We have seen how the marching parties were accompanied by a large contingent of sick who were unfit to travel and yet could not be left behind, sometimes even at the point of death. They were compelled to sit all day in a cramped position in the rude carts, intensifying the already acute pains of their often mortal ailments, and were exposed to all conditions of the weather. When dry and warm, they were enveloped in clouds of dust, causing intolerable discomfort, especially in the case of disease of the respiratory organs; when cold and inclement, still worse dangers attended the exposure to snow and wintry winds. No change into dry clothing on arrival was feasible, for with inconceivable carelessness the baggage was allowed to become soaked through on the road. The baggage carts were unprovided with cover even by tarpaulins. Thus the sickly, in the worst stages of illness, were forced to lie down upon the same platforms, side by side with the more robust, to whom they quickly passed the contagion of their diseases. In the rare cases when the étape was provided with a lazaret, newcomers who were ill might fare better, but the average étape hospital was infamously bad.
The indictment against the Czar and his government for their brutal defiance of the commonest rules of humanity has been more than substantiated by the deplorable facts set forth in the previous pages. It is agreeable to note some disposition to mend matters on the part of the supreme authorities. Certain reforms in prison administration have been introduced in recent years, showing that the autocrat of all the Russias has not continued utterly indifferent to the sufferings of Siberian exiles and convicts. Widespread radical changes have been impossible; the evils were too deep seated and too extensive for general removal; but one or two new prisons have been erected, more in accord with the dictates of penitentiary science and aiming at partial improvement. A brief account of one or two of these may serve to relieve somewhat the gloomy picture which has been by no means over-coloured.
The Czars Alexander II and III could not plead ignorance of the horrible conditions prevailing in Eastern Siberia which were brought unmistakably to their notice by the reports of Anuchin in 1880 and 1882. Some of his condemnatory remarks have already been quoted and may be repeated here as summing up his final verdict. After minute inquiry and much investigation, he characterises the Siberian prisons as follows: “The exile system and penal servitude in Eastern Siberia are in the most unsatisfactory state ... while the exile bureaus in the provinces are not organised in a manner commensurate with the importance of the work that they have to do and are prejudicial rather than useful to the service.” The Czar Alexander III was so deeply impressed with the necessity for reform that he endorsed on this report in his own handwriting, “I should greatly like to do this and it seems to me indispensable.” Events proved too strong however even for the autocrat ruler of all the Russias. He says: “I have read this report with great interest, and I am more than troubled by this melancholy but just description of the government’s forgetfulness of a country so rich and so necessary to Russia.” On the part dealing with prisons the Czar endorsed the words, “A melancholy but not a new picture.” On a later page I shall go further into the ameliorations and improvements attempted since 1886.
CHAPTER VII
VAGABONDAGE AND UNIONS
Peculiar phases of criminality to be found in Siberian prisons—Country overrun with convict fugitives—Terrible privations suffered by these vagrants—The “call of the cuckoo”—The vagrants known as “brodyagi”—Number of runaway convicts in the summer months said to exceed thirty thousand—The formation of the “artel” or union in all companies of convicts—The power and methods of the “Ivans” or recidivists in the “artel”—Leo Deutsch’s story—Life of the politicals in the Middle Kara state prison—The “Sirius” or student who worked during the night—The humane governor, Colonel Kanonovich—He resigns rather than obey the government’s orders that the prisoners should be perpetually chained to wheelbarrows.
Certain types of criminals and some peculiar phases of criminality have grown up in Russian, and especially in Siberian prisons. They are mainly due to the negation of proper penitentiary principles and the absence of any fixed methods of treatment. Callous indifference has generally alternated with brutal repression and savage, disciplinary punishments. The chief result has been the growth of classes of criminals seldom seen elsewhere. The so-called “habitual offender” is to be met with strongly developed and in a peculiarly vicious form in Siberia. The whole country is overrun with fugitive convicts who have made good their escape in various fashions. Some have run from the marching parties, carrying their lives in their hands as they braved the bullets of the generally straight-shooting soldiers of the escort; others have successfully evaded the police at remote points of settlement as established exiles; not a few have benefited by the exchange of identity with some one who remained behind. All have become wild men of the woods, the terror of all peaceable members of society whom they may come across in the scattered settlements or single houses of the sparsely inhabited districts. Many thousands of these vagrants are at large in the summer months, when they may live in the open air and subsist as best they can on what they find or steal. Large numbers are recaptured; many perish from cold and starvation when winter approaches; many more give themselves up voluntarily to save their lives, accepting the severest flogging or a new sentence as the penalty of their escape.
Yet they are incorrigible wanderers and pass their lives in short periods of freedom and longer doses of confinement. When Kennan saw a marching party start, he was shown convicts who were treading the dolorous road for the sixth time. The captain of the escort assured him that he had known cases in which the journey had been repeated sixteen times. In other words, the vagrant had crossed Siberia just thirty-two times on foot, and had, therefore, walked as much as if he had twice made the circuit of the globe at the Equator.
The passionate craving for freedom has been well described by Dostoyevski. “At the first song of the lark throughout all Siberia and Russia, men set out on the tramp; God’s creatures, if they can break their prison and escape into the woods.... They go vagabondising where they please, wherever life seems to them most agreeable and easy; they drink and eat what they can find; at night they sleep undisturbed and without a care in the woods or in a field;... saying good night only to the stars; and the eye that watches them is the eye of God. It is not altogether a rosy lot: sometimes they suffer hunger and fatigue ‘in the service of General Cuckoo.’ Often enough the wanderers have not a morsel of bread to keep their teeth going for days at a time.... They are almost all brigands and thieves by necessity rather than inclination.... This life in the woods, wretched and fearful as it is, but still free and adventurous, has a mysterious seduction for those who have experienced it.”
A curious illustration of this consuming passion is to be found in the case of an aged convict who had become the servant of a high official at the Kara gold mines. This man ran away periodically at the return of spring, and although suffering always the same terrible privations, was brought back in irons. At last, at the fateful moment, he came to his master and begged that he might be locked up. “I am a brodyaga, heart and soul, quite irreclaimable, and I cannot resist the cuckoo’s call. Please do me the favour to put me under lock and key so that I cannot go off.” He was closely confined until the summer passed, and when the fever of unrest left him, he was released and became quiet, contented and docile as ever. A convict who has earned conditional freedom and received a grant of land, may have married, had children and lived quietly for some years, when suddenly some day he will have disappeared, abandoning wife and family, to the stupefaction of everybody. Vagrancy is in his blood. He probably was a deserter before his conviction; the passion for wandering has always possessed him. He has hungered after a change of lot, and nothing would hold him, not even his family, much less police surveillance or prison bars.
The largest number of these vagabonds, or “passportless” men, as they are called, have begun at the earliest opportunity to make a break for liberty while on the road between the étapes. As the party was being marshalled after the midday rest, or when it reached some defile or stretch of broken ground, a simultaneous dash was made by several through the marching cordon of guards. Fire was then opened instantaneously, and one or more of the fugitives fell while the rest got away. If the rush was made near some wood and cover could be gained, the escape was successful. The first step on reaching a safe shelter was to remove the leg irons by pounding the basils into an oblong shape with a stone. Then the fugitive’s face was turned westward toward the Ural Mountains, and one or two might by chance reach European Russia.