SAGHALIEN
Failure of the scheme to utilise Saghalien as a convict
settlement—Testimony of an official on the terrible condition of the
exiles—Gambling and drunkenness universal—Prevalence of immorality—The
prisons hot beds of vice—No classification of the prisoners—Convicts
refuse to settle on the island as colonists at the expiration of their
sentence—Account of two assassinations at Alexandrovsk—Description of
the cemetery there—Female murderers on the island—Sophie Bluffstein,
called the “Golden Hand”—Her adventurous career of crime—Sent to
Saghalien as a political prisoner—Carried on criminal operations when
released—Recaptured and again confined—Finally released and settled on
the island until her death—The merchant of Alexandrovsk and his
unfaithful wife—The vagrants in Saghalien—Barratasvili—His capture and
death—Horrible story of the fate which befell the convict
road-makers—Politicals on Saghalien—Their terrible sufferings.
The day will come when Russia, like the rest of the world, will learn
that it cannot finally dispose of its worst elements by shooting them
down on some distant dust heap. Siberia will act in its own defence as
did Australia, and refuse to be forever the dumping ground for
criminals. The prosperous development of that vast and richly endowed
territory has been too long delayed and already a change is imminent.
Enterprise has been stimulated by the construction of the great
Trans-Siberian railway. As Siberia grows in wealth and importance it
will surely resent and repudiate the exile system, whether enforced by
the improved methods of railway travelling or facilitated by sea
communications.
The old idea of removal still obtains, although an effort has been made
to avoid the horrors of the prolonged pilgrimage on land, by
substituting the long sea voyage from Odessa, through the Suez canal and
the southern seas to far Saghalien. Banishment to that convict colony,
although half the island has passed to the victorious Japanese, will
still survive, despite its manifest failure.
After the experience of a quarter of a century, it may be most
unhesitatingly asserted that the net result of the deportation to
Saghalien has been most disappointing. Failure has met the Russian
government on every side. Transportation has fulfilled none of the aims
of penal legislation, has been neither reformatory nor deterrent, but
merely painful and punitive without any return in benefit to the colony.
The island has made no progress; its scanty natural resources have been
little utilised, and no return has been obtained from the cultivation of
the indifferent soil. At the best period, barely one-tenth of the
convicts qualifying for conditional freedom, and labouring to become
proprietors of farms with lands cleared and stocked with cattle, were of
any value in carrying on the work; of the remaining nine-tenths, half
had no heart in it, and the other half were frankly idlers and vagabonds
hanging about the settlements, looking for free rations, and when the
issue ceased, ranging the country as masterless men depending on theft
and depredation for their bare living.
The social atmosphere was vitiated, and noxious evil elements
predominated; general depravity had become almost universal. It was the
old story of Australian transportation, and the later experience of New
Caledonia. Once more, penal exile stands condemned as a secondary
punishment, showing the same absence of any redeeming or compensating
features in the improvement of these new lands or the amelioration of
the individual. The system must be still more barren of results in the
future, now that the southern half of the island—the part most
favourable to agriculture—has been surrendered to Japan as part of the
last war indemnity. This will seriously diminish the amount of land
available for the “exile settlers,” as they are called.
The efforts made to colonise have been feeble and fruitless. Convict
labourers were set to clear the forests and reclaim waste lands, but in
a desultory, half-hearted fashion, without skill or knowledge, and
wielding primitive instruments and imperfect tools. Much time was wasted
in covering long distances to draw rations, and depending upon the
administration for advances to provide seed and stock, both inadequate
in quantity and of very inferior quality. As a general rule, the
settlers were physically unfit for the work in hand; their health was
not robust; they soon aged and broke down under the rough conditions of
daily life. All were crushed with indebtedness to the government for
advances, and also to private usurers who supplied means for
self-indulgence. A fierce passion for gambling consumed them, and
drunkenness was universal. Vodka was smuggled in freely from Japan, and
numbers of illicit stills manufactured it secretly upon the island. One
of the principal officials spoke as follows of the deplorable state of
things:—
“Convict life on Saghalien is a frightful nightmare. It is a compound of
debauchery, insolence and bravado, mixed with real suffering from
hardship and privation, and tainted indelibly with crime and
corruption.” Children born on or brought to the island are educated in
the worst vices, and when still of tender years are already profligate
or depraved. Modesty does not exist; young girls of twelve and thirteen
are invariably seduced and abandoned to prostitution; men enter into the
civil marriage so as to profit by the immorality of their temporary
wives; many female convicts are retained in government hands, simply to
purvey concubines for the colonial officials. The unsavoury and
shameless relations of the sexes are among the principal reasons why
colonisation has absolutely failed. There is no virtue among the female
residents of Saghalien, whether they are “free” women who have come out
voluntarily to join husbands or parents, or those condemned to
deportation. The latter are in many respects better placed than the
former, for they receive government shelter and allowances in food.
