THE EXILE SYSTEM
The exile system—A principal secondary punishment—Reform of 19th
century—Classification of exiles—The hideous march into Siberia—Infant
mortality—Less than half the exiles sentenced by regular
tribunals—Many banished by “administrative process” on arbitrary
order—The “untrustworthy”—Power to banish exercised by many even minor
authorities—Some cases of rank injustice—Monstrous ill-usage of a
medical man—Dr. Bieli and his wife’s insanity—Students and young
schoolgirls exiled—Simple banishment—The exile’s life in
Siberia—Danger of protesting against ill-usage—Penalties of infringing
rules—Surgeon forbidden to practise in a case of life and
death—Terrors of banishment to the far north in the arctic province of
Yakutsk—A living death—Denounced by Russian press.
An account has been given of the most prominent Russian penal
institutions in the mother country and of the prisons established for
all offenders upon whom confinement has been generally imposed as a
preparatory step to deportation. It remains to describe the system of
Siberian exile, long the principal element of penal coercion known to
the Russian code. For all alike, the undoubtedly guilty and the resolute
patriots with high aims, but often violent methods, this penalty exists
and has existed for centuries, ever imposed recklessly with marked
indifference to the human suffering it has entailed.
Banishment to the far-off wilds began soon after the vast region of
Siberia became part of the Empire, that is to say, in the middle of the
seventeenth century. It originated in the idea of “removal;” and was
adopted as a convenient outlet for the wrecks of humanity who had
survived the cruel, personal inflictions prescribed by savage laws. All
who escaped the capital sentence and were neither impaled nor beheaded,
endured secondary punishment of atrocious severity; they were flogged by
the knout or bastinadoed; they were cruelly mutilated, their limbs were
amputated or their tongues torn out; they were branded with hot irons or
suspended in the air by hooks run into the ribs, and left to die a death
of lingering torment. Those that were left were transported to Siberia.
What the system was and to a great extent still is, despite skin-deep
reforms, with its most glaring evils, claims description in any account
purporting to be complete. It is necessary to refer to the sufferings
endured and the infamies practised in some detail, so that we may
realise the true measure of the infinite misery they have caused. It is
almost impossible to conceive of the horrors of that march of thousands
of both sexes across a continent; ragged, debilitated men, weak women
and helpless children, tramping on and on for a whole year or more,
shoeless, insufficiently clad and subsisting on the chance alms of the
charitable; fed by a meagre pittance, lodged nightly in half-ruinous log
prisons, or festering for weeks in detestable forwarding prisons. The
Russian exile system has rivalled in its inflictions the cruelties and
barbarities of the darkest ages.
By degrees changes in the penal code, multiplying offences punishable by
exile, increased the numbers sent to Siberia. The colonisation and
development of the new country claimed the attention of the government.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries increasing numbers
were deported, but with no attempt at organised system and with the most
callous neglect of the human beings driven forth like cattle along the
dreary road. They were at all times abominably misused everywhere,
harassed, whipped, starved, and treated worse than the four-footed
beasts, which from their intrinsic value would have been worth a certain
amount of care. Exile was substituted for the death penalty, and the
families of the offender often accompanied him. The punishment was
sometimes accorded for breaking laws and regulations that were most
trivial and ridiculous. Among offences were included fortune-telling,
prize-fighting, snuff-taking, and driving with reins—a culpable western
innovation—for the Russian rode his draught horse then or ran beside it.
The demand for enforced labour steadily increased as Siberia’s natural
resources became more and more evident. The discovery of mineral wealth,
the rich silver mines of Nertchinsk in the Trans-Baikal, and the
establishment of large manufactories at Irkutsk called for more exiles,
and laws were passed extending the punishment. Any kind of misconduct
led to deportation. Jews were exiled for failing to pay their taxes,
serfs for cutting down trees without permission, and minor military
offences were visited with this penalty. Large numbers took the road,
but without the slightest organisation. There was no system; the exiles
were driven in troops like cattle from town to town. No one knew exactly
the cause of exile or could differentiate between individuals. Some were
murderers and the most hardened offenders; some were simple peasants
guilty of losing their passports or the victims of an oppressive
proprietor. “The exile system,” says Kennan, “was nothing but a chaos of
disorder in which accident and caprice played almost equally important
parts.”
