I was far away in the Vitím mountains when some Polish exiles, who were
employed in piercing a new road in the cliffs round Lake Baikál, made
a desperate attempt to break their chains and to force their way to
China across Mongolia. Troops were sent out against them, and a Russian
officer was killed by the insurgents. I heard of it on my return to
Irkútsk, where some fifty Poles were to be tried by a court-martial.
The sittings of courts-martial being open in Russia, I followed
this, taking detailed notes of the proceedings, which I sent to a
St. Petersburg paper, and which were published in full, to the great
dissatisfaction of the Governor-General.
Eleven thousand Poles, men and women, had been transported to East
Siberia in consequence of the insurrection of 1863. They were chiefly
students, artists, ex-officers, nobles, and especially skilled
artisans from the intelligent and highly developed working-men’s
population of Warsaw and other towns. A great number of them were
kept in hard labour, while the remainder were settled all over the
country in villages where they could find no work whatever and lived
in a state of semi-starvation. Those who were condemned to hard labour
worked either at Chitá, building the barges for the Amúr--these were
the happiest--or in iron works of the Crown, or in salt works. I saw
some of the latter, on the Léna, standing half-naked in a shanty, round
an immense cauldron filled with salt-brine, and mixing the thick,
boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the
gates of the shanty were wide open to make a strong current of glacial
air. After two years of such work these martyrs were sure to die from
consumption.
Lately, a considerable number of Polish exiles were employed as
navvies building a road along the southern coast of Lake Baikál. This
narrow Alpine lake, four hundred miles long, surrounded by beautiful
mountains rising three to five thousand feet above its level, cuts off
Transbaikália and the Amúr from Irkútsk. In winter it may be crossed
over the ice and in summer there are steamers, but for six weeks in
the spring and another six weeks in the autumn the only means to reach
Chitá and Kyákhta (for Pekin) from Irkútsk was to travel on horseback
a long circuitous route, across mountains 7,000 to 8,000 feet in
altitude. I once travelled along this track, greatly enjoying the
scenery of the mountains, which were snow-clad in May, but otherwise
the journey was really awful. To climb eight miles only, to the top of
the main pass, Khamár-dabán, it took me the whole day from three in the
morning till eight at night. Our horses continually fell through the
thawing snow, plunging with the rider many times a day into icy water
which flowed underneath the snow-crust. It was decided accordingly to
build a permanent road along the southern coast of the lake, blowing
up a passage in the steep, almost vertical cliffs which rise along
the shore, and spanning with bridges a hundred wild torrents which
furiously rush from the mountains into the lake. Polish exiles were
employed at this hard work.
Several batches of Russian political exiles had been sent during the
last century to Siberia, but, with the submissiveness to fate which
is characteristic of the Russians, they never revolted; they allowed
themselves to be killed inch by inch, without ever attempting to free
themselves. The Poles, on the contrary--this must be said to their
honour--were never so submissive as that, and this time they broke into
open revolt. They evidently had no chance of success--they revolted
nevertheless. They had before them the great lake, and behind them a
girdle of absolutely impracticable mountains, beyond which begin the
wildernesses of North Mongolia; but they nevertheless conceived the
idea of disarming the soldiers who guarded them, forging those terrible
weapons of the Polish insurrections--scythes planted as pikes on long
poles--and making their way across the mountains and across Mongolia,
towards China, where they would find English ships to take them. One
day the news came to Irkútsk that part of those Poles who were at work
on the Baikál road had disarmed a dozen soldiers and broken out into
revolt. Eighty soldiers were all that could be despatched against them
from Irkútsk. Crossing the lake in a steamer, they went to meet the
insurgents on the other side of the lake.
The winter of 1866 had been unusually dull at Irkútsk. In the Siberian
capital there is no such distinction between the different classes
as one sees in Russian provincial towns; and the Irkútsk ‘society,’
composed of numerous officers and officials, together with the wives
and daughters of local traders and even clergymen, met during the
winter, every Thursday, at the Assembly Rooms. This winter, however,
there was no ‘go’ in the evening parties. Amateur theatricals, too,
were not successful; and gambling, which was usually pursued on a grand
scale at Irkútsk, only dragged just along: a want of money was felt
this winter among the officials, and even the arrival of several mining
officers did not bring with it the heaps of bank-notes with which
these privileged gentlemen usually enlivened the knights of the green
tables. The season was decidedly dull--just the season for starting
spiritualistic experiences with talking tables and talkative spirits.
