TIUMEN AND TOMSK
New route taken by exiles since opening of the Trans-Siberian
railway—Increased numbers produced overcrowding in all prisons both in
Europe and Asia—The “forwarding prisons” the cause of much
distress—The Tiumen prison; cells, kitchen, hospital—Infectious
diseases—Death-rate—Tomsk forwarding prison—Conditions worse than at
Tiumen—The balagan or family “kamera”—Futile attempts to dispute
incontrovertible evidence—“Étapes” or road prisons and “polu étapes”
or half-way houses—Distance covered daily by the marching parties—The
“telyegas” or country carts which carried the sick—Method of buying
provisions from villagers en route—The “étape” of Achinsk—Infectious
diseases in these prisons—The reports of Governor-General
Anuchin—Sympathy of the Czar Alexander III.
The old order changeth slowly, and the hideous memories of the black and
baleful past will long survive. The pages which record the disgraceful
facts may be torn out of Russian prison history but they can never be
eradicated or forgotten. Let it be granted that reforms and improvements
have been introduced, and that some of the most glaring evils have been
removed, we may doubt whether in the present condition of the empire,
still shaken to its very base by disaster and disaffection, the
betterment goes below the surface or will be lasting. The governing
authorities in these troublous times have but little leisure to discuss
penology, and although long since aroused to a lively sense of the
shortcomings of their prison system, they are slow to mend their ways.
Changes and ameliorations promised still tarry by the way, and there is
but little hope that the frightful conditions so long prevailing have
even in part disappeared.
The chief blot upon the method of transportation no longer exists, it is
true. The wearisome, almost interminable march has been replaced by the
long railway journey over the Trans-Siberian line, completed in 1897 and
opened the following year for the conveyance of exiles. The convicts no
longer spend a couple of years or more on a journey now performed in
eight or ten days. Their sufferings are no longer protracted
indefinitely, but for a brief space they are still locked up like cattle
in dirty, ill-ventilated vans, and are still collected in the foul
“forwarding prisons,” whence they pass on for distribution to Eastern
Siberia, the convict colony of Saghalien, or the outer darkness near the
North Pole. A few well-planned and commodious new prisons have been
erected in recent years, for which credit must be given to the prison
administration, but they have applied only a partial remedy to existing
conditions.
The exile route to-day naturally follows the new line of railway. From
Moscow the road strikes south to Samara on the Volga, to which point a
large passenger traffic is brought by the great water-way to board the
trains. From Samara to Ufa on the west slope the Ural Mountains, and
after scaling them the line descends to Chelyabinsk on the Siberian
frontier. Here the convict travellers are divided into parties according
to their destination. Some go north toward Tiumen and Tobolsk, others
travel due east in the direction of Lake Baikal, and others start south
for Semipalatinsk and the Altai.
The route before the railway was built was from Moscow, the centre of
the home prison system, thence by train to Nizhni-Novgorod, and on by
boat down the Volga through Kazan to Perm, and thence by train across
the Ural Mountains to Ekaterinburg and Tiumen. All exiles of whatever
class, without distinction or separation, travelled this way, and all
halted at Tiumen, where they were made up into parties and forwarded to
their several destinations.
Overcrowding was the curse of all Russian prisons; the cause of
discomforts innumerable, inflicting untold suffering, producing deadly
endemic and epidemic diseases. That it was the same everywhere, we are
told on incontestable authority, and the futile attempts made by
superficial inquirers to vindicate the government which is responsible
are contemptible. To begin with St. Petersburg, the official report of
the society for prisons stated that in 1880 the show prison, the
Litovski Zamok, although built for seven hundred inmates, uniformly
contained from nine hundred to a thousand; and the depot prison,
supposed to hold two hundred, was always filled with double the number.
The first named had 103 rooms nominally for eight hundred persons. These
rooms, as described by an eye-witness, were exceedingly dirty, and he
further says: “The ‘black holes’ are dreadful; they are absolutely
deprived of light; a dark labyrinth leads to them and within all is wet,
with rotten floors and dripping walls. A man coming from the outer air
staggers away half asphyxiated. Specialists say that the healthiest man
will surely die if he is kept there for three or four weeks. After a
short stay prisoners went out exhausted; several could hardly stand on
their feet.”