Two cases may be quoted here of the haphazard arbitrary treatment that
commonly prevailed. A peasant who had innocently bought a stolen horse
was sent to Siberia as an enforced colonist, but was not set at liberty
on arrival. Through some error and confusion as to his identity, he was
transported to the Berozev mines and worked there underground for three
and twenty years. Again, the governor of Siberia, Traskin, of
notoriously evil repute, having a spite against one of the councillors
of the State Chamber, banished him from the province of Irkutsk, with an
order that he should never be permitted to remain more than ten days in
the same place. The wretched man accordingly spent the rest of his life
in aimless wanderings through Siberia.
With the nineteenth century some reforms were introduced. The exiles
were organised in parties, marched under escorts, and _étapes_, or
halting stations for a stay of a night or more, were built at regular
intervals along the road. The identification and separate personality of
individuals were established by means of proper papers showing whom they
were, their history and destination. A great administrative measure was
the creation in 1823 of a central bureau at Tobolsk (removed later to
Tiumen) for the record and registration of all exiles arriving and
passing into Siberia. Sub-offices at the principal Siberian towns
assisted with the necessary details showing the distribution and
disposal of all persons banished. Full statistics are consequently
available for estimating accurately the extent of penal deportation in
recent years. Approximately, since the beginning of the nineteenth
century, more than a million souls have passed the boundary line between
Europe and Asia. Speaking more exactly, the total number banished
between 1823 and 1887 amounted to 772,979, or an annual average of about
seventeen thousand.
Siberian exiles have been grouped by Kennan into four great classes.
These are as follows: the hard-labour convicts, in Russian called the
_katorzhniki_; the penal colonists, or _poselentzy_; the persons merely
banished, the _ssylny_; women and children who go to Siberia voluntarily
as the companions of fathers and parents, and conversely, in rare cases,
men who accompany their wives. Members of this class are called
_dobrovolny_. According to law, they are not under the disciplinary
control of the escort, but, as a matter of fact, they are subjected to
the same treatment as the convicts. An eye-witness reported in a Moscow
paper in 1881 that when he met a party of exiles on the march, “the
exhausted women and children literally stuck in the mud, and the
soldiers dealt them blows to make them advance and keep pace with the
rest.”
Members of the two first classes wore chains, leg fetters, and walked in
slippers for distances of six and seven thousand miles. The rest went
free of such physical encumbrances, but were otherwise exposed to the
terrible hardships and privations of the long protracted, wearisome
march. The mere atmospheric conditions and extremes of temperature in
the varying seasons suffice to break down the health of all but the most
hardy, for winter succeeded summer before the march ended and vice
versa, so that arctic cold alternated with tropical heat, and deep snow
with burning sun and torrential rains. When to such exposure are
superadded unsuitable clothing, bad and insufficient food, the
insanitary condition of the over-crowded _étapes_ and the absence of
medical care, “one is,” Kennan says, “surprised, not that so many die,
but that so many get through alive.”
A Russian painter, M. Jacoby, has painted an awful picture depicting the
frightful scene. It has been graphically described by Kropotkin and may
be quoted here in full to give a clear idea of this hideous march.
“You see a marshy plain where the icy wind blows freely, driving before
it the snow that begins to cover the frozen soil. Morasses with small
shrubs or crumpled trees, bent down by wind or snow, spread as far as
the eye can reach; the next village is twenty miles distant. Low
mountains, covered with thick pine forests, mingling with the gray snow
clouds, rise in the dust on the horizon. A track marked all along by
poles to distinguish it from the surrounding plain, ploughed by the
passage of thousands of carts, covered with ruts that keep down the
hardest wheels, runs through the naked plains. The party slowly moves
along this road. In front a row of soldiers opens the march. Behind them
heavily advance the hard-labour convicts, with half-shaved heads,
wearing gray clothes with a yellow diamond on the back, and open shoes
worn out by the long journey, and exhibiting the tatters in which the
wounded feet are wrapped. Each convict wears a chain riveted to his
ankles, its rings being twisted with rags. The chain goes up each leg
and is suspended to a girdle. Another chain closely ties both hands and
a third chain binds together six or eight convicts. Every false movement
of any of the gang is felt by all his chain companions; the feebler is
dragged forward by the stronger and he must not stop the way; the
_étape_ stage is long and the autumn day is short.
“Behind the hard-labour convicts march the _poselentzy_, condemned to be
settled in Siberia, wearing the same gray clothes and the same kind of
shoes.... In the rear you discover a few carts drawn by the small,
attenuated, cat-like peasants’ horses. They are loaded with the bags of
the convicts, and with the sick or dying who are fastened by ropes on
the top of the load. Behind the carts struggle the wives and children of
the convicts; a few have found a free corner on a loaded cart, and
crouch there when unable to move further, whilst the great number march
behind the carts, leading their children by the hand or bearing them in
their arms. In the rear comes a second detachment of soldiers,
stimulating these weak, feeble creatures to fresh exertions by blows
with the butt end of their muskets.”
