From Pekin to Calais by Land

by Harry De Windt

Such is a brief sketch of the aboriginal tribes of Siberia, a people I have passed over lightly, as we saw little or nothing of them during our transit through Siberia, and I wish to present that country to the reader exactly as I saw it. Siberia is now almost as much the “land of the stranger” as Australia, and it is more than probable that less than a century hence, the aboriginal tribes of Eastern Siberia will, with the exception of the Russianized Bouriatte, have disappeared altogether from the face of the earth.

We now set about making preparations for the journey to Tomsk. Our tarantass was again overhauled, a very necessary proceeding after our rough journey through Trans-Baikalia, or what we then thought rough. It was a mere trifle to what was in store for us. Embarking on a journey in Siberia means a preparation of at least three days. One cannot, as in England, pack up a portmanteau and be off at a few hours’ notice. There is firstly the permission of the police required to enable one to leave a town or city at all, secondly that most important item in Siberian travel, horses, and thirdly a document authorizing the holder to procure them. This is called the “Podarojna,” and is of two kinds.

The “Kasiomné” or Imperial Podarojna is used only by Government officials of all classes, who, though they pay nothing for horses, are always served first at a post-station, even though the luckless holder of a privatne or second-class podarojna, may have been waiting for his two or three days. We found this to our cost on several occasions, notably on one, where, though our horses were already harnessed, and we were about to start, a Government engineer dashed up, and producing his kasiomné, had them taken away from us and proceeded calmly on his way, leaving us to curse him and our fate, and wait another twenty-four hours. In urgent cases, such as an imperial messenger with despatches from Moscow or Petersburg, the kasiomné is written in red ink, and marked “Courier,” when, though there may be no horses available in the station, the inhabitants of the village are bound to provide them.

The ordinary podarojna is called the “Privatne,” and costs twenty-five roubles. This entitles the holder to horses at any station where they may be available, but they must always be taken out and handed over to the fortunate possessor of a first-class podarojna, should the latter make his appearance before the tarantass has actually started. To obviate this difficulty a private company has lately been started at all the stations on the Great Post-Road, to provide the holders of second-class podarojnas with horses. They charge exorbitant fares, however, and we always preferred to wait even two or three days for the regular Government horses. In some cases we found that the Government post-master and manager of the private company were in league to rob travellers.

Provisions also had to be thought of, and those of the most portable kind——sardines, Liebig’s Extract, a small chest of tea, sugar, and half a dozen pots of jam constituted our commissariat department, together with two bottles of cognac, and half a dozen flasks of vodka, for with the exception of milk, black bread, and eggs, nothing is to be got as a rule at the post-stations. We invariably found a menu with prices affixed on the walls of every waiting-room, even in the smallest villages, but on inquiry, the tempting list of cutlets, beefsteak, &c., &c., usually dwindled down to the homely but unappetizing egg and black bread! Indeed, with the exception of Krasnoiarsk, Nijni-Udinsk, and Kansk, this constituted our sole fare from Irkoutsk to Tomsk, with one exception, where, delayed for a couple of days at Sonkovskaya, we were regaled with a basin of broth at the village ostrog, or prison. I think that plate of soup did more towards dispelling any wild notions I may have had anent the ill-treatment of Siberian exiles than pages of writing! Many a time, when delayed on the road, have I smelt the savoury fumes from the ostrog cook-house with envy, as I slunk back disgusted to my stale egg and black bread at the post-house. Sad though their lot undoubtedly is, the Siberian convicts are not only well clad, but considerably better fed than our own criminals in England. Be it understood that I speak of criminals, and not political prisoners or nihilists, to whom, notwithstanding all that ardent Russophiles may say, Siberia is a veritable hell upon earth. The Russian “criminal” is exiled to colonize, the Russian “nihilist” (in most cases) to die.

