From North Pole to Equator: Studies of Wild Life and Scenes in Many Lands

by Alfred Edmund Brehm

On the anniversary of the death all the friends and relatives are summoned once more to the bereaved yurt. After greeting and condoling with the women, who are still shrouded in mourning garments, they fetch the horse, saddle and load it in the same manner as when moving the aul, and lead it before the mollah to be blessed. This done, two men approach, seize its bridle, unsaddle it, throw it to the ground, and stab it through the heart. Its flesh serves as a meal for the poor of the company, its skin falls to the mollah. Immediately after the horse has been killed, the lance is handed to the most important man among the relatives; he takes it, pronounces a few words, breaks the shaft in pieces, and throws these into the fire.

Now the horses come snorting up, eager to prove their speed in the race; the young riders who guide and bridle them start off at a given signal and disappear in the steppe. The bard takes the mollah’s place, and commemorates the dead once more, but also extols the living and seeks to gladden their hearts. The women lay aside the singular head-dress, which serves as a sign of mourning, and don their gala attire. After the abundant repast, the vessel of intoxicating milk-wine circulates freely, and sounds of joy mingle with the tones of the zither.

Mourning for the dead is over; life asserts its rights once more.

COLONISTS AND EXILES IN SIBERIA.

Those who regard Siberia as merely a vast prison are as far from the truth as those who look upon it as one immeasurable waste of ice. Russia does indeed send thousands of criminals or others under sentence of punishment to Siberia every year; and there are among these some who, having been convicted of serious crimes against life and property, are not free during the whole of their enforced sojourn. But only a very small proportion of all the criminals are really in confinement for the whole period of their sentence, and every one of them has it in his power to render this confinement less severe, or even to free himself from it altogether by his behaviour, and thus he enjoys advantages which do not fall to the lot of the inmates of our prisons and houses of correction. Wide tracts of the vast territory which is governed by the Russian sceptre, great countries according to our ideas, have never been used as penal colonies at all, and will probably always remain free of those forced immigrants, who cause the settled population much more disagreeableness, not to say suffering, than they have to endure themselves. And along the same paths, which formerly were never trodden save in sorrow, there now pass many free human beings, hoping and striving to better their lot in the distant East. Voluntary colonists join the compulsory ones even in such districts and tracts of country as were formerly dreaded and shunned as the most inhospitable regions on earth. A new era is opening for Siberia; for blinding fear is gradually being replaced by illuminating knowledge even among those classes of society which are more prone to fear than desirous of knowledge.

The descriptions of Siberia with which we are familiar come, for the most part, from the mouth or the pen of educated exiles, that is to say, from people whom the settled inhabitants call “unfortunate”, and treat as such. Probably only a very small proportion of the descriptions in question are untrue, but they are, nevertheless, inaccurate in most cases. For misfortune clouds the eyes and the soul, and destroys that impartiality which is the only possible basis of a correct estimate of the conditions of life. These conditions are much better than we are accustomed to believe, much better, indeed, than they are in more than one of the mountainous districts of our Fatherland; for the struggle for existence in Siberia is an easy one as far as man is concerned. Want in the usual sense of the word, lack of the ordinary necessaries of life, is here almost unknown, or at least, only affects those whose power of work has been weakened by illness or other misfortune. Compared with the hardships against which many a poor German dwelling among the mountains has to contend during his whole life, without ever emerging victorious from the struggle, the lot of even the convict in Siberia appears in many cases enviable. Privation oppresses only the mental, not the bodily life of the residents in Siberia, for whoever is faithful to the soil receives from it more than he needs, and if any one forsakes it for some of the other occupations customary in the country, he can earn quite as much by the honest work of his hands as he could have reaped from the soil itself. Thus do the present conditions of life appear to one who studies them with unprejudiced eyes.

I have honestly striven to form an unbiassed judgment on the present conditions of life among the inhabitants of the parts of Siberia through which we travelled. I have descended into the depths of misery, and have sunned myself on the heights of prosperity, I have associated with murderers, highwaymen, incendiaries, thieves, swindlers, sharpers, vagabonds, scoundrels, insurgents and conspirators, as well as with fishermen and huntsmen, shepherds and peasants, merchants and tradesmen, officials and magistrates, with masters and servants, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, contented and discontented, so that I might confirm my observations, widen my knowledge, test my conclusions, and correct erroneous impressions; I have begged the police officers to describe the exiles’ lot to me, and have questioned the exiles themselves; I have sought out criminals in their prisons, and have observed them outside of these; I have conversed with peasants, trades-people, and colonists generally, whenever and wherever it was possible, and have compared the statements made to me by these people with the detailed communications made to me by the government officials: I may therefore believe that I gathered as much information as was possible, taking into account the speed and shortness of our journey. In any case, I have collected so much material that I may confine myself solely to the results of my own investigations in attempting to give a rapid sketch of the life of exiles in Siberia. My description will not be free from errors, but it will certainly be a just estimate of the state of affairs.