The infant mortality under these conditions almost exceeds belief, and
deportation to Siberia has been aptly and truthfully described as a
“massacre of the innocents.” In the year 1881, when 2,561 children
followed the exile march, very few survived. The majority succumbed to
the hardships of the road and died before or immediately after their
arrival at their destination. The yearly quota has constantly increased,
numbering from five to eight thousand. To the danger to health incurred
must be added the moral degradation, especially in the case of the young
girls.
Before reviewing the conditions and setting forth the actual facts, with
the processes that produced them, it will be well to dissect the grand
totals and arrive at the relative proportions of the three principal
classes composing the whole body of exiles constantly moving across the
frontier to fill the prisons and to people Siberia to its uttermost
ends. Less than one-half were criminal in the sense that they had
committed offences and had been adjudged guilty in open court by duly
constituted tribunals. The larger moiety had had no legal trial; they
had been punished with banishment by the irresponsible action and simple
fiat of minor officials and bodies of ill-educated peasants, wielding
the extraordinary powers conferred by “administrative process.” At no
time and in no civilised land have people been so ruthlessly sacrificed
and subjected to the forfeiture of personal liberty by this utter
abnegation of justice and fair play, and the result is a standing
disgrace to the government that permitted and encouraged it. The extent
to which this most reprehensible system has obtained may be judged by a
simple statement of figures. For many years past the average number
sentenced to exile by legal verdict in regular courts was 45.6 per cent.
of the whole yearly contingent, and those banished by “administrative
process” was 54.4 per cent. It must always be borne in mind that, in
describing the methods pursued and the painful results attendant on
them, more than half the sufferers were either entirely innocent or
guilty of offences that could only be deemed criminal by a strained
interpretation of the exercise of authority, and in no case had they
been properly tried and convicted by law.
The system has been defined by Mr. Kennan as “the banishment of an
obnoxious person from one part of the empire to another without the
observance of any of the legal formalities which in most civilised
countries precede the deprivation of rights and the restriction of
personal liberty.” A person might be entirely guiltless of any offence,
he need not have made himself amenable to the law; it was enough that
the local authorities should suspect him of being “untrustworthy”[1] or
believe that his presence in any place was “prejudicial to public
order,” or threatened public tranquillity. He might be arrested
forthwith and detained in prison for a period varying from two weeks to
two years, and then by a stroke of the pen be deported, forcibly, to any
part of the empire and kept there under police surveillance for from one
to ten years. He could not protest or seek to defend himself. The same
impenetrable secrecy was maintained as in the dungeons of the Spanish
Inquisition. Not a whisper reached him of the causes of his arrest; he
might not examine the witnesses who accused him or supported the charge
against him. He must not call upon friends to speak of his loyalty and
good character; he was perfectly helpless and altogether at the mercy of
the authorities, and even his nearest relatives were in ignorance of his
whereabouts or what happened to him. They could not help him or must not
if they would.
Footnote 1:
The Russian word is “neblagonadiozhny” and means literally, “of whom
nothing good can be expected,” and the expression has been given a
very wide interpretation. Young people who read certain forbidden
books or join forbidden societies for the ventilation of certain
principles are deemed untrustworthy.
The power to send people into exile thus arbitrarily was vested in petty
authorities, officers of gendarmerie, subordinate police officials, or
mere executive orders countersigned by the minister of the interior and
approved by the Czar. There is nothing new in this system. The people of
Russia, from noble to serf, have never enjoyed the semblance of liberty;
the Russian bureaucracy has wielded the unlimited power delegated to it
by the autocratic Czar, and from the beginning of the eighteenth century
twenty different classes of officials could employ “administrative
methods” as a substitute for judicial process. The right was vested in
governors, vice-governors, chiefs of police, and provincial bureaus,
ecclesiastical authorities and landed proprietors. In addition to the
power to send into exile, these various authorities could at their
discretion confiscate property, brand, inflict torture and flog with the
knout. Village communes had also the power to order the removal by exile
of members who were worthless and ill-conducted, of whom their fellows
were anxious to get rid.
