We have another portrait of Captain Nikolin from one who knew him but too well. Leo Deutsch suffered for some years under his régime and describes him “as a malicious, ill-natured man, continually devising petty humiliations for the prisoners.” In person he was a short, heavily built man, some fifty years of age, “with a bald head, a full gray beard, thin, tightly closed, rather cruel lips, an impenetrable face and cold gray eyes. His broad round face, cunning little eyes, and bristling moustache, gave him the look of a fat, spiteful old tom-cat, and he was always designated by that nickname. The expression of his eyes was particularly catlike; he looked as if just ready to pounce on a victim and stick his claws into it. He always spoke in a low voice, this ‘tom-cat;’ but he chattered unceasingly, and kept smacking his lips all the time, his expression being always peevish and discontented.... We petitioned our ‘tom-cat’ for leave to plant a garden in the yard; there was space enough, the work would have been beneficial, and then we might have had vegetables for our table, the deficiency in which particular had been so detrimental to our health. The ‘tom-cat’ roundly refused. ‘We should need spades,’ he said, ‘and they might be used to dig a hole whereby to get away.’ So, again, when one of us was sent some flower-seeds and sowed them in a wooden box, the box was taken away by Nikolin’s orders; the earth in it might have served to conceal some contraband article. Such needless tyrannies embittered us still more against the detested commandant. However peaceably we might otherwise have been inclined, our hatred of this man might well have blazed out at any opportunity; he himself probably guessed as much, for he became more and more mistrustful, at last never entering our prison. He felt that he had made enemies all round him, and sat lonely in his own house, or squabbled with his cook, afraid to show himself outside. It may be a matter of surprise that one of his many enemies did not find a way to put an end to him, that being a not unusual course of events in Kara; but finally he could endure such a life no longer, and applied to be transferred elsewhere. In the spring of 1887 his application was granted, and he departed, accompanied by the anathemas of the entire population of Kara.” Captain Nikolin was in due course succeeded by the Colonel Masyukov of whom we have heard so much in his conflict with the politicals of the state prison at Kara.

Captain Nikolin’s colleague at Kara, coequal in authority, but with independent functions, was Major Potulov, who governed the ordinary criminal prison at Kara. He was a man of a pleasanter type, who was both civil and hospitable to George Kennan, possibly to keep an eye upon his motions and, perhaps, take the sting out of the condemnation his command so richly deserved. He is described as a tall, fine looking, soldierly man about fifty years of age, affable in manner and disposed to act fairly by his charges, so far as it lay within his power. Where he failed was in loyalty to his superiors, and he was gifted with rare talents for fraud and embezzlement. He stole unblushingly, and enriched himself largely at the expense of the state. His chief device was to keep hundreds of prisoners on the rolls who were mere “ghosts;” men who had disappeared by flight or death, but for whom rations were still drawn and the value thereof shared between him and the purveyor. He was presently detected and dismissed, but escaped justice through his influential friends.

Patrin of Saghalien came to the front at a later date, when deportation to the island colony was in full swing, and his evil reputation became widespread as the most brutal and rapacious official in Russian penal annals. His character was so well known far and wide that he figured as the prison demon on the San Francisco stage. His was a reign of terror in the Alexandrovsk prison, and he drove through the town armed with revolver and Winchester rifle, committing acts of atrocious criminal violence in the open streets. Horrible stories were current of his misusage of his charges, of constant punishments in the dark cells or with the plet till death was the result. He was equally harsh with his officers. One of them, who had gone to complain of the insulting and outrageous conduct of a comrade toward his (the complainant’s) wife, was struck on the mouth by Patrin and felled to the ground. He had an abrupt way of dealing with recalcitrant prisoners. One day there came before him a young convict of an irascible temper, who had obstinately refused to work. Patrin forthwith fell upon him, striking him on the jaw. The prisoner, although of slight build, closed with the governor and, showing superhuman strength, dragged him to the top of the staircase. Now the warders who had been hanging about hurried to their chief’s assistance, and the fight became a perfect mêlée in one confused struggling group, all gravitating toward the edge of the stairs, down which they suddenly fell headlong. Patrin came out on top, with the prisoner underneath. But the latter had seized a revolver from one of the guards, and when he was raised to his feet pointed the weapon to his own forehead and shot himself, saying, “It was Patrin I wanted to kill.”

The political prisoners at Saghalien were subjected to the tender mercies of Patrin, and he also had charge of the women’s prison, but his infamous behaviour toward the women was too abominable to be told.

CHAPTER IX
CHANGES IN SYSTEM

The Kara settlements—Descriptions of the prisons by Kennan—Filthy state of the prison buildings at Ust Kara—Gold mining—Illicit trade in “stolen gold”—Improvements in the prison system—The new prison of Alexandrovsk—Mr. Foster Fraser’s account of the excellent state of the prison in 1901—The prison at Verkhni Udinsk—The island of Saghalien used as a penal colony—Disadvantages of the place—Coal mining chief industry—Climate uncongenial—Exiles sent by sea from Odessa—Terrible sufferings on the voyage—Convict marriages—Deplorable conditions on the island—Prison discipline in force at Alexandrovsk—Punishments inflicted—The plet.

