A Secret Service: Being Strange Tales of a Nihilist

by William Le Queux

With ankles fettered by long heavy chains held to the waist by means of a rope, we were fastened together in gangs and passed out upon the Chudova road on the first stage of the weary tramp to that bourne whence few exiles return. The rumbling of the springless carts in the rear, for those who might fall ill on the way, awoke the echoes of the silent thoroughfares, and following us were several Cossacks who with lanterns carefully examined the road over which we had passed, in order that no letter should be dropped clandestinely.

The night was wet and stormy as our weird, dismal procession passed through the slumbering city and out upon the broad highway on its journey eastward to the Ourals. Our wet clothes clung to us as we walked; the icy wind that blew across the wide open plain chilled our bones. Nevertheless, we plodded doggedly onward in silence, for conversation had been forbidden, and those who had spoken had felt the heavy thongs of the escort’s knout. The settled look of despair, and the sighs that frequently escaped my fellow-exiles, plainly showed what were their feelings at being banished from their native land.

Since the day I had seen Mascha in the prison-yard I had heard nothing of her. A thousand times I had wondered what had been her fate; yet now, in my despair, I had relinquished all hope of seeing her again. Indeed, irreparable ruin had descended upon myself and my family so swiftly, that already I had grown callous as to my ultimate fate.

Without trial, I had been sentenced by the Provincial Governor of Moghilev, upon the report of General Martianoff, to hard labour for life. Such, alas! was my punishment for endeavouring to rescue my poor defenceless sister from the inhuman wrath of the dissolute representative of the Tzar! I was well aware that for the Russian political convict is reserved a death by slow torture to which any other means of ending life is preferable. The silver mines in the terrible district beyond Lake Baikal are the tombs of political suspects. The Government is well aware that the conditions under which convicts work at Kara, Nerchinsk, Pokrovski, and the other distant mining settlements to which “politicals” are sent, are such as to cause death in from five to seven years. With that refinement of cruelty for which the Government has earned an unenviable notoriety, it has abolished the death sentence and substituted one more torturing in that distant land where God is high and the Tzar is far away. The prisons and étapes of Siberia are foul, insanitary, half-ruined wooden structures where human beings perish like flies. Typhoid, diphtheria, and other epidemic diseases prevail there constantly, and infect all who have the misfortune to be huddled into the awful places. The grievously sick, for want of attendance, wallow on the floor in the midst of filth, and their clothes rot on their bodies; while so over-crowded are these pestilential kameras by persons of all ages and both sexes, that for those who are not fever-stricken there is neither room to sit nor lie.

The exiles who are consigned underground are convicts of the worst type, and political offenders of the best. The murderer for his villainy, the intelligent honest Muscovite who expresses Liberal opinions—not a whit more revolutionary than the ideas of English Radicals—are deemed equally worthy of slow, agonising death.

Having reached Chudova, we were conveyed by train to Nijni Novgorod, and there placed in a sort of cage on board a large barge, and taken down the Volga and up the Kama to Perm, whence we took train to Ekaterinbourg, a town of considerable proportions beyond the Ourals.

Here our weary journey on foot across Siberia commenced, and long before the Asiatic frontier was reached, the paucity of human habitations, the barrenness of the soil, and the increasing bleakness of the climate, had had their effect upon even the hardiest among us. But we still pushed onward, ill, hungry, footsore.

I well remember the day we crossed the frontier, and bade farewell to our native land.

Already we had walked three hundred versts from Ekaterinbourg, along the Great Post Road, at that season covered by a deep snow, and only marked by the long straight line of black telegraph posts and wires. Away, as far as the eye could reach, nothing was visible but the broad plain of dazzling whiteness, and the grey, snow-laden sky, when suddenly we came to a tall, square, brick-built obelisk, bearing on one side the arms of the European province of Perm, and on the other those of the Asiatic province of Tobolsk. It was the boundary-post of that great lonely prison-land, Siberia.

No other boundary-mark in the world has witnessed so much human suffering, or, according to Mr. George Kennan, has been passed by such a multitude of heart-broken people. As it is situated about half-way between the last European and the first Siberian étape, the captain allowed our convoy to halt for rest, and for a last farewell to home and country. The Russian peasant, even when a criminal, is patriotic, and deeply attached to his native land; and there was a heart-rending scene when our wearied band stopped before the crumbling obelisk. Some gave way to wild hysterical grief; some comforted the weeping; others knelt and pressed their faces to the loved soil of their native land, and collected a little earth to take with them into exile, while a few of the women, pale, tragic figures in their black-hooded cloaks, pressed their thin, pale lips to the European side of the cold brick pillar, kissing good-bye to all it symbolised.