Innumerable cases of oppression and injustice are on record of which a
few may be cited. One of the most flagrant was that of Constantine
Staniukovich, who was the son of a Russian admiral. He had been in the
navy but had a fondness for literature and became a writer of plays and
novels condemned by the censor as of “pernicious tendency.” But he
continued to write and finally became the proprietor of a magazine. He
was seized without warning and locked up in the fortress of St. Peter
and St. Paul. His wife, who was at Baden Baden, heard nothing of his
arrest, and found when she returned to St. Petersburg that he had
mysteriously disappeared. She learned, after diligent inquiry, that he
was in prison, and that his letters had been secretly tampered with, his
offence being a correspondence through the post with a well-known
Russian revolutionist residing in Switzerland. At length, after a long
imprisonment, he was exiled by administrative process to Tomsk for three
years. His magazine was discontinued by his absence and he was
financially ruined. Neither wealth nor a high social position could save
him from arbitrary treatment.
Another literary man, M. Berodin, was banished to Yakutsk, close to the
Arctic Circle, because the manuscript of an article deemed “dangerous”
was found in his house in St. Petersburg by the police. This was a spare
copy of an article he had written for the _Annals of the Fatherland_,
which had been accepted but had not appeared. When he was on his way to
Eastern Siberia to expiate this horrible offence, the incriminated
article was passed by the censor and actually published without
objection in the same magazine, and without the alteration or omission
of a single line. The exile read his own article, for which he had
suffered, in the far-off place of his confinement.
The most monstrous instances of high handed proceedings are recorded.
One unfortunate gentleman was exiled because he was suspected of an
intention to put himself in an illegal situation, no more than a
projected change of name. Another man was exiled and sent to Siberia
because he was the friend of an accused person who was waiting trial on
a political charge, and of which he was in due course acquitted. But the
friend of this innocent man was deemed an offender, and was sent across
the frontier. Such was the chaos of injustice, accident and caprice,
that errors were constantly made as to identification. When the roll of
a travelling party was called, no one answered to the name of Vladimir
Sidoski. A Victor Sidoski was in the ranks and was challenged to answer.
“It is not my name. I am another man, I ought not to have been arrested;
I am Victor, not Vladimir,” was the answer. “You will do quite as well,”
retorted the officer. “I shall correct the name in the list.” And Victor
the innocent became Vladimir the prisoner. It sometimes happened that an
arrest was made by mistake; the wrong man was taken and it was clearly
shown, but no release followed. It was unsafe to take up the case of any
victims of misusage. One lady who resented acts of manifest injustice
was arrested and banished because “it was no business of hers.”
A young and skilful surgeon, Dr. Bieli, was shamefully ill-treated. Two
women students at a medical college in St. Petersburg had been expelled
on suspicion of “untrustworthiness,” and being anxious to continue their
studies, had remained in the capital and had secretly become the
doctor’s pupils. They were without passports in an “illegal” position
and should have been handed over to the police. But Dr. Bieli shielded
them until their visits to his house, generally at night, attracted the
attention of the police, and it was thought that some political
conspiracy was in progress. Arrests followed, the fatal truth came out,
and Dr. Bieli was exiled to the arctic village of Vorkhoyansk. His wife
was expecting her confinement and could not go with him, but travelled
after him, starting on a journey of six thousand miles to be made in the
rough jolting _telyegas_ and enduring endless hardships. Her health
broke down and gradually her mind gave way. But she bore up until the
end of her trials seemed near, when she learned that a mistake had
occurred in the place of her destination and that she must traverse
another three thousand miles before she reached her husband. The sudden
shock was fatal; she became violently insane and died a few months later
in the prison hospital at Irkutsk.
The measure of administrative process has been defended by intelligent
Russians who visit the blame upon the Nihilists and terrorists,—“a band
so horribly vile that their crimes are beyond parallel.” A writer in a
German periodical justifies this language by denouncing the bloodthirsty
recklessness of the revolutionists who have not hesitated to use the
assassin’s knife and dynamite bombs. To give local authorities power to
banish the suspected was essential as a means of precaution, “the only
possible means to counteract the nefarious doings of these dark
conspirators.” Admitting, however, that the decision was unfortunate and
has caused unspeakable misery, he says: “From the day this power was
delegated no man knows at what moment he may not be seized and cast into
prison or doomed to exile.”
