Through Siberia

The supposed quicksilver-mines.—Inadequate evidence of their existence.—Unsupported statements of writers.—Not known to Anglo-Siberians.—Silver-mines perhaps intended.—Deleterious fumes a myth.—Questionable allegations regarding silver-mines.—Misstatements exposed.—Testimonies of Collins and other eye-witnesses.—Accounts of ex-prisoners and Lutheran pastor.—Nertchinsk Zavod and work in the mines.—Condition of affairs in 1866.—Present state of things.—The Nemesis of exaggeration.

When crossing the Pacific I heard it remarked by an American clergyman that Mrs. Beecher Stowe, in her exaggerated account, as he thought it, of American slavery, showed great shrewdness in assigning to her story a locality that was very remote and unknown to most of her readers. A similar observation might be made in regard to not a few of the writers on Siberian exiles and their labours in the mines. How the idea first came into my mind I know not, but when in 1874 an Englishman, born in Russia, told me in Petersburg that the worst of Russian criminals were put down in quicksilver-mines in Siberia, where they were speedily killed by unhealthy fumes, it seemed to me like an item of news I had heard before. Since my return from Siberia the question has been frequently put to me, Did you go to the quicksilver-mines, where the exiles are so cruelly treated? Baron Rosen also wrote, “Eight persons of the above-mentioned eleven criminal categories were dispatched at once to the quicksilver-mines of Nertchinsk; ... they worked for long years underground in the mines, like the other forced labourers.” Again, the Newcastle Daily Chronicle for 21st November, 1878, quoting, apparently, Captain Wiggins, says: “Desperate criminals only are sent to labour in the quicksilver-mines, and for these there is a specially severe discipline provided, and ‘horrors,’ without doubt, exist.” And I have somewhere read, if I mistake not, that in the vicinity of Nertchinsk was a quicksilver-mine, which for a time was worked, but that the loss of life entailed upon the convict labourers was so great as to cause it to be given up.

Now it is somewhat remarkable that I have been unable to learn that there is a quicksilver-mine in Siberia at all, or to get satisfactory proof that one ever existed. This may perhaps surprise my readers, but I proceed to explain myself thus:—The “English Cyclopædia,” under the article “Mercury,” mentions various places where this mineral is found, but says nothing of Siberia. Yet surely, if mines exist there, affording employment for numerous labourers, we ought to hear something of their output. Again, in “Ure’s Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines,” a standard book on mining (p. 120), we find a good deal concerning the mines of Siberia, of those in the Urals, the Altai, and Daouria (which last comprise those about Nertchinsk), but nothing is said of quicksilver-mines in any one of these regions.⁠[1] Again, Mr. Atkinson, who spent several years in Asiatic Russia, went to the district of Nertchinsk, and had friends among the mining engineers, says: “Tin and zinc ores are found, but neither have as yet been much worked, and I am not aware of the existence of quicksilver, though it is said to be found in these regions.” Mr. Eden, in his valuable little compilation on Siberia, speaking of its mineralogy, says, “Quicksilver also is reported to exist in some of the north-eastern provinces”; but he gives no authority for the report, says nothing of its being worked, nor mentions the existence of it at Nertchinsk. I may further add that recently I have seen the Englishman whom I met at Kiakhta, and who since has twice passed through Nertchinsk. He asked particularly of an officer connected with the mines for one of quicksilver, and was told that, though there was said to be quicksilver in the neighbourhood, it was not worked.

To these testimonies I must add my own, that neither in the town of Nertchinsk, through which we passed, nor in the neighbourhood, nor indeed throughout Siberia, did we anywhere hear of a quicksilver-mine. The only testimony I have ever received in the opposite direction is that of a released political exile, who has told me that he once heard from some of his fellow-prisoners at Petrovsky Zavod, many miles distant, that there was a small quicksilver-mine at Nertchinsk, but so poor an affair that it was not worked. Subsequently my informant was deported to four places in succession round about Nertchinsk, but he neither saw nor heard anything more of the said quicksilver-mine. Accordingly, on meeting, since my return, with an English acquaintance who has spent a large part of his life in Siberia, and who knows it well, I said to him, “You have heard, have you not, that there are quicksilver-mines in Siberia?” to which he replied in the affirmative, but he did not know where they existed; and when I asked him whether, if I took upon myself to say that there was no such thing as a quicksilver-mine in Siberia, he could contradict me, he thought awhile, and then was obliged to confess he could not. The Englishman from Kiakhta said the same; and my most recent informant, a released political exile, who spent some years in the mines about Nertchinsk, assures me to the same effect. In the face, therefore, of the prevalent notion to the contrary, and notwithstanding what little evidence I have been able to collect in their favour, I must express my grave doubts as to whether mercury has ever been worked, in any sense worthy of the term, by Russian convicts; and I shall further venture on the assertion that there does not exist a quicksilver-mine in Siberia at all.

