From Pekin to Calais by Land

by Harry De Windt

We were anxious, if possible, to reach Tiretskaya, fifty versts distant, before sundown, and make the latter our sleeping-place. It would not be a difficult task, the post-master said. There was but one relay at Zalarinsk, twenty versts off, and unless we fell in with the mail from Petersburg, then about due, we were sure to be able to get horses without delay. The troika was therefore put in at once, and we were hastily swallowing a couple of glasses of tea, preparatory to a fast of twelve hours, when a shouting and cracking of whips was heard in the village street, and in another minute in galloped the mail, four mud-splashed carts, followed by a tarantass, in which, armed to the teeth and resplendent in green and gold, reclined the courier in charge.

“Lochade scorei” (horses quickly), shouted the latter, as he leapt from the tarantass, and brushed past us into the waiting-room, where a few moments after, we saw him pouring down tumbler after tumbler of scalding tea. To appeal to his finer feelings was, we knew, useless. Sadly we watched, as our troika was ruthlessly taken out and harnessed to a mail-cart, to the evident satisfaction and amusement of the courier, who, having finished his tea, was smoking a cigarette and watching our discomfiture with no little amusement. “Sibiri, gospodin!” he said, as he climbed into his tarantass, and the cortège dashed off again on its way to China. It was indeed Siberia! and we realized to the full that patience is a virtue, when the post-master told us that under no circumstances could we hope to get horses till five o’clock that evening.

The long sunny day wore slowly away. There was absolutely nothing to do, or look at, and time hung fearfully heavy on our hands. Towards mid-day we strolled up to the prison, situate as usual about a hundred yards outside the village.

The village prisons, or temporary resting-places for prisoners on the road to the mines, are square or rather oblong wooden buildings, three sides of which form quarters for the convicts and their guards, while the remaining wing, a little detached from the main building, is used for washing and cooking purposes. The open courtyard in the centre of the building is used for exercise. It is rough and unpaved, and in wet weather often knee-deep in mud and slush. This yard is entered by a pair of high gates, the only entrance to the building, the whole being surrounded by a high palisade, at every corner of which is posted, night and day, a sentry with a loaded rifle. This vigilance, however, is only maintained during the summer months. From April to October it is a very different matter; and as the sentries often sleep upon their posts, and the bars and gratings of the windows are so rickety and insecure that a child could dislodge them, escape becomes comparatively easy. An escape or attempted escape does not increase the length of a prisoner’s sentence. There is a chance of a sound flogging with rods if the runaway is brought back, but that is all. Without the connivance of their guards, I doubt if prisoners would ever attempt to break out at all, and were the prison officials more careful, not to say conscientious, in the discharge of their duties, the Siberian roads would be comparatively safe, instead of being, as they now are, infested with thieves and desperadoes of the worst description. There is another and still more powerful reason, which was explained to us by our travelling acquaintance V., and one that clearly demonstrates that the highest as well as the lowest officials connected with Siberian prisons are very far from being sans reproche. The practice I am about to describe, however, takes place only in the remoter districts of Eastern Siberia, whence no whisper of the scandal is ever likely to reach the ears of the Petersburg authorities.

It is marvellously simple. Lieutenant A., of the Imperial Guard, having lived not wisely but too well in the Russian capital, is compelled to exchange, and finds himself transferred in five or six short mouths from the gaiety and gilded salons of Petersburg to some desolate convict settlement in the Trans-Baikal, his only society the Cossacks under his command; his sole occupation, maintaining order among the two or three hundred convicts in his charge. The next station, thirty versts off, is under the command of his friend and brother officer in misfortune, Lieutenant B., who to lighten the long, wintry evenings, makes periodical visits to A. Heavy drinking, high play, and other little amusements, which I need not mention, but which will continue so long as female prisoners exist in Siberia, are the result of these meetings; very frequently, also, one of the guardsmen loses considerably more than he is able to pay. A Russian would sooner die than owe a debt of honour, but the pockets of both these dashing guardsmen are probably sadly deficient of that necessary commodity, “ready money.” There is but one way out of the difficulty. Early in spring, a batch of fifty or sixty convicts are liberated (upon the understanding that they return before the end of September) to get their living as best they can upon the roads. Some have been known to reach Tomsk from Nertchinsk on these summer excursions. Nor do they ever fail to return, for none but a lunatic would ever think twice of escaping outright from Siberia. During the absence of the gang, M. le Lieutenant draws the money for their rations, &c. from Petersburg, and discharges his just debts. “Cela n’est pas plus difficile que cela!”