He casts all the responsibility on the revolutionists, but in doing so,
as Kennan says, puts the cart before the horse. Terrorist measures were
the reply to grievous oppression. “It was administrative exile,
administrative caprice, and the absence of orderly and legal methods in
political cases that caused terrorism, not terrorism that necessitated
official lawlessness.” Already the true facts are patent and thoroughly
understood by the world at large. The so-called excesses of the
revolutionists have not been committed, as the champions of the Russian
government would have us believe, “by bloodthirsty tigers in human form
at the prompting of presumptuous fancies,” but “by ordinary men and
women exasperated to the pitch of desperation by administrative
suppression of free speech and free thought, administrative imprisonment
for years upon suspicion, administrative banishment to the arctic
regions without trial, and, to crown all, administrative denial of every
legal remedy and every peaceful means of redress.”
Already “the whirligig of time has brought its revenges.” Russia is
wading through blood to the still far-off horizon which is at last
dawning on a vexed and tortured people. The overthrow of despotism is
approaching inevitably if slowly. The will of the people cannot be
ignored or their aspirations checked and crushed by the old arbitrary
methods of repression and coercion.
A whole volume might be filled with the detailed iniquities of the
administrative process, which was so largely operative and so long
before the oppressed people were goaded into retaliation. As far back as
the early decades of the nineteenth century, statistics were gathered by
a careful and industrious writer covering the period between 1827 and
1846 and showing the average number banished annually to be between
three and six thousand, and the aggregate for the twenty years to be
nearly eighty thousand. Beyond doubt in more recent years the numbers
have steadily grown, although the exact figures are not available.
Kropotkin ably summarises the objects of exile: “Students and girls
suspected of subversive ideas; writers whom it was impossible to
prosecute for their writings, but who were known to be imbued with a
‘dangerous spirit;’ workmen who were known to have spoken against the
authorities; persons who have been irreverent to some governor of a
province or _ispravnik_ were transported by hundreds every year.” The
barest denunciation and the most casual suggestion were sufficient to
afford a motive.
Several young girls were condemned, not merely to exile, but to hard
labour for from six to eight years for having given a socialistic
pamphlet to one workman. A child of fourteen became a penal colonist for
shouting aloud that it was a shame to condemn people to death for
nothing.
A flagrant case was that of M. Annenkov, a landed proprietor, who
proposed the health of the governor at a banquet given him by the
nobility of Kursk. At the end he was bold enough to remark that he
greatly hoped his excellency would devote more time to the affairs of
the province. The following week a _tarantas_ containing two gensdarmes
stopped at his door; he was arrested, was forbidden to bid his wife
farewell, and was conveyed as a prisoner to a distant part. Only after
six months and the most urgent representations of influential friends
was he again set free.
In the last decade of the reign of Alexander II, between 1870 and 1880,
administrative exile was employed with unprecedented recklessness and
the most consummate indifference to personal rights. Unlimited
discretionary powers were vested in governors of provinces. General
Todleben, in Odessa, banished all of the “untrustworthy” class without
inquiry or discrimination, and sent into exile every one whose loyalty
to the existing government was even doubtful. It was enough to be
registered as a “suspect” on the books of the secret police, or to have
been accused, even anonymously, of political disaffection. Parents who
had the most honourable record of unblemished loyalty were exiled
because their children had become revolutionists; schoolboys were exiled
because they were acquainted with some of the disaffected and had failed
to report the fact to the police; teachers were exiled for circulating
copies of a harmless magazine; members of provincial assemblies, who
claimed the right to petition the Czar for redress of grievances, were
sent across the frontier; and university students, who had been tried
and acquitted of a political offence, were re-arrested and exiled by
administrative process,—all in violation of the most elementary
principles of justice.
The majority of the administrative exiles were political prisoners, but
all politicals were not let off with simple banishment. A considerable
number of political offenders were sentenced to hard labour and also to
penal exile. They did not live apart but were incorporated with the
common-law criminals and subjected to precisely the same irksome
treatment; they were equally deprived of civil rights, and could never
count upon freedom absolute and unconditional. A few might in the long
run be allowed to return to European Russia, at the intercession and
with the guarantee of influential friends, but endless exile was
generally their portion and a hard hand-to-mouth existence, with
unceasing struggles to gain bread, for when nominally free they are
still under police surveillance and do not easily find the means of a
livelihood. They are worse off than when prisoners, for they are granted
no government allowance and must fight for every kopeck under many
disadvantages.
We come thus to the large class of the _ssylny_, those simply banished,
whose liberty is forfeited, although they are not actually subjected to
imprisonment; and with them must be comprised the emancipists, those who
have completed their penalty but are not permitted to leave Siberia.
