BY WAY OF THE CONVOY-STATIONS—A CLUMSY OFFICER—THE VAGABOND—A MAN-HUNT
The real hardships of the journey now began for the “politicals.” From
Moscow to Tomsk, over three thousand miles, the conditions of travelling
had been more or less European; but henceforward we were to go entirely
by road, crawling from one halting-station to another by short stages.
In the terrible Siberian cold, in the glowing heat of summer, in all
weathers, without regard to the fitness or unfitness of the road,
parties of a hundred prisoners are despatched from Tomsk regularly on
fixed days of the week, parties which consist alternately of men only,
and of families—men, women, and children. The day’s march is a stage of
from sixteen to twenty miles, and every third day is a rest. At this
tortoise-like pace—on an average about thirteen miles a day—the long
wandering lasts for many weeks and months, under the most wretched
conditions of life.
In the damp rooms of the convoy-stations, the air of which is loaded
with every evil odour imaginable, the convicts lie squeezed together on
the bare boards of the two sloping wooden shelves, one above the other,
which do duty for bed-places. These invariably swarm with myriads of
parasites; sleep is probably impossible for half the night, and early in
the morning the prisoners are driven forth to begin afresh the weary
march. Long before sunrise the criminal contingent will be standing
drawn up in the yard, to wait there in the cold until the roll is
called, and at last the signal to start is given. At the head of the
procession march the older criminals, seasoned rascals most of them, the
“Ivans.” The majority of them have trodden this path more than once
already, and know every brook and copse on the way. They go at a quick
pace, in serried ranks, and easily do their four miles an hour, or even
more. Behind them the other criminals straggle painfully along in
irregular groups separated by long stretches of road. Then come carts
with the sick and exhausted and the baggage; and lastly, the
“politicals” in the rear, two or three together in each one-horse cart,
under the charge of their special escort.
[Illustration:
IN A SIBERIAN PRISON
To face page 158
]
This strange procession extends itself along the road for about
three-quarters of a mile, and raises clouds of dust, from which we in
the rearguard have most to suffer. To add to our woes there is the
special scourge of those regions, the Siberian midge. Swarms of those
terrible little creatures kept us company, not only attacking our hands
and faces, and getting into mouth, nose, ears, and eyes, but inserting
themselves beneath our clothing, and inflicting tortures of irritation.
The only—and even these inefficient—means of protection are nets of
horsehair, with which we had taken care to provide ourselves.
After the first ten miles or so there is a halt in some woodland
clearing, or by a spring or stream. The criminals here break their fast,
usually only on dry bread, and perhaps some of them have not even that.
Their feeding is managed in this way: each man receives daily five to
twelve kopecks,[60] according to the locality through which they are
passing (where prices depend on the result of the last harvest), and
also according to the “rank” of the prisoner, for even here there are
class distinctions and privileges. This allowance is only under the most
favourable circumstances sufficient to satisfy hunger; it covers, at a
pinch, the cost of bread, tea, and a few vegetables. But gambling is so
deeply rooted a passion among the criminal prisoners that they will
stake their last coin, and he who loses everything has to go hungry. His
only resource then is to beg; and whenever we passed through a village
some of the most destitute always went begging, under the soldiers’
supervision. They would station themselves before a hut and start a
pitiful song, when the Siberian women would throw out pieces of bread to
them. Travellers, too, whom we met would give them alms, and these gifts
were shared among the whole party, for the criminals too had their
_artèl_, or union.
Footnote 60:
A kopeck is equal to a farthing.—_Trans._
After the short rest the party would set out again in the same marching
order, and try to reach the halting-station before the noonday heat
began. As soon as they arrived at the station the advance party would
crowd round the door, ready to rush in directly it was opened; and then
would begin the battle for the best sleeping-places, the weaker being
thrust aside or trampled down by the stronger. At our first sight of
this mad fighting and struggling among some hundred men in a narrow
space we thought they would kill each other, but generally the wild
tumult of blows, kicks, and curses did not result in anything serious.
Of course the “Ivans” came off triumphant, having secured the best
places for themselves, while the old and weak had to be content with the
worst corners. The crowding, dirt, stench, and noise made these prisons
veritable hells on earth.
