&hekhov's only full-length work of nonfiction, presented for the first time in an English translation
Translated by Luha and Michael Terpak, Introduction by Kobert Payne
The
Island:
A Journey to Sakhalin
Anton Chekhov
$6.95
Sakhalin Island in the North Pacific was the site of five principal penal colonies inhabited by thie\es, murderers, political exiles, their families, and an unenlightened bureaucracy. Prisoners were condemned to hard labor, often in the coal mines, and on release were confined to the island as colonists. Treatment was often harsh; flogging was frequent. The climate was execrable: foggy, cold, and rainy in the summer, with snow the remaining eight months. Escape was often plotted, and infrequently successful.
In 1890 Chekhov arrived at Sakhalin, "the only place left where it is possible to study colonization by criminals." Surprised to see prisoners and exiles walking the streets freely, he soon became accustomed to the mores of this strange land where "the local ladies think nothing of permitting their children to go out and play in the care of nursemaids sentenced to exile for life."
From the experiences of this journey, Chekhov produced The Island, "an important historical document," according to D. S. Mirsky, "remarkable for its thoroughness, objectivity, and impartiality." Yet The Island is more than a work of ethnological and sociological significance-a lucid documentation of the need lor penal reform throughout Russia. It is a telling and compassionate portrait of the people of Sakhalin, and a demonstration of the senselessness of brutality.
Everywhere evincing the skill, the perception, and selection of the master craftsman, The Island is a mirror in which we see briKiantly illuminated the humanistic sympathies and sensitivity of Anton Chekhov.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Asked for his autobiography by a magazine editor, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov wrote:
"You want my autobiography? Here it is. I was born in Taganrog in 1860. I graduated fror the gymnasium. I got an M.D. from i\loscow University. I received the Pushkin Prize. I began to write in 1879. I took a trip to Sakhalin in 1890. I took a trip to Europe, where I drank excellent wine and ate oyster: .. .I sinned a little in the drama, but moderately. My works were translated into all
languages, except foreign
"With my colleagues, the doctors, as well as my fellow writers, I have excellent relations... I would love to get a pension. But it is all nonsense. Write whatever you wish ...if you run out of facts, replace them with lyrics."
ABOUT TIIE TRANSLATORS
Luba and Michael Terpak received their training in Slavonic languages at Columbia University. They have translated poetry from the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian, have written articles about travel in the USSR and on the Soviet theater, and have extensive experience in simultaneous translations from the Russian and the Ukrainian.
tue russian library presents masterpieces of singular spiritual energy and freshly penetrating style characteristic of the renaissance of Russian literature during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The series includes the works of both the giants anc their most noted contemporaries, all in new and definitive translations-prime materials ft the understanding of Russia, its culture, and its people.
THE RUSSIAN LIBRARY General Editor robert payne
TITLES IN PRINT, FALL, 1967
sister my LIFE
by Boris Pasternak. Translated, by Pbillip C. Flayderman. The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin
by Anton Chekhov. Tramlated by Luba and Micbael Terpak.
The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon
and other stories
by Boris Pilnyak. Tramlated by Beatrice Scott. Love and Other Stories
by Yuri Olyesha. Translated by Robert Payne. The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky Tramlated by Guy Daniels.
IN PREPARATION
Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova
Translated by Carole W. Bartlett. correspondence with friends
by Nikolai Gogo!. Tramlated by Artbur Hudgins. Selected Poems of Osip Mandelshtam
Tramlated by Peter Russell. The Apocalypse of our Time
by v. v. Rozanov. Translated by Janet Romanoff. AN anthology of GEORGIAN poetry
Tramlated by George NakaJbidze. AN anthology of russian poetry Tramlated by Guy Daniels.