The prisons on the island are hot-beds of vice; all classes of offenders
are herded together, with no system of classification but the one based
upon the length of sentence. An attempt has been made to separate the
uncondemned awaiting trial from the recidivist and hardened offender,
but the division is not carried far, and too often the association is
indiscriminate, and the wholly bad habitual criminals mix freely with
the less hardened wrongdoers, who are rapidly corrupted and debased by
their evil surroundings. The worst elements are concentrated in the
“testing” prison of Alexandrovsk, including those who have graduated and
grown gray in crime on the mainland. Prison discipline is generally
slack and ineffective, and from ill-judged economy the staff of warders
is too weak for supervision and control. The officers themselves are
often of inferior stamp, drunken, untrustworthy, overbearing, given to
“trafficking” with the prisoners, accepting bribes for the clandestine
introduction of strong drink, or to assist in escapes, quick to oppress
and misuse their charges.
Another impediment to colonisation is the noted and invincible dislike
to the place constantly present in the minds of the enforced colonists
or exiled class at large. No ex-convict would willingly remain on
Saghalien. When their terms of detention are ended, all want to turn
their backs on the island forever. Nothing would reconcile one to
continued residence, not even the acquisition of comparative wealth and
the possession of lands and herds, a house to shelter him, and domestic
ties. Anyone who can happily scrape together the necessary means hungers
to spend it in paying his passage home. He must possess his soul in
patience for a long time. Six years must be spent as an exile settler
after release from his prison probation; six more as a peasant, and then
only permission is granted to cross to the mainland, but never to return
to St. Petersburg or Moscow. Now and again a fugitive—and there is a
large percentage of escapes as we shall see—may reach home, but he is in
constant danger of rearrest. One political prisoner actually succeeded
in reaching the capital, but had the bad luck to meet in the streets of
St. Petersburg a gendarme officer who knew him. He was recognised and
sharply interrogated. “How did you manage to come so far, and what
brings you here?” asked the officer. “This brought me,” replied the
exile, as he promptly drew his revolver and shot his inconvenient
questioner down. Arrest followed immediately, and trial, with a fresh
sentence of fifteen years. Once more he was sent to Saghalien, where he
is still living as an exile settler with small hope of a second
enlargement.
There are occasional, but very rare, exceptions among ex-convicts who
elect to remain and settle down in the colony. Mr. Hawes tells us of
one, a Cossack from the Caucasus, probably an old insurgent, who, with
tireless industry, had made himself a home at the village of Uskovo on
the upper waters of river Tim, some fifty miles from Alexandrovsk. This
man with infinite labour had cleared enough of the primeval forest to
sow a respectable crop of corn, some 150 puds or upwards of 5,000
English pounds, which returned him a twelvefold crop. He was a careful
farmer, and sowed his seed with judgment, unlike most of the peasants
who scattered it at one place insufficiently and at another in excess.
Yet good harvests might be secured by steady industry, were the peasants
only willing to give agriculture a fair trial. Another similar case was
that of a free-command convict, whose wife had followed him out from
Europe. He was permitted to live with her outside the prison on
condition that he performed his allotted task of hard labour, which was
to haul tree trunks into Alexandrovsk to the number of one hundred and
twenty. He was energetic and thrifty, and by the aid of a loan from the
crown purchased a number of draught ponies to help him in hauling, by
which means he contrived to get a certain amount of spare time to work
on his own account. He had struck a new idea, inspired by the fact that
a steady traffic in oxen and ponies, bound to the town bazaar or market,
constantly passed his door. He established a sort of livery stable in a
little courtyard adjoining his cottage, where he provided shelter for
the cattle and sleeping places for the drovers on beds of hay. He soon
did a large business and prospered greatly.
