With the nineteenth century some reforms were introduced. The exiles were organised in parties, marched under escorts, and étapes, or halting stations for a stay of a night or more, were built at regular intervals along the road. The identification and separate personality of individuals were established by means of proper papers showing whom they were, their history and destination. A great administrative measure was the creation in 1823 of a central bureau at Tobolsk (removed later to Tiumen) for the record and registration of all exiles arriving and passing into Siberia. Sub-offices at the principal Siberian towns assisted with the necessary details showing the distribution and disposal of all persons banished. Full statistics are consequently available for estimating accurately the extent of penal deportation in recent years. Approximately, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than a million souls have passed the boundary line between Europe and Asia. Speaking more exactly, the total number banished between 1823 and 1887 amounted to 772,979, or an annual average of about seventeen thousand.
Siberian exiles have been grouped by Kennan into four great classes. These are as follows: the hard-labour convicts, in Russian called the katorzhniki; the penal colonists, or poselentzy; the persons merely banished, the ssylny; women and children who go to Siberia voluntarily as the companions of fathers and parents, and conversely, in rare cases, men who accompany their wives. Members of this class are called dobrovolny. According to law, they are not under the disciplinary control of the escort, but, as a matter of fact, they are subjected to the same treatment as the convicts. An eye-witness reported in a Moscow paper in 1881 that when he met a party of exiles on the march, “the exhausted women and children literally stuck in the mud, and the soldiers dealt them blows to make them advance and keep pace with the rest.”
Members of the two first classes wore chains, leg fetters, and walked in slippers for distances of six and seven thousand miles. The rest went free of such physical encumbrances, but were otherwise exposed to the terrible hardships and privations of the long protracted, wearisome march. The mere atmospheric conditions and extremes of temperature in the varying seasons suffice to break down the health of all but the most hardy, for winter succeeded summer before the march ended and vice versa, so that arctic cold alternated with tropical heat, and deep snow with burning sun and torrential rains. When to such exposure are superadded unsuitable clothing, bad and insufficient food, the insanitary condition of the over-crowded étapes and the absence of medical care, “one is,” Kennan says, “surprised, not that so many die, but that so many get through alive.”
A Russian painter, M. Jacoby, has painted an awful picture depicting the frightful scene. It has been graphically described by Kropotkin and may be quoted here in full to give a clear idea of this hideous march.
“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 or snow, 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 gray snow clouds, rise in the dust on the horizon. A track marked all along by poles to distinguish it from the surrounding plain, ploughed by the passage of thousands of carts, covered with ruts that keep down the hardest wheels, runs through the naked plains. The party slowly moves along this road. In front a row of soldiers opens the march. Behind them heavily advance the hard-labour convicts, with half-shaved heads, wearing gray clothes with a yellow diamond on the back, and open shoes worn out by the long journey, and exhibiting the tatters in which the wounded feet are wrapped. Each convict wears a chain riveted to his ankles, its rings being twisted with rags. The chain goes up each leg and is suspended to a girdle. Another chain closely ties both hands and a third chain binds together six or eight convicts. Every false movement of any of the gang is felt by all his chain companions; the feebler is dragged forward by the stronger and he must not stop the way; the étape stage is long and the autumn day is short.
“Behind the hard-labour convicts march the poselentzy, condemned to be settled in Siberia, wearing the same gray clothes and the same kind of shoes.... In the rear you discover a few carts drawn by the small, attenuated, cat-like peasants’ horses. They are loaded with the bags of the convicts, and with the sick or dying who are fastened by ropes on the top of the load. Behind the carts struggle the wives and children of the convicts; a few have found a free corner on a loaded cart, and crouch there when unable to move further, whilst the great number march behind the carts, leading their children by the hand or bearing them in their arms. In the rear comes a second detachment of soldiers, stimulating these weak, feeble creatures to fresh exertions by blows with the butt end of their muskets.”
The infant mortality under these conditions almost exceeds belief, and deportation to Siberia has been aptly and truthfully described as a “massacre of the innocents.” In the year 1881, when 2,561 children followed the exile march, very few survived. The majority succumbed to the hardships of the road and died before or immediately after their arrival at their destination. The yearly quota has constantly increased, numbering from five to eight thousand. To the danger to health incurred must be added the moral degradation, especially in the case of the young girls.
Before reviewing the conditions and setting forth the actual facts, with the processes that produced them, it will be well to dissect the grand totals and arrive at the relative proportions of the three principal classes composing the whole body of exiles constantly moving across the frontier to fill the prisons and to people Siberia to its uttermost ends. Less than one-half were criminal in the sense that they had committed offences and had been adjudged guilty in open court by duly constituted tribunals. The larger moiety had had no legal trial; they had been punished with banishment by the irresponsible action and simple fiat of minor officials and bodies of ill-educated peasants, wielding the extraordinary powers conferred by “administrative process.” At no time and in no civilised land have people been so ruthlessly sacrificed and subjected to the forfeiture of personal liberty by this utter abnegation of justice and fair play, and the result is a standing disgrace to the government that permitted and encouraged it. The extent to which this most reprehensible system has obtained may be judged by a simple statement of figures. For many years past the average number sentenced to exile by legal verdict in regular courts was 45.6 per cent. of the whole yearly contingent, and those banished by “administrative process” was 54.4 per cent. It must always be borne in mind that, in describing the methods pursued and the painful results attendant on them, more than half the sufferers were either entirely innocent or guilty of offences that could only be deemed criminal by a strained interpretation of the exercise of authority, and in no case had they been properly tried and convicted by law.
The system has been defined by Mr. Kennan as “the banishment of an obnoxious person from one part of the empire to another without the observance of any of the legal formalities which in most civilised countries precede the deprivation of rights and the restriction of personal liberty.” A person might be entirely guiltless of any offence, he need not have made himself amenable to the law; it was enough that the local authorities should suspect him of being “untrustworthy”[[1]] or believe that his presence in any place was “prejudicial to public order,” or threatened public tranquillity. He might be arrested forthwith and detained in prison for a period varying from two weeks to two years, and then by a stroke of the pen be deported, forcibly, to any part of the empire and kept there under police surveillance for from one to ten years. He could not protest or seek to defend himself. The same impenetrable secrecy was maintained as in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition. Not a whisper reached him of the causes of his arrest; he might not examine the witnesses who accused him or supported the charge against him. He must not call upon friends to speak of his loyalty and good character; he was perfectly helpless and altogether at the mercy of the authorities, and even his nearest relatives were in ignorance of his whereabouts or what happened to him. They could not help him or must not if they would.
[1]. The Russian word is “neblagonadiozhny” and means literally, “of whom nothing good can be expected,” and the expression has been given a very wide interpretation. Young people who read certain forbidden books or join forbidden societies for the ventilation of certain principles are deemed untrustworthy.