But perhaps silver-mines were intended instead of “quicksilver,” in which case it should be observed that, if the quicksilver-mines have no existence, then the slow process of killing convicts by their fumes is a delusion. That working in quicksilver-mines is destructive to health is perfectly well known; but working in silver-mines is quite another matter. When at Barnaul, we heard nothing of any difficulty arising under this head in the working of the Altai silver-mines. When in the Rocky Mountains, I heard from a Russian lady, who had been down the silver-mine near Virginia city, that the heat was very great, but she said nothing as to the air being otherwise objectionable. Mr. Collins, also, describing his descent of one of the Nertchinsk mines, the silver-mine of Zarentunskie, says: “We now passed along another drift, and found nothing unpleasant in this underground passage.” Moreover, the two released exiles, to whose information I have already alluded, have told me that they never perceived any objectionable fumes,—that, in fact, there were none.

But, apart from the supposed deadly fumes, there has been a great deal said and written respecting the Siberian mines in general, and those of Nertchinsk in particular, which my experience and reading lead me to question, not to say to contradict. The number of Englishmen who have visited the great mine of Nertchinsk is represented, I believe, solely by Captain Cochrane,⁠[2] and great changes have taken place since his day. In 1848, the Emperor Nicolas decided, with a view to carrying out his plans in the regions of the Amur, that the whole of the people in the Trans-Baikal should become Cossacks. Hitherto a large body of the population had been employed in mining operations, and Mr. Atkinson speaks of this sudden change as having closed the silver-mines of Nertchinsk; but I suppose he means relatively, for the mines have been worked for many years since by convicts, and, if we are to believe all that is written on the subject, they are full of horrors to the present day. But I shall venture to examine a few of these writings which say so, and compare them with the statements of travellers and eye-witnesses. I shall offer, too, my own experience, and then leave the reader to judge respecting the truth of the whole.

The author of “The Russians of To-day” says (p. 216): “The miners are supposed to be the worst offenders, and their punishment is tantamount to death by slow torture; for it is certain to kill them in ten years, and ruins their health long before that time. If the convict have money or influential friends, he had better use the time between his sentence and transportation in buying a warrant which consigns him to the lighter kinds of labour above ground, otherwise he will inevitably be sent under earth, and never again see the sky until he is hauled up to die in an infirmary.” This was published in 1878, and I have italicised the doubtful or erroneous words.

Again, the Contemporary Review for September 1879, in an article on “Conspiracies in Russia,” says (p. 143): “Of the treatment of political exiles in Siberia, as it has been carried on for a long time past, I have before me a thrilling description from the pen of Mr. Robert Lemke, a German writer, who has visited the various penal establishments of Russia with an official legitimation. He had been to Tobolsk, after which he had to make a long, dreary journey in a wretched car, until a high mountain rose before him. In its torn and craggy flank the mountain showed a colossal opening similar to the mouth of a burnt-out crater. Fetid vapours, which almost took away his breath, ascended from it.”

Mr. Lemke then walks down with a guide, and—

“Entering a room of considerable extent, but which was scarcely a man’s height, and which was dimly lit by an oil lamp, the visitor asked, ‘Where are we?’ ‘In the sleeping-room of the condemned! Formerly it was a gallery of the mine; now it serves as a shelter.’ The visitor shuddered. This subterranean sepulchre, lit by neither sun nor moon, was called a sleeping-room. Alcove-like cells were hewn into the rock; here, on a couch of damp, half-rotten straw, covered with a sackcloth, the unfortunate sufferers were to repose from the day’s work. Over each cell a cramp iron was fixed, wherewith to lock up the prisoners like ferocious dogs. No door, no window anywhere.

“Conducted through another passage, where a few lanterns were placed, and whose end was also barred by an iron gate, Mr. Lemke came to a large vault, partly lit. This was the mine. A deafening noise of pickaxes and hammers. Then he saw some hundreds of wretched figures, with shaggy beards, sickly faces, reddened eyelids, clad in tatters,—some of them barefoot, others in sandals, fettered with heavy foot-chains. No song, no whistling; now and then they shyly looked at the visitor and his companion.”