As to the specific charge of overcrowding, a few details must carry
conviction. The prison at Nizhni-Novgorod was built for three hundred,
and generally held seven or eight hundred persons. In Poland there were
four prisons occupying the space required for one. The prison at Perm
was built in 1872 for 120 inmates, but in the same year it held just
double that number and the cubical air space allotted to each individual
was from 202 to 260 cubic feet, or, as Kropotkin puts it, it was just as
if a man was living in a coffin eight feet by six feet. Another
authority, the _Journal of Legal Medicine_, issued by the medical
department of the Ministry of the Interior, gives the cubical contents
as no more than 124 cubic feet per head. At Tomsk the prison was
disgracefully overcrowded. It was built for nine hundred but contained
over two thousand souls. At Samara the average prison population was
1,147, but the aggregate cubic capacity of all the prisons in the town
was for 552 inmates. At Verkhni Udinsk an _ostrog_ built for 140
prisoners was often packed with five hundred and even eight hundred
inmates. On the whole, summing up the dreadful facts, an apologist of
the Russian government admits that the prisons contain half as many more
than the number originally intended.
Let us pass to the direct evidence of a perfectly veracious witness,
speaking out of his own experience. George Kennan approached his
self-imposed task with a judicial, well-balanced mind, quite
unprejudiced against the Russian system, predisposed, if anything, to
view it with favour. He paid a lengthy visit to the Tiumen forwarding
prison, with the full permission of the authorities, who withheld
nothing from his observation, premising only that it was greatly
overcrowded and in a bad sanitary condition.
As to the first point, the figures were conclusive. It was a well-known
fact that the prison was built originally for 550 inmates but was
subsequently enlarged by the addition of detached barracks so as to hold
nominally 850 prisoners. On the day Kennan visited it, the number was
1,741, as witnessed by a blackboard hanging up at the office door. In
the first room entered, a _kamera_ or cell, 35 feet long, 25 feet wide
and 12 feet high, the accommodation and air space at the outside was for
forty persons. On the night before, 160 had slept or, more exactly,
passed the night in the room. The same dreadful superfluity of human
beings existed throughout the entire prison.
“I looked around the cell,” says Kennan. “There was practically no
ventilation whatever, and the air was so poisoned and foul that I could
hardly force myself to breathe it. We visited successively in the yard
six _kameras_ or cells, essentially like the first, and found in every
one of them three or four times the number of prisoners for which it was
intended, and five or six times the number for which it had adequate air
space. In most of the cells there was not room enough on the sleeping
platforms for all of the convicts, and scores of men slept every night
on the foul, muddy floors, under the _nary_, ‘sleeping platforms,’ and
in the gangways between them and the walls.”
The main building, containing the kitchen, the workshops, the hospital
and a large number of _kameras_, was in a worse sanitary condition than
the barracks. The air in the corridors and cells, particularly on the
second story, was indescribably foul. The oxygen had been breathed again
and again; it was laden with fever germs from the unventilated hospital
wards, fetid odours from diseased human lungs and unclean human bodies,
and the stench of unmentionable receptacles. “It was like trying to
breathe in an underground hospital drain,” says Kennan. The kitchen was
a dark, dirty room in the basement where three or four half naked cooks
were baking large loaves and preparing soup. The bread was sour and
heavy, but as good as that usually eaten by Russian peasants; the soup
was found to be good and nutritious.
The hospital was on the third floor and the wards were larger and
lighter than the _kameras_, but wholly unventilated; no disinfectants
were in use, and the air was polluted to the last degree. The prospect
of regaining health in such unwholesome dens was small. A man in robust
condition must certainly become infected in a few weeks, and there was
little hope for the recovery of the sick. All the worst disorders were
to be found among the patients; scurvy, typhus fever, typhoid fever,
acute bronchitis, rheumatism and syphilis. Only the patients affected by
malignant typhus were isolated in a single ward. The women were
separated from the men, but that was all. “The patients, both men and
women, seemed to be not only desperately sick, but hopeless and heart
broken.” The mortality was excessive. Typhus was epidemic every year.
The prison was uniformly overcrowded; it had been built for eight
hundred and generally contained eighteen hundred. Some scanty
ventilation was possible when the windows could be opened, but in the
stormy autumn or bitter winter no fresh air could be admitted.
