A violent controversy was aroused between the enterprising and outspoken American investigator, Mr. George Kennan, and a well-known English explorer, Mr. H. de Windt, who undertook to contest the statements, and, indeed, to deny the facts set forth by Mr. Kennan, plainly condemning them as the phantasy of a disordered imagination and boldly affirming that such a place as the Tomsk forwarding prison “does not exist.” Mr. de Windt’s arguments are based upon the negative evidence of his own experience. He declares that he saw nothing of the horrors described, but then he never saw or closely inspected the prisons incriminated. He was, no doubt, admitted to certain prisons, which he visited under the auspices of the authorities, and he reported upon them hastily and on imperfect knowledge. Mr. Kennan’s painful story is so completely sustained by Russian official reports and the open condemnation of the Siberian press, that it is entitled to full credence and may be relied upon as absolutely trustworthy and conclusive. His account of Tiumen and Tomsk must take a prominent place in the history of penal institutions.
The exile system called the étapes or “road prisons” into being. They were very numerous and were planted at intervals of every twenty-five or forty miles, and as this distance was beyond the limit of a single day’s march, half-way houses, or polu étapes, were to be met with regularly along the road. Each étape was the headquarters of a detachment of soldiers who formed the convoy or escort of the convicts moving eastward. At the polu étapes there were no troops. The head of each convoy was a commissioned officer styled the nachalnik.
The marching parties covered 330 miles every month, doing from fifteen to twenty miles on two succeeding days and resting on the third. Thus a party leaving Tomsk on Monday morning reached a polu étape that night, slept there and passed on to another regular étape on Wednesday, where they halted for twenty-four hours. On Thursday the journey was resumed with a fresh escort, a polu étape was reached that night, and a regular étape the next, and so on, day after day and week after week for many months. Until 1883, there was no separation of the sexes on the march, but after that date single men were excluded from the family parties in which women and children were included. Terrible demoralisation was previously the rule in the constantly overcrowded étapes, and the grossest offences were commonly committed.
The departure of a marching party from the forwarding prison was generally fixed at eight o’clock in the morning, when the telyegas, or country carts, for the conveyance of the sick and infirm, began to collect in front of the prison gate. Next appeared the prison blacksmith with his anvil and portable forge, to test the fetters as the convicts came forth, and after he had satisfied himself that the rivets were fast and the basils had not been bent, an under officer doled out ten kopecks to each individual, and the convicts were formed in line, by classes, for convenience of inspection and calling the roll. The hard-labour convicts removed their gray visorless caps to show that their crowns were half shaved according to regulation. From the other sides of their heads hung a mat of long, coarse and dishevelled hair. At length the whole party, numbering from three to four hundred, assembled in the street; each convict carried a gray linen two-bushel bag for the storage of his personal effects. Many possessed tea-kettles, dangling from the waist belts that supported the leg irons, and one or two might be seen with a favourite dog in their arms. All the men were dressed alike in long gray overcoats over coarse linen shirts and loose gray trousers. The women wore no distinctive uniform, but were dressed mostly in peasant costume with gaily coloured handkerchiefs on their heads. Square foot-wrappers of gray linen were used in lieu of stockings and all wore the koty, or low shoes, while they lasted, but they were of such rotten, worthless material that they fell to pieces in a couple of days and the wretched wayfarers went barefooted.
The telyegas were carts of the rudest description, one-horsed and without springs or seats, and the occupants, sick and suffering, old, infirm and emaciated, lay at the bottom on a scanty layer of grass. A doctor’s certificate was essential to secure a place in the carts, and a sharp lookout was kept to weed out the malingerers. In one year more than twenty-five hundred broken-down persons were conveyed to their destination in as many as 658 carts.
When the column started, the marching party led the van at a brisk pace, followed by the military escort, the carts bearing the sick, and those conveying the gray linen bags. The commanding officer brought up the rear. “This strange procession,” says Deutsch, who knew from personal experience, “extends itself along the road for about three-quarters of a mile, and raises clouds of dust.” A terrible scourge was the Siberian midge, a pest attacking not only the exposed hands and face but getting into the mouth, nose, ears and eyes, and under the clothing, and inflicting unendurable irritation. The pace maintained was at the rate of two miles an hour. After traversing ten miles, a halt was called for rest and the noon-day meal. The effort was little for the able-bodied, but for the weaker, laden with chains and bundles, the long march was most exhausting, and all gladly flung themselves on the ground, wet or dry. A spot was chosen at the entrance of some village, and its residents came forth to haggle and huckster over the sale of coarse food, such as black rye bread, fish pies, hard boiled eggs, milk and kvas, or sour country beer. Prices varied, and no attempt was made to control them officially; they were liable to be extortionate at seasons of scarcity, after bad harvests, and the government allowance was at times ludicrously inadequate, barely enough to satisfy hunger. Besides, the average convict is an inveterate gambler, and many became penniless risking and losing the whole of their allowance. Then they would beg by the roadside, as already described. After a short hour’s pause, the march was resumed, a second ten miles was painfully covered, and it was almost dark when the halt for the night was reached, whether at an étape or polu étape.