Mr. Lemke leaves the mine and speaks to one of the officers about the convicts’ rest. “Rest!” said the officer, “convicts must always labour. There is no rest for them; they are condemned to perpetual forced labour, and he who once enters the mine never leaves it!” And so on.⁠[3]

These remarkable extracts may be appropriately followed by reference to an article in the Echo for May 5th, 1881. It numbered 100 lines, and on reading it I had the curiosity to mark every line that appeared to me to contain a misstatement or a blunder. No less than 20 were marked; that is to say, one line in every five. The article is headed. “On the Road to Siberia.” The author begins by starting his pedestrian exiles on the march at the Sparrow Hills at Moscow, and in crossing Russia he gives them all sorts of difficulties by road to overcome; whereas I have shown, in an earlier chapter, that for years past the prisoners are taken by steam across Russia, and that the exile reaches the first prison in Siberia without walking at all. Then the author places his pedestrian exiles under the charge of mounted, long-speared guards, feeds them with bread and oil (which latter I never yet heard of in a Russian prison), and, what is more amusing, feeds the Cossack horses with the meal (whatever that may be) eaten by their masters. Then having got his exiles over the Ural, he says:—

“Beyond the Ural, however, with its simple industries and markets, the region becomes more barbarous; it is less relieved by the softening aspects of social life; the exile population, clad in sheepskins, thickens at every step; the cold grows so intense” [this, by-the-bye, in the “open season,” i.e. the summer], “that occasionally the Cossacks on guard are frozen, lance in hand; and the silver-mines are now not far distant,—immense caverns, illuminated by torches of pine, peopled by men with leaden-hued faces, caused by exhalations from the copper ore, in which the silver is found imbedded; inhabited too by women and children, who share in the unhealthful labour, and contribute their quota to the terrible totals of mortality, living, dying, and being buried often far below the light of day.”

Now, when I read this, my first thought was to take Mr. Punch’s advice, and “write to the Times,” but I repressed my feelings till I could gather these extracts, italicise the questionable words, and then calmly place before the reader such remarks upon the matter as I have to offer. Let me, then, observe, in the first place, that neither of these three authors professes to write from personal experience. Had the writer in the Echo been to Siberia in the “open season,” he would not have frozen his mounted guard, lance in hand, but would have made him trudge on foot at the side of his convoy, sweating beneath the load of rifle and bayonet; and neither of the three writers, had they been to Siberia, would have been so vague with regard to its geography. The author of the “Russians of To-day” (p. 216) informs his readers that “Siberia is a territory covering about six times the area of England and Scotland!” Had he written sixty times he would have been not far from the mark; but—perhaps six was a printer’s error!

Again, the Contemporary writer says that Mr. Lemke “had been to Tobolsk, after which he had to make a long dreary journey until a high mountain was before him;” which sentence, though not expressly saying so, leaves one to infer that the mountain was at least in the vicinity, whereas the country about Tobolsk is flat, and there is no mountain answering to the writer’s description, where convicts are employed, within 2,000 miles. So, again, the writer for the Echo, almost immediately after getting his exiles over the Urals, informs us that “the silver-mines are now not far distant,” which is hardly an exact way of speaking of 3,000 miles.

But I shall now proceed to give such personal information as I am able about Nertchinsk, prefacing what I have to say with words from Mr. Collins’s chapters describing his visit to the mines of the district. This, I think, should go far to satisfy an ordinary reader as to the quality of the miners’ food, clothing, and sleeping accommodation. “This [gold] mine was a convict establishment, like all the mines east of Lake Baikal. The men were well clad, and in visiting the hospital, prison, and quarters, I found the arrangements for their health and sleeping clean and comfortable. Cooks were preparing dinner for the prisoners. I tasted of the soup, bread, and kacha, or grits, made from buckwheat and milk, and found them good and well prepared. There were a number on the sick list, mostly those who had recently arrived, but they were in a warm, clean room, with clean beds and clothing, and with a separate kitchen, where proper diet was prepared for them.”

