The higher administration of Siberia was influenced by excellent intentions, and I can only repeat that, everything considered, it was far better, far more enlightened, and far more interested in the welfare of the people than the administration of any other province of Russia. But it was an administration—a branch of the tree which had its roots at St. Petersburg—and that was enough to paralyze all its excellent intentions, enough to make it interfere with and kill all the beginnings of local life and progress. Whatever was started for the good of the country by local men was looked at with distrust, and was immediately paralyzed by hosts of difficulties which came, not so much from the bad intentions of the administrators, but simply from the fact that these officials belonged to a pyramidal, centralized administration. The very fact of their belonging to a government which radiated from a distant capital caused them to look upon everything from the point of view of functionaries of the government, who think first of all about what their superiors will say, and how this or that will appear in the administrative machinery. The interests of the country are a secondary matter.
Gradually I turned my energy more and more toward scientific exploration. In 1865 I explored the western Sayáns, where I caught a new glimpse of the structure of the Siberian highlands and came upon another important volcanic region on the Chinese frontier; and finally, the year following, I undertook a long journey to discover a direct communication between the gold mines of the Yakútsk province (on the Vitím and the Olókma) and Transbaikália. For many years the members of the Siberian expedition (1860-1864) had tried to find such a passage, and had endeavoured to cross the series of very wild, stony parallel ridges which separate these mines from the plains of Transbaikália; but when, coming from the south, they reached that gloomy mountain region, and saw before them the dreary mountains spreading for hundreds of miles northward, all of these explorers, save one who was killed by natives, returned southward. It was evident that in order to be successful the expedition had to move from the north to the south—from the dreary unknown wilderness to the warmer and populated regions. It so happened, also, that while I was preparing for the expedition I was shown a map which a Tungus had traced with his knife on a piece of bark. This little map—a splendid specimen, by the way, of the usefulness of the geometrical sense in the lowest stages of civilization, and one which would consequently interest A. R. Wallace—so struck me by its seeming truth to nature that I fully trusted to it, and began my journey from the north, following the indications of the map.
In company with a young and promising naturalist, Polakóff, and a topographer, we went first down the Léna to the northern gold mines. There we equipped the expedition, taking provisions for three months, and started southward. An old Yakút hunter, who twenty years before had once followed the passage indicated in the Tungus map, undertook to act for us as a guide and to cross the mountain region—250 miles wide—following the river-valleys and gorges indicated by the Tungus with his knife on the birch-bark map. He really accomplished that astounding feat, although there was no track of any sort to follow, and all the valleys that one saw from the top of a mountain pass, all equally covered with wood, seemed to be absolutely alike to the unpractised eye. This time the passage was found. For three months we wandered in the almost totally uninhabited mountain deserts and over the marshy plateau, till at last we reached our destination, Chitá. I am told that this passage is now of value for bringing cattle from the south to the gold mines; as for me, the journey helped me immensely afterwards in finding the key to the structure of the mountains and plateaus of Siberia—but I am not writing a book of travel, and must stop.
The years that I spent in Siberia taught me many lessons which I could hardly have learned elsewhere. I soon realized the absolute impossibility of doing anything really useful for the masses of the people by means of the administrative machinery. With this illusion I parted for ever. Then I began to understand not only men and human character, but also the inner springs of the life of human society. The constructive work of the unknown masses, which so seldom finds any mention in books, and the importance of that constructive work in the growth of forms of society, appeared before my eyes in a clear light. To witness, for instance, the ways in which the communities of Dukhobórtsy (brothers of those who are now settling in Canada, and who found such a hearty support in England and the United States) migrated to the Amúr region; to see the immense advantages which they got from their semi-communistic brotherly organization; and to realize what a success their colonization was, amidst all the failures of State colonization, was learning something which cannot be learned from books. Again, to live with natives, to see at work the complex forms of social organization which they have elaborated far away from the influence of any civilization, was, as it were, to store up floods of light which illuminated my subsequent reading. The part which the unknown masses play in the accomplishment of all important historical events, and even in war, became evident to me from direct observation, and I came to hold ideas similar to those which Tolstóy expresses concerning the leaders and the masses in his monumental work, ‘War and Peace.’
Having been brought up in a serf-owner’s family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing, and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline, and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills. Although I did not then formulate my observations in terms borrowed from party struggles, I may say now that I lost in Siberia whatever faith in State discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist.
From the age of nineteen to twenty-five I had to work out important schemes of reform, to deal with hundreds of men on the Amúr, to prepare and to make risky expeditions with ridiculously small means, and so on; and if all these things ended more or less successfully, I account for it only by the fact that I soon understood that in serious work commanding and discipline are of little avail. Men of initiative are required everywhere; but once the impulse has been given, the enterprise must be conducted, especially in Russia, not in military fashion, but in a sort of communal way, by means of common understanding. I wish that all framers of plans of State discipline could pass through the school of real life before they begin to frame their State Utopias: we should then hear far less than at present of schemes of military and pyramidal organization of society.
With all that, life in Siberia became less and less attractive for me, although my brother Alexander had joined me in 1864 at Irkútsk, where he commanded a squadron of Cossacks. We were happy to be together; we read a great deal and discussed all the philosophical, scientific, and sociological questions of the day; but we both longed after intellectual life, and there was none in Siberia. The occasional passage through Irkútsk of Raphael Pumpelly or of Adolph Bastian—the only two men of science who visited our capital during my stay there—was quite an event for both of us. The scientific and especially the political life of Western Europe, of which we heard through the papers, attracted us, and the return to Russia was the subject to which we continually came back in our conversations. Finally, the insurrection of the Polish exiles in 1866 opened our eyes to the false position we both occupied as officers of the Russian army.
VIII
I was far away in the Vitím mountains when some Polish exiles, who were employed in piercing a new road in the cliffs round Lake Baikál, made a desperate attempt to break their chains and to force their way to China across Mongolia. Troops were sent out against them, and a Russian officer was killed by the insurgents. I heard of it on my return to Irkútsk, where some fifty Poles were to be tried by a court-martial. The sittings of courts-martial being open in Russia, I followed this, taking detailed notes of the proceedings, which I sent to a St. Petersburg paper, and which were published in full, to the great dissatisfaction of the Governor-General.
Eleven thousand Poles, men and women, had been transported to East Siberia in consequence of the insurrection of 1863. They were chiefly students, artists, ex-officers, nobles, and especially skilled artisans from the intelligent and highly developed working-men’s population of Warsaw and other towns. A great number of them were kept in hard labour, while the remainder were settled all over the country in villages where they could find no work whatever and lived in a state of semi-starvation. Those who were condemned to hard labour worked either at Chitá, building the barges for the Amúr—these were the happiest—or in iron works of the Crown, or in salt works. I saw some of the latter, on the Léna, standing half-naked in a shanty, round an immense cauldron filled with salt-brine, and mixing the thick, boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the gates of the shanty were wide open to make a strong current of glacial air. After two years of such work these martyrs were sure to die from consumption.