Of the partial attempts made by Russia to reform the methods of inflicting penal servitude on wrong-doers, I shall speak more at large. A detailed account must be given of the new prisons erected more in conformity with modern ideas; and the persistent pursuit of that will-o’-the-wisp, penal colonisation by deportation to the desert island of Saghalien, with its futile processes and disappointing results, claims attention. Before leaving the older methods of enforcing hard labour, it will be well to describe its last stronghold and the system obtaining there until quite a recent date. “Kara the Black,” so called from a Tartar word, aptly describes the series of prisons and convict settlements established in the valley of the Kara River to work the mines, chiefly gold mines, the private property of the Czar. There are other mines of salt and silver, the latter chiefly at Nertchinsk, supposed to have been worked out, and now leased to private hands with profitable return, in spite of their deadly unhealthiness from the quicksilver emanations that poisoned them. The annals of Nertchinsk are as horrible as any in Siberian prison history, and the ancient prison of Akatui in the district still stands to bear witness to the cruelties and tragedies practised upon the unhappy politicals who inhabited it. The silver mines were reopened at Algachi in the neighbourhood, where there was a prison which Kennan saw and unhesitatingly condemned. “As a place of confinement,” he writes, “even for the worst class of offenders, it was a disgrace to a civilised state, and the negligence, indifference and incompetence shown by the government in dealing with its admitted evils were absolutely inexcusable.” Speaking further of the Nertchinsk district and of the mines at Algachi and Pokrovski and others, Mr. Kennan was of opinion that the prisoners permitted to work in them suffered less than those, the larger proportion, who were doomed to unbroken idleness in the overcrowded, foul-smelling prisons. It was irksome enough to work eight or ten hours daily in an icy gallery, three hundred feet below ground; the mines were badly ventilated, and the gases liberated by the explosives used may be injurious; but there are no deadly exhalations from poisonous ores to affect the health, and no doubt the worst feature of penal servitude in Siberia was not the hard labour in the mines but the almost inconceivably foul condition and enforced idleness of the prisons.

Returning now to the Kara prisons, seven in number, two of them were allotted to politicals, one for each sex, and of the remaining five the total population was approximately eighteen hundred convicts. Half of them were detained as prisoners; the other half were permitted generally to join the “free command.” The latter were still convicts, receiving rations and restricted to the settlement, but residing in barracks or in their own houses. The prison building of Ust Kara, at the Lower Diggings, is compared by Kennan to “a long, low, horse-car stable made of squared but unpainted logs, which are now black, weather-beaten, and decaying from age.” It was in the form of a square surrounded by logs twenty-five feet high, closely set together, and sharpened at the top like enormous lead pencils. Entrance was gained after ascending a few steps through a heavy wooden door opening upon a long, low and very dark corridor with a wet, slippery floor, much broken and damaged. The first sensation was that of damp air laden with the fetid odours that constantly vitiate all Siberian prisons. Kennan was unable to compare it to any known bad smell. He says, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies.... To unaccustomed senses, it seems so saturated with foulness and disease as to be almost insupportable. As we entered the corridor, slipped upon the wet, filthy floor, and caught the first breath of this air, Major Potulov (the commandant) turned to me with a scowl of disgust, and exclaimed, ‘It is a repulsive prison.’” In the cells there was absolutely no ventilation whatever. Even the brick oven drew its air from the corridor. The walls of squared logs had once been whitewashed, but had become dark and grimy, and were blotched in many places with extensive bloodstains, the life blood of countless insatiable enemies, bed-bugs, crushed to death in unceasing warfare. The floor was deeply encrusted with dry, hard-trodden filth. The sloping wooden platforms on which the convicts slept side by side, closely packed, without bedding or covering, were inconceivably dirty. All the cells were the same except that in one a shoemaker’s bench diffused the quite pleasing odour of fresh leather.

Small wonder that contagious diseases were rife in such an atmosphere; scurvy, typhus and typhoid constantly prevailed and the prison surgeon admitted that the first was endemic, saying, “We have more or less scurvy here all the year round.” The infected were not at once removed to hospital, but lay there to pollute and poison the air breathed by their comparatively healthy comrades. All the conditions of this were so manifestly odious that the commandant did not attempt to explain, defend or excuse them, but, as Kennan tells us, “he grew more and more silent, moody and morose as we went through the kameras.” He knew too well that it was beyond his power to remedy the abounding evil; he might listen to grievances, hear petitions and complaints, but was powerless to relieve them.

The middle Kara prison was on precisely similar lines, but the air was fresher during the day time, when the bulk of the inmates were absent at the mines, to which the hard-labour prisoners proceeded in the early morning and where they spent the day. Their midday meal was taken with them, to be eaten beside the camp fire in any weather, even the fiercest winter storms. They returned to the prison late in the afternoon, and dined on a fairly good meal of hot soup, bread and meat and a cup of brick tea. This they ate on their sleeping platforms, and passed the night without removing their clothing.