Through Siberia

Gold-mines not underground.—Hours of labour.—Visit to a mine.—Punishments.—Branding abolished.—Miners marching off.—Statistics respecting runaways.—Women criminals at mines.—A new building for expected politicals.—Superannuated forçats.—The hospitals.—“Birching” and its effects.—Kara in 1859.—Improvements effected by Colonel Kononovitch.—A children’s home.—Return to the gold-mine.—Comparison of Siberian and English convicts.—Distribution of books.

As I had visited the mine of the Archangel Gabriel near Krasnoiarsk, I was in some measure prepared what to expect in the gold-mines of Kara. It was not easy, however, to get rid of a preconceived notion attaching to Siberian mines, that the convicts must be working underground, for I had entered the country with ideas such as those expressed by the author of “The Russians of To-day.”⁠[1]

But now that I have been to the convict gold-mines, I have, happily, no such horrors to relate. All the gold-mining is done aboveground. The season begins on the 15th February, and ends on the 15th November, and they work 13 hours a day, excepting certain hours for refreshment and rest. I suppose, however, both the length of the season and of their daily labour must be to some extent modified by the rigour of the frost and the duration of the light. During the three winter months the ground is frozen, and they are mostly unemployed.

The visiting of the mine at Kara was far from pleasant. It was like walking into a large gravel-pit, from 20 to 30 feet deep. In this pit 198 men were at work, some removing the roots, stones, and surface-earth, and others carting off the gold-bearing sand to the washing machine. The miners were surrounded with a cordon of armed sentries, as at Portland prison. A large number of the convicts had irons on their legs; this, however, was something special to a particular prison, and was inflicted for two months as a punishment for aiding and abetting the escape of four comrades.⁠[2]

A certain measure of earth was allotted to the men as each day’s labour. A released Pole, who had been at Kara, though he did not work in the mines, told me it was a 7-feet cube to three men. This he allowed to be less than the quantity worked by free labourers. He said these latter had the help of horses and were better fed, but there were 70 horses in the mine I visited at Kara, and the reader may judge, from what has been said, whether or not the miners’ food was sufficient. So far, therefore, the Siberian convicts at Kara did not appear to be worked harder than—I should think not so hard as—our own at Portland.

I asked what was done to them if they did not fulfil their tasks, and was told that they were punished first by privation, and, if that did not suffice, by corporal chastisement with rods. Kara, I heard subsequently, is one of three places in Siberia where the troichatka or “plète” is in use. The colonel described it as a whip with three ends, of which, for serious offences, any number up to 20 stripes might be given; but, he said, he rarely used it, cases of insubordination being usually met by seclusion, irons, less food, or delay of removal to a higher class, which last might mean, in some cases, the virtual prolongation of a sentence for a couple of years.

The branding of prisoners is no longer practised. There were two or three veterans at Kara, one of whom, at my request, was brought to me, and whose cheeks and forehead were marked with the letters K A T, an abbreviation of Katorjnik, a convict. This man had been marked in 1863, and the letters presented a tattooed appearance, though the operation of tattooing must be the more severe, since it is slowly done by hand, whereas, in the case of the prisoners, the brand was done by a kind of cupping instrument, or stamp, furnished with small points, which, on being tapped, pierced the skin. A liquid was then rubbed on, and so the convict was tattooed for life. I just missed seeing one of these instruments at Nikolaefsk, where it had been recently sold as a curiosity.

It was late in the afternoon when we reached the mine at Kara; and by the time we had looked round, and gone among the miners, the hour arrived for leaving off work; the drum sounded, and the convicts formed in line, some of them shouldering tools, and what looked like stretchers for carrying loads of earth between two bearers. Their heavy tools were put in carts to be drawn by horses, and all marched under guard to their prison, five miles off. This walk, therefore, to and fro must in this instance be added to their day’s labour; but I noticed that, when the convicts walked out of the mine, the free labourers continued working, and did so for some hours afterwards.

