II

The five years that I spent in Siberia were for me a genuine education

in life and human character. I was brought into contact with men of all

descriptions: the best and the worst; those who stood at the top of

society and those who vegetated at the very bottom--the tramps and the

so-called incorrigible criminals. I had ample opportunities to watch

the ways and habits of the peasants in their daily life, and still more

opportunities to appreciate how little the State administration could

give to them, even if it were animated by the very best intentions.

Finally, my extensive journeys, during which I travelled over fifty

thousand miles in carts, on board steamers, in boats, but chiefly on

horseback, had a wonderful effect in strengthening my health. They also

taught me how little man really needs as soon as he comes out of the

enchanted circle of conventional civilization. With a few pounds of

bread and a few ounces of tea in a leather bag, a kettle and a hatchet

hanging at the side of the saddle, and under the saddle a blanket, to

be spread at the camp fire upon a bed of freshly cut spruce twigs,

a man feels wonderfully independent, even amidst unknown mountains

thickly clothed with woods or capped with snow. A book might be written

about this part of my life, but I must rapidly glide over it here,

there being so much more to say about the later periods.

Siberia is not the frozen land buried in snow and peopled with exiles

only that it is imagined to be, even by many Russians. In its southern

parts it is as rich in natural productions as are the southern parts

of Canada, which it resembles very much in its physical aspects; and

beside half a million of natives, it has a population of more than

four millions of Russians. The southern parts of West Siberia are as

thoroughly Russian as the provinces to the north of Moscow.

In 1862 the upper administration of Siberia was far more enlightened

and far better all round than that of any province of Russia proper.

For several years the post of Governor-General of East Siberia had

been occupied by a remarkable personage, Count N. N. Muravióff, who

annexed the Amúr region to Russia. He was very intelligent, very

active, extremely amiable, and desirous to work for the good of the

country. Like all men of action of the governmental school, he was

a despot at the bottom of his heart; but he held advanced opinions,

and a democratic republic would not have quite satisfied him. He had

succeeded to a great extent in getting rid of the old staff of civil

service officials, who considered Siberia a camp to be plundered, and

he had gathered around him a number of young officials, quite honest,

and many of them animated by the same excellent intentions as himself.

In his own study, the young officers, with the exile Bakúnin among them

(he escaped from Siberia in the autumn of 1861), discussed the chances

of creating the United States of Siberia, federated across the Pacific

Ocean with the United States of America.

* * * * *

When I came to Irkútsk, the capital of East Siberia, the wave of

reaction which I saw rising at St. Petersburg had not yet reached

these distant dominions. I was very well received by the young

Governor-General, Korsákoff, who had just succeeded Muravióff, and

he told me that he was delighted to have about him men of liberal

opinions. As to the commander of the General Staff, Kúkel--a young

general not yet thirty-five years old, whose personal aide-de-camp

I became--he at once took me to a room in his house, where I found,

together with the best Russian reviews, complete collections of the

London revolutionary editions of Hérzen. We were soon warm friends.

General Kúkel temporarily occupied at that time the post of Governor

of Transbaikália, and a few weeks later we crossed the beautiful

Lake Baikál and went further east, to the little town of Chitá, the

capital of the province. There I had to give myself, heart and soul,

without loss of time, to the great reforms which were then under

discussion. The St. Petersburg Ministries had applied to the local

authorities, asking them to work out schemes of complete reform in the

administration of the provinces, the organization of the police, the

tribunals, the prisons, the system of exile, the self-government of the

townships--all on broadly liberal bases laid down by the emperor in his

manifestoes.

