_THE CONVICT MINES OF KARA._
Gold-mines not underground.--Hours of labour.--Visit to a
mine.--Punishments.--Branding abolished.--Miners marching
off.--Statistics respecting runaways.--Women criminals at
mines.--A new building for expected politicals.--Superannuated
forçats.--The hospitals.--“Birching” and its effects.--Kara in
1859.--Improvements effected by Colonel Kononovitch.--A children’s
home.--Return to the gold-mine.--Comparison of Siberian and
English convicts.--Distribution of books.
As I had visited the mine of the Archangel Gabriel near Krasnoiarsk, I
was in some measure prepared what to expect in the gold-mines of Kara.
It was not easy, however, to get rid of a preconceived notion attaching
to Siberian mines, that the convicts _must_ be working underground, for
I had entered the country with ideas such as those expressed by the
author of “The Russians of To-day.”[1]
But now that I have been to the convict gold-mines, I have, happily, no
such horrors to relate. All the gold-mining is done aboveground. The
season begins on the 15th February, and ends on the 15th November,
and they work 13 hours a day, excepting certain hours for refreshment
and rest. I suppose, however, both the length of the season and of
their daily labour must be to some extent modified by the rigour of the
frost and the duration of the light. During the three winter months the
ground is frozen, and they are mostly unemployed.
The visiting of the mine at Kara was far from pleasant. It was like
walking into a large gravel-pit, from 20 to 30 feet deep. In this
pit 198 men were at work, some removing the roots, stones, and
surface-earth, and others carting off the gold-bearing sand to the
washing machine. The miners were surrounded with a cordon of armed
sentries, as at Portland prison. A large number of the convicts
had irons on their legs; this, however, was something special to a
particular prison, and was inflicted for two months as a punishment for
aiding and abetting the escape of four comrades.[2]
A certain measure of earth was allotted to the men as each day’s
labour. A released Pole, who had been at Kara, though he did not work
in the mines, told me it was a 7-feet cube to three men. This he
allowed to be less than the quantity worked by free labourers. He said
these latter had the help of horses and were better fed, but there were
70 horses in the mine I visited at Kara, and the reader may judge, from
what has been said, whether or not the miners’ food was sufficient. So
far, therefore, the Siberian convicts at Kara did not appear to be
worked harder than--I should think not so hard as--our own at Portland.
I asked what was done to them if they did not fulfil their tasks, and
was told that they were punished first by privation, and, if that
did not suffice, by corporal chastisement with rods. Kara, I heard
subsequently, is one of three places in Siberia where the _troichatka_
or “plète” is in use. The colonel described it as a whip with three
ends, of which, for serious offences, any number up to 20 stripes might
be given; but, he said, he rarely used it, cases of insubordination
being usually met by seclusion, irons, less food, or delay of removal
to a higher class, which last might mean, in some cases, the virtual
prolongation of a sentence for a couple of years.
The branding of prisoners is no longer practised. There were two or
three veterans at Kara, one of whom, at my request, was brought to
me, and whose cheeks and forehead were marked with the letters K A T,
an abbreviation of _Katorjnik_, a convict. This man had been marked
in 1863, and the letters presented a tattooed appearance, though the
operation of tattooing must be the more severe, since it is slowly done
by hand, whereas, in the case of the prisoners, the brand was done by
a kind of cupping instrument, or stamp, furnished with small points,
which, on being tapped, pierced the skin. A liquid was then rubbed on,
and so the convict was tattooed for life. I just missed seeing one of
these instruments at Nikolaefsk, where it had been recently sold as a
curiosity.
It was late in the afternoon when we reached the mine at Kara; and
by the time we had looked round, and gone among the miners, the hour
arrived for leaving off work; the drum sounded, and the convicts
formed in line, some of them shouldering tools, and what looked like
stretchers for carrying loads of earth between two bearers. Their heavy
tools were put in carts to be drawn by horses, and all marched under
guard to their prison, five miles off. This walk, therefore, to and fro
must in this instance be added to their day’s labour; but I noticed
that, when the convicts walked out of the mine, the free labourers
continued working, and did so for some hours afterwards.
