But the net was closing round Barratasvili. A combined effort was set on foot to put an end to him and his gang. It was winter time when the end came. Overcome with fatigue, he one day ventured off the road into the forest close to a deserted saw-mill, and with his companions fell asleep. An overseer, trudging along the road, noticed the tracks of his skis, and they aroused his suspicions. Ordinary travellers do not leave the road to plunge into the deep snow of the dense forest. He, too, was tired, but he went back to Derbensk and secured the assistance of a posse of soldiers. Following up the track, step by step, through the forest, they came upon the long-sought robbers resting. The alarm was given. Firing began on both sides. The leader of the gang was hit in the left shoulder, but still continued to fire. The soldiers sought shelter behind tree trunks. Barratasvili, in taking aim, exposed his head and in so doing was shot in the forehead. Their leader killed, his companions threw down their arms, were taken and beaten by the soldiers with the butt ends of their muskets. In encounters of this kind, the soldiers, furious at the loss of their comrades, treat their captives most brutally, and in some cases the latter have died from injuries thus received. Three of the four companions of Barratasvili were hanged at the corners of the testing prison at Alexandrovsk. In theory, capital punishment is supposed to have been abolished in Russia, but the sentence is still passed by court-martial and the island of Saghalien in under martial law. These brodyagi were really strangled, not hanged. A rope with a slip-knot was fixed round the neck of the culprit, the other end being carried up and made taut to a crosspiece supported by two upright poles. The convict stood on a box, which was kicked away from under his feet, and strangulation often tardily ensued.
The brodyagi had little hope of permanent evasion. Now and again a few determined fugitives have seized a boat and attempted a passage across the sea to the mainland. They might win through the dangers of the sea, having evaded the native trackers, half savage men of the Gilyak tribe, more ready to shoot down than to capture, and they might make good their landing at Cape Muraviev or Pogob. But they must face starvation and almost certain death from the terrible winter cold. The alternative is voluntary surrender, with the certainty of flogging and a prolongation of sentence. More frequently, the brodyagi infest the taiga and hang about the sparse settlements on the chance of plunder, or, if in any numbers, combine for a descent upon the villages. In one year, 1896, nine convicts who had escaped from the Alexandrovsk prisons at various times joined forces in the Timovsk district and gave a great deal of trouble. They were pursued by strong parties of soldiers, but often turned to show fight, having become possessed of firearms. Eventually they were captured, the survivors of the gang ending as usual upon the gallows.
When they are Chinese—and in Manchuria, the Russians hunt them down and shoot as many as they can at sight—those wounded and taken alive are decapitated and their heads hung by the way-side, but no real attempt has been made to rid Siberia and Saghalien of this great pest and danger.
Statistics are not helpful, as so few arrests are made, and so few crimes discovered. Garroting is the chief device of the footpad. With a short stick and a noose of twine, he approaches his victim from the rear, slips the cord over his head and strangles the man, woman or child, who is unable to utter a cry; then he strips from the body everything likely to lead to its identification, and decamps. If there is an accomplice, he blocks the stranger’s advance or engages his attention at the correct moment. Nor is there perfect safety in numbers. “Whilst at Khabarovsk,” says a recent traveller, “I paid a visit to one of the lone pioneers of Anglo-Saxondom in that far-off land. There, within a stone’s throw of the governor-general’s house, three citizens were attacked within five minutes of our passing. Their assailants got away, but all three of the merchants succumbed to their injuries. At Blagoveschensk, in broad daylight, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and quite close to the main hotel and high street, I heard a series of revolver shots, and turning, saw a man leisurely reloading his revolver. His victim, a woman in this case, never uttered a cry, merely fell. The street was almost deserted, and the people who heard and saw took very little notice, but with the aid of a passing soldier, we arrested that man, and in the rough and ready lock-up to which he was taken were electric lights and telephone. In a few minutes the district superintendent was summoned, but we were scarcely thanked for our part, and we were told that our action was not Siberian, and that the affair was none of ours.
“From Cheliobinsk to Vladivostok crime is equally common. In the latter place, I was told that after each pay-day at the naval fitting yard men were missing and never returned. On one occasion thirty disappeared, and ordinarily eight or ten bodies are found within a few days, stripped of every shred of clothing, their tattooed marks gashed over and the features hacked so that they could not be recognised. Russians suffer more than the Chinese, and Russians are usually the aggressors. Policemen are too few and too wary. Unless the street be crowded, men may shout loud and long before any will venture to their assistance.”
