All sorts of provisions will be frightfully dear, and yet we dare not leave. So what is to be done?” The same doubts as to the future pressed heavily upon those tradesmen whose shops were not burnt.⁠[2]

Of course there were various rumours afloat during the excitement of the previous day—one, that the devastation was caused by a wilful act. Similar rumours were afloat at Perm and Tagil, and at Irkutsk more than twenty arrests were reported. But, upon asking the Governor, it proved to be nonsense; for only two men had been arrested, and it was very doubtful whether even they were guilty. The only origin I heard given was that a hay-loft ignited, from which the flames spread.⁠[3]

In Siberian towns the police are represented by the gendarmerie; and in other places are police-masters with their employés. There are, strictly speaking, no policemen, but Cossacks are usually employed in their stead; and at the end of their short service are allowed to go home. They are, however, anything but efficient constables, and I was told that at Irkutsk the authorities do not employ them. To protect whatever might be of value among the ruins, and to keep order after the fire, troops were marched into the city by day, and patrolled the place at night.

Great credit was due to the officials for the prompt manner in which they attempted the relief of distress. The fire was scarcely extinguished before a committee was formed, and some of the merchants laid down handsome sums. Proclamations were posted about the place, saying that officers could be furnished with dinners at the rate of 30 kopecks a plate, that bread might be bought for 2 kopecks—that is, a halfpenny—a pound; and that for the first week the poor might have bread for nothing; further, that all persons burnt out might, on application, receive the sum of 30 kopecks. No serious outbreak of disorder occurred during our stay, though a good deal of drunkenness was visible. With two inebriates we were brought palpably into contact. In the yard we occupied was a small kitchen-house, where lived a woman cook, her husband, and some children. The husband had been to the fire, had been drinking, and came home accompanied by a drunken associate. The companion, referring to the cook, said, “As for that woman, she ought to be hanged”; whereupon her husband fell to beating mercilessly both her and her boy of about ten years old; and the child came to us crying, as if he were half killed. Whereupon we rushed to the rescue, and one of the party, seizing the drunken man, took him from his wife, and gave him a thrashing.⁠[4]

When I got further east, I heard of a third and similar instance of wife-beating, related to me by a merchant in whose house I stayed. His servants were convicts, simply because he could get no others; but he said he was not usually curious to ask for what crimes they had been sent to Siberia. It happened, however, that he had a woman-cook who was particularly well-behaved, and an excellent servant; and he asked her one day why she had been exiled. She said it was for poisoning her husband; upon which my friend opened his eyes, and said,—

“Oh, then, perhaps you will murder me?”

“Oh, no, master; I should not murder you.”

“Yes, but if you would murder your husband, why not, some day, me?”

“Oh, no, master; you would not do as he did, for he beat me every day for two years.”

Thus it was not altogether a meaningless form at a Russian wedding, that anciently the bridegroom took to church a whip, and in one part of the ceremony lightly applied it to the bride’s back, in token that she was to be in subjection.

It should be remembered, however, that the brutal conduct just described belongs to a type well known in a certain part of England; the difference between the two being that the Russian bully beats his wife with a whip, while the English one kicks her to death. The Russian wives take very kindly to a moderate amount of such treatment, and those of the lower class do not murmur or complain, but consider the “master” has a right to chastise them; and when things do not go so far as this, they expect, when they do not please their husbands, to be slapped and corrected accordingly. In fact, the Russian wife among the lower classes does not take what we think her proper position in a house. The husband usually goes to market once a week, and buys all he wants, business of such importance not being entrusted to the wife, who therefore knows nothing even of the cost of her household articles. Among the higher classes, also, the master usually sends his chief servant to market, and pays for all that is consumed in the house.

There came out of this quarrel between man and wife another characteristic of the Russian peasantry, which perhaps is a remnant of serfdom, and betrays their want of manliness in the presence of their superiors. My merchant friend, just referred to, had a convict in the house whilst I was there, whom once before he had dismissed for drunkenness. The man came back entreating that he might be reinstated, but his master said, “No, I have warned you continually, and done everything I could to keep you sober, but in vain.” “Yes, sir,” said the man; “but then, sir, you should have given me a good thrashing.” So with the fighting husband at Irkutsk: after receiving his stripes he went away, but soon after came back, thanking the gentleman for his thrashing, and promising to behave better in future. In the days of serfdom, it was no uncommon thing for a gentleman to box the ears of his droshky driver; but this cannot now be done with impunity. My mercantile friend told me he was one day driving in Petersburg with a Russian gentleman, when the latter struck the isvostchik for doing something that displeased him; whereupon the man turned round and said, “No more of that, sir; those days are gone by, and if you strike me again I shall return it,”—a threat quite unbearable to a blagorodni, or “noble”; and he was about to go on as of old, when my friend said, “Look! you had better not; for if you are summoned, and I am called as a witness, I shall be bound to say that you began it”; whereupon he desisted.