Before the miners started, their numbers were called, for prisoners sometimes attempt to remain in the mine all night for the purpose, it may be, of washing earth secretly to secure a little gold, or, more frequently, with a view to escape. If it be spring-time, a runaway may succeed, during the summer, in getting a long way off, and, as winter comes on, give himself up, be imprisoned as a vagrant or vagabond, and, the following spring, be fortunate enough, perchance, to make his escape again, and so get towards Europe. Sometimes they manage to obtain forged passports, and travel as free men. At other times the escaped gather in bands, and roam about the country. It is, in fact, by no means uncommon to meet escaped prisoners on the roads, but they are not spoken of as malicious. They are not like banditti. They will sometimes steal a chest of tea from the hindmost vehicle of a caravan, or, indeed, run off with horse, cart, and all; but they do not usually attack travellers. The runaways beg food of the peasantry, who, of course, by law, ought not to aid them; so they compromise matters by placing food on their window-sills at night, ostensibly with the charitable purpose of helping passers-by in distress. They thus avoid conflict with the authorities, and do not anger the convicts, who might otherwise do them mischief, especially by setting the house on fire.

The half-liberty given to convicts after a period of good behaviour presents a loophole for escape, of which many hundreds avail themselves.⁠[3] These escaped convicts are known as “Brodiagi,” or “roaming gentry.” They wander about, guided through the forests by marks left by the natives and preceding runaways. There are some places, it is said, where they can live without fear. M. Réclus goes so far as to say that sometimes the authorities, in times of difficulty, or when ordinary labourers fail, call in the help of “vagabonds,” with the tacit understanding that they will not ask for their passports, whereupon hundreds emerge from the surrounding forests and present themselves for employment. I am not able to confirm this from my own experience as regards the authorities, but I met with a private firm who had in their employ several men without their “papers.”

When marched out of the Kara mine, those in the higher category are free to go to their families. I saw, too, near the Cossack barracks, a dwelling in course of erection for those who were living half-free, but in which they were to sleep at night. Those in the lower category are taken to their respective prisons, and may sleep, if they choose, in summer from nine o’clock till five, and in winter from seven till seven.

I looked in at a prison, near the colonel’s house, just before the men were going to rest. I do not remember that there were any lights, and the place was gloomy enough; but I suspect that it must be more so during the long nights of winter. At Tiumen I observed but one small candlestick in a room for 65 prisoners,—light enough to make the darkness visible. In this respect my testimony is of limited value, as my visits were paid by day, but I can readily believe Goryantchikoff’s dismal description of the foul air and gloom of a Siberian prison by night. Whether the majority of prisoners, however, would wish for a constant and plentiful supply of oxygen I am not sure. They certainly do not provide for it in their own houses, any more than do some of the poorer classes in England.

I have said nothing yet of the female prisoners at the mines of Kara. Russian women look upon prison life from very different points of view. I met a lady in Petersburg who visited the female wards in the prisons, and she told me that on one occasion a woman, on being brought back to her cell for the fourth or fifth time, found the arrangement of its furniture altered, whereupon she asked that her bed might be put “in the place where she always slept”; whilst another, a worthy old soul, on entering her cell, turned to the ikon and thanked God that her old age was so well provided for! This, of course, is very different from the picture of Siberian female prison life represented in “The Russians of To-day” (p. 230):—

“Women are employed in the mines as sifters, and get no better treatment than the men. Polish ladies by the dozen have been sent down to rot and die, while the St. Petersburg journals were declaring that they were living as free colonists; and, more recently, ladies connected with Nihilist conspiracies have been consigned to the mines in pursuance of a sentence of hard labour.” I neither heard nor saw anything of women labouring in the mines, and one of my released exile informants, from Nertchinsk, says that it is not true that women work in the mines in getting the mineral. At Kara there were 154 female prisoners to more than 2,000 men; and since the latter have a clean shirt every week, it would seem likely that the women may be employed in laundries and work-rooms, only that I am under the impression the prisoners wash their own linen. Five out of every six of the women convicts at Kara, dismal to relate, were murderesses, and walking between 58 of them in their prison at Ust-Kara was not pleasant. Some had babies, and most of the mothers had murdered their husbands. Husband-murder seemed to me painfully frequent in Russia, for which, in the fifteenth century, they had a barbarous punishment: the murderess was buried alive up to the neck, and left to the hungry dogs!

