It was dangerous to protest against ill-usage. A number of exiles, goaded to desperation by brutal severity of the acting governor of the province of Tobolsk, respectfully declared that there was a limit to human endurance and that their position had become intolerable. This petition was adjudged “audaciously impudent” and its authors, nineteen in number, were removed to a barren village within the Arctic Circle. Memorials from free and independent bodies were equally unpalatable to the authorities. The medical society of Tver in European Russia, a short distance from Moscow, dared to back up a request made by a number of qualified physicians exiled to Siberia to be allowed to practise in the places of their banishment. A year or two before, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia had reported to the Czar that the number of doctors in the country was utterly insufficient, saying, “In the cities only is it possible to take measures for the preservation of health. In every other part of Eastern Siberia physicians are almost wholly lacking, and the local population is left helpless in its struggle with diphtheria and other contagious diseases which desolate the country.” Two years later the medical school of Tver was swiftly punished for venturing to endorse this statement, and for daring to ask that the prohibition to practise might be rescinded in the case of the doctors so urgently needed. The school was forthwith broken up and two of its members who were in state services were summarily dismissed from their posts.
Exiled physicians who dared to infringe the rules were mercilessly dealt with. A student named Dolgopolov had been banished for a most trifling offence. During a riot at the Kharkov university, when the streets were being cleared by the mounted Cossacks with their heavy dog-whips, Dolgopolov indignantly took the brutal horsemen to task. For this he was promptly arrested and banished by administrative process to Western Siberia. Here, at the earnest entreaty of two suffering fellow creatures, one ill with typhus fever, and the other afflicted with cataract, he ventured to prescribe for them. He was immediately summoned before the chief of police, who had a personal grudge against him, and roughly reminded him he had transgressed the regulations. A little later he was called in to attend the major’s wife who had been accidentally shot in the leg by her son. The immediate extraction of the bullet was essential, and no one but Dolgopolov was competent to perform the operation. He explained that he was forbidden to practise under pain of imprisonment, but it was put to him as a matter of life and death, and he at last consented. The next day he was arrested by order of the ispravnik and thrown into prison at Tiukalinsk, where he contracted typhus fever. His case excited profound sympathy in the town, which was magnified by the authorities into a charge of exercising a pernicious and dangerous influence, and was so reported to the governor, who immediately ordered his removal to the arctic town of Surgut. No mention had been made of his illness, but the convoy officer refused to receive him. As the ispravnik would not be baulked, however, he obtained a peasant’s cart, dragged the patient from his bed in hospital and sent him away in his night-shirt under the escort of two policemen.
He arrived at Ishim after 126 miles en route. Other political exiles who resided here rallied around him, had him examined by the local surgeon, and got the local chief of police to draw up a statement and telegraph it to the governor, who heard for the first time of the sufferer’s dangerous illness, and who replied by ordering him to be taken into the local hospital. It was currently reported that the governor took a substantial bribe from the ispravnik at Tiukalinsk for sparing him the prosecution he richly merited. Dr. Dolgopolov gradually recovered and was later sent to Surgut. The Siberian ispravniks, or chiefs of police, were notorious offenders, and Kennan says that at the time of his journey there were ten under accusation of criminal charges but still evading trial by timely propitiation, in cash, of their superiors.
Police surveillance was the more difficult to bear because a large number of the officials who carried out this duty were degraded characters with criminal antecedents. Many had been originally common-law exiles taken into the government service at the expiration of their terms. Kennan states that he came across police officers whom he would not dare to meet at night, when alone and unarmed. He records that in the city of Tomsk the police had been constantly guilty of “acts of violence, outrage and crime, including the arrest and imprisonment of innocent citizens by the hundreds, the taking of bribes from notorious criminals, the subornation of perjury, the use of torture and the beating nearly to death of pregnant women.” A newly appointed governor, on visiting a prison, heard three hundred complaints of unjust imprisonment, and on investigation of them two hundred prisoners were set at liberty. The methods of surveillance were unceremonious and rudely intrusive. An exile wrote to the press as follows, complaining that the police entered his quarters repeatedly to verify his presence and to see if any one else was there. “They walk past our houses constantly, looking in at the windows and listening at the doors. They post sentries at night on the corners of the streets where we reside, and they compel our neighbours to watch our movements and report upon them to the local authorities.”