Before the miners started, their numbers were called, for prisoners
sometimes attempt to remain in the mine all night for the purpose, it
may be, of washing earth secretly to secure a little gold, or, more
frequently, with a view to escape. If it be spring-time, a runaway may
succeed, during the summer, in getting a long way off, and, as winter
comes on, give himself up, be imprisoned as a vagrant or vagabond,
and, the following spring, be fortunate enough, perchance, to make
his escape again, and so get towards Europe. Sometimes they manage to
obtain forged passports, and travel as free men. At other times the
escaped gather in bands, and roam about the country. It is, in fact,
by no means uncommon to meet escaped prisoners on the roads, but they
are not spoken of as malicious. They are not like banditti. They will
sometimes steal a chest of tea from the hindmost vehicle of a caravan,
or, indeed, run off with horse, cart, and all; but they do not usually
attack travellers. The runaways beg food of the peasantry, who, of
course, by law, ought not to aid them; so they compromise matters
by placing food on their window-sills at night, ostensibly with the
charitable purpose of helping passers-by in distress. They thus avoid
conflict with the authorities, and do not anger the convicts, who might
otherwise do them mischief, especially by setting the house on fire.
The half-liberty given to convicts after a period of good behaviour
presents a loophole for escape, of which many hundreds avail
themselves.[3] These escaped convicts are known as “_Brodiagi_,” or
“roaming gentry.” They wander about, guided through the forests by
marks left by the natives and preceding runaways. There are some
places, it is said, where they can live without fear. M. Réclus goes so
far as to say that sometimes the authorities, in times of difficulty,
or when ordinary labourers fail, call in the help of “vagabonds,” with
the tacit understanding that they will not ask for their passports,
whereupon hundreds emerge from the surrounding forests and present
themselves for employment. I am not able to confirm this from my own
experience as regards the authorities, but I met with a private firm
who had in their employ several men without their “papers.”
When marched out of the Kara mine, those in the higher category are
free to go to their families. I saw, too, near the Cossack barracks, a
dwelling in course of erection for those who were living half-free, but
in which they were to sleep at night. Those in the lower category are
taken to their respective prisons, and may sleep, if they choose, in
summer from nine o’clock till five, and in winter from seven till seven.
I looked in at a prison, near the colonel’s house, just before the men
were going to rest. I do not remember that there were any lights, and
the place was gloomy enough; but I suspect that it must be more so
during the long nights of winter. At Tiumen I observed but one small
candlestick in a room for 65 prisoners,--light enough to make the
darkness visible. In this respect my testimony is of limited value, as
my visits were paid by day, but I can readily believe Goryantchikoff’s
dismal description of the foul air and gloom of a Siberian prison by
night. Whether the majority of prisoners, however, would wish for a
constant and plentiful supply of oxygen I am not sure. They certainly
do not provide for it in their own houses, any more than do some of the
poorer classes in England.
I have said nothing yet of the female prisoners at the mines of Kara.
Russian women look upon prison life from very different points of view.
I met a lady in Petersburg who visited the female wards in the prisons,
and she told me that on one occasion a woman, on being brought back to
her cell for the fourth or fifth time, found the arrangement of its
furniture altered, whereupon she asked that her bed might be put “in
the place where she always slept”; whilst another, a worthy old soul,
on entering her cell, turned to the ikon and thanked God that her old
age was so well provided for! This, of course, is very different from
the picture of Siberian female prison life represented in “The Russians
of To-day” (p. 230):--
“Women are employed in the mines as sifters, and get no better
treatment than the men. Polish ladies by the dozen have been sent
down to rot and die, while the St. Petersburg journals were declaring
that they were living as free colonists; and, more recently, ladies
connected with Nihilist conspiracies have been consigned to the mines
in pursuance of a sentence of hard labour.” I neither heard nor saw
anything of women labouring _in_ the mines, and one of my released
exile informants, from Nertchinsk, says that it is not true that women
work _in_ the mines in getting the mineral. At Kara there were 154
female prisoners to more than 2,000 men; and since the latter have
a clean shirt every week, it would seem likely that the women may
be employed in laundries and work-rooms, only that I am under the
impression the prisoners wash their own linen. Five out of every six
of the women convicts at Kara, dismal to relate, were murderesses,
and walking between 58 of them in their prison at Ust-Kara was not
pleasant. Some had babies, and most of the mothers had murdered their
husbands. Husband-murder seemed to me painfully frequent in Russia, for
which, in the fifteenth century, they had a barbarous punishment: the
murderess was buried alive up to the neck, and left to the hungry dogs!