According to the official reports of the inspectors of exile
transportation, in the eleven years between 1876 and 1886 the greatest
number of deaths in the Tiumen prison hospital was 354, the lowest 175,
the average 270. This is an unparalleled death-rate. In various European
prisons the rate is on the average as follows:—England, 1.4 per cent.;
France, 3.8 per cent.; Austria, 3.5 per cent.; Belgium, 1.8 per cent.;
United States, 1.7 per cent. “In the Tiumen forwarding prison it was
29.5 per cent., or almost 300 per thousand.... This would entirely
annihilate a fixed population in from two and a half to four years,”—a
death-rate such as this, in the words of Mr. Cable, “exceeds that of any
pestilence that ever fell on Europe in the Middle Ages.”
The female prison was in a separate yard within a high stockade of
sharpened logs. The _kameras_ were clean and well-lighted; floors and
sleeping platforms had been scrubbed; the rooms were not so densely
overcrowded, and the air was purer than on the men’s side. But the
condition of the third detached prison, that for exiled families, in
which men, women and children were herded together to the number of
three hundred, was horrible. It was overcrowded; the air was heavy and
foul; “dozens of children were crying from hunger and wretchedness; and
the men and women looked tired, sleepless and dejected.” All the women
were voluntarily accompanying their husbands or fathers into banishment.
The disgraceful state of the Tiumen forwarding prison was perfectly well
known to the authorities, and has been strongly commented upon in
official reports. How far amendment has proceeded I have no definite
information, although we may hope that the diversion of the outward
stream of exiles since the opening of the Trans-Siberian railway has
greatly reduced the excessive demands upon the imperfect accommodation.
But there is another forwarding prison further eastward and at one time
on the direct line of exile traffic. This is at the city of Tomsk, which
is actually fifty miles distant from the railway, because the local
authorities refused to pay the blackmail demanded by the projectors of
the line to bring it through, or within easy reach of the city. Before
railway days, the convicts travelled in barges on the river Tobol from
Tiumen to Tomsk. These barges were planned to accommodate six hundred on
each voyage; they were towed by steamers and made the journey in from
seven to ten days, completing eighteen trips during the season of open
navigation, and thus they transported annually between ten thousand and
eleven thousand souls.
If the Tiumen prison was in horrible condition, that of Tomsk was
infinitely worse. Its deplorable state was frankly admitted to George
Kennan by the authorities when they granted him permission to visit it.
“I think you will find it the worst prison in Siberia,” said the acting
governor of the province of Tomsk. What else was to be expected when the
buildings were filled with more than twice the number of inmates which
they could properly accommodate? The Tomsk forwarding prison was
designed to hold fourteen hundred, but three thousand or even four
thousand were habitually crammed into it. The numbers arriving exceeded
the power of distribution, and week by week a residuum remained to
increase the permanent population. The _étapes_, or halting stations
along the road, could accommodate only a limited number and there were
not enough troops to provide for more than one marching party each week.
The Tomsk forwarding prison is described by Mr. Kennan, who saw it in
1885, as, “a stockaded camp or enclosure three acres in extent, lying on
open ground outside the city.” Within were some fifteen to twenty log
buildings grouped about a pyramidal church tower. Each wooden building
in the enclosure was a one-storied barrack prison of square logs with
board roofs, heavily grated windows and massive iron doors secured with
padlocks. There were eight of these, each constituting a prison ward and
each divided into two _kameras_, one on each side of a central corridor
running through the building. Each ward or building was calculated to
hold 190 inmates, but was crowded with at least three hundred. Each cell
was about forty feet square and the air space was seven-eighths of a
cubic fathom per head. The cells were fairly well lighted, but the
atmosphere was pestilential and the temperature from the natural heat of
the prisoners’ bodies was fifteen or twenty degrees higher than the
external air. The usual sleeping platforms ran across the cells, but
there was not room on them for half of the number confined there, and
the other half was forced to sleep beneath the platforms, or on the
floor in the adjoining gangways. These lay there on the mud-stained and
filthy floor, without pillows, blankets or bedclothing. They were in
such a grievous state that they complained feelingly of the heat,
foulness and oppressiveness of the air and declared that it was
impossible to move about in the day time or to get rest at night.
