“Six years ago the Czar, by imperial ukase, ended the banishment of political prisoners to Siberia, but you see how it is, this edict, like most of the imperial decrees that go out from our Emperor and his government, was meaningless. A flood of politicals pours through Tyumen all of the time now, and most people have forgotten that that edict was ever issued.
“Cruelties like those of former times are not employed now. That is to say, prisoners are not mutilated, although they are sometimes beaten and roughly handled, and while the prisons are still foul and bad they are not as they were even a generation ago. What the government does now is to desert its political prisoners to inevitable starvation, and to force many of them into intimate daily contact with loathsome diseases in the settlements of diseased savages in the interior.”
I was soon to learn the full truth of these statements from other lips, but I listened to this man’s story with keenest interest. It appears that there are two classes of political prisoners, the so-called privileged, and unprivileged, exiles. The privileged grade includes the graduates of all technical schools and universities, all noblemen, and the sons and daughters of noblemen. The unprivileged are all others: peasants, merchants, workmen, clerks, and the rest of the rank and file.
The government allows each privileged exile three dollars a month, out of which he must rent a room, or sleeping-place of some description, pay for his food, clothing, and all other necessities. If the wife of a privileged exile accompanies her husband into exile, she also is granted six rubles, or three dollars, and one dollar and a half for each child. But at the present time eighty-five per cent. of the political exiles in western Siberia, are of the unprivileged class, and these the government allows one ruble and a half, or seventy-five cents, a month! It seems almost unthinkable that a government which aspires to greatness would turn adrift living men and expect them to live for years on an allowance of seventy-five cents a month. Sometimes exiles arrive unknown to the Red Cross Society, and then there happens to them what would happen to nearly all unprivileged exiles if the government’s dole were not supplemented—they starve.
At this point a bright-faced, buoyant man of about thirty-five entered the room, and shook hands with us with great warmth. He soon told his story. He came from the town of Yaroslaff, on the Upper Volga. By trade he was a carpenter. Last spring the workmen of Yaroslaff decided to keep May Day (the European Labor Day) by what they called a “peaceful celebration”; they would not only refrain from work, they would remain indoors all day. On the eve of May Day the governor caused to be issued a proclamation warning all the inhabitants of the province that any one who celebrated Labor Day in any way whatsoever would be punished. The Yaroslaff work-men decided to take the chance. They remained in their respective homes all day, merely absenting themselves from work. The next morning every man who had thus “celebrated” was placed under arrest. The man whom I met here in Tyumen had been sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia for this offense.
The man had brought with him his wife and five children—as “voluntary” exiles. During the first three days after their arrival in Tyumen they had no money, and somehow had failed to connect with the Red Cross committee, in consequence of which they literally starved. The man told me that he had not one piece of bread for his children, the youngest of whom cried constantly through hunger.
For many years the government made a slightly better allowance to exiles for food than now. When Mr. George Kennan was in Tyumen, for example, the cost of food for each prisoner in the forwarding prison was 3-1/2 cents a day, and for privileged prisoners 5 cents a day.[20]
The impossibility of living on seventy-five cents a month, the current allowance, is patent on the face of it. Living is very high in Siberia. All foods are costly. For example, the government allowance of bread for soldiers is thirty pounds a month. Now thirty pounds of bread cost ninety cents! Sugar—criminally high all over Russia—is twelve cents a pound in Siberia. Ordinary meat is practically unobtainable at any price in the remoter places. All vegetables, save potatoes, are unknown. The character of the soil, in the northern provinces, is such that no vegetables will grow. Potatoes, being scarce, are thirty cents a pail.
I do not wish to sustain the popular impression that Siberia lies entirely within the region of Arctic cold and barrenness, for it reaches as far south as the latitude of central and southern Italy, Greece, and Constantinople, but political exiles at the time of my visit to Siberia were being sent rather to the northern and desolate parts of Tobolsk province, to Yakutsk, and the Transbaikal region.
Space forbids that I recount the vivid hours spent in Tyumen, of interesting conversations I enjoyed with cultivated men and women who had been sent off to this distant Asiatic province to end their efforts to do something worth while for their long-suffering fellow countrymen. After three days I started for Tobolsk, the capital of this western province, where I anticipated planning a tour of a few hundred miles to outlying settlements used for penal colonization.