The old order changeth slowly, and the hideous memories of the black and baleful past will long survive. The pages which record the disgraceful facts may be torn out of Russian prison history but they can never be eradicated or forgotten. Let it be granted that reforms and improvements have been introduced, and that some of the most glaring evils have been removed, we may doubt whether in the present condition of the empire, still shaken to its very base by disaster and disaffection, the betterment goes below the surface or will be lasting. The governing authorities in these troublous times have but little leisure to discuss penology, and although long since aroused to a lively sense of the shortcomings of their prison system, they are slow to mend their ways. Changes and ameliorations promised still tarry by the way, and there is but little hope that the frightful conditions so long prevailing have even in part disappeared.
The chief blot upon the method of transportation no longer exists, it is true. The wearisome, almost interminable march has been replaced by the long railway journey over the Trans-Siberian line, completed in 1897 and opened the following year for the conveyance of exiles. The convicts no longer spend a couple of years or more on a journey now performed in eight or ten days. Their sufferings are no longer protracted indefinitely, but for a brief space they are still locked up like cattle in dirty, ill-ventilated vans, and are still collected in the foul “forwarding prisons,” whence they pass on for distribution to Eastern Siberia, the convict colony of Saghalien, or the outer darkness near the North Pole. A few well-planned and commodious new prisons have been erected in recent years, for which credit must be given to the prison administration, but they have applied only a partial remedy to existing conditions.
The exile route to-day naturally follows the new line of railway. From Moscow the road strikes south to Samara on the Volga, to which point a large passenger traffic is brought by the great water-way to board the trains. From Samara to Ufa on the west slope the Ural Mountains, and after scaling them the line descends to Chelyabinsk on the Siberian frontier. Here the convict travellers are divided into parties according to their destination. Some go north toward Tiumen and Tobolsk, others travel due east in the direction of Lake Baikal, and others start south for Semipalatinsk and the Altai.
The route before the railway was built was from Moscow, the centre of the home prison system, thence by train to Nizhni-Novgorod, and on by boat down the Volga through Kazan to Perm, and thence by train across the Ural Mountains to Ekaterinburg and Tiumen. All exiles of whatever class, without distinction or separation, travelled this way, and all halted at Tiumen, where they were made up into parties and forwarded to their several destinations.
Overcrowding was the curse of all Russian prisons; the cause of discomforts innumerable, inflicting untold suffering, producing deadly endemic and epidemic diseases. That it was the same everywhere, we are told on incontestable authority, and the futile attempts made by superficial inquirers to vindicate the government which is responsible are contemptible. To begin with St. Petersburg, the official report of the society for prisons stated that in 1880 the show prison, the Litovski Zamok, although built for seven hundred inmates, uniformly contained from nine hundred to a thousand; and the depot prison, supposed to hold two hundred, was always filled with double the number. The first named had 103 rooms nominally for eight hundred persons. These rooms, as described by an eye-witness, were exceedingly dirty, and he further says: “The ‘black holes’ are dreadful; they are absolutely deprived of light; a dark labyrinth leads to them and within all is wet, with rotten floors and dripping walls. A man coming from the outer air staggers away half asphyxiated. Specialists say that the healthiest man will surely die if he is kept there for three or four weeks. After a short stay prisoners went out exhausted; several could hardly stand on their feet.”
As to the specific charge of overcrowding, a few details must carry conviction. The prison at Nizhni-Novgorod was built for three hundred, and generally held seven or eight hundred persons. In Poland there were four prisons occupying the space required for one. The prison at Perm was built in 1872 for 120 inmates, but in the same year it held just double that number and the cubical air space allotted to each individual was from 202 to 260 cubic feet, or, as Kropotkin puts it, it was just as if a man was living in a coffin eight feet by six feet. Another authority, the Journal of Legal Medicine, issued by the medical department of the Ministry of the Interior, gives the cubical contents as no more than 124 cubic feet per head. At Tomsk the prison was disgracefully overcrowded. It was built for nine hundred but contained over two thousand souls. At Samara the average prison population was 1,147, but the aggregate cubic capacity of all the prisons in the town was for 552 inmates. At Verkhni Udinsk an ostrog built for 140 prisoners was often packed with five hundred and even eight hundred inmates. On the whole, summing up the dreadful facts, an apologist of the Russian government admits that the prisons contain half as many more than the number originally intended.
Let us pass to the direct evidence of a perfectly veracious witness, speaking out of his own experience. George Kennan approached his self-imposed task with a judicial, well-balanced mind, quite unprejudiced against the Russian system, predisposed, if anything, to view it with favour. He paid a lengthy visit to the Tiumen forwarding prison, with the full permission of the authorities, who withheld nothing from his observation, premising only that it was greatly overcrowded and in a bad sanitary condition.
As to the first point, the figures were conclusive. It was a well-known fact that the prison was built originally for 550 inmates but was subsequently enlarged by the addition of detached barracks so as to hold nominally 850 prisoners. On the day Kennan visited it, the number was 1,741, as witnessed by a blackboard hanging up at the office door. In the first room entered, a kamera or cell, 35 feet long, 25 feet wide and 12 feet high, the accommodation and air space at the outside was for forty persons. On the night before, 160 had slept or, more exactly, passed the night in the room. The same dreadful superfluity of human beings existed throughout the entire prison.
“I looked around the cell,” says Kennan. “There was practically no ventilation whatever, and the air was so poisoned and foul that I could hardly force myself to breathe it. We visited successively in the yard six kameras or cells, essentially like the first, and found in every one of them three or four times the number of prisoners for which it was intended, and five or six times the number for which it had adequate air space. In most of the cells there was not room enough on the sleeping platforms for all of the convicts, and scores of men slept every night on the foul, muddy floors, under the nary, ‘sleeping platforms,’ and in the gangways between them and the walls.”
The main building, containing the kitchen, the workshops, the hospital and a large number of kameras, was in a worse sanitary condition than the barracks. The air in the corridors and cells, particularly on the second story, was indescribably foul. The oxygen had been breathed again and again; it was laden with fever germs from the unventilated hospital wards, fetid odours from diseased human lungs and unclean human bodies, and the stench of unmentionable receptacles. “It was like trying to breathe in an underground hospital drain,” says Kennan. The kitchen was a dark, dirty room in the basement where three or four half naked cooks were baking large loaves and preparing soup. The bread was sour and heavy, but as good as that usually eaten by Russian peasants; the soup was found to be good and nutritious.