The same evils were present in every cell. But the horrors culminated in
the “family” room or _balagan_, the long, low shed of rough pine
boards,—a frame work hastily put together and with sides of thin white
cotton sheeting. There were three of these crammed full of family
parties, men, women and children. The shed was surrounded by a foul
ditch half full of filth which soaked through and from under the
cotton-sheeting wall. The only light that penetrated within the
windowless _balagan_ was through this wall of cotton. The place was
packed with hundreds of occupants,—“weary-eyed men, haggard women and
ailing children,” sitting and lounging about the sleeping platforms and
on the broken boards of the floor through which exuded all kinds of
abominations. The air was insufferably fetid from the great numbers of
infants unwashed and wholly uncared for. Wet underclothing, washed in
the camp kettles, was hanging from the beams to dry; an
indistinguishable chaos of bags, bundles and domestic utensils
encumbered the floor, and the crowd was so closely packed that people
could not move without touching each other. No remedy, no alleviation
was possible. The cold at night in these cotton enclosed walls, or the
damp heat and imperfect ventilation in the bath-house—which many would
have preferred—were equally fatal to infant life. Detention in these
wretched apologies for shelters was greatly prolonged. No change of
clothing was provided; a man wore the same shirt for months, until it
almost dropped off, in dirty ragged scraps, full of vermin. Not
strangely was it thought a welcome relief when the orders came to take
the road. The toilsome march with its incessant hardships and exhausting
fatigue was preferable to the fixed residence in a forwarding prison.
The hospital at Tomsk was in some respects better than that at Tiumen;
it occupied a separate building, and was kept in better order. There
were always more patients than beds to receive them, and the surplus in
various stages of acute disease lay about on benches or on the floor.
Despite the overcrowding, the place was kept fairly clean, the bed
clothing was fresh and plentiful and the air was less polluted than at
Tiumen. The percentage of the sick varied according to the season. It
rose in November, when the population was at its highest, to twenty-five
per cent., and among the diseases malignant typhus, the true type of the
ancient, but now happily rare, “gaol fever,” was always largely present.
There were twenty-four hundred cases of illness in the year and at the
most crowded time there have been 450 cases in the hospital with beds
for only 150 patients.
The prison surgeon, one of the most humane and devoted of his class, Dr.
Orzheshko, has described his experience covering fifteen years. In
November, he says, “three hundred men and women dangerously sick lay on
the floor in rows, most of them without pillows or bed clothing; and in
order to find even floor space for them we had to put them so close
together that I could not walk between them, and a patient could not
cough or vomit without coughing or vomiting into his own face or into
the face of the man lying beside him. The atmosphere in the wards became
so terribly polluted that I fainted repeatedly upon coming into the
hospital in the morning, and my assistants had to revive me by dashing
water into my face. In order to change or purify the air, we were forced
to keep the windows open; and as winter set in, this so chilled the
rooms, that we could not maintain ... a temperature higher than five or
six degrees Réamur above the freezing point.”
This hospital was so saturated with contagious disease that it stood
condemned, and deserved to be burned down. Official procrastination
delayed its destruction, but in 1887 a sum of 30,000 rubles was granted
for the erection of a new hospital, which is, presumably, now occupied.
It was high time to make a change. The city of Tomsk, the capital of
Siberia, the great centre of Siberian trade, flourishing, prosperous and
increasing, naturally became alarmed. The free inhabitants were
threatened with the spread of dire epidemic diseases. The local press,
defying the censorship, eloquently denounced the horrible condition due
to the vast accumulation of excessive numbers in the forwarding prison,
and the resultant evils in sickness and mortality. The newspapers stated
incontrovertible facts. The death-rate in the city of Tomsk was fifty
per thousand per annum, sufficiently large, but in the prison it was
three hundred per thousand. Typhus was the predominating disease,
accompanied by smallpox, diphtheria, measles and scarlatina. This typhus
constituted 56.4 per cent. of all the sickness in the forwarding prison
in 1886, 62.6 per cent. in 1887 and 23 per cent. in 1888. The
corresponding death-rate in these years was 23.2, 21 and 13.1 per cent.