Near this women’s department was a new cellular building of
wood, recently erected. I notice this particularly because of its
bearing upon the number of political exiles that are supposed to be
_imprisoned_ in Siberia. The spring of 1879, it will be remembered,
was a time of great excitement in Russia. An attempt was made upon the
life of the Tsar, the great cities of the empire were placed under
military command, and the journals talked of troops of prisoners being
sent off to Siberia. And this was true, only they were not troops of
_political_ prisoners. A telegram, however, was sent from Petersburg
to the telegraph office at Kara, enjoining the commandant to prepare
places for a certain number of prisoners about to be dispatched. But
the number prepared for was not very great after all, for, as far as I
remember, it did not exceed 20 or 30 at most; so that if the convoys of
29 prisoners, whom my interpreter met in returning, were all destined
for Kara, as he heard they were, then this small prison would be
filled, and it might, in a sense, be called “a State prison.” When,
therefore, in a previous chapter, I ventured to say there was, with one
exception, no prison in Siberia that could be called a political or
State prison, this was the exception in my mind.[4]
Of course I entered this little prison and looked at the cells. They
were ranged on either side of a roomy oblong space, in which were two
stoves. The chief fault I had to find with the cells was that they were
very small, and lighted, I think, only from the lobby within, the area
of each cell being certainly smaller than that of the cells in Coldbath
Fields, though I am not sure that they were smaller than those at
Portland, nor do I remember how they compared with ours for height. If,
therefore, the prisoners were to work by day, as do ours at Portland,
perhaps the cells at Kara were not too small. For my own part, I would
rather inhabit one of them in solitude by night than be turned in among
the motley crew of the larger prisons.
There were convicts at Ust-Kara, however, in a plight more pitiable
than those confined in the political cells, or who had to work in
the mines. I allude to the occupants of two or three wards in an old
weather-beaten, smoke-dried, low-pitched building, in which were
confined a number of old men, perhaps from 30 to 50 in number, who were
not ill in such sense as to be patients in the hospital, but who were
condemned to prison for life, or who, though too old to work, had not
served their time.
I do not remember any sight in Siberia that so touched me as this. To
see scores of able-bodied men pent up in wards with nothing to do was
bad, to hear the clanking of their chains was worse, though many of
them were burly fellows who could carry them well. More touching still
were the convoys of exiles with faithful and innocent women following
their husbands; but to see these old men thus waiting for death was
a most melancholy picture. The doctor inspects the convicts once a
month, and determines upon those who are past work, who, in the absence
of any specific disease, are then brought into these wards for the
remainder of their lives. To release them, the colonel pointed out,
would be no charity, because, being too old to work, and being out
of the near range of poor-houses or similar institutions, they would
simply starve. And thus they were left in confinement for a Higher
Power to set them free. They lounged in the prison and in the yard, and
some sat near a fire, though it was a sunny day in July. One old man
was pointed out who had attained to fourscore years, and another had
reached the age of ninety, and so on. The difficult breathing of one,
however, the wheezing lungs of a second, and the hacking cough of a
third, proclaimed in prophetic tones that their time was short; and one
wished them a softer pillow for a dying head than a convict’s shelf in
a prison ward. Their building was one of the oldest in the place, and
was doomed to be pulled down within a month.