We took an early opportunity after the fire to deliver up to General Khamenoff, its owner, the second tarantass we had borrowed at Tomsk, and in which my companion and I had driven and slept for a thousand miles. Our benefactor was in reality a rich merchant, and had given, if I mistake not, very handsome sums of money for educational purposes in Irkutsk. This patriotic action had gained him the distinction of “General.” His buildings had been saved, and we thus had an opportunity of seeing the house of one well-to-do merchant at Irkutsk.

The General was getting old, and appeared in a long dressing-gown, coming out of his beautiful garden, and seating us in a little secretarial chamber, which had about it sundry marks of foreign influence and taste. Before joining us, however, he bade adieu to a previous visitor, and called his footman to open the door. There was something inexpressibly droll about his manner of doing so, for he simply gave a prolonged grunt—ugh!!—and as the footman did not come at grunt number one, it was repeated, and the servant in passing received from his master a cuff at the back of the head, doing so with a grin and a duck of the noddle, as a schoolboy receives a blow from his mother’s palm, knowing that he shall not be hurt. The old gentleman then heard from us how we had escaped from the hotel, and how we were making a sleeping chamber of his tarantass, which he said we might continue to do until we left the town.

I was anxious to learn something of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in the province, and to inquire what the Russian Church was doing in her missions to the Buriats. The chief ecclesiastic of the province is one Benjamin, Archbishop of Irkutsk and Nertchinsk, under whom is a suffragan bishop, Meleti of Selenginsk. The Diocese has 347 churches and chapels, 5 monasteries, and one nunnery. One of the monasteries is near Lake Baikal, and here lives, if I mistake not, the Bishop of Selenginsk, who could have given information about the Buriats, but the monastery lay too far out of our way to allow of our visiting it. Nor were we successful with the Archbishop; for on going to the monastery, his official residence, which had narrowly escaped the fire, we found him gone to his country residence in the suburbs. “When will he return?” we asked. “God knows,” said our priest informant; thereby using an expression which I observed to be very common among all classes of Russians.⁠[5]

On the Tuesday morning after the fire we were to be presented, as I have said, to the acting Governor-General of Eastern Siberia. The supreme Governor-General was Baron Friedrichs, to whom I had two private letters of introduction, besides my official documents; also we had made the acquaintance of his son when travelling on the Obi. The Baron, who was in ill-health, was at some mineral springs on the Mongolian frontier, and his place was filled at the time of our visit by M. Lochwitzky, the Governor of Yeneseisk, to whom we were presented by General Ismailoff. We met at the Governor-General’s house, the finest in the city, having been originally built and furnished, regardless of expense, by an enormously rich tea merchant. We found M. Lochwitzky the first of the Siberian Governors (except the Governor-General in the West) who could converse in French. He entered readily into my plans for the distribution of books, thanked me for those I had left at Krasnoiarsk for his province, and promised to do for me what was a great boon, namely, to send some books to the town of Yakutsk, to be distributed throughout that largest province of the country. We were introduced to a Colonel Solovief, whose brother was in London, as Secretary to the Grand Duchess of Edinburgh; and after an assurance from the Governor-General that he would do all he could to further our wishes, we started to see the prisons, under the conduct of the Procureur of the town.

We drove through the ruins of the fire, and then crossed, by a wooden bridge 300 yards long, the Uska-Kofka, by which one side of Irkutsk is bounded. This stream divides the town from the prison and the workshops, where a certain number of convicts are employed.⁠[6] Speaking generally, the prison seemed to me to resemble others I had seen in Siberia, and to call for no special remark. Perhaps, however, I ought to add that before I left the town I had the opportunity of hearing about the establishment from a prisoner’s point of view. Thus I heard that, at six o’clock on the morning of our visit, the prisoners were told to have all in order because some Englishmen were expected, and that certain objectionable things were hidden away. I thought, however, that it did not speak much for my informant’s candour when, on pressing him to say what the objectionable things were, he did not tell me. Again, my informant tried to make it appear that the officers stole the prisoners’ food by giving them short quantity, though he said the quality of the food was good enough. The Procureur said the prisoners did not eat all the food allowed them; and from the quantity of pieces of bread which we so often saw lying about in Russian prisons, I should be disposed to think this true. This seems to be so common, that we were told at Tiumen the prisoners may sell what they do not eat; but at Irkutsk my informant said that they did not receive more than half their allowance, and that a quarter of a pound only of meat was given for 10 men—a quantity so ridiculously small, that one could not but think that here exaggeration must have overshot the mark. Moreover, my informant told me that what he said was not from personal experience, because he was not one of the peasant prisoners whose circumstances he professed to relate.⁠[7]