Both classes are practically prisoners, although not within four walls
perhaps. Their movements are restricted, and they are still held under
observation within a certain area and must observe certain stringent
rules of conduct. Their condition is only a modified form of
imprisonment applicable to at least half of the entire number
transported to Siberia.
A code of rules has been drawn up for all whom the law condemns to exile
and enforced domicile, whether at home or in far-off Siberia. The
pregnant word “banishment” is carefully excluded from these rules, and
police surveillance takes effect on those “assigned to definite places
of residence,” an expression euphemistically applied to the wildest and
most remote regions of the empire. It is an obviously colourable
suppression of true facts. The names of such places as the frontiers of
Mongolia, the arctic province of Yakutsk, or the sub-tropical mountain
districts of Central Asia are never mentioned, but there can be no
mistakes as to the irksome character of the rules. It is a life of
sufferance, of sometimes open arrest, and often of rigorously curtailed
freedom of movement. The exile must remain where he is planted; to move
his quarters he must give notice and obtain the consent of the police,
to whom he must constantly report himself. His chosen place of residence
is liable to visitation and search at any time of the day or night, and
anything it contains may be removed; his correspondence, all letters and
telegrams, inward and outward, may be read or withheld at all times.
The manner of the exile’s daily life is laid down with great minuteness,
and the nature of his employments specified, chiefly in the negative
sense. He cannot hold any position in the service of the state; he must
do no clerical work for any society or institution; he must not promote,
or serve with any company; he cannot act as curator of any museum; he
must not give lectures or impart instruction as a schoolmaster; he must
not take any part in any theatricals, and is forbidden generally to
exercise any public activity. He may not embark in any photographic or
literary occupation; may not deal in books, must not keep a tea house or
grog shop, or trade in intoxicating liquors. He shall not appear or
plead in court except on behalf of himself and his near relations, nor
without special permission may he act as physician, accoucheur,
apothecary or chemist. The penalty of contravening any of these
regulations is imprisonment for terms varying from three days to one
month. Exiles without means are granted a meagre allowance from the
treasury, but it is withdrawn if they fail to obtain employment through
bad conduct or laziness. The difficulty of getting a living under so
many restrictions is not considered.
The exile’s life is full of irksome conditions. When, after a nearly
interminable journey, he reaches his “definite domicile,” he must find
his own residence with some reluctant householder who does not care to
shelter a presumably dangerous political, subject at all times of the
day or night to police visitation; and, moreover, the householder is
expected to spy upon his tenant and report any suspicious circumstance.
When at length he overcomes these irritating and causeless objections
and rents a bare room, he has to settle the question of daily
subsistence. His wife and family he has left behind in Russia, probably
destitute, while he is here in Siberia without means, and with little
hope of being able to secure them. He falls back on the government
grant, no more than twelve shillings a month, and finds that it is
utterly insufficient to provide him with the commonest necessaries of
life. Rent, coarse food, meat, rye flour, a few eggs, “brick” tea and a
little cheap tobacco exhaust his allowance and leave a substantial
deficit, and this without spending a kopeck on washing, kerosene or
medicine.
Naturally the exile seeks to supplement his inadequate income. His
position is nearly hopeless. Possibly he has had the best education, is
a graduate of the university, knows several languages, and is a skilful
surgeon or practised physician. He does not, of course, expect to find
in the wilds of Siberia as many openings for his trained intelligence as
in St. Petersburg or Moscow, but surely there is room for an expert
penman, a good accountant, a competent teacher, a fair musician? Yet he
seems to have no chance to earn a few rubles, a few kopecks even, day by
day. The regulations, quoted above, close every avenue, debar him from
every employment but ordinary manual labour. He has never learned any
handicraft; he cannot work as carpenter, shoemaker, wheelwright or
blacksmith; he has no capital and cannot go into trade; he must not
engage himself as driver or teamster, for he cannot leave the village to
which he has been assigned. There is nothing left for him except to dig,
but there is not an inch of land for him to cultivate. All the ground in
the neighbourhood belongs to the village commune and has been already
allotted to its members, so that any available land is so far distant
that he would risk arrest by going there.
In this dilemma he petitions the government to relieve him of his
restrictions, and permit him to engage in such a harmless vocation as
teaching music, but he is referred to the rule forbidding it. To this
refusal was once added the cruel suggestion that the starving and
impecunious convict might hire himself out as a labourer to the king,
his peasant, for half a dozen kopecks a day. The same answer was given
to a petition from some political prisoners who begged to be allowed to
occupy and cultivate a tract of government ground near their village.