There were two hospitals at Kara; one near the house of the commandant,
at Middle Kara, containing, at the time of my visit, 43 patients; and
the other at Ust-Kara, with 93 patients.[5] By the time the exiles
have reached Kara they have trudged nearly 1,000 miles, and have been
lodged, after leaving Moscow, in about 200 étapes and prisons. Many, of
course, die on the route, but I have no official statistics upon this
point. A released exile told me that, as far as he remembered, it was
in his day about 16 per cent. With the survivors the fatigue of the
march, together with deficiencies or irregularities of nourishment, and
the bad atmosphere in some of the prisons, often induces scorbutus or
scurvy. The colonel said that with bathing twice a day, and with good
food, they are soon cured; and, though many arrive sick in April, they
are commonly well before autumn. In winter they have fewer patients
generally, and commonly no cases of scorbutus at all.
We visited the hospital at Middle Kara on the Saturday afternoon. It
was a fine building, with large, lofty, and airy rooms, which were
clean, and decked with boughs of birch and coniferous trees, placed
in the corners, not merely for ornament, but with the idea that the
odour given off by them is salubrious. I saw the same thing on a large
scale in the prison hospital at Tomsk; and upon my asking in one of the
prisons at Ust-Kara why a large branch of cypress was placed there,
they said it was for the sake of the smell.
In the Siberian hospitals, at the head of every bed, was hung a board,
with the occupant’s name written in Russian, and the name of the
disease, written in Roman letters, in Latin; and as this was the only
part of the writing I could read, I used generally to run my eye over
the diseases in the wards. A remark made thereon caused the doctors
sometimes to ask if I had studied medicine, which unfortunately I had
not. Hence I was nonplussed at the word “costegcetis,” written over a
man’s bed, and of which I asked an explanation; whereupon I was told
that the man, who had been a ringleader in aiding the recent escape of
the runaways, had been birched with 100 stripes of the rod, and that
he was consequently in hospital for recovery. Whether the effects of
a birching are very serious I do not clearly make out, but I met at
least two cases in which the recipients of the rod made fun of it. One
was that of a servant in a house where I stayed. She was a convict, and
therefore liable, in case of misconduct, to be sent by her mistress to
the police to be birched, as in bygone days had been more than once
done with her; but she did not fear the switches, saying they would not
_kill_ her: “they did indeed make one a little sore, but that was of no
consequence!”
I saw only one suffering in this way at Kara; and the colonel told me,
as already stated, that though he rarely used the whip, yet that he
did not choose to be trifled with. It was manifest that he could not
maintain discipline among 2,000 convicts if he did, yet I met with
no prison official in Siberia who seemed so judiciously to line with
velvet the glove of steel as did Colonel Kononovitch. The whole place
bore about it marks of the superintendence of a man who conscientiously
acted from a high sense of duty.
I have already mentioned what an unenviable reputation Kara had in
former days. An old sea captain, with whom I stayed, told me he paid a
visit to Kara in 1859, when there were 2,000 men branded, and chained
to their barrows by night and by day. The overseer of the gold-mines,
a German, told him that he had shot four men who had killed others
when at work; and I have heard, since my return, that some of the
predecessors of Colonel Kononovitch were so cruel that the mention
of their names made convicts tremble. It is not, then, greatly to be
wondered at that this evil reputation has descended to later days.
