_SIBERIAN PRISONS._
Old Finnish prisons.--Model Petersburg prison.--Officers.--Contraband
importations.--Russian prisons of six kinds.--Siberian
prisons of three kinds: their number, location, structure,
furniture.--Prisoners: their classification.--Kansk
statistics.--Method of trial.--Remands.--Exchanging names and
punishments.
The prisons of Russia occupy a position midway between the dungeons of
the Middle Ages and the modern cellular abodes for criminals of the
nineteenth century. A few of them, however, approach very near these
extremes on either side. With regard to Finland, it is hardly fair to
hold the Russian Government responsible for the condition of its prison
affairs, because, although the Emperor is Grand Duke of that country,
he allows these liege subjects to make their own laws. Nevertheless,
I can never forget the vividness with which my boyhood’s reading came
back to me or Robin Hood and the dungeons of Nottingham Castle, when I
first visited the old prisons of Åbo and Wiborg. The descent by steps
with candles to prisoners in the lower rooms, the dim light entering by
windows in walls ten feet thick, the clanking of chains, the like to
which I have seen in no other country except perhaps Mongolia--these
things spoke more eloquently than a visit to the former prison of Sir
Walter Raleigh, or even the unused Ratisbon chamber for the torture
of Protestant heretics; and that because these northern prisons
were inhabited by living men. The majority of the Finnish prisons,
however, and certainly all the new ones, are better than the two I
have mentioned; though, unless a change has taken place since 1876,
the Finns still have and use sets of irons nearly ten times the weight
of any others I have seen in Europe. To pass to the other extreme.
One sees in Petersburg a brand-new prison, which may be supposed to
represent the very beau ideal of what a house of detention ought to be.
It is only right to say, however, before going further, that the
condition of prisons and criminals in Russia is in a transitional
state. The authorities have seen the necessity for reforms for at least
20 years, and great pains have been taken that these reforms should
be made judiciously and effectively. Deputies have been sent to visit
the prisons of other countries and report thereon; a commission has
been appointed to receive the reports, to consider and debate, and
so thoroughly to “shed upon the question the light of science.” All
this has been done, and the reforms are yearly expected to take place,
pecuniary reasons alone delaying the change for the better. Meanwhile a
model prison has been built in the capital, and those who wish to see
what Russia _can_ do should visit this house of detention for persons
awaiting their trial. It is built in the shape of a right angle, having
two long corridors four storeys high. There are 285 separate cells
for men, 32 for women, others for confinement in common, as well as
places for associated and solitary exercise. Into cell No. 227 the
late Emperor once entered, of which they keep up the remembrance by
allowing no one to be confined therein. No expense appears to have
been spared in building the prison. The floors are of asphalte, and
the door of each cell is of solid oak. Within are iron bedsteads, made
to fold and hook up neatly against the wall. The tables and seats are
of sheet iron, with hinges; and, both within the cells and without,
every article and fitting of brass is rubbed to a high degree of
polish. The officers move about noiselessly in felt shoes, so that
they can unexpectedly and at any moment observe a prisoner through the
wire-covered inspection-holes. In the infirmary are 10 cells for those
who are to be kept apart, and 32 beds for those who live in common.
There is likewise a room in which 40 men may mingle by day, and a
general sleeping apartment with 36 bedsteads, across each of which wire
is stretched, making for the prisoner a hard but clean, and, I should
imagine, not uncomfortable bed. There is also a room for bookbinding,
where a few can work.
The building contains three places of worship, for Russians, Roman
Catholics, and Protestants respectively, the Russian having a very
handsome _ikonostasis_ and chandelier; and I was pleased to find that,
if a man can read, he has always a New Testament in his cell, and
further that, by asking, he can obtain from the library other books in
addition. This is as it should be.
