making thus a total of more than six hun- | who spin out an aimless life in the hamdred thousand people who have crossed lets of the far north, and put an end to the Ural Mountains since 1823, when the first records of exile were taken. Few of those who have endured the horrors of hard labor and exile in Siberia have committed to paper their sad experience. The protopope Avvakum did, and his letters still feed the fanaticism of the raskolniks. The melancholy stories of the Menshikoff, the Dolgorouky, the Biron, and other exiles of high rank have been transmitted to posterity by their sympathizers. Our young republican poet Ryléeff, before being hung in 1827, told in a beautiful poem, "Vainarovsky," the sufferings of a Little Russian patriot. Several memoirs of the "Decembrists" (exiled for the insurrection of December 26, 1825), and the poem of Nekrasoff, "The Russian Women," are still inspiring the young Russian hearts with love for the prosecuted and hate to the prosecutors. Dostoevsky has told in a remarkable psy. chological study of prison life his experience at the fortress of Omsk after 1848; and several Poles have described the martyrdom of their friends after the revolutions of 1831 and 1848. . . . But, what are all these pains in comparison with the sufferings endured by half a million of people, from the day when, chained to iron rods, they started from Moscow for a two or three years' walk towards the mines of Transbaïkalia, until the day when, broken down by hard labor and privations, they died at a distance of five thousand miles from their native villages, in a country whose scenery and customs were as strange to them as its inhabitants -a strong, intelligent, but egotistic race! What are the sufferings of the few, in comparison with those of the thousands under the cat o'-nine-tails of the legendary monster Rozguildéeff, whose name is still the horror of the Transbaïkalian villages; with the pains of those who, like the Polish doctor Szokalsky and his companions, died under the seventh thousand of rodstrokes for an attempt to escape; with the sufferings of those thousands of women who followed their husbands and for whom death was a release from a life of hunger, of sorrow, and of humiliation; with the sufferings of those thousands who yearly undertake to make their escape from Siberia and walk through the virgin forests, living on mushrooms and berries, and inspired with the hope of at least seeing again their native village and their kinsfolk? Who has told the less striking, but not less dramatic pains of those thousands their wearisome existence by drowning in the clear waters of the Yenisei? M. Maximoff has tried, in his work on "Hard Labor and Exile," to raise a corner of the veil that conceals these sufferings; but he has shown only a small corner of the dark picture. The whole remains and probably will remain unknown; its very features are obliterated day by day, leaving but a faint trace in the folk-lore and in the songs of the exiles; and each decade brings its new features, its new forms of misery for the ever-increasing number of exiles. It is obvious that I shall not venture to draw the whole of this picture in the narrow limits of a review article. I must necessarily limit my task to the description of the exile as it is now say, during the last ten years. No less than one hundred and sixty-five thousand human beings have been transported to Siberia during this short space of time; a very high figure of criminality, indeed, for a population numbering seventy two millions, if all exiles were "criminals." Less than onehalf of them, however, crossed the Ural in accordance with sentences of the courts. The others were thrown into Siberia, without having seen any judges, by simple order of the administrative, or in accordance with resolutions taken by their communes - nearly always under the pressure of the omnipotent local authorities. Out of the 151,184 exiles who crossed the Ural during the years 1867 to 1876, no less than 78,676 belonged to this last category. The remaining were condemned by courts: 18,582 to hard labor, and 54.316 to be settled in Siberia, mostly for life, with or without loss of all their civil rights.* Our criminal statistics are so imperfect that a have but one good work on this subject, by M. Anuthorough classification of exiles is very difficult. We chin, published a few years ago by the Russian Geographical Society, and crowned with its great gold medal; it gives the criminal statistics for the years 1827 to 1846. However old, these statistics still give an ap proximate idea of the present conditions, more recent partial statistics having shown that since that time all figures have doubled, but the relative proportions of different categories of exiles have remained nearly the 1755 exiled during the years 1827 to 1846, no less same. Thus, to quote but one instance, out of the than 79,909, or 50 per cent., were exiled by simple orders of the administrative; and thirty years later we of arbitrary exile (78,676 out of 151,184 in 1867 to 1876). find again nearly the same rate-slightly increasedThe same