It was dangerous to protest against ill-usage. A number of exiles,
goaded to desperation by brutal severity of the acting governor of the
province of Tobolsk, respectfully declared that there was a limit to
human endurance and that their position had become intolerable. This
petition was adjudged “audaciously impudent” and its authors, nineteen
in number, were removed to a barren village within the Arctic Circle.
Memorials from free and independent bodies were equally unpalatable to
the authorities. The medical society of Tver in European Russia, a short
distance from Moscow, dared to back up a request made by a number of
qualified physicians exiled to Siberia to be allowed to practise in the
places of their banishment. A year or two before, the governor-general
of Eastern Siberia had reported to the Czar that the number of doctors
in the country was utterly insufficient, saying, “In the cities only is
it possible to take measures for the preservation of health. In every
other part of Eastern Siberia physicians are almost wholly lacking, and
the local population is left helpless in its struggle with diphtheria
and other contagious diseases which desolate the country.” Two years
later the medical school of Tver was swiftly punished for venturing to
endorse this statement, and for daring to ask that the prohibition to
practise might be rescinded in the case of the doctors so urgently
needed. The school was forthwith broken up and two of its members who
were in state services were summarily dismissed from their posts.
Exiled physicians who dared to infringe the rules were mercilessly dealt
with. A student named Dolgopolov had been banished for a most trifling
offence. During a riot at the Kharkov university, when the streets were
being cleared by the mounted Cossacks with their heavy dog-whips,
Dolgopolov indignantly took the brutal horsemen to task. For this he was
promptly arrested and banished by administrative process to Western
Siberia. Here, at the earnest entreaty of two suffering fellow
creatures, one ill with typhus fever, and the other afflicted with
cataract, he ventured to prescribe for them. He was immediately summoned
before the chief of police, who had a personal grudge against him, and
roughly reminded him he had transgressed the regulations. A little later
he was called in to attend the major’s wife who had been accidentally
shot in the leg by her son. The immediate extraction of the bullet was
essential, and no one but Dolgopolov was competent to perform the
operation. He explained that he was forbidden to practise under pain of
imprisonment, but it was put to him as a matter of life and death, and
he at last consented. The next day he was arrested by order of the
_ispravnik_ and thrown into prison at Tiukalinsk, where he contracted
typhus fever. His case excited profound sympathy in the town, which was
magnified by the authorities into a charge of exercising a pernicious
and dangerous influence, and was so reported to the governor, who
immediately ordered his removal to the arctic town of Surgut. No mention
had been made of his illness, but the convoy officer refused to receive
him. As the _ispravnik_ would not be baulked, however, he obtained a
peasant’s cart, dragged the patient from his bed in hospital and sent
him away in his night-shirt under the escort of two policemen.
He arrived at Ishim after 126 miles en route. Other political exiles who
resided here rallied around him, had him examined by the local surgeon,
and got the local chief of police to draw up a statement and telegraph
it to the governor, who heard for the first time of the sufferer’s
dangerous illness, and who replied by ordering him to be taken into the
local hospital. It was currently reported that the governor took a
substantial bribe from the _ispravnik_ at Tiukalinsk for sparing him the
prosecution he richly merited. Dr. Dolgopolov gradually recovered and
was later sent to Surgut. The Siberian _ispravniks_, or chiefs of
police, were notorious offenders, and Kennan says that at the time of
his journey there were ten under accusation of criminal charges but
still evading trial by timely propitiation, in cash, of their superiors.
Police surveillance was the more difficult to bear because a large
number of the officials who carried out this duty were degraded
characters with criminal antecedents. Many had been originally
common-law exiles taken into the government service at the expiration of
their terms. Kennan states that he came across police officers whom he
would not dare to meet at night, when alone and unarmed. He records that
in the city of Tomsk the police had been constantly guilty of “acts of
violence, outrage and crime, including the arrest and imprisonment of
innocent citizens by the hundreds, the taking of bribes from notorious
criminals, the subornation of perjury, the use of torture and the
beating nearly to death of pregnant women.” A newly appointed governor,
on visiting a prison, heard three hundred complaints of unjust
imprisonment, and on investigation of them two hundred prisoners were
set at liberty. The methods of surveillance were unceremonious and
rudely intrusive. An exile wrote to the press as follows, complaining
that the police entered his quarters repeatedly to verify his presence
and to see if any one else was there. “They walk past our houses
constantly, looking in at the windows and listening at the doors. They
post sentries at night on the corners of the streets where we reside,
and they compel our neighbours to watch our movements and report upon
them to the local authorities.”