The halting-stations were usually tumbledown, one-storied buildings
made of rough-hewn tree-trunks, and were divided inside by passages
into two, three, or four rooms. Near this prison building would be a
house for the officer in command and another for the soldiers, the
whole enclosed by a stockade of posts about fifteen feet high, closely
fitted together, and pointed at their upper ends. There are two
classes of halting-stations:—larger ones, where the days of rest are
spent, and where an officer is always in residence, and smaller ones,
which are only used as lodging for one night.
[Illustration:
ROLL-CALL OF PRISONERS AT A HALTING-STATION
To face page 160
]
When the question of places had been settled the prisoners would all
come out into the yard. Here there were generally market-women with
their wares outspread, and a regular bargaining would ensue. Of course,
the convicts were always ready to cheat the women and steal from them,
and the latter would then raise loud cries of lamentation; as, however,
in such cases the convicts all stuck together like one man, no inquiry
could ever elicit any evidence in favour of the complainants.
Washing and cooking also went on in the yard, a big fire being kindled
in the middle of it; and no one ever thought of danger to the wooden
buildings and stockade.
The “politicals” were given a separate room; and our first task on
arrival was always to screen off a part with sheets and rugs to make a
place for our ladies. The position of these poor women, obliged to camp
out in such close proximity to us men, was in many ways very
uncomfortable, especially as soldiers were often quartered with us; but
we did our best to spare them any unpleasantness that could be avoided.
For some of our party the greatest hardship of our long journey was the
early rising; they needed sleep beyond everything, and from force of
habit could not get it early in the night. As the ordinary criminals
liked early hours—and the earlier the better—there were often disputes
between us on the subject. We usually arranged the evening before with
the officer of the convoy, and also with the headman of the ordinary
convicts, and appointed six a.m. as the hour for starting; but once we
had a regular battle on this point. We “politicals” seldom made use of
the courtyard until the criminals were shut up for the night; there was
no room for us till then, and it was therefore only toward nightfall
that we could get out into the open air. One evening, however, some of
us were in the yard, when the officer came up and ordered us to go
inside. We were exceedingly surprised at this piece of gratuitous
interference, and asked what it meant.
“Make haste, and be off, or I shall order the start to be made at four
o’clock to-morrow morning,” said the officer.
“But you have just agreed that we shall start at six,” said we.
“Well, and now I say that we shall start at four.”
“We shall stick to the original arrangement, and won’t stir before six,”
we returned.
“We shall see about that!” was the rejoinder; and off he went.
Evidently we should have a tussle, but we were unanimous in our resolve
not to give in to any such arbitrary proceeding.
Next morning the watch awakened us while it was still dark, and said the
officer had given orders that we must be moving. We paid no attention to
this. The ordinary convicts had been already called out, and were in the
yard ready for the start, when at four o’clock the sergeant came and
repeated the order. Some of us then dressed, but the others remained
lying on the plank beds. Meanwhile the convicts began to grumble at
being kept freezing in the cold; they cursed and threatened, and made a
great to-do outside our windows. The officer himself now appeared,
accompanied by one of the soldiers, and again repeated his order to
start. We did not stir, and he called to his people—
“Drive them out with the butt-ends of your rifles!”
This would now most certainly have become a serious affair if the
soldiers had obeyed at once, for we were prepared to defend ourselves.
Fortunately they hesitated a moment, and that saved us.
“What are you doing?” cried some of us. “Do you want to have bloodshed?
That would not be pleasant for you. You have broken your promise, and in
no case are we obliged to begin the march so early; the instructions
only say that a party must reach its destination before sunset.”
At this moment the sergeant came up in haste.
“Captain,” said he, “the convicts are in rebellion; they want to break
in here.”
“Let us get at them!” we heard them shouting outside; “we’ll soon make
them show their legs!”
“There you are!” we cried to the officer. “You have brought this on
yourself. It is your fault for having inflamed those men against us.”
The man lost his presence of mind in face of this danger; and, scared
out of his wits, instead of giving orders, appealed to us for counsel.
“In God’s name, what’s to be done?”
We advised him to let the fellows start off at once, under command of
the sergeant, so as to get them out of the way.
“At six o’clock we will be ready, and will go after them; but we won’t
start a minute sooner.”
He went off somewhat humbled, and gave the order as we had suggested. We
drank our tea very peacefully, and got ready at our leisure. From time
to time the orderly appeared, and asked if we would start; but we always
looked at the time and said it was only so many minutes to six.