is approximately true with regard to other that out of the 79,846 condemned by courts, 14,531 (725 categories. It appears from M. Anuchin's researches per year) were condemned as assassins; 14,248 for heavier crimes, such as incendiarism, robbery, and making thus a total of 70,871 cases (about 3.545 per forgery; 40,666 for stealing, and 1,426 for smuggling, year) which would have been condemned by the codes Twenty years ago, the exiles traversed on foot all the distance between Moscow and the place to which they were despatched. They had thus to walk something like forty-seven hundred miles in order to reach the hard-labor colonies of Transbaïkalia, and fifty-two hundred miles to reach Yakutsk. Nearly a two years' walk for the former, and two years' and a half for the second. Some amelioration has been introduced since. After having been gathered from all parts of Russia at Moscow, or at Nijniy-Novgorod, they are transported now by steamer to Perm, by rail to Ekaterinburg, in carriages to Tumen, and again by steamer to Tomsk. Thus, according to a recent English book on exile to Siberia, they have to walk "only the distance beyond Tomsk." In plain figures, this trifling distance means two thousand and sixty-five miles to Kara, something like a nine months' foot journey. If the prisoner be sent to Yakutsk he has "only" two thousand nine hundred and forty miles to walk, and the Russian government having discovered that Yakutsk is a place still too near to St. Petersburg to keep these political exiles, and sending them now to Verkhoyansk and Nijne-Kolymsk (in the neighborhood of Nordenskjöld's wintering-station), a distance of some fifteen hundred miles must be added to the former "trifling" distance, and we have again the magic figure of forty-five hundred miles or two years' walk- reconstituted in full. However, for the great mass of exiles, -although not always by a jury of all countries in Europe. The remainder, however (that is, nearly 89,000), were exiled for offences which depended chiefly, if not entirely, upon the political institutions of Russia: their crimes were: rebellion against any serf-proprietors and authorities (16,456 cases); nonconformist fanaticism (2,138 cases); desertion from a twenty-five years' military service (1,651 cases); and escape from Siberia, mostly from administrative exile (18,328 cases). Finally, we find among them the enormous figure of 48,466 vagrants," of whom the laureate of the Geographical Society says: "Vagrancy mostly means simply going to a neighboring province without a passport"out of 48,466 vagrants," 40,000 at least, being merely people who have not complied with passport regulations (that is their wife and children being brought to starvation, they not having the necessary five or ten roubles for taking a passport, and walking from Kalouga, or Tula, to Odessa, or Astrakhan, in search of labor). And he adds: "Considering these 80,000 exiled by order of the administrative, we not only doubt their criminality; we simply doubt the very existence of such crimes as those imputed to them.". The number of such criminals" has not diminished since. It has nearly doubled, like other figures. Russia continues to send every year to Siberia, for life, four to would be simply condemned to a fine of a few shillings. To these "criminals" we must add no less than 1,500 women and 2,000 to 2,500 children who follow every year their husbands, or parents, enduring all the horrors of a march through Siberia and of the exile. five thousand men and women, who in other States the foot journey has been reduced by onehalf, and they begin their peregrinations in Siberia in special carriages. M. Maximoff has very vividly described how the convicts at Irkutsk, to whose judgment such a moving machine was submitted, declared at once that it was the most stupid vehicle that could be invented for the torment of both horses and convicts. Such carriages, which have no accommodation for deadening the shocks, move slowly on the rugged, jolting road, ploughed over and over by thousands of heavily loaded cars. In western Siberia, amidst the marshes on the eastern slope of the Ural, the journey becomes a true torture, as the highway is covered with loose beams of wood, which recall the sensation experienced when a finger is dragged across the keys of a piano, the black keys included. The journey is hard, even for the traveller who is lying on a thick felt mattress in a comfortable tarantass, and it is easy to conceive what the convict experiences, who is bound to sit motionless for eight or ten hours on the bench of the famous vehicle, having but a few rags to shelter him from snow and rain. Happily enough this journey lasts but a few days, as at Tumen the exiles are' embarked on special barges, or floating prisons, taken in tow by steamers, and in the space of eight or ten days are brought to Tomsk. I hardly need say that, however excellent the idea of thus reducing by one-half the long journey through Siberia, its partial realization has been most imperfect. The convict barges are usually so overcrowded, and are usually kept in such a state of