Personally, I would very much sooner undergo a term of imprisonment for a criminal offence in Siberia than in England. The work in summer is undoubtedly harder, but during the winter months, when mining is suspended, convicts at Irkoutsk are employed for the most part in cigarette-making, or work of a similar light nature, while they are treated with more laxity, and enjoy far more liberty, than in our convict-prisons at home. Smoking is not forbidden, card-playing and other games allowed, and free conversation, for in Siberia solitary confinement among criminals is unknown, while, as a rule, their friends, if they have any in the neighbourhood, are permitted to see them once a month, and on these occasions are allowed to bring the prisoner tobacco, food, and any other luxuries, excepting alcoholic liquors. Even in this respect, however, the rules are by no means stringent.

A SIBERIAN CRIMINAL CONVICT.

I am now writing of what came under my own personal observation at Irkoutsk and Tomsk, for save on one or two occasions we were never allowed to enter a village ostrog, nor at any time to exchange words with political prisoners while in confinement. As, however, a considerable portion of the population at Irkoutsk consisted of political exiles living under police surveillance, I was able to gather some interesting details from this class relative to their life while in prison and at the mines, which soon convinced me that even a murderer is better off in Siberia than the writer of a so-called offensive political article, in a Petersburg or Moscow journal, or the enthusiastic student who has too openly expressed his views on the great social question. Where the criminal is allowed to mix freely with his fellows and receive his friends, the “political” is kept in solitary confinement, forbidden not only to address his warders, but also, which is a far greater punishment, deprived of the use of books, pens, ink, and paper. Smoking is also in his case strictly tabooed, and any food but that specially laid down by prison rules. And if the men are harshly treated, let the reader imagine the torture it must mean to women of refinement and education who have been accustomed to the comforts of civilized life, to be suddenly thrust into the midst, if not the company, of a gang of murderers, thieves, and vagabonds. I met, while at Irkoutsk, one of the female political exiles whose portrait appears in these pages (but whose name I suppress for obvious reasons), and heard from her own lips the outrages and indignities which she had been subjected to by her guards on the long ten months’ march from Tomsk to Nertchinsk. Her life, she said, had indeed been a hell. It was only on arrival at the mines that she got comparative rest, for though the work was harder, it was preferable to the society of the brutes who had persecuted her during the long, lazy summer marches. She is now at Irkoutsk for life, and with the exception of daily reporting herself at the police registry, is a free woman, so long as she keeps to a radius of ten miles of that city. But although barely five and twenty, the march and two years at the mines have turned her once auburn hair snow white.

There are, no doubt, those who richly merit their fate. Vera Anitchkoff, for instance, who will never leave the mines again. The prisoner depicted in prison dress is Count ————, a Polish nobleman, who not ten years ago had a hotel in Paris, a villa at Cannes, and who, stoic and brave fellow as he is, remarked that he would not mind so much had they not given him “cette coiffure ridicule!” The French journalist, M.D., was one of the most prominent members of the Paris commune, and is certainly well out of the way, for a more desperate and dangerous character never harangued a mob from the barricades. There are at least a dozen communists in various parts of Siberia, who, escaping from France in 1870, have made their way to Petersburg and other Russian cities, only to get into fresh trouble and receive their quietus in the gold-mines of Trans-Baikal and forests of Sakhalin. We, however, saw but two, M.D. and our friend the Pole, on the shores of Baikal. The other two portraits represented are criminal types, one that of a man, a native of Nijni Novgorod, who had murdered his mother and two sisters. On being asked why he had committed the murders, he replied, “Oh, I was sick of my family, and wanted to go to Siberia. There is money to be made there, and I could not afford to go at my own expense!” And such men as this are to be the pioneers and colonizers of Asiatic Russia! for no criminal, however bad, ever goes to Siberia without a notion that one day, sooner or later, he will obtain his ticket of leave, and with it a house, a piece of ground, and a sum of money to start him in life. No wonder that most of the gangs we met on the road were composed of cheery, happy-go-lucky fellows, chaffing their guards, singing, smoking, and laughing, a striking contrast to the dozen or so of wretched men and women in plain clothes jolting along the rough road in tumbrils behind them, some of the women pale, delicate-looking creatures with a baby at the breast, who looked as if death, and not the gloomy prison-gates of Irkoutsk or Kara, would end their journey.