The settlements we passed were mostly of Tartars. The women would offer for sale milk, fish, and raw turnips—the latter sweet and tasty, though hard, and very cheap. Two and three for a cent. Toward nightfall we would pass fishermen in crude boats that were often merely dugouts—logs, hollowed and roughly shaped. On the whole the civilization of these shores was as crude as any frontier country could be, and the dirty, dilapidated hamlets we could see in the distance from the steamer-decks, suggested only decay and stagnation. Even the somber wooden Moslem houses of worship with their gilded, or painted, crescents, looked faded and forgotten, rarely reflecting any of the garishness which characterizes the temples of Mohammed. Relics of a dead civilization are all that remain to these people who once boasted a powerful empire, with glory as well as power.
Tobolsk proved a business-like town of something over 20,000 inhabitants. It commands an excellent location on the river Irtysh, facing the junction of the Tobol. On a high bluff to the west of the town proper is a striking monument to Jermak, the conqueror of Siberia. Behind this monument is a small but tremendously interesting museum. It contains large collections of old instruments of torture: branding tools, used to stamp the foreheads and cheeks of prisoners, instruments for pulling out the center bone of the nose, painful shackles, and other horrible devices for human torture. Besides these things are splendid collections epitomizing the ethnology of western Siberia through costumes and excellent models of the industries of the natives. The ornithology, geology, and mineralogy of the country are also indicated through complete collections.
There is one good hotel in Tobolsk, but when we arrived it was entirely filled with officers and we were obliged to put up at a small and dilapidated inn kept by a Pole. The man’s father had been sent to Siberia with the Polish revolutionists of the early ’50’s. This man was born in Siberia and had never been out of the country. He had married there and had children born to him, so that he had virtually become a Siberian.
One of the letters of introduction given to me in Tyumen was to a young woman whom I had been particularly told to seek out first. For reasons I did not question I was to find her through a mutual friend of hers and the writer of my letter of introduction. The morning after our arrival in Tobolsk my interpreter and I called at the house of the friend, who accepted the password we had been instructed in as evidence of our trustworthiness. She bade us enter and wait in an inner room while she sent out for the girl whom we wanted to see.
More than half an hour passed before the girl arrived. When she came in I was greatly surprised by her appearance. She did not look more than twenty, and she was gowned as any woman might be of a morning in any fashionable resort in the season. Her manner and bearing suggested Mayfair drawing-rooms. My first thought was that she must be the daughter of an aristocratic family, who had been exiled, but I remembered that the remark had been passed that she was not a prisoner. She was graciously glad to see us and told us we were most fortunate in having come to Tobolsk just at that time, because there were many political exiles in town from all over the province, even from Berezov, a thousand versts to the north. It appeared that every autumn, just before the rivers closed in for the winter, delegates of one or two “free” exiles from each settlement were appointed to go to Tobolsk to purchase the winter’s supply of matches, candles, pins, and other little things; for once the winter sets in it is often many months before a courier can get through, even with mail. The girl told us to come to a certain house in a neighboring street that evening and she would have there to meet us a number of the delegates from different parts of the province.
The house she designated was one belonging to a physician who had been exiled from an eastern Russian city for twelve years, by order of the local governor. He had never been able to learn what charge there was against him, and as he was a Constitutional Democrat, and opposed to revolutionary activity, he found his exile particularly exasperating. However, he had brought his wife and children with him and he was striving to make the best of his situation. He welcomed us with the utmost cordiality, when, at the appointed hour, we repaired to his house. It was seldom that exiles have such direct communication with the outside world as we afforded.
One of the greatest hardships of exile life to educated men and women is the life of enforced idleness that they must lead. Hard labor, indeed, for politicals, is usually interpreted enforced idleness. For an educated and disciplined mind emptiness and absolute lack of occupation is the most cruel strain. The result is that politicals often beg local authorities to permit them to go to work in the mines, merely that they may have occupation. This physician told me that previous to my coming some poor people had come to him to give them relief from pain they were suffering from a certain curable cause. The doctor gave them some simple remedy and sent them away. A day or two after he received a reprimand from a police authority—he was there as an exile, not as a professional man, and he was not expected to use his professional knowledge! The man protested that he had done very little, yet it had relieved the poor peasants, and inasmuch as the government made no provision for healing the sick he could not understand why he should not do what he could.
“But the government does provide physicians,” was the officer’s reply.
The physician then asked me to wait until others of the exiles came in, when the Berezov man reported that the single Berezov doctor, for example, has a territory almost as large as the whole of France! Others told me that in the central and southern sections of Tobolsk province physicians have districts which are defined as “a radius of five hundred versts of a given point.” In winter the only means of communication is by sledge. Fancy a New York physician who had one patient in Atlantic City, another in Lenox, and a third in Utica, and no other way of getting from point to point than by horse; or a Boston practitioner with a call to make in Pawtucket, and a patient to be operated upon in Bangor!
A delegate from a village called Felinsky gave me a photograph of the funeral of a political exile who died through the sheerest, most wanton, neglect. He had a bad tooth which developed an abscess. There was no one about who knew how to lance it, or that it should be lanced, and blood poisoning set in, causing his death.