But Colonel Kononovitch had effected great improvements. It has
already been pointed out that many of the Siberian prisons were old
and dilapidated, but that reforms were expected yearly to take place;
and, there being no money forthcoming, things were allowed to go on
as best they could. It was under this condition of affairs that the
colonel was appointed to Kara, with its crazy buildings, some of which
had been pulled down only a few days before my arrival. I saw one or
two that were yet standing. Of course he applied for funds to meet the
expenses of new buildings so urgently needed, but received only the
stock answer with a polite bow that there were insufficient funds, and
that they could not expend money on prisons whilst waiting for reforms;
whereupon the average Siberian official might have allowed things to
drift, but not so the colonel! The reforms he knew had been talked of
for 15 years, and he commenced a number of “economies,” by which, if
money were not forthcoming from one quarter, it might be obtained from
another.[6]
In this way he might quietly have pocketed £1,200 a year, and if in
Russian fashion he had handed round hush money, all might probably
have been smooth enough. But so did not the colonel, and he pointed
out some of the improvements he had been able to effect by these
economies.[7]
The subordinate officials at Kara are very scantily paid, the chief of
each prison receiving £70 a year, and his inferior officer £24. When
at Tomsk, we heard of prison officials still lower, under each of whom
were placed 30 prisoners, but who received only £6 a year and their
food and accommodation, which were similar to those of the prisoners.
It is not, therefore, greatly to be wondered at if these petty officers
are not above misappropriating some of the prisoners’ food, or taking
bribes. Colonel Kononovitch encouraged these men to engage in trade,
or to keep horses, in which case he employed them in carrying or other
ways, so long as they did not rob the prisoners.
But other substantial good was effected; for during the previous two
years and a half the colonel, chiefly, I understood, by his economies,
had erected no less than 18 buildings, for which the governor of the
province complimented him highly.[8]
The colonel, moreover, did not spend his savings wholly on prisoners,
or restrict his efforts to what might be strictly called his duty. He
exceeded that, and allowed his justice to enlarge into benevolence.
After seeing the hospital he took me to a children’s home which he had
built for boys whose fathers were in prison.[9]
The building was simple, but prettily situated within an enclosure,
where was the best kitchen-garden I had seen in Siberia. In a
green-house and a hot-house were growing melons, and I know not what.
These the colonel said he sold for the good of the concern, and the
money obtained for vegetables helped to pay the expenses of the
school. The schoolmaster was an exile, and had been, I suspect, of
good position from what I heard about him after I had left the place.
The children were assembled for me to see, and I was tempted to act
the schoolmaster and put to them some questions, but it was under
difficulties of a polyglot character; and by the time my ideas had
filtered twice through Russian, French, and English, the children’s
answers were not very clear. Everything looked clean and orderly,
and, what was better, there were about the place tokens of care and
sympathy. Behind the house was a natural shrubbery, enclosed from the
forest. In this a pavilion was erected, in which, from time to time,
the commandant brought his wife and family to drink tea with the
children, when the boys who had sisters in the colony might meet them,
and where the humanizing influence of kindness was allowed to flow
forth.
By the time we had seen the school the day was far spent, and I was
desirous to return to the mine to witness the final washing of the
sand. During the day there had been worked (I presume by convicts
and freemen together) 30 sajens, or, as they put it, 30,000 poods of
sand. The produce of the first half of the day had been taken out of
the machine; and after the convicts had left the mine, a few workmen
remained washing the sand, in which at length the gold was found
together with black dust of iron.[10]
The number of men who had stayed for the last of the washing was less
than a dozen, and there was a certain gravity manifested by the little
group as they took their places round the wooden apron on which was
pushed up and down the few handfuls of mineral that remained of 240
tons that had passed through the cylinder. Darkness came on, so that
they had to light torches of pine. There stood the colonel, looking
on with dignity. The Cossack, too, was there, with loaded rifle, to
protect the gold. The wooden scraper pushed away at the sand, and
then the brush, and there was left only the gold and iron, less than
half a pint. This was put in the miniature frying-pan, dried over an
extempore fire, and then placed in a tin can. It was given into my hand
that I might feel its weight, which I judged to be about a pound, and,
if so, worth £40. The can was then given to the Cossack, who mounted
his horse, and, accompanied by an escort, took it off to the treasury.