Punctually on the stroke of the hour we got up and set off after the
rest of the convoy.
This occurrence had the effect of winning us the respect and sympathy of
most of the convicts. Our firmness and decision pleased them and
impressed them. They were surprised that such a handful of us—fourteen
men and women—should have successfully resisted the domineering of an
officer, who had at his command a hundred soldiers and their own
contingent into the bargain.
Friendly relations were established between our two divisions, and
throughout our journey we never came into collision. One only of the
convicts had a grudge against us, and took every opportunity of evincing
his dislike. He was an old hand, had repeatedly escaped from prison, and
was now being transported as a criminal of “unknown antecedents.” He was
evidently from the working-classes, but was distinguished by keen
reasoning powers, and had read an astonishing amount. Reading seemed to
be his master passion, but the works of reactionary authors exclusively
had fallen into his hands—Katkov, Meshtchèrsky, etc.—and his views were
according. He had formed really remarkable opinions on politics in
general, and Socialism in particular. He was genuinely convinced that
the revolutionists had killed Alexander II. solely because he had
emancipated the serfs! He accused us before all the other convicts of
being either discontented aristocrats or their paid agents. After this,
several of us entered into discussion with him, and tried to convert
him. By degrees our arguments began to take effect; he begged us to lend
him books, and sought our society whenever possible. I had many talks
with him, and tried to get him to tell me about his past and his
wandering life; but I never succeeded in learning who and what he really
was. He remained to the end the “Ivan of unknown antecedents,” as he was
called in his record-book. Yet he would readily tell us tales of his
vagabondage. I asked him on one occasion how he managed to get through
to European Russia when he escaped from Siberia.
“Oh, where’s the difficulty?” he replied. “The chief thing is to have
the Urals behind your back; then you get a train or a steamboat, and
stop wherever you like. I would go in that way to Kharkov, or Kiëv, or
Odessa, or Rostov, hire a room, and live quite comfortably. I was always
respectably dressed; my passport was all right (that we see to
ourselves), and so nobody bothered about me. The one thing I cared about
was to subscribe to a library and get books. I’ve read all sorts of good
things—Gaboriau, Paul de Kock, Ponson du Terrail, and lots more beside.
At midday I would dine at a restaurant, and go to the theatre in the
evening sometimes.”
“That sounds very nice. But where did you get the money for all that?” I
inquired, with interest.
Of earning a living in the ordinary sense there was evidently no
question here. One would suppose the gentleman to have been living on
private means.
[Illustration:
ESCAPED CONVICT-TRAMP (BRODYAGA)
To face page 164
]
“Money? Oh, I took whatever there was to take!”
“Well, tell me just what that means,” I asked him. And he thereupon
explained his theory of life.
“Above everything, it’s my motto that ‘Self’s the man.’ I don’t hold
with joint-stock business in our way of life. Thieves make bad partners,
you know. You run the chance of being murdered or split on at every
turn; so I always work on my own hook.”
He then related how he “worked” at burglary, pocket-picking, or petty
thefts, each as occasion served.
“Of course,” he observed, “sometimes you have a bit of bad luck and get
caught. Then off you go to Siberia, and have to begin all over again. I
expect I shall go on all my life ringing the changes on Europe and
Asia,” he concluded, with perfect composure.
I realised from the narrations of this man and other criminals the
astonishing numbers belonging to this vagabond class. It is generally
recruited from the ranks of those condemned to transportation for the
less serious offences; but some among its members have been sentenced to
penal servitude, and have then “swopped.” As soon as the sun of spring
shines out, not one of them remains at his place of exile; they all
manage to get away and make for European Russia. They usually choose
byways and tracks known only to themselves through the _taigà_ or
primeval forest, but occasionally they wander quite calmly along the
great Moscow high road—until the completion of the railway the only
regular way of transit between Eastern Siberia and Europe. We ourselves
often met these tramps on the road, travelling in couples or in quite
considerable bands. They came along in their prison clothes, a bundle
and a small kettle on their backs; always skirting the edge of the
forest, so as to vanish within its recesses if need be. At sight of our
party they would stop for a chat with the convicts, among whom they
often found old acquaintances. The officers and soldiers seemed not to
trouble their heads about them in the slightest degree.
“Where are you off to?” the officer of our convoy once asked, when some
tramps saluted him, cap in hand.