This was published in 1860. Before leaving Asia I had an opportunity of asking an American, who had visited the Nertchinsk mines, as to what he saw, but he told of no such barbarities as those quoted above. Again, I asked an Englishman living in Siberia about women working in the silver-mines, but he had never heard of such a thing, nor have I; and my second exile informant denies it; so that I trust the women and the children with “leaden-hued faces,” inhabiting the mines and “sharing in the unhealthful labour,” exist only in the imagination of the writer for the Echo. Had the article said that there were women and children at the mines, it would have been less difficult to believe, because I found them at the gold-mines—the women employed in scrubbing, washing, or hard female labour, and their children taken care of, clothed and fed in a school; but this will be alluded to hereafter. Again, I met a naval officer, who had seen the coal-mines at Dui, in Sakhalin, and who spoke of the prison abuses there in no measured terms. He had visited the mines at Nertchinsk five years before we met, and had descended into one of them; but though he said the men looked sickly, and sometimes had to “go on all fours” to get the mineral (which, I suppose, all miners occasionally have to do), yet he had no barbarities of which to speak, and did not confirm any of the notions with which I entered the country, as to the prisoners being kept underground by night and by day. He said they worked twelve hours a day, six on and six off. I questioned, too, the chief of the gold-mines at Kara concerning the silver-mines at Nertchinsk, which are not far off. He denied that the prisoners were kept underground, and thought they worked in three sections of eight hours each.

I have three testimonies besides, not from prison officials, travellers, or amateur philanthropists, but from men, two of whom themselves worked in the mines of Nertchinsk; whilst the third, a Lutheran pastor, told me of what he had heard direct from prisoners at the mines, where it was his business periodically to visit. He said that old convicts at Nertchinsk and Kara had told him of Rozguildieff, a director, 20 years before, who gave them only 4 lbs. of bread a day, and who used to go about with four Cossacks behind him, armed with the knout, to thrash those who did not do the prescribed quantity of work. He afterwards became blind. I have heard from another quarter that this man used sometimes to condemn his prisoners, not to so many stripes, but so many “lbs.” of the birch—to 10 or 15 lbs., for instance—which meant that the man should be flogged until a certain weight of rods had been used up. But a military officer was sent to inspect the mines, and Rozguildieff was removed; since which time the pastor said that all seemed going on well, and that he had heard no complaints of abuse. I have also heard of this Rozguildieff and his cruelty from a third person, who was at Petrovsky Zavod in 1866, with about 500 prisoners, many of them Polish insurgents. Another testimony respecting the mines is from a Pole whom I met, engaged as a clerk at one of the post-houses. He had been sent to Nertchinsk as a political prisoner, condemned to hard labour, but he said he was not compelled to work. Perhaps he had the good fortune to be taken as a servant, or employed as a clerk; this he did not explain, but he said that the officers were not cruel, and that of the prison treatment he had no complaint to make. He had, he said, 3 lbs. of bread, and ½ lb. of meat a day. He might write a letter every three months; and so well satisfied did he seem with his present lot, that he said if the Emperor were to allow his return to Poland he would certainly go; but if he were offered permission to return only to Russia, he would prefer to stay where he was. One reason for this, it has been suggested, might be that police supervision is more irksome in Russia than in Siberia.

The last testimony I would offer is perhaps the most satisfactory of all, because it came to me direct in English from one who, implicated in the Polish insurrection of 1863, was sent as a political exile to Nertchinsk, with several like offenders from the Russian and Polish aristocracy, he himself being a man who had received a university education. The accounts he gave me relate to the condition of things in 1866 and 1867. The principal centre of the mining district, he said, was called Nertchinsky Zavod, or Bolshoi Zavod, “the great works,” at which, however, the mines were abandoned before 1865, and the prison was afterwards used for a hospital. Round about were various mines, works, hospitals, and prisons, such as Kadaya, Akatuya, Klitchka, Alexandreffsky, Algatche (the last a smelting place), and some others. At Stretinsk and Sivakoff, on the Shilka, were ship-yards, where prisoners were employed. There would seem to be labour going on still at Nertchinsk and at Algatche, since, from the Governor’s letter to me, it appears that some of my books have been sent to these two places, and to the hospital at Stretinsk; but the greater part of the mines just mentioned have now passed out of Government into private hands. I am speaking, however, of things as they were in the time of my informant, who laboured at Kadaya, Akatuya, Alexandreffsky, and Nertchinsky Zavod. Kadaya was only two or three versts from the Chinese frontier,⁠[4] Alexandreffsky was about six versts from the frontier, and 35 from head-quarters. At most of the places there were prisons built: at Alexandreffsky, of stone; at Kadaya, of wood; and at Akatuya, partly of wood and partly of stone. At Nertchinsky Zavod the prison was very old, and was empty. The commandant, General Chitoff, living there, he preferred to house the convicts at a convenient distance. At Alexandreffsky there were not less than 700 prisoners in three buildings. Of these, 30 or 40 were Russian political offenders; the remainder were Polish insurgents of 1863. At Akatuya there were 110 prisoners, 60 of whom were Polish priests, together with 22 other prisoners sent to join them for extra punishment.