With the exception of government officials, soldiers, and enterprising trades-people, chiefly merchants, the stream of emigrants from Russia to Siberia was made up, until 1861, solely of those who went under compulsion: serfs of the Czar who worked in his own mines, and criminals who were sent, chiefly, to those of the state. With the suppression of serfdom, which had a deeper influence on the state of society than was supposed, or than is even now recognized, the emigration of the former class ceased at once. Millions of men were set free by a word from their mild and large-hearted ruler; thousands of them forsook the mines and turned their attention to the fruitful soil, which their relatives had already been cultivating; the Czar’s mines were almost depopulated, and even now they have scarcely recovered from the effects of the blow. But the great imperial or crown-estate of the Altai gained, instead of its former colonists, a new element which it had lacked, a free peasantry, not indeed possessing heritable property, but yet at full liberty to cultivate the rich soil. The suppression of serfdom also altered the condition of those tracts of country which had been chiefly colonized by convict exiles, for there, too, it became possible to establish a free peasantry. But here the continuous emigration-stream proves rather a hindrance than an advantage; for in most cases the convicts who are exiled to parts of the country already peopled introduce an element of disquiet among the settled inhabitants, and prevent such hopeful and prosperous colonization as in the crown-estate of the Altai, which has never been used as a convict settlement, and never will be so used as long as it remains the property of the Czar. On the other hand, many voluntary emigrants make their way to the Altai, and on that account the population increases more rapidly there than in the rest of Siberia.

It is a magnificent tract of country this crown-estate of the Altai, and, as a landed property, it is also remarkable as being the largest which can be found anywhere. For its superficial area may be stated in round numbers at 400,000 square versts, or about 176,000 English square miles. It includes within itself mountain ranges and plains, hill chains and table-lands; it lies between navigable rivers, and contains others which could be made navigable without special difficulty; it still contains vast and utilizable forests, and wealth immeasurable above and beneath the ground. Ores of various kinds have been discovered at no fewer than eight hundred and thirty different places within its boundaries, without taking into account other two hundred and seventy spots at which it has been found, but which have never been thoroughly examined. In the Altai, one literally walks upon silver and gold; for auriferous silver-ore as well as lead, copper, and iron intersect the mountains in veins, more or less rich, but usually worth working; and the rivers flowing from them carry down golden sand. A stratum of coal, whose extent has not yet been determined, but in which a depth of seven or eight yards has been proved in various places, underlies such an extensive tract, that, judging from the composition of the exposed masses of rock, one is justified in concluding that the whole northern portion of the estate stands above a great coal-basin.[86] And yet the real wealth of the estate of the Altai lies, not in its subterranean treasures, but in its rich black soil, which spreads over mountain slopes and plains, and is swept together in river-basins and hollows, so that it covers them to the depth of a yard and a half. Beautiful, often grand, mountain districts alternate with pleasing hilly tracts of arable land, and gently-undulating plains, which the farmer prefers above all else, steppe-like landscapes with fruitful valleys watered by a brook or river, forests of luxuriantly sprouting trees, low and tall, with groves or park-like shrubbery. The climate, though not mild, is by no means intolerable, and nowhere hinders profitable cultivation of the exceedingly fertile, and, for the most part, virgin soil. Four months of hot, almost unvarying summer, four months of severe continuous winter, two months of damp, cold, and changeable spring, and a similar autumn, make up the year, and though the mean warmth of the best half of the year is not sufficient to mature the grape, it ripens all the kinds of grain which we grow in Northern and Central Germany; and in all the southern portions of the crown property the temperature is high enough to admit of melon culture.

Such is the character of the land which has been free, for more than two generations, from exiled criminals, and which now harbours such colonists as, within certain limits, one would like to see throughout the whole remaining and not less rich and fertile southern portion of Siberia. Of course these farmers of the Altai cannot be compared with our peasants who inherit their land; but they compare favourably with any ordinary Russian peasants. One can see that their fathers and grandfathers have been serfs of the greatest and most exalted Lord of the Empire, not half-slaves of a master who, powerless himself, demands the most absolute subjection; one can also assure oneself in many ways that the lack of landed property has in no wise hindered them from becoming prosperous, that is, from earning more than enough to supply their necessities.