The Island
A Journey to Sakhalin
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Island
A Journey to Sakhalin
Translated by luba and michael terpak With an Introduction by robert payne
wsp
FSJ
WASHINGTON PRESS, INC., New York, 1967
COPYRIGHT, ©, 1967, BY WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS MAY BE
REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A R.EVIEW TO BE PRINTED IN A MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 67-10299
PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA BY WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Contents
introduction xi
I Nikolayevsk-on-the-Amur - The Steamship Baikal - Cape Pronge and the Estuary Inlet - The Sakhalin Peninmla - LA Pĉrouse, Broughton, Krusenstern and Nevelskoy - Japanese Explorers - Cape Dzhaore - The Tatar Coast - De Kastri I
II A Short Geography - Arrival in Northern Sakhalin - Fire - The Pier - ln the Village - Dinner with Mr. L. - Acquaintances - GeiiC1"al Kononovich - The Arrit al of thc Governor-General - Ditmer and the Illmnination 15
The Census - Contents of the Statistical Form - My Questions and the Answers Received - The Huts aiid Their Inhabitants - The Exiles' Opiniom of the Census 30
The Duyka River - The Alexandrovsk Valley - The Alexandrovka Slobodka - Vagrant Krasivy - The Alexandrovsk Post - Its Past - Yurts -
The Sakhalin Paris 41
The Alexandrovsk Penal Servitude Prison - The Prisoti Wards - Convicts in Chaim - The Goldeti Hand - The lAtrines - The Maidan -
Convict Labor in Alexandrovsk - Servants - Workshops 53
VI Yegor's Story 68
VII The Lighthouse - Korsakovskoye - The Collection of Dr. P. I. Suprunenko - The Meteorological Station - The Climate of the Alexandrovsk Region - Novo-Mikhaylovka - Potemkin - Ex-executioner Tersky - Krasny Yar - Butakovo 75
VIII The Arkay Stream - Arkovsky Cordon - First, Second and Third Arkovo - The Arkovo Valley - The Western Bank Settlements, Mgachi, Tangi, Khoe, Trambaus, Viakhty and Vangi - The Tunnel - The Cable House - Due - Barracks for Families - The Dhc Prison - Coal Mines - Voyevodsk Prison - Prisoners in Balls and Chains 91
IX Tym or Tymi - Lieutenant Boshnyak - Polyakov - Upper Armudan - Lower Armudan - Derbinskoye - A Journey on the Tym - Uskovo - The Gypsies - A Joumey into the Taiga - Voskresenskoye I I 5
X Rykovskoye - The Local Prison - The Meteorological Station of M. N. Galkin-Vrasky - Palevo - Mikryukov - Valzy and Longari - Malo- Tymovo - Andreye-lvanovskoye 131
XI A Projected District - The Stone Age - Was There Free Colonization? - The Gilyaks - Their Numerical Composition, Appearance, Physique, Food, Clothing, Dwellings, Hygiene - Their Character - Attempts at Their Russification - Orochi 141
XII My Departure for the South - A Jovial Lady - The Western Shore - The Flux - Mauka - Krilon - Aniva - The Korsakov Post - New Acquaintances - A Northeaster - The Climate of Southern Sakhalin - The Korsakov Prison - The Fire Wagons I 57
Poro-an-Tomari, Muravyevsky Post - First, Second and Third Drop - Solovyevka - Lyutoga - Goly Mys - Mitsulka - Listvenichnoye - Khomutovka - Bolshaya Yelan - Vladimirovka - The Farm, or Firm - Lugovoye - Popovskiye Yurty - Berezniki - Kresty - Bolshoye and Maloye
Takoe - Galkino-Vraskoye - Dubky - Naybuchi - The Sea 173
Tarayka - Free Settlers - Their Failures - The Ainus, Boundaries of Their Dispersion, Enumeration, Appearance, Food, Clothing, Habitations, Temperament - The ĵapanese - Kusun-Kotan - The Japanese Consulate 192
Convict Householders - Transfer to Settler Status - Choice of Sites for New Settlements - Housekeeping - Half-Ownen - Transfer to Peasant Status - Resettlement of Peasants-formerly-convicts on the Mainland - Life in the Settlements - Proximity of the Prison - Analysis of the Population
by Birthplace and State - Village Authorities 2 I I
XVI Composition of the Convict Population According to Sex - The F^ale Probl^ - Convict Women and Female Settlers - Male and Female Cohabitants - Free Women
XVII Composition of the Population by Age - Family Status of Convicts - Marriages - Birth Rate - Sakhalin Children 248
XVIII Occupatiom of Convicts - Agriculture - Hunting - Fishing - Migratory Fish: Whales and Herring - Prison Fishing - Craftsmanship 265