“Your Excellency knows; we’re going to the Government’s lodgings,” the
rogues replied, grinning.
“Oh, get along with you, then, in God’s name!” the officer laughed; and
then told us that he had escorted this very lot into exile a few months
back.
“Government lodgings” was the recognised euphemism for prison, and it
was perfectly true that most of these vagabonds would find their way
back there soon enough; by autumn hardly a man of them would be still at
large. Meanwhile they begged their way along. The Siberian natives were
liberal in almsgiving; partly from obedience to their religion, which
enjoins charitable deeds, but not a little from fear, as, if refused,
these tramps are not slow in revenging themselves. In many places there
was a regular custom of putting out food on the window-sill at night—a
bowl of thickened milk, a piece of bread, or some curd-cheese. The
peasants would even leave open the door of the bath-house (generally
placed at a little distance from the other houses), that the wanderers
might find shelter. They were admitted very unwillingly to the
dwelling-houses, from a not unjustifiable mistrust of their conduct; and
that reminds me of the following episode.
One day as we were on the march a criminal told me that he had known
Tchernishevsky.[61] This naturally excited my interest, and I asked him
how and where he had met that great martyr to our cause. He told me that
he had once before been exiled, and sent to Viluisk, in Yakutsk.
Tchernishevsky was there at the same time; they were let out of prison
together, and interned in the same town. The man could tell me nothing
except some details of the way in which Tchernishevsky had passed his
time in exile; but that was enough to make my heart warm towards him. It
seemed to me that a criminal who had known personally one of the noblest
men in Russia must have something in him a little different from the
rest. When he had told me all he could of Tchernishevsky, I asked him
how he himself came to be going back into exile.
Footnote 61:
This celebrated scholar and political writer, though not an active
member of the revolutionary party, was arrested in 1866 and condemned
to penal servitude. During his imprisonment in the Fortress of Peter
and Paul he wrote his famous novel, _What Should We Do?_ which had
such a great influence on the youth of his time.—_Trans._
“I got sick of that cursed hole, Viluisk,” he said, “and got away with
some other tramps. We’d been a few days on the road when one stormy
night we came to a village. It was pouring in torrents, and we could
find nobody who would let us in, till at last an old man opened the door
of his hut. We begged him in God’s name to give us shelter.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘will you promise to leave us old folks in peace?’
“‘What do you take us for, grandfather?’ said we. ‘Have pity on us!’
“So he let us in, and the old woman gave us something to eat, and they
allowed us to lie on the stove by turns. Well, they went to sleep, and
we just _did for them_, and went off with everything that could be of
any use to us. We didn’t get far: the peasants came after us and caught
us; and then there was the usual game—trial and sentence to penal
servitude. But on the way here I made a ‘swop,’ and now I’m going into
exile as ‘of unknown antecedents.’”
* * * * *
On their side, however, the people of Siberia are often guilty of great
brutality towards the convict-tramps, sometimes shooting them down like
beasts of the chase simply in order to steal their clothes, boots, and
the products of their begging. I have been told, for instance, by people
whose evidence is to be trusted, that the following is a typical
instance.
A tramp had hired himself out to a peasant for the winter. When spring
laid the road open, he received the whole sum due to him, and took his
departure. His wages amounted to the veriest trifle, for the peasants
drive hard bargains with the poor rascals; but his master grudged
parting with even this miserable pittance, and after his departure took
his gun and went on the chase. Siberians are keen huntsmen and dead
shots; they are as much at home in the forest as the wild animals. This
man soon got on the convict’s trail, caught him up, shot him down
ruthlessly, and left the body to the beasts of prey, while he went home
with the spoils.
Throughout our journey we constantly heard tales of unrecognised corpses
found, and shocking crimes never unravelled. Siberia was then a wild,
forsaken land, untraversed by roads save for the one great Moscow
highway. The government of the country districts, entirely in the hands
of the police, was corrupt from top to bottom. What wonder if events
that chill one’s blood with horror take place there without exciting
more than a passing comment? The life of a human being is not valued
highly in itself anywhere throughout the Tsar’s dominions; but in
Siberia it counts for absolutely nothing, as my own eyes often
testified. Even now, when distinct progress has been made in many
respects, and the administration of justice greatly reformed (since
1897), this state of things is little changed.