filthiness, that they have become real nests of infection. "Each barge has been built for the transport of eight hundred convicts and the convoy," wrote the Tomsk correspondent of the Moscow Telegraph, on November 15, 1881; "the calculation of the size of the barges has not been made, however, according to the necessary cubical space, but according to the interests of the owners of the steamers, MM. Kurbatoff and Ignatoff. These gentlemen occupy for their own purpose two compartments for a hundred men each, and thus eight hundred must take the room destined for six hundred. The ventilation is very bad, there being no accommodation at all for that purpose, and the cabinets are of an unimaginable nastiness." He adds that "the mortality on these barges is very great, especially among the children," and his information is fully confirmed by offi cial figures published last year in all newspapers. It appears from these fig. ures that eight to ten per cent. of the convict passengers died during their ten days' journey on board these barges; that is, something like sixty to eighty out of eight hundred. imagination could picture." The families. of the convicts receive no cloth from the State. Mostly peasant women, who, as a rule, never have more than one dress at once; mostly reduced to starvation as soon as their husbands were taken into custody, they have buckled on their sole cloth when starting from Arkhangelsk or Astrakhan, and, after their long peregri nations from one lock-up to another, after the long years of preliminary detention and months of journey, only rags have remained on their shoulders from their weather-worn clothes. The naked ema "Here you see," wrote friends of ours who have made this passage, "the reign of death. Diphtheria and typhus pitilessly cut down the lives of adults and children, especially of these last. Corpses of children are thrown out nearly at each station. The hospital, placed under the supervision of an ignorant soldier, is always over-ciated body and the wounded feet appear crowded." from beneath the tattered clothes as they are sitting on the nasty floor, eating the hard black bread received from compassionate peasants. Amidst this moving heap of human beings who cover each square foot of the platforms and beneath them, you perceive the dying child on the knees of his mother, and close by, the new born baby. The baby is the delight of, the consolation to these women, each of whom surely has more human feelings than any of the chiefs and warders. It is passed from hand to hand; the best rags are parted with to cover its shivering limbs, the tenderest caresses are for it. way! One of them stands by my side as I write these lines, and repeats to me the stories she has heard so many times from her mother about the humanity of the sce lerates and the infamy of their "chiefs." She describes to me the toys that the convicts made for her during the interminable journey - plain toys inspired by a good-hearted humor, and side by side, the miserable proceedings, the exactions of money, the curses and blows, the whistling of the whips of the chiefs. At Tomsk the convicts stop for a few days. One part of them - especially the common-law exiles, transported by order of the administrative are sent to some district of the province of Tomsk which extends from the spurs of the Altay ridge on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north. The others are despatched farther towards the east. It is easy to conceive what a hell the Tomsk prison becomes when the convicts arriving every week cannot be sent on to Irkutsk with the same speed, on account of inundations, or obstacles on the rivers. The prison was built to contain nine hundred and sixty... How many have grown up in this souls, but it never holds less than thirteen to fourteen hundred, and very often twenty-two hundred, or more. One-quarter of the prisoners are sick, but the infirmary can shelter only one-third, or so, of those who are in need of it; and so the sick remain in the same rooms, upon or beneath the same platforms where the remainder are crammed to the amount of three men for each free place. The shrieks of the sick, the cries of the fever-stricken patients, and the rattle of the dying mix together with the jokes and laughter of the prisoners, with the curses of the warders. The exhalations of this human heap mix with those of their wet and filthy clothes and with the emanations of the horrible parasha. "You are suffocated as you enter the room, you are fainting and must run back to breathe some fresh air; you must accustom yourself by-and-by to the horrible emanations which float like a fog in the river"such is the testimony of all those who have entered unexpectedly a Siberian prison. The "families room is still more horrible. "Here you see," says a Siberian official in charge of the prisons - M. Mishlo "hundreds of women and children closely packed to gether, in such a state of misery as no The prison, however, is cleared by-andby, as the parties of convicts start to continue their journey. When the season and the state of the rivers permit it, parties of five hundred convicts each, with women and children, leave the Tomsk prison every week, and begin their foot journey to Irkutsk and Transbaïkalia. Those who have seen such a party in march, will never forget it. A Russian painter, M. Jacoby, has tried to represent it on canvas; his picture is sickening, but the reality is still worse. You see a marshy plain where the icy wind blows freely, driving before it the snow that begins to cover the frozen soil. Morasses with small shrubs, or crumpled trees, bent down by wind and show, their rifles those women who stop exhausted in the freezing mud of the road. The procession is closed by the car of the commander of the party.