Near this women’s department was a new cellular building of wood, recently erected. I notice this particularly because of its bearing upon the number of political exiles that are supposed to be imprisoned in Siberia. The spring of 1879, it will be remembered, was a time of great excitement in Russia. An attempt was made upon the life of the Tsar, the great cities of the empire were placed under military command, and the journals talked of troops of prisoners being sent off to Siberia. And this was true, only they were not troops of political prisoners. A telegram, however, was sent from Petersburg to the telegraph office at Kara, enjoining the commandant to prepare places for a certain number of prisoners about to be dispatched. But the number prepared for was not very great after all, for, as far as I remember, it did not exceed 20 or 30 at most; so that if the convoys of 29 prisoners, whom my interpreter met in returning, were all destined for Kara, as he heard they were, then this small prison would be filled, and it might, in a sense, be called “a State prison.” When, therefore, in a previous chapter, I ventured to say there was, with one exception, no prison in Siberia that could be called a political or State prison, this was the exception in my mind.⁠[4]

Of course I entered this little prison and looked at the cells. They were ranged on either side of a roomy oblong space, in which were two stoves. The chief fault I had to find with the cells was that they were very small, and lighted, I think, only from the lobby within, the area of each cell being certainly smaller than that of the cells in Coldbath Fields, though I am not sure that they were smaller than those at Portland, nor do I remember how they compared with ours for height. If, therefore, the prisoners were to work by day, as do ours at Portland, perhaps the cells at Kara were not too small. For my own part, I would rather inhabit one of them in solitude by night than be turned in among the motley crew of the larger prisons.

There were convicts at Ust-Kara, however, in a plight more pitiable than those confined in the political cells, or who had to work in the mines. I allude to the occupants of two or three wards in an old weather-beaten, smoke-dried, low-pitched building, in which were confined a number of old men, perhaps from 30 to 50 in number, who were not ill in such sense as to be patients in the hospital, but who were condemned to prison for life, or who, though too old to work, had not served their time.

I do not remember any sight in Siberia that so touched me as this. To see scores of able-bodied men pent up in wards with nothing to do was bad, to hear the clanking of their chains was worse, though many of them were burly fellows who could carry them well. More touching still were the convoys of exiles with faithful and innocent women following their husbands; but to see these old men thus waiting for death was a most melancholy picture. The doctor inspects the convicts once a month, and determines upon those who are past work, who, in the absence of any specific disease, are then brought into these wards for the remainder of their lives. To release them, the colonel pointed out, would be no charity, because, being too old to work, and being out of the near range of poor-houses or similar institutions, they would simply starve. And thus they were left in confinement for a Higher Power to set them free. They lounged in the prison and in the yard, and some sat near a fire, though it was a sunny day in July. One old man was pointed out who had attained to fourscore years, and another had reached the age of ninety, and so on. The difficult breathing of one, however, the wheezing lungs of a second, and the hacking cough of a third, proclaimed in prophetic tones that their time was short; and one wished them a softer pillow for a dying head than a convict’s shelf in a prison ward. Their building was one of the oldest in the place, and was doomed to be pulled down within a month.

There were two hospitals at Kara; one near the house of the commandant, at Middle Kara, containing, at the time of my visit, 43 patients; and the other at Ust-Kara, with 93 patients.⁠[5] By the time the exiles have reached Kara they have trudged nearly 1,000 miles, and have been lodged, after leaving Moscow, in about 200 étapes and prisons. Many, of course, die on the route, but I have no official statistics upon this point. A released exile told me that, as far as he remembered, it was in his day about 16 per cent. With the survivors the fatigue of the march, together with deficiencies or irregularities of nourishment, and the bad atmosphere in some of the prisons, often induces scorbutus or scurvy. The colonel said that with bathing twice a day, and with good food, they are soon cured; and, though many arrive sick in April, they are commonly well before autumn. In winter they have fewer patients generally, and commonly no cases of scorbutus at all.