Though I visited three “ostrogs,” it was only with considerable difficulty and a lavish expenditure of roubles that I succeeded in doing so. It seems strange that the Russian Government should show such a strong dislike to strangers visiting their convict establishments, for I must confess to being most agreeably disappointed by what I saw. Notwithstanding all the blood-curdling and revolting accounts so vividly set forth by the authors of “Called Back,” “The Russians of To-day,” and similar works, I found the prisons of Siberia clean and comfortable, though perhaps not so sweet-smelling as our convict establishments at Chatham or Dartmoor. It would be hard to keep them so, considering that every twenty-four hours brings in a fresh batch of prisoners, each in wet weather, with a pound or so of black, stinking mud on his feet. At one village only (Rasgonnaia) along the whole post-road from Irkoutsk to Tomsk was the ostrog (a very old one) almost uninhabitable. It swarmed with rats, the post-master told us, and convicts, in winter, were sometimes severely bitten; while they were forced to sleep in the daytime, rest at night being rendered impossible by the swarms of vermin. Let me in justice add that this was the only really bad ostrog I heard of or saw during the whole journey, and the authorities were on the point of pulling it down and building a new one. We hear a deal in England of wretched hovels, where convicts are housed together like sheep in a pen, human pigstyes reeking with filth of every description, where not a day passes but a prisoner is carried off by typhus or some other malignant fever. As a matter of fact I have seldom seen neater buildings. But for the black and white sentry boxes, the barred windows, and imperial eagle over the gate, one would never take them for prisons at all, and they were often, with their bright yellow walls, red roof, and neatly kept gardens, the only cheerful-looking building in the squalid villages through which we passed. The ostrog at Koutoulik was empty, but a gang was expected that afternoon, a Cossack told us. Preparations for their arrival were already being made in the shape of cakes, cream, eggs, apples, sweetmeats, and cigarettes spread out on snowy linen cloths for the delectation of lucky convicts who had made a few kopeks on the road.

THE POST-HOUSE AT RASGONNAIA.

We strolled back to the post-house after our inspection, and called in sheer desperation for the Samovar. There was literally nothing else to do. Seven long hours must be got through before we could hope to get horses and proceed on our journey. It is this eternal delay, this irksome waiting that makes Siberian travel so monotonous and dispiriting. The fatigue and privation were trifling compared to the long weary days of boredom and inaction. We got into a habit at last of calling mechanically for tea at every station. Fifteen or twenty glasses were, after the first week, our daily allowance, and I verily believe I drank tea enough during the two months I was in Siberia to keep a dozen old maids going for a year.

Koutoulik consists of some eighteen or twenty houses and presented a depressing appearance enough even that bright sunny afternoon, for the village was deserted by all save women, children, dogs, and pigs, the men being busy in the fields getting in the harvest. Under the guidance of the post-master, a Pole who spoke a few words of French, I visited one of the cottages. Most of the women were dirty, bedraggled creatures, but some of the younger girls were good-looking, and the children many of them beautiful, with fair flaxen hair and light blue eyes that made one wonder how such thoroughly northern types of beauty could have been born and reared so far east. The mistress of the cottage we entered (a young and rather pretty woman) apologized for her costume, which consisted simply and solely of a thin and almost transparent muslin nightgown reaching a little below the knee; the only garment worn indoors by peasant women in the brief but tropical Siberian summer. We begged her not to apologize, assuring her that the costume, though scanty, suited her remarkably well.