And thus ended the day. That the men who worked in the mines had no
easy task was plain, but it was equally plain that their labour,
as compared with that of an English navvy or convict, was nothing
extraordinary. The tread-wheel is unknown to them. Foreigners speak
with horror of Siberian punishments, to which, as a set-off, I may
mention that a Russian lady asked me, with a shudder, whether it could
possibly be true that in England we placed prisoners on a wheel, on
which, if they did not continue to step, it broke their legs! Comparing
Siberian convicts with English,[11] the Siberian has the advantage in
more food (which perhaps the climate may require), more intercourse
with his fellows, and far more permissions to receive visits from
his family. The Kara convict, when in the higher category, receives
besides 15 per cent. of what he earns for the Government; and even in
the lower category he is credited with the money, though its payment
is deferred till he mounts higher. Political prisoners also may write
to their friends; and though by strict right, I believe, criminals in
Siberia cannot do so, yet this rule is not carried out, or is as often
honoured in the breach as in the observance.
The following day was Sunday, and happened to be the colonel’s
name’s-day. This kept him at home for the morning to receive visitors.
A telegram came to felicitate him from Madame’s father, from
Ekaterineburg, a distance of 3,000 miles, taking 30 hours in transit.
As the visitors did not speak French, I was not introduced, and had a
comparatively quiet time to arrange and digest the information I had
received. Later, I unfolded to the colonel my plan of distributing the
Scriptures throughout Siberia. With this work he sympathized heartily,
and promised to do what I wished. He subsequently received a lion’s
share of the books, etc., I left with the governor of the province.
I gave him some for the children’s home, and afterwards sent him a
considerable number for his soldiers. All these reached Kara safely,
and I have since had the great satisfaction of hearing that they were
properly distributed throughout the colony. According to my latest
news, the colonel is said to have left Kara; and if this be so, I can
only hope that he has been replaced by as good a man.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] He says (p. 229): “They never see the light of day, but work and
sleep all the year round in the depths of the earth, extracting silver
or quicksilver under the eyes of taskmasters, who have orders not to
spare them. Iron gates guarded by sentries close the lodes, or streets,
at the bottom of the shafts, and the miners are railed off from one
another in gangs of twenty. They sleep within recesses hewn out of the
rock--very kennels--into which they must creep on all fours.”
[2] According to the law of 1857 (Article 569), it appears that irons
are worn during the time a prisoner is in the lowest category (or
during probation time), after which they are continued as follows: for
one condemned for life, 8 years: from 15 to 20 years, 4 years: from 12
to 15 years, 2 years: from 6 to 8 years, 18 months; and from 4 to 6
years, 12 months.
[3] The number of “forçats” who, living free, ran away from Kara and
escaped the control of the authorities for 15 years preceding my visit,
is as follows: 1864, 327; 1865, 448; 1866, 369; 1867, 402; 1868, 354;
1869, 266; 1870, 483; 1871, 326; 1872, 368; 1873, 585; 1874, 321; 1875,
242; 1876, 175; 1877, 256; 1878, 194.
Thus it will be seen that in 1869 there ran away a smaller number
than in any preceding year, namely, 266, whereas in the following
year, 1870, there ran away 483. This great difference was accounted
for by the fact that up to 1869 the prisoners were under the
“administration of the mines,” and when they were passed over to the
new administration of the Minister of the Interior, this at first gave
much dissatisfaction. Again, in 1873, the number of escapes rose to the
highest, namely, 585, during which year it appeared the quantity of
provisions was lessened; whilst, on the other hand, in 1875, the number
of escapes being so low, less than in any preceding year, namely,
175, was accounted for by there having been in that year a building
committee, which gave wages to certain of the convicts for their work.
Up to 1st July of the year of my visit, 155 had escaped.
[4] After leaving Kara I heard that the number of political prisoners
to be transported there was considerably augmented; but I have it
on good authority that even then the number expected did not exceed
60. The most recent information I have received, since the Emperor’s
assassination, goes on to say that as Nertchinsk was made the special
place of deportation for the Poles after 1863, so Kara has been made
the special place for Nihilists; but I have no official information to
that effect.