In the female division we found for warders superior-looking young
women dressed in uniform, the insignia of office on their collars
being a pair of crossed keys. Some of the women prisoners, as with the
men, are placed together in common, and in some cases they have their
choice of solitary or social life. This is true in a sense other than
that which first appears; for one lady prisoner, a criminal condemned
to Siberia, was about to take to herself a husband before proceeding
thither, and the happy event was to be celebrated in the prison on the
morning after my visit. Peeping through the food aperture of one of the
doors was the face of a pretty young woman, a political prisoner, in
whose possession had been found suspicious books. There was a women’s
reception-room, having a bath warmed by gas; but as it was found to
cost about five shillings to heat, it is not surprising that this
particular bath is seldom used.
Dark cells were shown to us, in which a prisoner may not be put for
more than six successive days. The place where prisoners were allowed
to converse with their friends was dark, which is not usual; and I
observed in it no place for an officer to sit between the parties
whilst they were speaking.
The attempts of the authorities to keep the prisoners from intercourse
with one another, and with the outer world, do not yet appear to be
perfectly successful.
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The Polish prisoners in Warsaw, according to M. Andreoli, had a plan by
which they could pass news in a couple of hours to all the prisoners in
the fortress. A square was divided into 25 spaces for the 25 letters
of the Polish alphabet. One knock was understood to mean A, two knocks
B, and so on; or, again, these signals might be changed by one knock,
signifying V, and so forth; this dumb speech being kept up by tapping
on the walls. This, however, is only one method.
In the chapel of the model prison at Petersburg are 24 boxes for
prisoners whom they wish to keep from holding communication with each
other, even by a look. But the partitions which separate them are only
of wood, and I observed that those I entered had been furtively bored
with small holes, through which conversation could be held. Again,
the prisoners are allowed to receive food from their friends outside,
and, although it is first examined by the officials, the friends
manage sometimes to introduce for the prisoners some strange culinary
concoctions. There were brought to a man, for instance, one day 230
roubles in a basin of buttermilk. Again, another man was frequently
found the worse for drink in his cell. Milk was regularly brought to
him, and duly tasted by the authorities; but still the man got drunk.
At last they discovered that the jug in which the milk was brought
had a false bottom with an aperture in the handle, and so the mystery
was solved. What will not topers do to procure drink? On arriving at
Werchne Udinsk, we heard that a drunken woman had just been detected in
trying to smuggle spirits into the prison in a pig’s entrails!
I saw quite a collection of contraband articles at Petersburg, which
had been found in the possession of prisoners. Among them were
knives (one ingeniously made from a steel pen), playing cards, and
dominoes--all of them of original and unique, if not of artistic,
character; also a file, for which a prisoner had given a warder 50
shillings. The man, too, had made busy use of his purchase. He set his
mind upon breaking loose, and thought to file through a bar of iron an
inch or more thick that confined him. But he could do his work only
during the time that the warders were at dinner and at supper, and
then not too loudly, giving 200 strokes of the file at dinner and 100
at supper time. He went on thus for three months, and then managed to
break the iron. But he was detected, and condemned to Siberia, whither
he had already been sent before, and whence he had managed to escape.
There he has probably by this time found less costly and well-built
prisons from which to break loose.
Before speaking, however, of the prisons of Siberia, it may be well to
observe that in European Russia there are at least six various kinds of
prisons. There is, first, the fortress--such as that at Schlüsselburg,
in which it is generally supposed are confined grave offenders,
especially the political and revolutionary. I have not visited one
of these. Next there are military prisons, in which severity of
discipline is said to be similar to that of the fortress. Then there
are hard-labour prisons, in which long-term convicts work out their
sentences. There are also houses of correction, where short-term
prisoners do the same; likewise houses of detention, in which persons
are kept awaiting their trial. I heard also of “houses of industry,”
which, unless I am mistaken, are somewhat like our reformatories;
and, lastly, there are buildings in which prisoners on their march to
distant places stay temporarily--some only for a few days, others for
weeks. These nice distinctions, however, can be drawn only in large
towns in European Russia. In Siberia, especially in small towns, the
same building serves for all classes of prisoners, the best arrangement
practicable being made for special cases. Speaking generally, and
from my own observation rather than from accurate information upon
the subject, there appeared to me to be in Siberia three classes of
buildings which the English would call by the general name of prisons.