A violent controversy was aroused between the enterprising and outspoken
American investigator, Mr. George Kennan, and a well-known English
explorer, Mr. H. de Windt, who undertook to contest the statements, and,
indeed, to deny the facts set forth by Mr. Kennan, plainly condemning
them as the phantasy of a disordered imagination and boldly affirming
that such a place as the Tomsk forwarding prison “does not exist.” Mr.
de Windt’s arguments are based upon the negative evidence of his own
experience. He declares that he saw nothing of the horrors described,
but then he never saw or closely inspected the prisons incriminated. He
was, no doubt, admitted to certain prisons, which he visited under the
auspices of the authorities, and he reported upon them hastily and on
imperfect knowledge. Mr. Kennan’s painful story is so completely
sustained by Russian official reports and the open condemnation of the
Siberian press, that it is entitled to full credence and may be relied
upon as absolutely trustworthy and conclusive. His account of Tiumen and
Tomsk must take a prominent place in the history of penal institutions.
The exile system called the _étapes_ or “road prisons” into being. They
were very numerous and were planted at intervals of every twenty-five or
forty miles, and as this distance was beyond the limit of a single day’s
march, half-way houses, or _polu étapes_, were to be met with regularly
along the road. Each _étape_ was the headquarters of a detachment of
soldiers who formed the convoy or escort of the convicts moving
eastward. At the _polu étapes_ there were no troops. The head of each
convoy was a commissioned officer styled the _nachalnik_.
The marching parties covered 330 miles every month, doing from fifteen
to twenty miles on two succeeding days and resting on the third. Thus a
party leaving Tomsk on Monday morning reached a _polu étape_ that night,
slept there and passed on to another regular _étape_ on Wednesday, where
they halted for twenty-four hours. On Thursday the journey was resumed
with a fresh escort, a _polu étape_ was reached that night, and a
regular _étape_ the next, and so on, day after day and week after week
for many months. Until 1883, there was no separation of the sexes on the
march, but after that date single men were excluded from the family
parties in which women and children were included. Terrible
demoralisation was previously the rule in the constantly overcrowded
_étapes_, and the grossest offences were commonly committed.
The departure of a marching party from the forwarding prison was
generally fixed at eight o’clock in the morning, when the _telyegas_, or
country carts, for the conveyance of the sick and infirm, began to
collect in front of the prison gate. Next appeared the prison blacksmith
with his anvil and portable forge, to test the fetters as the convicts
came forth, and after he had satisfied himself that the rivets were fast
and the basils had not been bent, an under officer doled out ten kopecks
to each individual, and the convicts were formed in line, by classes,
for convenience of inspection and calling the roll. The hard-labour
convicts removed their gray visorless caps to show that their crowns
were half shaved according to regulation. From the other sides of their
heads hung a mat of long, coarse and dishevelled hair. At length the
whole party, numbering from three to four hundred, assembled in the
street; each convict carried a gray linen two-bushel bag for the storage
of his personal effects. Many possessed tea-kettles, dangling from the
waist belts that supported the leg irons, and one or two might be seen
with a favourite dog in their arms. All the men were dressed alike in
long gray overcoats over coarse linen shirts and loose gray trousers.
The women wore no distinctive uniform, but were dressed mostly in
peasant costume with gaily coloured handkerchiefs on their heads. Square
foot-wrappers of gray linen were used in lieu of stockings and all wore
the _koty_, or low shoes, while they lasted, but they were of such
rotten, worthless material that they fell to pieces in a couple of days
and the wretched wayfarers went barefooted.
The _telyegas_ were carts of the rudest description, one-horsed and
without springs or seats, and the occupants, sick and suffering, old,
infirm and emaciated, lay at the bottom on a scanty layer of grass. A
doctor’s certificate was essential to secure a place in the carts, and a
sharp lookout was kept to weed out the malingerers. In one year more
than twenty-five hundred broken-down persons were conveyed to their
destination in as many as 658 carts.