[5] This gave a sick-list of 136 to a population of upwards of 2,000
exiles and 1,000 Cossacks; besides, I suppose, the surrounding
peasants. The number of convicts who died in the Kara hospitals from
1872 was as follows:--
1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878
108 287 152 55 118 117 90,
and the number for 1879, up to the 1st July, was 65.
At Tiumen the number on the sick-list was 19 out of 1,113 prisoners
on the day of our visit. The number of sick prisoners, out of 20,711
passing through Tiumen in 1878, was 1,562, of whom 1,246 were cured,
280 died, and 44 remained in hospital.
[6] Thus the Government allowed him 4_s._ 6_d._ per sajen for 8,000
sajens of wood for fuel, which, instead of buying, he procured by
sending his unemployed miners into the forest to cut, giving them, to
their great satisfaction, a small payment, and effecting a saving of
1_s._ per sajen. A year’s economy, therefore, in wood brought him £400.
He found, too, by being his own timber-merchant, he could procure a
log from 20 ft. to 30 ft. long for 7½_d._, for which dealers would
have made him pay 2_s._ Then, again, the Government allowed him 7½_d._
per pood for 7,000 poods of hay, instead of buying which he sent his
prisoners into the neighbouring valleys to cut three times the normal
quantity. Part of this was for feeding the horses he had already, and
the rest for feeding others he added in order that he might be his own
carrier, and so save the contract for carriage.
[7] He paid each of the convicts, as perquisites, 4_d._ per sajen
for the wood they cut, increased their allowance, and if, at the end
of a job, all had gone well, he gave them each 1½_d._ a day extra.
This helped the poor fellows to get sundry little extras, especially
tobacco, which was encouraged; for the colonel, though he did not smoke
himself, yet had imbibed the notion that it was good for the health of
the prisoners.
[8] I understood at the time that these buildings had been erected
entirely out of savings; but I have since been told that, from 1877 to
1879 there was granted, for the erection of prisons in Nertchinsk, the
sum of £17,500, a part of which was destined for Kara.
[9] The house had cost £200; and he informed me that for another £100
he could put up a house for girls, of whom there were 20 about the
place, whose fathers were prisoners. About £4 10_s._ per year was
allowed by Government for each child, and to educate, clothe, and care
for them as the colonel was doing costs about £5 a year extra for each;
and this money he raised, I understood, among his friends.
[10] The Government determines how much gold is to be washed in the
season. In 1878 it was 25 poods, or 900 lbs. They told me that the
average they were finding for the season of 1879 was ¾ of a zolotnik
of gold to every 100 poods of sand, and that none of the mines about
Kara yield more than one zolotnik to the 100 poods; also that the
strata of gold sand are never more than seven feet, but usually less
in thickness. I have already stated in an earlier chapter, only
in different figures, that whilst 5 zolotniks to the 100 poods is
considered good, 1 zolotnik to the same quantity is poor. Hence it is
apparent that no private company would work the mines of Kara, and the
Government do so only to provide penal employment at a reduced cost
to the State. There are at Kara certain mines spoken of as belonging
to the Emperor’s private purse. When the convicts work in these,
the Minister of the Interior is paid for their labour according to
the amount of work they do. This I understood to be an economical
arrangement in favour of the Emperor.
[11] Unfortunately my Siberian statistics are not sufficiently complete
to allow a comparison between the _numbers_ of English and Russian
convicts. “O. K.” points out that since 1860, out of a population of
84,000,000, Russia has had on an average 20,000 criminals a year;
whilst England and Wales, out of little more than a quarter of that
population, has annually 12,000 criminal convictions. I am afraid that
it is not satisfactory to _compare_ these figures, because the 20,000
Russian criminals does not include, I presume, those left in prisons
west of the Urals, but only those sent to Siberia; and, again, 12,000
does not nearly cover the total number of criminals in England and
Wales. In the borough and county jails of England and Wales there was,
in 1878, a daily average of 19,818 prisoners, besides 10,208 in convict
prisons. I think, however, I am right in estimating that there is not a
daily average of 10,000 convicts in the _prisons_ of Siberia.