We visited the hospital at Middle Kara on the Saturday afternoon. It was a fine building, with large, lofty, and airy rooms, which were clean, and decked with boughs of birch and coniferous trees, placed in the corners, not merely for ornament, but with the idea that the odour given off by them is salubrious. I saw the same thing on a large scale in the prison hospital at Tomsk; and upon my asking in one of the prisons at Ust-Kara why a large branch of cypress was placed there, they said it was for the sake of the smell.

In the Siberian hospitals, at the head of every bed, was hung a board, with the occupant’s name written in Russian, and the name of the disease, written in Roman letters, in Latin; and as this was the only part of the writing I could read, I used generally to run my eye over the diseases in the wards. A remark made thereon caused the doctors sometimes to ask if I had studied medicine, which unfortunately I had not. Hence I was nonplussed at the word “costegcetis,” written over a man’s bed, and of which I asked an explanation; whereupon I was told that the man, who had been a ringleader in aiding the recent escape of the runaways, had been birched with 100 stripes of the rod, and that he was consequently in hospital for recovery. Whether the effects of a birching are very serious I do not clearly make out, but I met at least two cases in which the recipients of the rod made fun of it. One was that of a servant in a house where I stayed. She was a convict, and therefore liable, in case of misconduct, to be sent by her mistress to the police to be birched, as in bygone days had been more than once done with her; but she did not fear the switches, saying they would not kill her: “they did indeed make one a little sore, but that was of no consequence!”

I saw only one suffering in this way at Kara; and the colonel told me, as already stated, that though he rarely used the whip, yet that he did not choose to be trifled with. It was manifest that he could not maintain discipline among 2,000 convicts if he did, yet I met with no prison official in Siberia who seemed so judiciously to line with velvet the glove of steel as did Colonel Kononovitch. The whole place bore about it marks of the superintendence of a man who conscientiously acted from a high sense of duty.

I have already mentioned what an unenviable reputation Kara had in former days. An old sea captain, with whom I stayed, told me he paid a visit to Kara in 1859, when there were 2,000 men branded, and chained to their barrows by night and by day. The overseer of the gold-mines, a German, told him that he had shot four men who had killed others when at work; and I have heard, since my return, that some of the predecessors of Colonel Kononovitch were so cruel that the mention of their names made convicts tremble. It is not, then, greatly to be wondered at that this evil reputation has descended to later days.

But Colonel Kononovitch had effected great improvements. It has already been pointed out that many of the Siberian prisons were old and dilapidated, but that reforms were expected yearly to take place; and, there being no money forthcoming, things were allowed to go on as best they could. It was under this condition of affairs that the colonel was appointed to Kara, with its crazy buildings, some of which had been pulled down only a few days before my arrival. I saw one or two that were yet standing. Of course he applied for funds to meet the expenses of new buildings so urgently needed, but received only the stock answer with a polite bow that there were insufficient funds, and that they could not expend money on prisons whilst waiting for reforms; whereupon the average Siberian official might have allowed things to drift, but not so the colonel! The reforms he knew had been talked of for 15 years, and he commenced a number of “economies,” by which, if money were not forthcoming from one quarter, it might be obtained from another.⁠[6]

In this way he might quietly have pocketed £1,200 a year, and if in Russian fashion he had handed round hush money, all might probably have been smooth enough. But so did not the colonel, and he pointed out some of the improvements he had been able to effect by these economies.⁠[7]

The subordinate officials at Kara are very scantily paid, the chief of each prison receiving £70 a year, and his inferior officer £24. When at Tomsk, we heard of prison officials still lower, under each of whom were placed 30 prisoners, but who received only £6 a year and their food and accommodation, which were similar to those of the prisoners. It is not, therefore, greatly to be wondered at if these petty officers are not above misappropriating some of the prisoners’ food, or taking bribes. Colonel Kononovitch encouraged these men to engage in trade, or to keep horses, in which case he employed them in carrying or other ways, so long as they did not rob the prisoners.