Sometimes there was a sad slip between the cup and the lip. It is on
record that an exile settler by unremitting diligence had put by enough
to pay for his passage home at the expiration of his term of exile. On
his way to Alexandrovsk, he was resting on a bridge when another
villager of the free command came and seated himself alongside.
Suddenly, as they chatted pleasantly together, the newcomer knocked the
other senseless with a heavy blow on the head, and having rifled his
body, dropped it into the stream running below. He thus became possessed
of his victim’s pocket-book containing his money and the certificate of
the expiration of his sentence. Fate was adverse, however, and when he
proceeded to make use of his ill-gotten gains, the certificate was
recognised as the property of the deceased. Arrest and detention were
followed by full discovery of the crime and its punishment.
At Saghalien there was no security to life and property in the towns and
still less safety in the interior, which was ravaged and harassed by the
vagrant convicts, continually moving to and fro. Murder was committed
daringly and unblushingly on the smallest temptation, such as the
possession of even a small sum of money. When Mr. Hawes was at
Alexandrovsk, he met when on his way to church a couple of men just out
of hospital who had evidently been drinking. One of them reeled a little
in his walk and was manifestly drunk. Within a few hours this luckless
creature lay, a corpse, in the market place. He had been murdered by his
companion for the six or seven rubles he carried in his pocket. Three
days later, a man living near the market place imprudently sat near the
lamp at an open window, and was shot through it. Hawes describes the
cemetery he visited on a hill to the north of the town; it was filled
with wooden crosses, black, brown and green, clustering thickly, and
much the same epitaph was inscribed on all, “Here lies —— murdered ——
18—.” No mention was made of the assassin; that was quite unnecessary.
The victims were buried both singly and in groups of three, four or
five. The theatre of the crime was usually the market place or bazaar
near-by, where quarrels were frequent and weapons such as knives,
daggers and revolvers were constantly employed. Murderous assaults and
hand-to-hand fights were repeated almost daily, and the police seldom
took notice of the disturbance. Men were often pointed out in the open
road who had half a dozen or more murders to their credit. Mr. Hawes saw
one hovering near his hut who had slain eight victims, and it seemed
inexplicable that such a miscreant should be suffered to be still at
liberty. His immunity was due to his prompt escape into the _taiga_ or
wild, wooded interior. Convicts who did so might be captured some day,
but were seldom identified or there was insufficient evidence to secure
their conviction. The authorities, too, were generally callous when one
villain murdered another, philosophically saying, “After all the brutal
crowd has been well diminished by one.” Of course if an official was
murdered, more serious steps were taken to bring the offender to
justice. A Saghalien murderer was known to have committed the capital
offence nineteen times, and still evaded punishment.
Female murderers were plentiful enough on Saghalien, and one of the most
remarkable was a certain Sophie Bluffstein, commonly called the “Golden
Hand.” As a criminal, she had few equals among wrong-doers in any land.
She was a Jewess, who, as a girl of rare beauty, had married a man of
her own race, a financial agent, but she left him when his affairs
became entangled. She developed into a cosmopolitan adventuress who made
the capitals of Europe her stage, and was well known in London, Paris,
Vienna and St. Petersburg. Her business was to victimise tradesmen and
attract lovers over whom she gained extraordinary influence. Her frauds
were extensive and on the well-known lines. She lived in great style in
a smart house, in the most fashionable part of the city, and drove in
her carriage to the best shops where she made large purchases of jewelry
and valuables, for which, of course, she never paid. Her depredations
were on a colossal scale and she was “wanted” by the entire police of
Europe.