There is, first, the _étape_, in which exiles on the march rest for
a night or two; next, the _perisylnie_ prison, in which, for various
reasons, exiles may have to wait--it may be during the winter, or
until the ice be broken up on the rivers; and, thirdly, the _ostrog_,
which means a stronghold, and is a prison in general, where a man may
be simply confined, work at a trade, or eat and sleep after working
outside in the fields or mines. I have no statistics of the total
number of prisons of all sorts in Siberia, but suppose it cannot be
less than 300, which may be roughly computed thus: Nikolaefsk is more
than 9,000 versts from Tiumen, and, supposing that convicts walk 30
versts a day, they would require 300 resting-places for that route
alone. Some parts of the way, it is true, are traversed in summer
by river communication; but no notice has been taken in my estimate
of off-lying routes north and south, as, for instance, to Yakutsk,
Barnaul, etc. The expenses, therefore, of building and keeping in
repair this vast number of prisons must be very considerable.
As to the location of the prisons. The _étapes_ are found all along
the road from Tiumen to the Amur. There will also be found a prison or
lock-up in most of the principal towns. But of the larger buildings
there is one at Tiumen for the reception of all the ordinary exiles
as they come from Russia, and from which, as already stated, they are
distributed over Siberia. At Tobolsk are three hard-labour prisons,
with about 1,000 convicts, in which prisoners often spend part of
their terms before going further east. The next building of similar
dimensions is called the Alexandreffsky central prison, about 50 miles
from Irkutsk, where are some 1,500 hard-labour convicts. Continuing
east, there were formerly some large hard-labour prisons at Chita and
Nertchinsk, tidings from which, in years gone by, have caused many
an ear to tingle; but since the Russians have gained the Amur, and
many of the mines have passed from Government into private hands, the
great bulk of the convicts have been sent further east. At Kara, on
the Shilka, for instance, is a large penal colony, where there are
upwards of 2,000 convicts living in and about six prisons, the men
being supposed to work in the gold-mines. After Kara, the next large
colony is on the island of Sakhalin, which represents the utmost bound
of Russian penal life. I have said nothing of the prisons in the
provinces of Akmolinsk and Semipolatinsk, as I did not go there. There
is or was a large prison at Omsk, through which exiles used formerly
to pass; but, now their route has been changed, it serves only for
local purposes. They have no prisons in these provinces, I believe, of
considerable dimensions.
Some of the larger prisons in Siberia, especially those of stone, were
not originally built for their present purpose. There are certain
features, however, about the others which are more or less common to
all. The Siberian prison, like the houses of the Siberian people, is
usually built of logs calked with moss to keep out the cold. Near
the principal building, but generally detached, are the kitchen, the
bath-house, exercise-yard, stores for provisions, out-houses, etc., and
enclosing the whole is a high palisade of wooden poles pointed at the
top. From the fact that almost all the new prisons of Europe are built
upon the cellular plan, the detained being kept solitary, it appears
to have been recognised as a principle that the old method of herding
prisoners together is a bad one. The same principle would seem to have
been adopted also by Russia, in that the plan of the new house of
detention in the capital is in the main cellular. In Siberia, however,
the old plan continues, and usually the prisons inside are divided into
large rooms or wards, in each of which the principal feature is an
inclined wooden plane, resembling that of a guard-room bed, upon which
the prisoners sit and lounge by day, and sleep by night. If the room be
square, this divan or platform is placed against three of the walls,
or, if it be oblong, there may be a passage up the centre, from which
the sleeping places ascend to the walls on either side; or, lastly,
if the room be very large, there are two platforms meeting like a low
gable in the centre of the room, and two others against the walls. Thus
space is economised, and as many as 40 or 50 men (once I found 100) are
packed in a room. There are usually a few separate cells for political
or special offenders, and one or two for punishment.
Connected with the large prisons are usually a hospital, one or more
chapels, sometimes a school-room, and a few workshops.