Many ladies were to be found among the political exiles, often
defenceless girls from sixteen to twenty years of age and young married
women temporarily separated from their husbands who were interned
elsewhere or were at hard labour in the mines. They were constantly
exposed to indignity or worse, suffered insult or outrage, and were
compelled to associate with others for common protection. One young
woman, on returning from a short walk, found that a police officer had
invaded her private apartment and was lying asleep in helmet and boots
upon her bed. The chief of police also shamelessly misused his control
of the exiles’ correspondence, which was absolute; he might at his
discretion suppress and destroy any letters after perusal of their
contents, or detain them and postpone delivery on the ground that they
were in secret cipher which he was anxious to penetrate. Sometimes he
carried them to his club and read them aloud between drinks to his boon
companions, who laughed brutally at the tender messages contained in
them.
It must be admitted that the fate of those merely banished is stern
enough and their condition is in some respects worse than that of the
actually imprisoned. Loss of liberty is a terrible punishment, of
course, but at least food and lodging are provided and, as has been
shown, the simple exile is not certainly assured of either. There are
phases of exile, too, which far transcend the worst form of
incarceration. Banishment to a _ulus_ or _yurt_ of the arctic province
of Yakutsk is the most barbarous penalty that could well be devised for
the prolonged torture of a civilised being. The province of Yakutsk is
very sparsely inhabited, the climate is arctic, the post arrives rarely
and at long intervals; common necessaries, not to say luxuries, such as
tea, sugar, petroleum, are unprocurable. Even stale black bread can
seldom be obtained and at an exorbitant price. The native’s hut, or
_yurt_, is tent-shaped and built of rough logs, the interstices filled
up with earth and turf. The life of an exile there has been stigmatised
as a “living death,” and a description by a writer in the _Russian
Gazette_ is quoted.
“The Cossacks who brought me from the town of Yakutsk to my destination
soon returned, and I was left alone among the Yakuts who do not
understand a word of Russian. They watch me constantly, for fear that if
I escape they will have to answer for it to the Russian authorities. If
I go out of the close atmosphere of the solitary _yurt_ to walk I am
followed by a suspicious Yakut. If I take an axe to cut myself a cane,
the Yakut directs me by gestures and pantomime to let it alone and go
back into the _yurt_. I return thither, and before the fireplace I see a
Yakut who has stripped himself naked, and is hunting for lice in his
clothing—a pleasant picture! The Yakuts live in winter in the same
buildings with their cattle, and frequently are not separated from the
latter even by the thinnest partition. The excrement of the cattle and
of the children; the inconceivable disorder and filth; the rotting straw
and rags; the myriads of vermin in the bedding; the foul, oppressive
air, and the impossibility of speaking a word of Russian—all these
things taken together are positively enough to drive one insane. The
food of the Yakuts can hardly be eaten. It is carelessly prepared,
without salt, often of tainted materials, and the unaccustomed stomach
rejects it with nausea. I have no separate dishes or clothing of my own;
there are no facilities for bathing, and during the whole winter—eight
months—I am as dirty as a Yakut. I cannot go anywhere—least of all to
the town, which is two hundred versts away. I live with the Yakuts by
turns—staying with one family for six weeks, and then going for the same
length of time to another. I have nothing to read, neither books nor
newspapers, and I know nothing of what is going on in the world.”
The editor of the _Russian Gazette_, M. S. A. Priklonsky, an eminent
publicist and man of letters, in commenting upon this state of things
writes, “Beyond this severity cannot go. Beyond this there remains
nothing but to tie a man to the tail of a wild horse, and drive him into
the steppe, or chain him to a corpse and leave him to his fate. One does
not wish to believe that a human being can be subjected, without trial
and by a mere executive order, to such grievous torment.... And yet we
are assured ... that up to this time none of the exiles in the province
of Yakutsk have been granted any alleviating privileges.”
Mr. Kennan bears witness in 1891 that exiles were still sent to Yakutsk,
and Leo Deutsch speaks of the practice as still prevailing much later,
although he and his colleagues did not shrink from removal there, hoping
it might lead to some more advantageous change later. But humanity
shudders at the detestable treatment of the poor people whose worst
crime was a passionate desire to alleviate the sufferings of their
fellow countrymen. Life at Yakutsk was infinitely more terrible than the
worst tortures inflicted by prolonged confinement in a separate cell,
which is commonly described as “the greatest crime of the nineteenth
century.”