The suburbs and villages in Siberia, says the same authority, suffer from the vagrant bands who raid settlements and houses, exacting all they dare and often not falling short of other crimes. They are the fugitives from justice, escaped criminals, the reckless and daring convicts who have eluded their prison guards. They have nothing but what they have stolen, a wooden staff and a short length of leather or twine. Whoever gets into their power has a short shrift and theirs is not longer if they are captured in the act or traced. For entering and robbing a church in Vladivostok, some were hanged, for in Siberia the death penalty is not in abeyance as in Russia. In Siberia—and in Russia too—lynch law is common among the peaceable, industrious, well-to-do peasants as it is also among the half Russianised natives. One method of dealing with cattle thieves is to bend down two straight young birch trees, tie the hands of the robber to one and his feet to the other, then release the trees and hurry away.
Later records describe the extraordinary career of a convict, Nagorny by name, who is said to have escaped seven times from Saghalien, his last having been effected while he was chained to a wheelbarrow. This man had been guilty of more than fifty murders and several hundred robberies, many of these having been perpetrated in the disguise of a gendarme, when he entered the houses of his victims under the pretext of making an official search. He was tall, strongly built and had a ruffianly expression. When he was arrested, Nagorny pointed a loaded revolver at his custodian, but the lock of the weapon proved damaged and it was useless.
A hideous story is preserved in Saghalien of a tragic event that occurred in the summer of 1892, when a party of a hundred convicts were sent from Alexandrovsk to make a road through the taiga to Rikovsk. It was a terrible task; the road followed the course of the Boroni River, in a wide and swampy valley, rendered impassable by unexpected heavy rains, which cut the workmen off from their base of supplies. Great numbers of the gang perished from starvation, dysentery and fevers. Three of them, maddened by their privations, escaped into the taiga, and when pursued, wandered further and further into the primeval forest. It was strongly suspected, but never proved, that one of the three was killed and eaten by his two comrades, for one of them when caught was found to be carrying a human bone in his pouch, but his mind was unhinged and he could give no coherent account of what happened. He was treated as a lunatic, and his insanity saved him from punishment, but he was ever afterward known as “Vasiliv the Cannibal.” The other fugitive, Kalenik, was sentenced to ninety-nine strokes of the plet, which killed him.
Political exiles have been deported to Saghalien, but not in any great number. They were among the earliest convicts transported by sea, and it is worth noting that the Russian government in 1888 was anxious to make no distinction between them and the common criminals. Mr. Kennan prints a letter concerning some of them from M. Galkin Vrasski, the well-known chief of prison administration, directing that no difference should be made between them and the ordinary criminals. They were to be subjected to the same discipline, but to be kept under stricter surveillance, if anything, and were to be liable to more severe punishments inflicted on Saghalien and in Siberia. Two, indeed, were flogged at Alexandrovsk, after an unhappy collision with the prison authorities caused by the neglect of one of them to raise his hat on meeting a subordinate official. Their sufferings were, of course, greater owing to the remoteness of their domicile and their savage surroundings. They were naturally more in touch with the civilised world at Tobolsk, Tomsk and Irkutsk, and were at a peculiar disadvantage on Saghalien, because of the dearth of educated people among the exiled population. They were in request for more cultured employment as schoolmasters, accountants or in scientific labours. As a rule, they bore their expatriation and the hardships of their daily life with equanimity, and were quiet and well-conducted. Many of them had been victims of Russian despotism and had suffered much in the Russian state prisons. One of them whom Mr. Hawes met on Saghalien was a lady who had at one time belonged to a secret society unknown to her husband. When Alexander II was assassinated she fled the country. On returning later to Russia, she was arrested on suspicion, but her identity could not be proved until her husband was tricked into recognising her when they were suddenly brought face to face. This lady was consigned to the fortress of Schlüsselburg[Schlüsselburg], and was so entirely lost sight of that her husband, presuming she was dead, married again. Ten years later he heard that she was alive and had been transported to Saghalien. Having somehow settled matters with his second wife, he followed his first to the other end of the world and was eventually allowed to settle with her at Vladivostok.
In spite of restrictions, hardships and almost intolerable conditions, the political exile has been a distinct aid and valuable factor in the settlement and development of Siberia, carrying with him ideals and standards and a degree of intelligence far in advance of the native Siberian settler and peasant. The infusion of such an element is all the more needed because of the low average of intelligence of the great mass of the convicts, many of whom become permanent residents of Siberia. Mr. Henry Norman has said of the prisoners in the prison of Irkutsk, as he found them: “Never has it been my lot, though I have visited prisons, civilised and uncivilised, in many parts of the world, to see human nature at such a low ebb.... From this point of view, Russian criminology has a task unknown in countries where civilisation has reached a higher average of development.” It is the criminal exile who has been a bar to progress in Siberia, and with the cessation of the transportation of this class of convicts, the future is brighter for the great exile territory which is so rich in natural possibilities.