Sophie Bluffstein’s personal fascination was unrivalled. Her chief
charms were her wonderful eyes, which seemed to have had magnetic effect
upon her admirers and drew them irresistibly to her feet, tempting them
to commit any crime to secure her good graces. One of her greatest
triumphs was the beguilement of the governor of Smolensk, where she had
been arrested and incarcerated. Her influence over him was such that she
induced him to connive at her escape, to desert his wife and family, and
to accompany her in her flight. The connection was brief, and she
resumed her evil courses, until she was caught in a trap at a gay supper
party of young men, some of whom were terrorists, and which was broken
up by the police. Arrested as a political offender, she was sent to
Siberia, where in due course she escaped, was recaptured and deported to
Saghalien.
Here she renewed her criminal activity, and when released from prison to
enter the free command, she gathered round her a choice collection of
the worst characters, whom she employed as her tools in the crimes she
planned and had carried out. In one case, a merchant, carrying on his
person a large sum in rubles, was robbed and murdered. The money was so
cleverly buried by her that it has not yet been discovered. Her
operations were greatly aided by a ship her confederates had seized and
openly used as a pirate craft. To check her villainies, she was shut up
at last in the testing prison at Alexandrovsk and kept constantly
handcuffed. Yet she eventually regained her liberty, and after living
more peaceably for a time at Rikovsk, she was allowed to settle at
Vladivostok, where she kept an inn until her death.
That life was held cheap at Saghalien will be shown by the following
story. A merchant of Alexandrovsk had reason to suspect his wife, a
young and beautiful Tartar woman, of infidelity, and when he upbraided
her she ran off and left him. She was never seen again, and it came out
afterward that he had hired an assassin at the price of twenty-five
rubles to kill her, according to the provisions of the Mahometan law.
The assassin and his employer quarreled over the ghastly business, and
the latter simplified the matter by hiring a second assassin to murder
the first. But the second murder was not so successfully accomplished as
the first; the victim escaped; the merchant was arrested, and a witness
came forward to say she had seen him preparing a noose to hang his wife
on his own account. No arrest was made for some time, and even the
merchant was let out on bail.
Thefts and highway robbery were of constant occurrence, and burglaries
also, both of private houses and government stores. There was a large
floating population of desperadoes, which was continually recruited by
the fugitives from justice, prison-breakers and vagrants from the free
commands, and exile settlers who preferred depredation to industry. The
_brodyaga_ was a greater scourge in Saghalien than in Siberia, another
and a potential check to the development of the colony on account of the
terrorism exercised over the well-disposed settler, whom he robbed and
maltreated. They worked generally in organised gangs, armed with stolen
rifles which they readily used. The most dangerous gang was that of
which the chief and captain was the notorious Barratasvili, the Robin
Hood of the island, whose feats are still remembered.
Barratasvili came to Saghalien first as an exiled forger, and he passed
through his prison probation with an exemplary character. He was looked
upon as a mild and well-disposed man, quite amenable to discipline. When
he joined the free command, he became a domestic servant and continued
to be well-conducted until suddenly he ran off and escaped to
Nicholaevsk on the mainland. He was pursued, taken and brought back to
Saghalien, only to give his escort the slip and gain the recess of the
forest, where he all but died of starvation. By the murder of a merchant
on his way from Dui to Alexandrovsk carrying the price of a horse he had
lately sold, Barratasvili obtained funds and became the leader of the
band which soon began to ravage the district. He was like the typical
brigand, waging war with the rich but in sympathy with the poor, whom he
succoured instead of attacking. He was daring and unscrupulous in his
robberies, shooting “at sight” all who offered the slightest resistance.
As he became more and more reckless and his crimes multiplied, the hue
and cry was raised against him, and wide plans were laid to capture him,
all of which he successfully evaded, still boldly showing himself where
he was most “wanted.”
On one occasion at Alexandrovsk, a strong detachment of soldiers
searched the town, house by house, in the small hours of the morning,
bent upon taking him, but quite fruitlessly. Yet four hours after the
search had begun, he was seen by a friend in the neighbourhood passing
along the street with no more disguise than being muffled up in a
fur-lined coat. Again, he entered a store in the town and having posted
a sentry to keep watch, proceeded to ransack the place, emptying the
counter cases of their jewelry, the tills and the safes of their cash.
The recklessness of these thieves was so great that they entered the
town and had their photographs taken.