When the column started, the marching party led the van at a brisk pace,
followed by the military escort, the carts bearing the sick, and those
conveying the gray linen bags. The commanding officer brought up the
rear. “This strange procession,” says Deutsch, who knew from personal
experience, “extends itself along the road for about three-quarters of a
mile, and raises clouds of dust.” A terrible scourge was the Siberian
midge, a pest attacking not only the exposed hands and face but getting
into the mouth, nose, ears and eyes, and under the clothing, and
inflicting unendurable irritation. The pace maintained was at the rate
of two miles an hour. After traversing ten miles, a halt was called for
rest and the noon-day meal. The effort was little for the able-bodied,
but for the weaker, laden with chains and bundles, the long march was
most exhausting, and all gladly flung themselves on the ground, wet or
dry. A spot was chosen at the entrance of some village, and its
residents came forth to haggle and huckster over the sale of coarse
food, such as black rye bread, fish pies, hard boiled eggs, milk and
_kvas_, or sour country beer. Prices varied, and no attempt was made to
control them officially; they were liable to be extortionate at seasons
of scarcity, after bad harvests, and the government allowance was at
times ludicrously inadequate, barely enough to satisfy hunger. Besides,
the average convict is an inveterate gambler, and many became penniless
risking and losing the whole of their allowance. Then they would beg by
the roadside, as already described. After a short hour’s pause, the
march was resumed, a second ten miles was painfully covered, and it was
almost dark when the halt for the night was reached, whether at an
_étape_ or _polu étape_.
There was little to choose between the _étapes_ and the _polu étapes_,
but the latter were smaller and the accommodation was consequently
worse. Both were stockaded enclosures, containing three or more long,
low, one-story buildings. One of these was the commanding officer’s
quarters, a second was for the soldiers of the escort, and the remaining
hut or huts formed the prison. Each was divided into two or three cells;
each was furnished with the usual plank sleeping platforms in a double
row, and a brick stove. The available space was much too small for the
prisoners passing through as these halting prisons were built for about
half the number. “All of these,” says an official report, “are not only
too small, but old and decayed and demand capital repairs.” The
governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Anuchin, reported confidentially in
1880, to the Czar, Alexander III, that all prisons he had visited,
including the _étapes_, were tumbled-down buildings in a lamentable
sanitary condition; that they were cold in winter and saturated with
miasma; that the prisons of the empire generally, with the exception of
the principal ones recently erected, were not remarkable for their good
qualities, but the Siberian prisons were particularly bad because they
were built quickly, with insufficient means, and almost wholly without
supervision of any kind. Only one architect had been employed and his
sphere of action was so wide that he paid only a rare visit to new works
in progress. The contractors departed from the original plans and evaded
conditions, so that the work was continually neglected. In the first
place the money was insufficient, after a portion of the government
appropriation had been stolen by fraudulent contractors and corrupt
officials, and the new _étapes_ were run up without stone foundations,
so that the walls soon “settled” and the buildings rapidly deteriorated
under climatic agencies and the injurious wear and tear of the constant
overcrowding. In temperate weather half the prisoners slept on the
ground in the outer courtyard, but when it was too inclement they filled
the _kameras_, lay about the corridors and packed themselves into the
garrets. Not the smallest care was taken to make places habitable. Dirt
accumulated everywhere; no provision had been made for ventilation, and
the windows would not even open. Occupation of quarters was a matter of
force, when the weakest went to the wall.
On arrival at an _étape_, generally in the afternoon, a halt was called
outside the palisade for roll-call, and then the great gates were thrown
open for the indiscriminate admission of the crowd. “With a wild, mad
rush and a furious clashing of chains, more than three hundred men made
a sudden break for the narrow gateway, struggled, fought and crowded
through it, and then burst into the _kameras_, in order to secure, by
preoccupation, places on the sleeping platforms,” says Kennan. Leo
Deutsch graphically describes this “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 and kicks and curses did not result in anything
serious.” The losers in the game took the worst places, or bartered for
a better bed with the more fortunate at the price of a few kopecks.
When the scramble for a night’s lodging ended, the tired wayfarers fell
to preparing their own suppers. Hot water for making tea was retailed by
the soldiers of the escort, and cooked food with coarse bread was bought
from the market women who came in to sell their wares. Sometimes they
did not appear and the convicts would almost starve, or the times were
hard and impossible prices were charged. The daily allowance issued by
the authorities was sometimes insufficient, and again the convicts went
short. Often enough the buyers cheated the sellers, or stole their
goods, and the poor women could get no redress. After supper, roll was
again called, the watch was set, sentries were posted, and the prisoners
were locked up and left for the night.