Convicts' Food - What and How the Prisoners Eat - Clothing - Church - School -
Literacy 284
The Free Population - The Lower Ranks of the Local Military Command - Guards - The Intelligentsia 303
The Morality of the Exile Population - Crimes - Investigation and Trial - Punishment -
Birch Rods and Lashes - The Death Penalty 320
XXII Escapees on Sakhalin - Reasons for Escapes - Composition of Escapees by Origin, Class and Others 341
XXIII Diseases and Mortality of the Convict Population - The Medical Organization - The Hospital in Alexandrovsk 359
Introduction
i
o n january i 6, i 890, his thirtieth birthday, Anton Chekhov was at the height of his fame. Astonishingly handsome, quiet-mannered, gentle, ironical, in full enjoy- ment of his genius and with no trace of arrogance, he seemed to be one of those men who are especially favored by the gods to accomplish everything they set out to do. In five years he had reached a dazzling position in Russian literature as the acknowledged master of the short story and as a playwright of indisputable power. He had already written most of the short stories for which he would be remembered, and many of the plays, and there was no in- dication that the tide was ebbing. On the contrary, he was in the full possession of the marvelous instrument he had created, and knew exactly how to play it. He had received the Pushkin Prize from the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and he had been elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. These were rare honors, and although he half despised his growing fame, he derived pleasure from them. It was not only that he was at the height of his fame and of his powers, but he was aware of being loved as few writers are ever loved. People were happy in his presence, and there appeared to be no dark shadows.
To have known Chekhov in those days was to have known genius robed in the garments of an extraordinary humanity. Over six feet tall, and so slender that he seemed taller, with a mane of thick brown hair, fine eyes, a straight nose, a sensual mouth and a well-trimmed beard, he looked like a young Viking. There was nothing in the least melan-
xi
choly and abstracted about his appearance. He enjoyed life passionately, entertained his friends continually, never hap- pier than when he collected flocks of actors, actresses, circus clowns, professional men and vagabonds of all kinds in his country house, where he regaled them with a running fire of jokes and ludicrous improvisations, treating them with princely hospitality. He enjoyed a number of liaisons with young women, who did not always write their mem- oirs. He had a steady income, and if it should ever happen that the vein of literature should dry up, he could always return to his medical practice. He was, and knew himself to be, the darling of the gods. Nevenheless, wherever he looked, the dark shadows were pressing in on him.
Although outwardly gay and carefree, confident of his powers and generous with his gifts of friendship and com- passion, he was strangely restless. There was no single name for this form of restlessness which increasingly took hold of him, like a fever. From time to time he would examine it, like a doctor examining a clinical chart, and he would offcr himself or his close friends elaborate explanations of the nature of the disease, but nearly always mockingly, with happy improvisations, as though it would go away if he laughed at it. He was too sensible, too down-to-earth, to take himself or his m^^s seriously. He was profoundly dissatisfied with his art, his fame and Russian society. At the same time he enjoyed his art, relished his fame and found himself at ease on all levels of Russian society, although he was oppressed by the poverty and ignorance of the Russian peasants and by the srupidity of their masters and of all bureaucrats. This was a dissatisfaction he shared with nearly all the educated men of his time, and though it weighed heavily on him, he found it no more oppressive on the eve of his thirtieth birthday than at any other period of his life.