Many ladies were to be found among the political exiles, often defenceless girls from sixteen to twenty years of age and young married women temporarily separated from their husbands who were interned elsewhere or were at hard labour in the mines. They were constantly exposed to indignity or worse, suffered insult or outrage, and were compelled to associate with others for common protection. One young woman, on returning from a short walk, found that a police officer had invaded her private apartment and was lying asleep in helmet and boots upon her bed. The chief of police also shamelessly misused his control of the exiles’ correspondence, which was absolute; he might at his discretion suppress and destroy any letters after perusal of their contents, or detain them and postpone delivery on the ground that they were in secret cipher which he was anxious to penetrate. Sometimes he carried them to his club and read them aloud between drinks to his boon companions, who laughed brutally at the tender messages contained in them.
It must be admitted that the fate of those merely banished is stern enough and their condition is in some respects worse than that of the actually imprisoned. Loss of liberty is a terrible punishment, of course, but at least food and lodging are provided and, as has been shown, the simple exile is not certainly assured of either. There are phases of exile, too, which far transcend the worst form of incarceration. Banishment to a ulus or yurt of the arctic province of Yakutsk is the most barbarous penalty that could well be devised for the prolonged torture of a civilised being. The province of Yakutsk is very sparsely inhabited, the climate is arctic, the post arrives rarely and at long intervals; common necessaries, not to say luxuries, such as tea, sugar, petroleum, are unprocurable. Even stale black bread can seldom be obtained and at an exorbitant price. The native’s hut, or yurt, is tent-shaped and built of rough logs, the interstices filled up with earth and turf. The life of an exile there has been stigmatised as a “living death,” and a description by a writer in the Russian Gazette is quoted.
“The Cossacks who brought me from the town of Yakutsk to my destination soon returned, and I was left alone among the Yakuts who do not understand a word of Russian. They watch me constantly, for fear that if I escape they will have to answer for it to the Russian authorities. If I go out of the close atmosphere of the solitary yurt to walk I am followed by a suspicious Yakut. If I take an axe to cut myself a cane, the Yakut directs me by gestures and pantomime to let it alone and go back into the yurt. I return thither, and before the fireplace I see a Yakut who has stripped himself naked, and is hunting for lice in his clothing—a pleasant picture! The Yakuts live in winter in the same buildings with their cattle, and frequently are not separated from the latter even by the thinnest partition. The excrement of the cattle and of the children; the inconceivable disorder and filth; the rotting straw and rags; the myriads of vermin in the bedding; the foul, oppressive air, and the impossibility of speaking a word of Russian—all these things taken together are positively enough to drive one insane. The food of the Yakuts can hardly be eaten. It is carelessly prepared, without salt, often of tainted materials, and the unaccustomed stomach rejects it with nausea. I have no separate dishes or clothing of my own; there are no facilities for bathing, and during the whole winter—eight months—I am as dirty as a Yakut. I cannot go anywhere—least of all to the town, which is two hundred versts away. I live with the Yakuts by turns—staying with one family for six weeks, and then going for the same length of time to another. I have nothing to read, neither books nor newspapers, and I know nothing of what is going on in the world.”
The editor of the Russian Gazette, M. S. A. Priklonsky, an eminent publicist and man of letters, in commenting upon this state of things writes, “Beyond this severity cannot go. Beyond this there remains nothing but to tie a man to the tail of a wild horse, and drive him into the steppe, or chain him to a corpse and leave him to his fate. One does not wish to believe that a human being can be subjected, without trial and by a mere executive order, to such grievous torment.... And yet we are assured ... that up to this time none of the exiles in the province of Yakutsk have been granted any alleviating privileges.”
Mr. Kennan bears witness in 1891 that exiles were still sent to Yakutsk, and Leo Deutsch speaks of the practice as still prevailing much later, although he and his colleagues did not shrink from removal there, hoping it might lead to some more advantageous change later. But humanity shudders at the detestable treatment of the poor people whose worst crime was a passionate desire to alleviate the sufferings of their fellow countrymen. Life at Yakutsk was infinitely more terrible than the worst tortures inflicted by prolonged confinement in a separate cell, which is commonly described as “the greatest crime of the nineteenth century.”