But the net was closing round Barratasvili. A combined effort was set on
foot to put an end to him and his gang. It was winter time when the end
came. Overcome with fatigue, he one day ventured off the road into the
forest close to a deserted saw-mill, and with his companions fell
asleep. An overseer, trudging along the road, noticed the tracks of his
skis, and they aroused his suspicions. Ordinary travellers do not leave
the road to plunge into the deep snow of the dense forest. He, too, was
tired, but he went back to Derbensk and secured the assistance of a
posse of soldiers. Following up the track, step by step, through the
forest, they came upon the long-sought robbers resting. The alarm was
given. Firing began on both sides. The leader of the gang was hit in the
left shoulder, but still continued to fire. The soldiers sought shelter
behind tree trunks. Barratasvili, in taking aim, exposed his head and in
so doing was shot in the forehead. Their leader killed, his companions
threw down their arms, were taken and beaten by the soldiers with the
butt ends of their muskets. In encounters of this kind, the soldiers,
furious at the loss of their comrades, treat their captives most
brutally, and in some cases the latter have died from injuries thus
received. Three of the four companions of Barratasvili were hanged at
the corners of the testing prison at Alexandrovsk. In theory, capital
punishment is supposed to have been abolished in Russia, but the
sentence is still passed by court-martial and the island of Saghalien in
under martial law. These _brodyagi_ were really strangled, not hanged. A
rope with a slip-knot was fixed round the neck of the culprit, the other
end being carried up and made taut to a crosspiece supported by two
upright poles. The convict stood on a box, which was kicked away from
under his feet, and strangulation often tardily ensued.
The _brodyagi_ had little hope of permanent evasion. Now and again a few
determined fugitives have seized a boat and attempted a passage across
the sea to the mainland. They might win through the dangers of the sea,
having evaded the native trackers, half savage men of the Gilyak tribe,
more ready to shoot down than to capture, and they might make good their
landing at Cape Muraviev or Pogob. But they must face starvation and
almost certain death from the terrible winter cold. The alternative is
voluntary surrender, with the certainty of flogging and a prolongation
of sentence. More frequently, the _brodyagi_ infest the _taiga_ and hang
about the sparse settlements on the chance of plunder, or, if in any
numbers, combine for a descent upon the villages. In one year, 1896,
nine convicts who had escaped from the Alexandrovsk prisons at various
times joined forces in the Timovsk district and gave a great deal of
trouble. They were pursued by strong parties of soldiers, but often
turned to show fight, having become possessed of firearms. Eventually
they were captured, the survivors of the gang ending as usual upon the
gallows.
When they are Chinese—and in Manchuria, the Russians hunt them down and
shoot as many as they can at sight—those wounded and taken alive are
decapitated and their heads hung by the way-side, but no real attempt
has been made to rid Siberia and Saghalien of this great pest and
danger.
Statistics are not helpful, as so few arrests are made, and so few
crimes discovered. Garroting is the chief device of the footpad. With a
short stick and a noose of twine, he approaches his victim from the
rear, slips the cord over his head and strangles the man, woman or
child, who is unable to utter a cry; then he strips from the body
everything likely to lead to its identification, and decamps. If there
is an accomplice, he blocks the stranger’s advance or engages his
attention at the correct moment. Nor is there perfect safety in numbers.
“Whilst at Khabarovsk,” says a recent traveller, “I paid a visit to one
of the lone pioneers of Anglo-Saxondom in that far-off land. There,
within a stone’s throw of the governor-general’s house, three citizens
were attacked within five minutes of our passing. Their assailants got
away, but all three of the merchants succumbed to their injuries. At
Blagoveschensk, in broad daylight, between two and three o’clock in the
afternoon, and quite close to the main hotel and high street, I heard a
series of revolver shots, and turning, saw a man leisurely reloading his
revolver. His victim, a woman in this case, never uttered a cry, merely
fell. The street was almost deserted, and the people who heard and saw
took very little notice, but with the aid of a passing soldier, we
arrested that man, and in the rough and ready lock-up to which he was
taken were electric lights and telephone. In a few minutes the district
superintendent was summoned, but we were scarcely thanked for our part,
and we were told that our action was not Siberian, and that the affair
was none of ours.