The _étape_ at Achinsk, for instance, between Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk, is
described by a newspaper of Irkutsk as “a _cloaca_ where human beings
perish like flies. Typhus fever, diphtheria and other epidemic diseases
prevail there constantly, and infect all who have the misfortune to get
into that awful place,” and a St. Petersburg newspaper says, “There one
doctor has on his hands more than three hundred sick.” A correspondent
wrote to a Tomsk journal, “As soon as you enter the court-yard of the
prison you notice the contaminated, miasmatic air.... Dante himself
would have thrown down his pen if he had been required to describe the
damp, cold, dilapidated cells of this prison. At night myriads of
bed-bugs torture every prisoner into a condition not far removed from
frenzy. The prison sometimes has six hundred inmates and to its filth
and disorder are attributable the typhus fever, diphtheria and other
diseases that spread from it, as from a pit of contagion, to the
population of the city.” In the Isham _étape_, the cold was intense and
the exiles arriving had no warm clothing. One man was frozen to death on
the road. At Cheremkhovsky the air space which was barely enough for two
persons had to serve for thirty. It was described by a prisoner as “a
grave and not a prison.” At Kirinsk, the building of decayed logs would
have fallen down had it not been shored up by other logs equally rotten.
A prisoner, to show the state of the wood, thrust his fingers out of
sight into the wall.
We have seen how the marching parties were accompanied by a large
contingent of sick who were unfit to travel and yet could not be left
behind, sometimes even at the point of death. They were compelled to sit
all day in a cramped position in the rude carts, intensifying the
already acute pains of their often mortal ailments, and were exposed to
all conditions of the weather. When dry and warm, they were enveloped in
clouds of dust, causing intolerable discomfort, especially in the case
of disease of the respiratory organs; when cold and inclement, still
worse dangers attended the exposure to snow and wintry winds. No change
into dry clothing on arrival was feasible, for with inconceivable
carelessness the baggage was allowed to become soaked through on the
road. The baggage carts were unprovided with cover even by tarpaulins.
Thus the sickly, in the worst stages of illness, were forced to lie down
upon the same platforms, side by side with the more robust, to whom they
quickly passed the contagion of their diseases. In the rare cases when
the _étape_ was provided with a lazaret, newcomers who were ill might
fare better, but the average _étape_ hospital was infamously bad.
The indictment against the Czar and his government for their brutal
defiance of the commonest rules of humanity has been more than
substantiated by the deplorable facts set forth in the previous pages.
It is agreeable to note some disposition to mend matters on the part of
the supreme authorities. Certain reforms in prison administration have
been introduced in recent years, showing that the autocrat of all the
Russias has not continued utterly indifferent to the sufferings of
Siberian exiles and convicts. Widespread radical changes have been
impossible; the evils were too deep seated and too extensive for general
removal; but one or two new prisons have been erected, more in accord
with the dictates of penitentiary science and aiming at partial
improvement. A brief account of one or two of these may serve to relieve
somewhat the gloomy picture which has been by no means over-coloured.
The Czars Alexander II and III could not plead ignorance of the horrible
conditions prevailing in Eastern Siberia which were brought unmistakably
to their notice by the reports of Anuchin in 1880 and 1882. Some of his
condemnatory remarks have already been quoted and may be repeated here
as summing up his final verdict. After minute inquiry and much
investigation, he characterises the Siberian prisons as follows: “The
exile system and penal servitude in Eastern Siberia are in the most
unsatisfactory state ... while the exile bureaus in the provinces are
not organised in a manner commensurate with the importance of the work
that they have to do and are prejudicial rather than useful to the
service.” The Czar Alexander III was so deeply impressed with the
necessity for reform that he endorsed on this report in his own
handwriting, “I should greatly like to do this and it seems to me
indispensable.” Events proved too strong however even for the autocrat
ruler of all the Russias. He says: “I have read this report with great
interest, and I am more than troubled by this melancholy but just
description of the government’s forgetfulness of a country so rich and
so necessary to Russia.” On the part dealing with prisons the Czar
endorsed the words, “A melancholy but not a new picture.” On a later
page I shall go further into the ameliorations and improvements
attempted since 1886.