I was told in the town that to take books to the Irkutsk prison was a work of supererogation; and I confess to a feeling of disappointment when, on asking to see the library, I was taken to a cupboard full of New Testaments and tracts, precisely the same as some of those I was distributing, but all kept so fresh and in such order that evidently no one had used them. The committee was reported to have spent as much as £30 on books for the prison, but the officials had evidently not made the books accessible to those for whom they were intended. Their excuse was that the prisoners did not ask for them; but no doubt the officials were afraid of their being torn, and that trouble would ensue, and so had kept them locked up. It reminded me of what my Finnish friend had written, that when she went to the prison, the officials said, “The books must be arranged in order, in case the inspector should come”; and thus the books were practically kept from the inmates. When the Governor asked me what I thought of the prison, I did not fail to point out the inconsistency of withholding the books; but of this he was ignorant, and he promised to look into the matter. I endeavoured also to make clear, in speech and by writing, that wherever my books or tracts went throughout the province, they were to be placed within reach at all times of the prisoners, and not to be put away in any of the libraries.

Thus we inspected the two prisons, and also saw a school built by the committee for prisoners’ children; in it were 42 scholars. We visited likewise a gentleman named Sokoloff, who was the deputy-inspector of schools for Eastern Siberia. There is also an inspector of schools for Western Siberia, who lives at Omsk. I was surprised to hear of the many schools and scholars in the sparsely-populated and, for scholastic purposes, exceedingly difficult country of Eastern Siberia.⁠[8] Our object in calling upon the inspector was to ask him to distribute throughout the schools copies of my tracts and periodicals, and to that end I began by showing my credentials. But upon hearing my object, he said that was quite sufficient; and he needed to see no papers, but would willingly help. He bought, moreover, on his own account, 200 New Testaments for 40 roubles, to give as prizes to the young schoolmasters on leaving the institution, by which means the books would be scattered widely.⁠[9]

We now considered our next step. My original idea, when leaving England, as already intimated, was to proceed to Irkutsk; and then, after running on to Kiakhta for the gratification of seeing a Chinese town, to return to Europe, and come home by the Caucasus and the Mediterranean. I had been warned before quitting London that I should see nothing of the severities of Siberian exile-life if I did not penetrate the region beyond Lake Baikal; and, travelling on the Obi, this statement was confirmed by a Russian officer in the prison service. I feared, however, I could not do this in a single summer, and that, if I went so far east, I should be unable to return before winter set in. It never occurred to me that there was any available way of reaching the Pacific from Irkutsk other than by crossing the Mongolian desert to China, and this I was not disposed to do.

But when I learned that there was a service of steamers on the Amur, this opened the way for other possibilities; and on June 21st, as we rolled away from Tomsk, there dawned upon my mind a thought, the conception of which seemed at once to promise the birth of great things. What, said I to myself, if I could go right across Asia and leave so many copies of Scripture as would suffice for putting at least a New Testament or a copy of the Gospels in every room of every prison, and in every ward of every hospital, throughout the whole of Siberia! As I look back upon it now as an accomplished fact, the matter seems ordinary enough; but when the thought came into my mind it looked like a consummation far beyond anything I had hoped to accomplish, and a result which, if it might be compassed, would be a cause of thankfulness for the rest of my life.

Accordingly I quietly nursed the idea till we reached Irkutsk, thus far having given a sufficiency of books answerable to the plan for all the provinces behind me; and there yet remained three before me. Several boxes of books were unopened, but these could not be sent forward, because, in the first place, there was no carrier, or, if there were, the fire had confounded all order; and even if some one could be persuaded to take the books, it was very doubtful if they would reach the hands of the prisoners unless I went with them in person and showed my credentials.

I determined, therefore, to journey onward and do my best to carry out the scheme which had taken possession of my mind. But to do this it was necessary to have supplementary documents, for I had asked the Minister of the Interior for letters only as far as Kiakhta. M. Lochwitzky, however, most kindly helped in the matter, and gave me the letters I needed for my extended plans. We were then free to go forward again (which the reader may do at once, if he prefers, by missing the next two chapters); but something must first be said of the routes by which former travellers have proceeded eastwards.