What did oppress him more than he ever dared to ad- mit was the death of his brother Nikolay the previous June. Nikolay was a gifted painter who had thrown his talents away, a wastrel with a common-law. wife, a drunkard who deliberately set himself to live like a bohemian. Charming, stupid and uncultivated, Nikolay was continually borrowing money from his brother, spending it on women and drink. He was already dying of typhoid fever and tuberculosis when Chekhov brought him to a rented estate in the Ukraine, hoping his diseases would be cured or alleviated in the dry summer air. He kept watch by the bedside, hop- ing against hope, reminding himself that miracles had hap- pened before and might happen again, his affection at war with his medical knowledge, for he knew the diseases were incurable. Most of the Chekhov family gathered on the small estate and Alexey Suvorin, the publisher, came down from St. Petersburg to share the long vigil. When at last Nikolay died, Chekhov's grief shocked his friends. "Poor Nikolay is dead," he wrote. "I am stupid, extinguished. I am bored to death, and there is not a penny-worth of poetry in life, and I have no desires." Quite suddenly he seemed to be drifting aimlessly in a sea of uncertainties. There was nothing he wanted to do, nowhere he wanted to go. Nikolay was the first of the large family to die, and he seemed to feel that his family, which gave meaning to his life, was in some curious way threatened. The "vaga- bond artist" had gone, and left a gaping hole in their lives.
It was about this time, when he was still recovering from the shock of grief, that he chanced upon a copy of the penal code and observed to his brother Mikhail that when a criminal is arrested and placed on trial, everyone is inter- ested, but when he is sentenced to imprisonment no one cares about his fate. He suffers hunger and cold, leads a life of desolate privation, and no one cares. He is made to perform absurd and useless labors, brutal guards have him at their mercy, but it is as though he had completely van- ished from the world. According to Mikhail it was this chance reading of the penal code which set him off on his journey to the island of Sakhalin, that cold and barren island which the Russian government had chosen as the place of exile for its most dangerous prisoners. Sakhalin lay at the farthest limits of the Russian empire, and could be reached only by a long and difficult journey across the whole length of Siberia. Even to Mikhail the motives for the journey remained mysterious. "Anton Pavlovich," he
xiii
wrote, "began making preparations for the journey to the Far East so suddenly and unexpectedly that at first we scarcely knew whether he was serious, or only joking."
Chekhov himself scarcely knew why he was going there; he knew only that he had to go there, that some im- pulse stronger than himself was driving him to it. At vari- ous times he would offer explanations to his friends, who were anxious for his health and disturbed by the prospect of his long absence. He would turn their questions into a joke, saying he needed "a good shaking-up," or he would explain patiently that he owed a debt to medicine and pro- posed to write a carefully documented dissertation on the medical aspects of the penal colony. To others he would say that he was bored, and an arduous journey relentlessly pur- sued would give him two or three days which he would remember with gratitude for the rest of his life. Or else he would explain that he had grown lazy and needed six months of uninterrupted physical and mental work to keep himself in training. He had so many explanations that the real one eventually vanished in a cocoon of myths, exag- gerations and inventive half-truths, for it amused him to see the bewilderment of his friends and he could deploy whole armies of reasons whenever they were required. It became a kind of game. It was a dangerous game, and he may have known that his life was at stake.
To those who were especially close to him he would hint that there were more serious reasons for the journey. To one he hinted darkly that he did not expect to return, to another he spoke of the need for a Russian writer to venture into the forbidding landscape of imprisonment for his soul's sake, while to a third he spoke of a restlessness which had gripped him by the throat and would not give him any rest—only a long journey would quieten him. But even when he spoke in this way we are made aware of evasions and circumlocutions. These statements were per- haps closer to the truth, but they were not the whole truth.
When the time came for him to make formal applica- tion to the authorities for permission to visit Sakhalin, which was under the administration of the Office of Prisons in St. Petersburg, Chekhov explained that he had only "scientific and literary purposes" in view, and those colorless words appear to have been designed to put the authorities off the scent. The head of the Office of Prisons was a pompous and much-decorated official called Mikhail Galkin-Vrasky, and co chis elderly nobleman Chekhov ac- cordingly wrote a humble letter of petition:
20 January 1890
Your Excellency,
Mikhail Nikolayevich!