The large rooms or wards have little or no furniture. Each is provided
with an _ikon_, or sacred picture, and sometimes with a shelf on which
the inmates may put their spoons, combs, and other table and toilet
requisites with which they provide themselves.
Concerning the prisoners, it has been already intimated that those
belonging to the upper classes are kept apart. There is a further
classification in some of the large prisons according to the crimes
committed: a room for murderers; a second for forgers and utterers
of base money; a third for thieves, and generally two or three for
“vagabonds”--that is, not merely for vagrants in the English sense of
the word, but generally for persons who have run away from supervision,
who have no papers, and can give no good account of themselves.[1]
The number of persons in Siberian prisons awaiting their trial, or the
confirmation of their sentences, is very considerable. This leads me
to speak of the courts, the judges, and their mode of trial. Since
November 20th, 1860, law reforms were begun in Petersburg, Moscow, and
Odessa, with their respective districts; and the new method of trial
resembles that of England, with a mixture of certain French elements
and some local introductions from Russia. Under the new _régime_ in
European Russia there are three courts, namely: those of the Judge of
the Peace; the Assizes; and the Senate. A Judge of the Peace tries
civil cases involving interests up to £50, and criminal cases involving
a year’s punishment or less. Appeal from his decision may be made to
a periodical meeting of Judges of the Peace for the district. At the
court of Assizes, which consists of from three to nine persons with
a president, trial is made by jury. The names of persons liable to
serve are put into an urn, from which 36 are drawn by lot. From these
the procureur, who is the public prosecutor, may, without assigning
any reason, strike off eight, and likewise the prisoner’s advocate a
greater number, bringing them down to 14. Then, if this jury decide
that the prisoner be guilty, the opinion is asked of both procureur and
advocate as to what punishment, according to the code, in their opinion
should be inflicted; after which the president gives the decision of
the court. The Senate is simply a court of appeal--does not re-try
cases, but merely judges whether or not in the lower court the law has
been rightly administered.
Trial by jury is not yet introduced into Siberia, but offenders are
judged by a tribunal consisting of odd numbers, of not more than
seven nor less than three. The tribunal is a standing institution,
the members of which are paid according to their grade--from about
£70 to £100 a year. A procureur (who is an officer of the Government)
prosecutes; and a barrister, retained by the prisoner, defends.
Witnesses are called on both sides, and the tribunal decides by a
majority of votes whether the prisoner be guilty or not. In case of
even numbers being present, or of equal voting, the president has a
vote and a half; but should the president be absent, and there be an
even number for and against the prisoner, then the defendant in this
and all similar cases has the benefit of the doubt. Should a verdict
of guilty be returned, the tribunal decides the punishment according
to the regulation of the code. In capital or important cases, however,
in Siberia, such as murder, the judgment of the tribunal must be
confirmed by the Governor-General; and hence, when the vastness of the
country is considered, it will be seen why prisoners sometimes wait so
long uncondemned. Suppose, for instance, a man commits a murder in a
place which happens to be at a distance from the town where a tribunal
sits. Some one goes to the authorities, deposes that a murder has been
committed, gives evidence in writing, and the culprit is arrested. If
the culprit can find bail he may remain free till wanted (in Russia it
is enough for this purpose to deposit, as a guarantee of returning,
a certain sum of money); but if unable to find bail he must go to
prison till he can be sent, suppose, to Nikolaefsk. If it be winter,
it would be too costly--the Amur being frozen--to send him by horses;
he must therefore wait till the following June for the opening of the
navigation. Then, having proceeded to Nikolaefsk, he is tried, perhaps
within a week, found guilty, and his punishment determined, after
which it is necessary that the papers concerning his case be sent to
the Governor-General at Irkutsk, a distance, there and back, of 5,000
miles; and so the prisoner must wait till his sentence is confirmed.