But other substantial good was effected; for during the previous two years and a half the colonel, chiefly, I understood, by his economies, had erected no less than 18 buildings, for which the governor of the province complimented him highly.⁠[8]

The colonel, moreover, did not spend his savings wholly on prisoners, or restrict his efforts to what might be strictly called his duty. He exceeded that, and allowed his justice to enlarge into benevolence. After seeing the hospital he took me to a children’s home which he had built for boys whose fathers were in prison.⁠[9]

The building was simple, but prettily situated within an enclosure, where was the best kitchen-garden I had seen in Siberia. In a green-house and a hot-house were growing melons, and I know not what. These the colonel said he sold for the good of the concern, and the money obtained for vegetables helped to pay the expenses of the school. The schoolmaster was an exile, and had been, I suspect, of good position from what I heard about him after I had left the place. The children were assembled for me to see, and I was tempted to act the schoolmaster and put to them some questions, but it was under difficulties of a polyglot character; and by the time my ideas had filtered twice through Russian, French, and English, the children’s answers were not very clear. Everything looked clean and orderly, and, what was better, there were about the place tokens of care and sympathy. Behind the house was a natural shrubbery, enclosed from the forest. In this a pavilion was erected, in which, from time to time, the commandant brought his wife and family to drink tea with the children, when the boys who had sisters in the colony might meet them, and where the humanizing influence of kindness was allowed to flow forth.

By the time we had seen the school the day was far spent, and I was desirous to return to the mine to witness the final washing of the sand. During the day there had been worked (I presume by convicts and freemen together) 30 sajens, or, as they put it, 30,000 poods of sand. The produce of the first half of the day had been taken out of the machine; and after the convicts had left the mine, a few workmen remained washing the sand, in which at length the gold was found together with black dust of iron.⁠[10]

The number of men who had stayed for the last of the washing was less than a dozen, and there was a certain gravity manifested by the little group as they took their places round the wooden apron on which was pushed up and down the few handfuls of mineral that remained of 240 tons that had passed through the cylinder. Darkness came on, so that they had to light torches of pine. There stood the colonel, looking on with dignity. The Cossack, too, was there, with loaded rifle, to protect the gold. The wooden scraper pushed away at the sand, and then the brush, and there was left only the gold and iron, less than half a pint. This was put in the miniature frying-pan, dried over an extempore fire, and then placed in a tin can. It was given into my hand that I might feel its weight, which I judged to be about a pound, and, if so, worth £40. The can was then given to the Cossack, who mounted his horse, and, accompanied by an escort, took it off to the treasury.

And thus ended the day. That the men who worked in the mines had no easy task was plain, but it was equally plain that their labour, as compared with that of an English navvy or convict, was nothing extraordinary. The tread-wheel is unknown to them. Foreigners speak with horror of Siberian punishments, to which, as a set-off, I may mention that a Russian lady asked me, with a shudder, whether it could possibly be true that in England we placed prisoners on a wheel, on which, if they did not continue to step, it broke their legs! Comparing Siberian convicts with English,⁠[11] the Siberian has the advantage in more food (which perhaps the climate may require), more intercourse with his fellows, and far more permissions to receive visits from his family. The Kara convict, when in the higher category, receives besides 15 per cent. of what he earns for the Government; and even in the lower category he is credited with the money, though its payment is deferred till he mounts higher. Political prisoners also may write to their friends; and though by strict right, I believe, criminals in Siberia cannot do so, yet this rule is not carried out, or is as often honoured in the breach as in the observance.

The following day was Sunday, and happened to be the colonel’s name’s-day. This kept him at home for the morning to receive visitors. A telegram came to felicitate him from Madame’s father, from Ekaterineburg, a distance of 3,000 miles, taking 30 hours in transit. As the visitors did not speak French, I was not introduced, and had a comparatively quiet time to arrange and digest the information I had received. Later, I unfolded to the colonel my plan of distributing the Scriptures throughout Siberia. With this work he sympathized heartily, and promised to do what I wished. He subsequently received a lion’s share of the books, etc., I left with the governor of the province. I gave him some for the children’s home, and afterwards sent him a considerable number for his soldiers. All these reached Kara safely, and I have since had the great satisfaction of hearing that they were properly distributed throughout the colony. According to my latest news, the colonel is said to have left Kara; and if this be so, I can only hope that he has been replaced by as good a man.