Proposing in the spring of the present year to journey to the Far East for scientific and literary purposes, and de- siring among other things to visit the island of Sakhalin both in its central and southern pans, I make bold to present this humble petition to Your Excellency for any assistance it may be possible for you to give me toward the fulfillment of the above-mentioned aims.
With sincere devotion and respect I have the honor to be Your Excellency's most humble servant,
Anton Chekhov
It was the kind of letter one writes with the sweat of one's brow, hoping for the precise degree of required flat- eery, the proper subservience, the necessary bureaucratic cone. The head of the Office of Prisons was suitably im- pressed by the letter and Chekhov was granted an audi- ence, where he explained at some length exactly what he intended co accomplish during the journey. He especially wanted to see the inside of the prisons and to study the industries which were being established on Sakhalin. Galkin-Vrasky could not have been more agreeable and police, and when Chekhov left the Office of Prisons he was under the impression chat all doors would be open co him. The nobleman understood thoroughly the purpose of the journey, congratulated Chekhov on his laudable desire co srudy the prison system, and immediately sene off a letter co Sakhalin, warning the authorities against the forthcom- ing visit of "the noted writer Anton Chekhov," who muse on no account be allowed to have any contact with political prisoners and certain specified categories of prisoners.
Meanwhile Chekhov was spending every available mo- ment studying the history of Sakhalin, the geology, geog- raphy, meteorology, the flora and fauna, the habits of the primitive tribes which still maintained an existence on the island. He pored over maps, and consulted obscure articles in magazines and newspapers, collecting so many books and articles that his rooms were piled high with them. He became an avid collector of statistics, which he copied out in his notebooks, and sketched out whole sections of the book he proposed to write—all those sections which did not depend on direct observation—and already the shape of the book was clear in his mind. What particularly dis- tressed him was the discovery that most of the articles pub- lished on Sakhalin were written by people who had never been there, had nat the least idea of the problems faced by the prisoners on the island, and were interested only in making pontifical statements on the virtues of the penal system and the high moral attitude of the government which kindly offered them a suitable method of expiating their crimes. Such men would enjoy a good meal and then sit down to write a learned discussion on some subject like "The Problems of Prison Management in Sakhalin," and an hour later they would have completed a formidable inquiry into a subject they knew nothing about. To his astonishment Chekhov discovered that there was very little worth reading about Sakhalin, and he had to piece together his knowledge of the island from hundreds of books and articles, finding a fact here and a description there, juxta- posing the impressions of a visitor recorded in some out- of-the-way magazine article with a set of official statistics. He was in no mood to suffer fools gently, and in his letters he railed against the idiocy of the bureaucrats who wrote out of insolence and ignorance on matters which were des- perately serious.
He worked in the libraries of St. Petersburg and Mos- cow, and set his friends working for him. His brother
Alexander was made to work through the old files of the Petersburg newspaper, while his sister Maria went to work in the Rumyantsev library in Moscow, copying out long articles with the help of her girl friends. Chekhov was an exacting taskmaster, for he demanded to see everything that had been written about Sakhalin, and every map, however ancient, which showed the island. "Day after day I read and write, write and read," he wrote to Suvorin in the second half of February. "The more I read, the stronger grows my conviction that in my two months on Sakhalin I shall not be able to accomplish more than a quarter of what I had hoped to accomplish." He had become, he said, "such a scholarly son of a bitch" that everyone will be sur- prised out of their wits, and he added that he had stolen a multitude of ideas from other people which he would later claim as his own. "In a practical age like ours, it is impossible to do otherwise," he wrote, and there was some- thing in his letter which suggested that he was about to write the book to end all books on Sakhalin, a compilation of every known fact and surmi::.e about the island with a twenty-page bibliography. With such a large volume, with so many authorities quoted in so many footnotes, he hinted that he would become what he always hoped to become— a real writer.