A gentleman who had been during the previous winter the pet of Irkútsk
society on account of the tales which he recited with great talent,
seeing that interest in himself and his tales was failing, now took
to spiritualism as a new amusement. He was clever, and in a week’s
time the Irkútsk ladies were mad over talking spirits. A new life
was infused amongst those who did not know how to kill time. Talking
tables appeared in every drawing-room, and love-making went hand in
hand with spirit rapping. An officer, whom I will call Pótaloff, took
it all in deadly earnest--talking tables and love. Perhaps he was less
fortunate with the latter than with the tables; at any rate, when the
news of the Polish insurrection came he asked to be sent to the spot
with the eighty soldiers. He hoped to return with a halo of military
glory. ‘I go against the Poles,’ he wrote in his diary; ‘it would be so
interesting to be slightly wounded!’
He was killed. He rode on horseback by the side of the Colonel who
commanded the soldiers, when ‘the battle with the insurgents’--the
glowing description of which may be found in the annals of the General
Staff--began. The soldiers slowly advanced along the road, when they
met some fifty Poles, five or six of whom were armed with rifles and
the remainder with sticks and scythes; they occupied the forest, and
from time to time fired their guns. The chain of soldiers did the
same. Lieutenant Pótaloff twice asked permission of the Colonel to
dismount and to dash into the forest. The Colonel very angrily ordered
him to stay where he was. Notwithstanding this, the next moment the
Lieutenant had disappeared. Several shots resounded in the wood,
followed by wild cries; the soldiers rushed that way, and found the
Lieutenant bleeding on the grass. The Poles fired their last shots and
surrendered; the battle was over, Pótaloff was dead. He had rushed,
revolver in hand, into the thicket, where he found several Poles armed
with pikes. He fired all his shots at them in a haphazard way, wounding
one of them, whereupon the others rushed upon him with their pikes.
At the other end of the road, on this side of the lake, two Russian
officers behaved in the most abominable way towards those Poles who
were building the same road but took no part in the insurrection. One
of the two officers rushed into their tent, swearing and shooting at
the peaceful convicts with his revolver, badly wounding two of them.
Now, the logic of the Siberian military authorities was that as a
Russian officer had been killed several Poles had to be executed. The
court-martial condemned five of them to death: Szaramówicz, a pianist,
a handsome man of thirty who was the leader of the insurrection;
Celínski, an ex-officer of the Russian army, a man of sixty, because
he had once been an officer; and three others whose names I do not
remember.
The Governor-General telegraphed to St. Petersburg asking permission to
reprieve the condemned insurgents, but no answer came. He had promised
us not to execute them, but after having waited several days for the
reply, he ordered the sentence to be carried out secretly early in
the morning. The reply from St. Petersburg came four weeks later,
by post: the Governor was left to act ‘according to the best of his
understanding.’ In the meantime five brave men had been shot.
The insurrection, people said, was foolish. And yet this handful of
insurgents obtained something. The news of it reached Europe. The
executions, the brutalities of the two officers, which became known
through the proceedings of the court, produced a commotion in Austria,
and Austria interfered in favour of the Galicians who had taken part
in the revolution of 1863 and had been sent to Siberia. Soon after
the Baikál insurrection the fate of the Polish exiles in Siberia was
substantially bettered, and they owed it to their insurgents--to those
five brave men who were shot at Irkútsk, and those who had taken arms
by their side.
For my brother and myself this insurrection was a great lesson. We
realized what it meant to belong in any way to the army. I was away;
but my brother was at Irkútsk, and his squadron was dispatched against
the insurgents. Happily, the commander of the regiment to which my
brother belonged knew him well, and, under some pretext, he ordered
another officer to take command of the mobilized part of the squadron.
Otherwise Alexander, of course, would have refused to march. If I had
been at Irkútsk, I should have done the same.
We decided, then, to leave the military service and to return to
Russia. This was not an easy matter, especially as Alexander had
married in Siberia; but at last all was arranged, and early in 1867 we
were on our way to St. Petersburg.