Akatuya, by reason of its isolation and loneliness, was regarded as the worst place of all, there being no village around it. There was reported to have been a Tatar in this prison, before 1866, chained to the wall, but this was an exceptional case, and such things, it was said, were not done to the political prisoners, some of whom had friends who could bring influence to bear in their favour. My informant, being counted “noble,” was exempted from wearing chains during the journey, but on his arrival he had irons, he said, of 7 lbs. (Russian) on the feet, and the same weight on the hands. If so, these handcuffs must have been heavier than any I have seen in Russia or Siberia. There were sometimes cases in which criminal prisoners burst into fits of ferocity, and were guilty of such insubordination as to call for special punishment. At Sivakoff, for instance, he had known men suspended for a time by the armpits, but none were chained to barrows or tools, as has been sometimes done. In the case of my informant himself, who insulted the Governor-General Korsakoff, and also joined others in a league to refuse to work on Sundays (the cruel and unjust regulation to this effect was enforced on these exiles in 1866), he, with many more, and for a considerable time, was put first on half rations, then deprived of meat, then of milk, and then was not permitted to lounge in the yard, but had to go straight from work to his ward. The priests had joined in this resistance to Sunday labour, and there were also Protestants and a Jew among the league. Some of the priests, however, were the first to give in, and all at length followed, so that they had afterwards only four holidays in the course of the year, though this was exclusive of bath-day, which recurred once a fortnight, and was a holiday as at Kara.

I asked as to the formation of the mines, and found that some of them had shafts and galleries; one shaft in particular, by reason of its construction, being dangerous to descend. In some cases it seems that the granite was dug from the side of a hill, and the work of the prisoners consisted largely of boring holes for blasting, which were charged with powder by Cossacks or labourers, and, in the absence of the prisoners, were fired. From an engineering point of view, the mines, as far as I could understand, were worked badly enough; and this agreed with what I had heard elsewhere. The mineral was brought to the surface in baskets, but they had no steam or horse-power. There were veins of silver, but often the galleries did not follow them, and the mines seemed to subserve the purpose of providing hard labour for malefactors, rather than that of bringing gain to the Emperor. Whilst my informant was talking to me, he had in his hand some pins, and, holding up one of them, he said, “I did not see a piece of silver as big as that all the time I was at Akatuya.”

I inquired carefully respecting the hours of labour, and heard that in 1866 it was 13 hours a day, which agrees with the hours I found at Kara in the gold-mines. At noon they came out of the mines to dinner—unless, that is, a man had arranged his hours otherwise; for it seemed that so long as they did not worry the Cossacks or prevent their lounging about and smoking, the prisoners might do their allotted number of hours when they pleased. There was, moreover, no definite amount of mineral required of every man daily, and hence he might work hard or not, pretty much as he liked.

This, then, appears to have been the condition of things at Nertchinsk 15 years ago;⁠[5] and from what I heard in Siberia, matters since seem to have improved rather than otherwise, though it must not be supposed that the lot of the convicts is an easy one. I am far from attempting to make it appear so. No doubt the corporal punishment inflicted in many cases is very severe. I shall have more to say of this hereafter. The period of an exile’s life spent at the mines, before being set free to colonize, cannot but be hard. Whatever laxity of discipline may prevail, as compared with the prisons of other countries, the herding together of the worst of characters, the deprivation of social, intellectual, and religious privileges, to speak of nothing else, must to many make life in the mines, from the nature of things, a burden. But this is very different from killing exiles by inches in quicksilver fumes, or keeping men, women, and children underground by night and by day, with insufficient clothing, food, and sleep. Such gross misstatements must in time be refuted, and the revulsion caused by their exposure often makes people too easily believe less severity than really exists. The treatment of prisoners necessarily depends greatly upon those who are set over them, and the study of human nature about us renders it quite needless to go to Siberia to discover that among prison officials there are both bad and good. That there have been instances of cruelty in the mines I do not doubt, but I believe far less have occurred than some writers would have us believe; and I trust that what has here been written may tend to throw some light upon a matter of which many are desirous to know the truth.