* spread as far as the eye can reach; the next village is twenty miles distant. Low mountains, covered with thick pine forests, mingling with the grey snow-clouds, rise in the dust on the horizon. A track, As the party enters some great village, marked all along by poles to distinguish it begins to sing the miloserdnaya― the it from the surrounding plain, ploughed "charity song." They call it a song, but and rugged by the passage of thousands it hardly is that. It is a succession of of cars, covered with ruts that break down woes escaping from hundreds of breasts the hardest wheels, runs through the at once, a recital in very plain words exnaked plain. The party slowly moves pressing with a childish simplicity the along this road. In front, a row of sol- sad fate of the convict - a horrible lamendiers opens the march. Behind them, tation by means of which the Russian heavily advanced the hard-labor convicts, exile appeals to the mercy of other miswith half-shaved heads, wearing grey erables like himself. Centuries of sufferclothes, with a yellow diamond on the ing, of pains and misery, of persecutions back, and open shoes worn out by the that crush down the most vital forces of long journey and exhibiting the tatters in our nation, are heard in these recitals which the wounded feet are wrapped. and shrieks. These tones of deep sorrow Each convict wears a chain, riveted to his recall the tortures of the last century, the ankles, its rings being twisted into rags stifled cries under the sticks and whips of if the convict has collected enough of alms our own time, the darkness of the cellars, during his journey to pay the blacksmith the wildness of the woods, the tears of the for riveting it looser on his feet. The starving wife. The peasants of the vil chain goes up each foot and is suspended lages on the Siberian highway understand to a girdle. Another chain closely ties these tunes; they know their true meanboth hands, and a third chain binds to ing from their own experience, and the gether six or eight convicts. Every false appeal of the neschastnyie - one of the movement of any of the pack is felt by all "sufferers," as our people call all prisonhis chain-companions; the feebler is ers is answered by the poor; the most dragged forward by the stronger, and he destitute widow, signing herself with the must not stop: the way the étape is cross, brings her coppers, or her piece of long, and the autumn day is short. bread, and deeply bows before the chained Behind the hard-labor convicts march"sufferer," grateful to him for not disthe poselentsy (condemned to be settled in daining her small offering. Siberia) wearing the same grey cloth and the same kind of shoes. Soldiers accompany the party on both sides, meditating perhaps the order given at the departure: "If one of them runs away, shoot him down. If he is killed, five roubles of reward for you, and a dog's death to the dog!" In the rear you discover a few cars that are drawn by the small, attenuated, cat-like peasants' horses. They are loaded with the bags of the convicts, with the sick or dying, who are fastened by ropes on the top of the load. Behind the cars hasten the wives of the convicts; a few have found a free corner on a loaded car, and crouch there when unable to move further; whilst the great number march behind the cars, leading their children by the hands, or bearing them on their arms. Dressed in rags, freezing under the gusts of the cold wind, cutting their almost naked feet on the frozen ruts, how many of them repeat the words of Avvakum's wife: "These tor tures, ah dear, how long will they last?" In the rear, comes a second detachment of soldiers who drive with the butt-ends of Late in the afternoon, after having cov ered some fifteen or twenty miles, the party reaches the étape where it spends the night and takes one day's rest each three days. It accelerates its pace as soon as the paling that incloses the old log-wood building is perceived, and the strongest run to take possession by force of the best places on the platforms. The étapes were mostly built fifty years ago, and after having resisted the inclemencies of the climate, and the passage of a hundred thousand of convicts, they have become now rotten and foul from top to bottom. The old log-wood house refuses shelter to the chained travellers brought under its roof, and wind and snow freely enter the interstices between its rotten beams; heaps of snow are