There was little to choose between the étapes and the polu étapes, but the latter were smaller and the accommodation was consequently worse. Both were stockaded enclosures, containing three or more long, low, one-story buildings. One of these was the commanding officer’s quarters, a second was for the soldiers of the escort, and the remaining hut or huts formed the prison. Each was divided into two or three cells; each was furnished with the usual plank sleeping platforms in a double row, and a brick stove. The available space was much too small for the prisoners passing through as these halting prisons were built for about half the number. “All of these,” says an official report, “are not only too small, but old and decayed and demand capital repairs.” The governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Anuchin, reported confidentially in 1880, to the Czar, Alexander III, that all prisons he had visited, including the étapes, were tumbled-down buildings in a lamentable sanitary condition; that they were cold in winter and saturated with miasma; that the prisons of the empire generally, with the exception of the principal ones recently erected, were not remarkable for their good qualities, but the Siberian prisons were particularly bad because they were built quickly, with insufficient means, and almost wholly without supervision of any kind. Only one architect had been employed and his sphere of action was so wide that he paid only a rare visit to new works in progress. The contractors departed from the original plans and evaded conditions, so that the work was continually neglected. In the first place the money was insufficient, after a portion of the government appropriation had been stolen by fraudulent contractors and corrupt officials, and the new étapes were run up without stone foundations, so that the walls soon “settled” and the buildings rapidly deteriorated under climatic agencies and the injurious wear and tear of the constant overcrowding. In temperate weather half the prisoners slept on the ground in the outer courtyard, but when it was too inclement they filled the kameras, lay about the corridors and packed themselves into the garrets. Not the smallest care was taken to make places habitable. Dirt accumulated everywhere; no provision had been made for ventilation, and the windows would not even open. Occupation of quarters was a matter of force, when the weakest went to the wall.
On arrival at an étape, generally in the afternoon, a halt was called outside the palisade for roll-call, and then the great gates were thrown open for the indiscriminate admission of the crowd. “With a wild, mad rush and a furious clashing of chains, more than three hundred men made a sudden break for the narrow gateway, struggled, fought and crowded through it, and then burst into the kameras, in order to secure, by preoccupation, places on the sleeping platforms,” says Kennan. Leo Deutsch graphically describes this “battle for the best sleeping places, the weaker being thrust aside or trampled down by the stronger. At our first sight of this mad fighting and struggling among some hundred men in a narrow space, we thought they would kill each other, but generally the wild tumult of blows and kicks and curses did not result in anything serious.” The losers in the game took the worst places, or bartered for a better bed with the more fortunate at the price of a few kopecks.
When the scramble for a night’s lodging ended, the tired wayfarers fell to preparing their own suppers. Hot water for making tea was retailed by the soldiers of the escort, and cooked food with coarse bread was bought from the market women who came in to sell their wares. Sometimes they did not appear and the convicts would almost starve, or the times were hard and impossible prices were charged. The daily allowance issued by the authorities was sometimes insufficient, and again the convicts went short. Often enough the buyers cheated the sellers, or stole their goods, and the poor women could get no redress. After supper, roll was again called, the watch was set, sentries were posted, and the prisoners were locked up and left for the night.
The étape at Achinsk, for instance, between Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk, is described by a newspaper of Irkutsk as “a cloaca where human beings perish like flies. Typhus fever, diphtheria and other epidemic diseases prevail there constantly, and infect all who have the misfortune to get into that awful place,” and a St. Petersburg newspaper says, “There one doctor has on his hands more than three hundred sick.” A correspondent wrote to a Tomsk journal, “As soon as you enter the court-yard of the prison you notice the contaminated, miasmatic air.... Dante himself would have thrown down his pen if he had been required to describe the damp, cold, dilapidated cells of this prison. At night myriads of bed-bugs torture every prisoner into a condition not far removed from frenzy. The prison sometimes has six hundred inmates and to its filth and disorder are attributable the typhus fever, diphtheria and other diseases that spread from it, as from a pit of contagion, to the population of the city.” In the Isham étape, the cold was intense and the exiles arriving had no warm clothing. One man was frozen to death on the road. At Cheremkhovsky the air space which was barely enough for two persons had to serve for thirty. It was described by a prisoner as “a grave and not a prison.” At Kirinsk, the building of decayed logs would have fallen down had it not been shored up by other logs equally rotten. A prisoner, to show the state of the wood, thrust his fingers out of sight into the wall.