Chekhov was perfectly serious in his desire to write an authoritative work on Sakhalin, and he was only half jok- ing when he spoke of becoming a real writer after writing his account of the penal colony. He had a great affection for the still unwritten book; it was his "brain-child," the fruit of interminable labors and many furious contemplations; and he was determined in those early days that it should have an impact on society. When the ^^k was finally writ- ten he was less hopeful about the impact on society.
As the winter gave way to spring, his friends became understandably more nervous about the journey. Now at last it became clear that he must be taken seriously. He was telling his friends that he would leave Moscow as soon as the ice melted on the Kama River, so that he could make
xvii
part of the journey by river. The ice melted shortly after Easter, and now Easter was approaching. Suvorin came to the conclusion that Chekhov was deadly serious and one last effort must be made to dissuade him. He listed all the dangers and inconveniences of the journey, doubted whether there could be any fruitful result, wondered whether Sakha- lin had the slightest interest for anybody, and advanced the claims of Chekhov's friends, who were entitled to know that he was in good health, not risking his life in some godforsaken island on the other end of the earth. The journey could be postponed; better still, it could be aban- doncd. Chekhov rcplied good-humoredly, prefacing the let- ter, as he often did, with the saint's day and a general indication of the weather he was enjoying in Moscow—by "io,ooo skylarks" he meant that spring had already come. He wrote:
/1-farch 9. TheForty Martyrs and 1 o,ooo sk;larks
Dear Alexey Sergeyet ich,
We arc both mistaken about Sakhalin, but you prob- ably more than I. I ^ leaving in the firm conviction that my expedition will not yield anything valuable in the way of literature or science; for this I have not enough knowl- edge or time or ambition. I have not carefully worked out plans like Humboldt or Kcnnan.[1] I want to write a couple of hundred pages, and in this way repay in some small part the debt I owe to medicine, which, as you know, I have ncglected like a swine.
Perhaps I shall not be able to write anything worth- while, but the journey docs not lose its glamour for me; by reading, observing, listening I shall discover and learn much. Although I have not yet left, thanks to the books I have gone through I have learned many things which every- one ought to know under a penalty of forty lashes, things which in my ignorance were hitherto unknown to me. Moreover I believe the journey will be an uninterrupted
six months of physical and mental labor, and for me this is necessary because I am a Little Russian and I have al- ready grown lazy. I have to discipline myself. Granting that my journey may be the purest nonsense, a mere whim, an act of stubbornness—think it over and tell me, what do I lose by going? Time? Money? Shall I have to undergo hardships? My time isn't worth anything, I'll never have any money anyway, as for hardships I'll be traveling by horse for twenty-five or thirty days, no longer, and for the rest of the time I shall be sitting on deck in a steamer or in a room, and I'll be bombarding you incessantly with letters.
Even if the journey turns out to be absolutely unre- warding, there are still bound to be two or three days in the course of the entire journey which I will remember for the rest of my life with joy or poignancy, surely? Etc., etc. That's how it is, my dear sir. You will say that this is not convincing, but what you write is equally unconvincing. For example, you write that Sakhalin is no use to anybody, and no one has the slightest interest in the place. Is this really true? Sakhalin may be uscless and uninteresting only to a society that docs not exile thousands of people to it and docs not spend millions maintaining it. Except for Australia in the old days and Cayenne, Sakhalin is the only place left where it is possible to study colonization by criminals: all Europe is interested in it, and we pay no attention to it.
Not more than twenty-five or thirty ye:irs ago our Rus- sian people, while exploring Sakhalin, performed wonder- ful exploits, for which one could believe men were gods, but we have no usc for this sort of thing, we don't want to know what kind of people they were, and so we sit comfort:ibly surrounded by our four walls and complain that God created man to no good purpose. Sakhalin is a place of intolerable sufferings, and man alone, whether free or enslaved, is capable of making such a place. Those who work near the island or on it have solved terrible and re- sponsible problems, and are doing so now. I am sorry I am not sentimental: otherwise I would say we ought to go on pilgrimage to Sakhalin as the Turks go to Mecca, while seamen and criminologists in particular should regard Sakhalin as military men look upon Sebastopol. From the books I have read and am reading, it is clear that we have sent millions of people to rot in prison, we have let them rot casually, barbarously, without giving it a thought, we have driven people in chains for thousands of miles through
the cold, infected them with syphilis, made them depraved, multiplied criminals, and we have thrust the blame for all this on red-nosed jail-keepers.
