Siberia: the start into the Interior
Politicals are corralled like so many cattle and marched to their respective destinations, which may be one thousand, fifteen hundred, or two thousand miles from Tyumen, the starting-point
One by one the exiles began to gather. To me it was a remarkable group. There was a civil engineer who had formerly been the district manager of one of the Baltic provinces railroads—now exiled to the far north. Then there was a mining engineer from Great Russia, the physician from Perm in the Urals, a Jewish student from Odessa, a peasant from Saratoff—who still bore the fresh bruises and mutilations of the police who tortured him—a Harkoff editor, a St. Petersburg school-teacher, and an “intellectual peasant” from Moscow province. This man, a follower of Robert Owen, could not get over his surprise at being greeted by a correspondent in Siberia. “When we fought on the barricades in Moscow,” he said, “correspondents came to see us. When we had our Peasants’ Union congress in Moscow, correspondents were there. And now in Siberia a correspondent visits us!” He shook his head in deep wonderment. Later, he showed me a Russian-English book which he had procured somehow, somewhere, and from which he hoped to learn English during the years of his exile. Around a steaming samovar we sat until far into the night—that little group and I—they relating to me the stories of their lives, the conditions of their exiles, and I telling them of what the world is doing, the world of which they once were a part, but which now seems remote as another planet, this world which they have lost. Some of them spoke English, nearly all of them knew French or German. They were strong men, all. Men of great hopes, of nobler thought and life than banishment and suffering can destroy.
The first matter I inquired about particularly was the prevalence of disease in the villages to which exiles are assigned. I was already satisfied in regard to the inevitableness of starvation. A report from a certain village five hundred versts from Tobolsk had recently reached Russia, asserting that the number of houses in the village which were infected with a certain loathsome disease was so great that the exiles could not escape close daily contact with it. This was an Ostiak village, and the disease had evidently been rooted there many years, for the report stated that the noses and lips of many of the inhabitants were entirely eaten away. I had already seen some dreadful cases, so I was not unprepared to learn that this report, which was signed by fifty political exiles, was not exaggerated. One of the group round our friendly samovar was an exile from the village of Felinsky. He told me that a careful investigation had just been made, and of the fifty houses composing Felinsky village, forty-eight were infected with this disease. And yet twelve politicals were assigned to this village. A government physician stated that in his district—Ovat Point—there were eighty-two villages, and over sixty per cent. of all the houses in all of the villages were similarly infected.
There is another very common disease found in these northern villages. It is a stomach ailment which poisons the blood. It results from eating bad fish. The query naturally presents itself: why do people eat fish that have gone bad? The explanation is plausible: the northern summers are short and the winters excessively long. The winters are also exceedingly severe, and during weeks at a time the people may not stir out of doors. It is necessary, therefore, for them to lay by what stores they can during the summer against the winter, when they may not shoot or trap. So the fish caught during the warm season are preserved according to a simple and crude method. They are partially sun-dried, then roughly salted. The sun-baking decays them slightly and the salt preserves them in practically that condition. Ordinarily, dried fish are preserved with a specially prepared salt, often containing a dash of sulphur, which prevents this slight decay. But these crudely prepared and partly decayed fish are said to be not untasty once one is accustomed to the diet, only the ultimate effects are disastrous. However, it is the best the people can do, and so they depend largely on these fish during the winter.
Scurvy is very common throughout the region, of course. The scurvy, in advanced forms, is one of the most nauseating of human diseases to look upon, but throughout Siberia, as throughout the famine region, there is no escaping it.
The political exiles in the town of Berezov had prepared a telegram to the Duma setting forth their plight. This telegram was to have been carried from Berezov to the nearest telegraph line—one thousand versts away—by the very messenger who brought the news of the dissolution. A copy of the telegram was preserved, however, and given to me. The text proved incontrovertibly that exile to a Siberian village at the government allowance is equivalent to banishment to starvation. To live upon the government grant would mean subsisting each day on one twelfth of a pound of meat (local meat, deer, or bear, etc.), one half pound of bread, one half of one piece of sugar, and eight potatoes. There would then be left eleven cents a month for lodging, and six cents a month for all exigencies, and such luxuries as candles, matches, and clothing. As a matter of fact it is difficult to find a room in any kind of a house for less than one dollar a month, unless one sleeps with native Ostiaks, and the great crime of Siberia is that political exiles are obliged to do this, even when the Ostiaks are foul with disease.