Kúkel, supported by an intelligent and practical man, Colonel

Pedashénko, and by a couple of well-meaning civil service officials,

worked all day long, and often a good deal of the night. I became

the secretary of two committees--for the reform of the prisons and

the whole system of exile, and for preparing a scheme of municipal

self-government--and I set to work with all the enthusiasm of a youth

of nineteen years. I read much about the historical development of

these institutions in Russia and their present condition abroad,

excellent works and papers dealing with these subjects having been

published by the Ministries of the Interior and of Justice; but what we

did in Transbaikália was by no means merely theoretical. I discussed

first the general outlines, and subsequently every point of detail,

with practical men, well acquainted with the real needs and the local

possibilities; and for that purpose I met a considerable number of men

both in town and in the province. Then the conclusions we arrived at

were re-discussed with Kúkel and Pedashénko; and when I had put the

results into a preliminary shape, every point was again very thoroughly

thrashed out in the committees. One of these committees, for preparing

the municipal government scheme, was composed of citizens of Chitá,

elected by all the population, as freely as they might have been

elected in the United States. In short, our work was very serious; and

even now, looking back at it through the perspective of so many years,

I can say in full confidence that if municipal self-government had been

granted then, in the modest shape which we gave to it, the towns of

Siberia would be very different from what they are. But nothing came of

it all, as will presently be seen.

There was no lack of other incidental occupations. Money had to

be found for the support of charitable institutions; an economic

description of the province had to be written in connection with a

local agricultural exhibition; or some serious inquiry had to be made.

‘It is a great epoch we live in; work, my dear friend; remember that

you are the secretary of all existing and future committees’, Kúkel

would sometimes say to me,--and I worked with doubled energy.

One example or two will show with what results. There was in our

province a ‘district chief’--that is, a police officer invested with

very wide and indeterminate rights--who was simply a disgrace. He

robbed the peasants and flogged them right and left--even women, which

was against the law; and when a criminal affair fell into his hands, it

might lie there for months, men being kept in the meantime in prison

till they gave him a bribe. Kúkel would have dismissed this man long

before, but the Governor-General did not like the idea of it, because

he had strong protectors at St. Petersburg. After much hesitation, it

was decided at last that I should go to make an investigation on the

spot, and collect evidence against the man. This was not by any means

easy, because the peasants, terrorized by him, and well knowing an old

Russian saying, ‘God is far away, while your chief is your next-door

neighbour,’ did not dare to testify. Even the woman he had flogged was

afraid at first to make a written statement. It was only after I had

stayed a fortnight with the peasants, and had won their confidence,

that the misdeeds of their chief could be brought to light. I

collected crushing evidence, and the district chief was dismissed. We

congratulated ourselves on having got rid of such a pest. What was,

however, our astonishment when, a few months later, we learned that

this same man had been nominated to a higher post in Kamchátka! There

he could plunder the natives free of any control, and so he did. A few

years later he returned to St. Petersburg a rich man. The articles he

occasionally contributes now to the reactionary press are, as one might

expect, full of high ‘patriotic’ spirit.

The wave of reaction, as I have already said, had not then reached

Siberia, and the political exiles continued to be treated with

all possible leniency, as in Muravióff’s time. When, in 1861, the

poet Mikháiloff was condemned to hard labour for a revolutionary

proclamation which he had issued, and was sent to Siberia, the Governor

of the first Siberian town on his way, Tobólsk, gave a dinner in his

honour, in which all the officials took part. In Transbaikália he

was not kept at hard labour, but was allowed officially to stay in

the hospital prison of a small mining village. His health being very

poor--he was dying from consumption, and did actually die a few months

later--General Kúkel gave him permission to stay in the house of his

brother, a mining engineer, who had rented a gold mine from the Crown

on his own account. Unofficially that was well known in East Siberia.

But one day we learned from Irkútsk that, in consequence of a secret

denunciation, a General of the gendarmes (state police) was on his way

to Chitá to make a strict inquiry into the affair. An aide-de-camp of

the Governor-General brought us the news. I was despatched in great

haste to warn Mikháiloff, and to tell him that he must return at once

to the hospital prison, while the General of the gendarmes was kept

at Chitá. As that gentleman found himself every night the winner of

considerable sums of money at the green table in Kúkel’s house, he soon

decided not to exchange this pleasant pastime for a long journey to

the mines in a temperature which was then a dozen degrees below the

freezing-point of mercury, and eventually went back to Irkútsk quite

satisfied with his lucrative mission.

The storm, however, was coming nearer and nearer, and it swept

everything before it soon after the insurrection broke out in Poland.