Meanwhile he is supplied with a paper, which is, I presume, his ticket
of indictment.[2]
Whether, when the case is fully ended, the prisoner keeps this or a
similar paper, I am not quite sure. I am under the impression that he
does, at all events whilst he is on the road to his destination; and,
further, that these papers serve as capital on which the prisoners
exercise their ingenuity for their mutual convenience. I mean in this
fashion: Ivan Nepomnoostchi has a ticket condemning him to five years’
labour in the coal-mines of Sakhalin, whilst the ticket of Augustus
Poniatowski condemns him for a similar time to the gold-mines of Kara.
For reasons best known to themselves, the one prefers country life
and a cottage or prison near a wood, whilst the other inclines to a
residence at the sea-side. So they change their tickets, their names,
and, as far as they can, their beings, and sometimes manage in this way
to effect what they wish. I have even heard of prisoners inducing those
who are free to exchange places with them, the bargain being effected
of course by money, and carried out whilst a gang of several hundreds
is marching on to a steamer, for instance, where heads are counted,
but where they cannot recognize faces. Goryantchikoff represents
the “changing of names” as taking place in the presence of prisoner
witnesses, and when several of the party are more or less intoxicated,
the price given being sometimes as much as 30 or 40 roubles. All are
bound to secrecy by esoteric law, and as the man receiving the money
generally spends it quickly in drink and so cannot restore it, he not
infrequently finds, when too late, that he has sold his liberty, or
exchanged a lighter to receive a heavier punishment for a few glasses
of brandy. This is dangerous work, however, for at some of the jails
they take down a full description of the prisoners, though they do
not usually photograph them, as in England. At Alexandreffsky, for
instance, they have a large book, the pages of which are filled with
columns headed as follows:--Name, age, crime, and punishment; from
whence; appearance; term of punishment; arrival; single or married;
religion; date of sentence; from what prison in Russia; remarks, etc.
I am not sure that I have given all the process by which they manage
the transfer of tickets, but what is written may perhaps render
intelligible the crime charged upon a roomful of prisoners at Irkutsk,
who, we were told, had been “changing their names.”
The present state of things, however, as regards prisons and exiles,
must, as already stated, be regarded as temporary, since the reforms
of 1860 have been now extended as far as the Urals, and it is only a
question of money when they shall be spread to Siberia also.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Some statistics with which we were favoured from Kansk for the
previous year, 1878, give interesting facts, showing the ages of
criminals when they committed their crimes, their education, condition
as to marriage, religion, place of birth, and also their repetition of
crimes. It should be borne in mind, however, that the figures refer
only to a small district of Eastern Siberia, an _okrug_ or circle, 200
miles in diameter, and with a population of 40,000. They are therefore
primarily of local value, though in their general aspects they are
highly suggestive. The number of criminals was 121 male and 61 female:
in all, 182. Of these there were 31 from 17 to 21 years of age; 83 from
21 to 33; 45 from 38 to 45; and 33 from 45 to 70. The figures, too,
show curiously enough that up to the age of 33 the proportion of male
criminals is largely in excess of the females, but that after that
age this order is reversed, and the proportion of female prisoners
preponderates over that of the males. Of the entire number, 182, not
one is marked “well educated,” only 46 could read and write, and 136
could do neither; 129 out of 182 were married, leaving 53 widows,
bachelors, and spinsters. With respect to religious profession, they
were classified thus: 112 were orthodox Russians, and 19 of other
Christian denominations; 34 were Jews, and 17 of other non-Christian
religions: 180 were born in the province; 22 had offended twice, and 3
had done so thrice.
[2] The following is a translation of such a paper, which is divided
into six columns, with a printed heading to each, and filled up as
follows:--
1. Surname, patronym, Christian name, and occupation of prisoner.
(_Gregory, son of Nicholas M----, a peasant._)
2. Age. (39.)
3. Crime. (_Wrong passport._)
4. When and by whose order imprisoned. (_On 9 April. Tomsk district
police._)
5. When the case was tried and how it stands. (_Terminated on 4 May,
1879. Now under revision._)
6. Remarks. (_He begs it may be quickly ended._)