accumulated in victs are not submitted to the control of the convoy. The Russian law says that the families of the conIn reality they are submitted to the same treatment as the convicts. To quote but one instance. The Tomsk November 3, 1881: "We have seen on the march the correspondent of the Moscow Telegraph wrote on party which left Tomsk on September 14. The exand the soldiers dealt them blows, to make them adhausted women and children literally stuck in the mud, vance and to keep pace with the party." the corners of the rooms. The étape was built to shelter one hundred and fifty convicts; that being the average size of parties thirty years ago. At present the parties consist of four hundred and fifty to five hundred human beings, and the five hundred must lodge on the space parsimoniously calculated for one hundred and fifty.* an illness during the journey? There are but five small hospitals, with a total of a hundred beds, on the whole stretch between Tomsk and Irkutsk, that is, on a distance which represents at least a four months' journey. As for those who can not hold out until a hospital is reached, it was written to the Golos, on January 5, 1881: "They are left at the étapes withThe stronger ones, or the aristocracy out any medical help. The sick-room has among the convicts-the elder vagrants no bedsteads, no beds, no cushions, no and the great murderers - cover each coverings, and of course nothing like square inch of the platforms; the remain- linen. The 48 kopecks per day that are der, that is, double the number of the allowed for the sick, remain mostly in full former, lie down on the rotten floor, cov-in the hands of the authorities." ered with an inch of sticky filth, beneath Shall I dwell upon the exactions to and between the platforms. What be- which the convicts are submitted, notcomes of the rooms when the doors are withstanding their dreadful misery, by closed, and the whole space filled with the warders of the étapes? Is it not suf human beings who lie naked on their ficient to say that the warders of these nasty clothes impregnated with water, will buildings are paid by the crown, besides be easily imagined. the allowance of corn flour for black The étapes, however, are palaces when bread, only with three roubles, or 6s. per compared with the half-étapes, where the year? "The stove is out of order, you parties spend only the nights. These cannot light the fire," says one of them, buildings are still smaller, and, as a rule, when the party arrives quite wet or still more dilapidated, still more rotten frozen; and the party pays its tribute for and foul. Sometimes they are in such a permission to light the fire. The winstate as to compel the party to spend the dows are under repair," and the party cold Siberian nights in light barracks pays for having some rags to fill up the erected in the yard, and without fire. As openings through which freely blows the a rule, the half-étape has no special comicy wind. "Wash up the étape before partment for the women, and they must leaving, or pay so much," and the party lodge in the room of the soldiers (see Maximoff's "Siberia "). With the resig. nation of our "all-enduring Russian mothers, they squat down with their babies wrapped in rags, in some corner of the room below the platforms or close by the door, among the rifles of the escort. 66 No wonder that, according to official statistics, out of the 2,561 children less than fifteen years old who were sent in 1881 to Siberia with their parents, 66 a very small part survived." The majority," the Golos says, "could not support the very bad conditions of the journey, and died before, or immediately after, having reached their destination in Siberia." In sober truth, the transportation to Siberia, as practised now, is a real "Massacre of Innocents." Shall I add that there is no accommodation for the sick, and one that must have exceptionally robust health to survive The Russian law, which mostly has been written without any knowledge of the real conditions it deals with, forbids to send out such numerous parties. But, in reality, the normal party numbers now 480 persons. In 1881, according to the Golos, 6,507 convicts were sent in sixteen parties, making thus an average of 406 convicts per party. N. Lopatin gives us the figure of 480 as the average size of parties. pays again, and so on and so on. And shall I mention, too, the manner in which the convicts and their families are treated during the journey? Even the political exiles once revolted, in 1881, against an officer who had permitted himself to assault in the dark corridor a lady marched to Siberia for a political offence. The common-law exiles surely are not treated better than the political ones. All these are not tales of the past. They are real pictures of what is going on now, at the very moment when I write these lines. My friend N. Lopatin, who made the same journey two years ago, and to whom I have shown these pages, fully confirms all the above statements, and adds much more which I do not mention only for want of space. What really is a tale of the past of a very recent case |