“From Cheliobinsk to Vladivostok crime is equally common. In the latter
place, I was told that after each pay-day at the naval fitting yard men
were missing and never returned. On one occasion thirty disappeared, and
ordinarily eight or ten bodies are found within a few days, stripped of
every shred of clothing, their tattooed marks gashed over and the
features hacked so that they could not be recognised. Russians suffer
more than the Chinese, and Russians are usually the aggressors.
Policemen are too few and too wary. Unless the street be crowded, men
may shout loud and long before any will venture to their assistance.”
The suburbs and villages in Siberia, says the same authority, suffer
from the vagrant bands who raid settlements and houses, exacting all
they dare and often not falling short of other crimes. They are the
fugitives from justice, escaped criminals, the reckless and daring
convicts who have eluded their prison guards. They have nothing but what
they have stolen, a wooden staff and a short length of leather or twine.
Whoever gets into their power has a short shrift and theirs is not
longer if they are captured in the act or traced. For entering and
robbing a church in Vladivostok, some were hanged, for in Siberia the
death penalty is not in abeyance as in Russia. In Siberia—and in Russia
too—lynch law is common among the peaceable, industrious, well-to-do
peasants as it is also among the half Russianised natives. One method of
dealing with cattle thieves is to bend down two straight young birch
trees, tie the hands of the robber to one and his feet to the other,
then release the trees and hurry away.
Later records describe the extraordinary career of a convict, Nagorny by
name, who is said to have escaped seven times from Saghalien, his last
having been effected while he was chained to a wheelbarrow. This man had
been guilty of more than fifty murders and several hundred robberies,
many of these having been perpetrated in the disguise of a gendarme,
when he entered the houses of his victims under the pretext of making an
official search. He was tall, strongly built and had a ruffianly
expression. When he was arrested, Nagorny pointed a loaded revolver at
his custodian, but the lock of the weapon proved damaged and it was
useless.
A hideous story is preserved in Saghalien of a tragic event that
occurred in the summer of 1892, when a party of a hundred convicts were
sent from Alexandrovsk to make a road through the _taiga_ to Rikovsk. It
was a terrible task; the road followed the course of the Boroni River,
in a wide and swampy valley, rendered impassable by unexpected heavy
rains, which cut the workmen off from their base of supplies. Great
numbers of the gang perished from starvation, dysentery and fevers.
Three of them, maddened by their privations, escaped into the _taiga_,
and when pursued, wandered further and further into the primeval forest.
It was strongly suspected, but never proved, that one of the three was
killed and eaten by his two comrades, for one of them when caught was
found to be carrying a human bone in his pouch, but his mind was
unhinged and he could give no coherent account of what happened. He was
treated as a lunatic, and his insanity saved him from punishment, but he
was ever afterward known as “Vasiliv the Cannibal.” The other fugitive,
Kalenik, was sentenced to ninety-nine strokes of the plet, which killed
him.
Political exiles have been deported to Saghalien, but not in any great
number. They were among the earliest convicts transported by sea, and it
is worth noting that the Russian government in 1888 was anxious to make
no distinction between them and the common criminals. Mr. Kennan prints
a letter concerning some of them from M. Galkin Vrasski, the well-known
chief of prison administration, directing that no difference should be
made between them and the ordinary criminals. They were to be subjected
to the same discipline, but to be kept under stricter surveillance, if
anything, and were to be liable to more severe punishments inflicted on
Saghalien and in Siberia. Two, indeed, were flogged at Alexandrovsk,
after an unhappy collision with the prison authorities caused by the
neglect of one of them to raise his hat on meeting a subordinate
official. Their sufferings were, of course, greater owing to the
remoteness of their domicile and their savage surroundings. They were
naturally more in touch with the civilised world at Tobolsk, Tomsk and
Irkutsk, and were at a peculiar disadvantage on Saghalien, because of
the dearth of educated people among the exiled population. They were in
request for more cultured employment as schoolmasters, accountants or in
scientific labours. As a rule, they bore their expatriation and the
hardships of their daily life with equanimity, and were quiet and
well-conducted. Many of them had been victims of Russian despotism and
had suffered much in the Russian state prisons. One of them whom Mr.
Hawes met on Saghalien was a lady who had at one time belonged to a
secret society unknown to her husband. When Alexander II was
assassinated she fled the country. On returning later to Russia, she was
arrested on suspicion, but her identity could not be proved until her
husband was tricked into recognising her when they were suddenly brought
face to face. This lady was consigned to the fortress of Schlüsselburg,
and was so entirely lost sight of that her husband, presuming she was
dead, married again. Ten years later he heard that she was alive and had
been transported to Saghalien. Having somehow settled matters with his
second wife, he followed his first to the other end of the world and was
eventually allowed to settle with her at Vladivostok.
In spite of restrictions, hardships and almost intolerable conditions,
the political exile has been a distinct aid and valuable factor in the
settlement and development of Siberia, carrying with him ideals and
standards and a degree of intelligence far in advance of the native
Siberian settler and peasant. The infusion of such an element is all the
more needed because of the low average of intelligence of the great mass
of the convicts, many of whom become permanent residents of Siberia. Mr.
Henry Norman has said of the prisoners in the prison of Irkutsk, as he
found them: “Never has it been my lot, though I have visited prisons,
civilised and uncivilised, in many parts of the world, to see human
nature at such a low ebb.... From this point of view, Russian
criminology has a task unknown in countries where civilisation has
reached a higher average of development.” It is the criminal exile who
has been a bar to progress in Siberia, and with the cessation of the
transportation of this class of convicts, the future is brighter for the
great exile territory which is so rich in natural possibilities.
Siberia will no doubt become the granary of the world. Its millions of
fertile acres must ere long develop its great food producing qualities.
With its great stretches of prairie waiting for the plough, its huge
forests and magnificent waters, “it is evident that the Siberia of
convicts and prisoners is passing away and the Siberia of the reaping
machine, the gold drill, the timber yard, the booming, flourishing new
town is awakening into new life.”
The present condition of Russia is appalling. Centuries of autocratic
rule, backed by barbarous methods, such as have been set forth at some
length in the foregoing pages, have culminated now in a social upheaval
that threatens the collapse of a vast empire. The stability of the
government is wholly undermined; long continued, merciless repression
has failed; resistance to constituted authority becomes daily more
daring and embittered. The Czar and his bureaucracy are more and more
fiercely and systematically assailed, despite the increased reprisals of
despotic power and the temporary triumph of a reactionary policy.
Rulers, with their backs to the wall, plead these outrages are
imperative in self-defence. The malcontents, ever increasing in numbers
and violence, have openly determined to make government impossible and
that terrorism by bomb-throwing and assassination is the only argument
left. They will accept no compromise; they distrust all promises, and
move steadily on to social revolution. “We cannot call our souls our
own,” said a working man in Moscow to an English writer; “we cannot
discuss affairs of our country without risk of Siberia; we are taxed
down to the last kopeck; we are black-mailed by every petty official; we
have no freedom of the press; if anybody in authority does us wrong, we
have no redress ... we hate the bomb-throwing as much as you do. But it
is the only argument left to us.” This is characteristic of the spirit
animating the “great mass of lethargic ignorant Muscovites” goaded at
last to action and gaining hourly in strength and recklessness.
Meanwhile the government maintains the struggle. Its persistent answer
is to refuse reforms until order is restored, and it still finds
champions and supporters, especially in the so-called “Black Hundred,” a
powerful reactionary organisation based upon an unofficial union of the
Russian people.
An examination of any of the recent budgets for yearly expenses of this
huge empire will show a most astonishing percentage appropriated to the
maintenance of order,—the upkeep of the police and censorship of the
press,—and will furnish to the intelligent observer a reason for present
conditions, as well as a reason for admiring the fidelity of the
educated members of the lower classes to their ideal of liberty.
Transcriber’s Note
Spelling and punctuation, where printer or editorial errors were
obvious, has been corrected, as summarized here:
221.4 Bogo[lom/mol]etz Transposed.
267.8 and the number had been much larger not long Replaced.
before[,/.]
289.25 the fortress of Sch[l]üsselburg, Added.