Today all of educated Europe knows that it is not the fault of the jailers, but rather of all of us—and this is none of our concern, this is not interesting! The celebrated '6os did nothing for the sick and imprisoned, thus break- ing the most imponant commandment of Christian civiliza- tion. In our time something is being done for the sick, but nothing for prisoners: the study of prison conditions does not interest our jurists in the least. No, I assure you, Sakhalin is of use, and it is interesting, and my sole regret is that it is I who am going there, and not someone else more capable of arousing public interest. I personally am going after the merest trifles. . . .
So Chekhov wrote in the longest and most carefully considered defense of his quixotic journey, when it became clear that some kind of explanation to his friends could no longer be avoided. But the explanation is not wholly con- vincing, and he was a little more convincing when he wrote a few days later to his friend Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov:
I am not going in order to observe or get impressions, but simply so that I can live for half a year as I have never lived up to this time. So don't expect anything from me, old fellow;if I have the time and ability to achieve any- thing, then glory be to God; if not, don't find fault with me. I shall be going after Easter week. . . .
II
When Chekhov left Moscow on April 21 on the first stage of his journey to the Far East, he believed he had made all the proper arrangements and taken all the proper precautions. He was armed with a bottle of cognac, top boots, a sheepskin, a waterproof leather coat, a knife "use- ful for cutting sausages and killing tigers," as he explained to Suvorin, and a revolver, which proved to be an unneces- sary luxury, for it was never used. He was in good spirits, although in the excitement of preparing for the journey he had been spitting blood. He had been spitting blood at intervals since the previous December; he had succeeded in convincing himself that it came from his throat and not from his lungs.
He had made his plans carefully and sensibly, and from conversations with people who had made the journey across Siberia he thought there would be no difficulties until he reached Sakhalin. In fact many things went wrong. Most of the time he was lonely, miserable, in a state of settled melancholy. If there had been a companion he liked, if the painter Isaac Levitan had accompanied him as he had once hoped, it might have been more endurable. The journey by train to Yaroslavl was uneventful, but travcling by boat along the Volga and Kama rivers shocked him because he seemed to be sinking into hitherto un- known regions of boredom. His first glimpse of the Volga was spoiled by rain, and when the sun came out he was delighted by the sight of the white churches and monas- teries along the banks and by the water meadows, but afterward when the sun lay hidden behind the clouds, the gray river became a torment. The Kama was no better, and besides, it grew colder the farther they traveled east- ward. There were patches of snow on the banks; ice floes floated down the river. The towns on the Kama seemed to be inhabited by people "who manufactured clouds, bore- dom, wet fences and garbage." He reached Perm at two o'clock in the morning, coughing and spitting blood. It was raining and bitterly cold. He took the train to Tyumen, where he discovered that the first boat did not leave for Tomsk for another two weeks, and so he arranged to hire a coach, a decision which he later regretted. He wore two pairs of trousers, a sheepskin jacket, a leather coat, and still he felt cold. Sometimes he saw straggling files of pris- oners, and the sight of those tragic figures making their way to their place of exile in Siberia only filled him with greater uneasiness, a more intolerable melancholy.
Still, there were some things he enjoyed or found amus- ing during the long journey from Tyumen to Tomsk. At first he enjoyed the sensation of spinning along at great speed in his small coach, a small springless carriage called a tarantass, drawn by a pair of horses. It resembled a wicker basket on wheels, and he liked "to look out on God's earth like a bird in a cage without a thought in the world." But soon the horses wearied and the coachman no longer shouted at them or whipped them. He found himself "groaning and moaning like an Egyptian pigeon."
Chekhov enjoyed the villages they passed through, and he had pleasant things to say about their sweet-smelling cleanliness, the soft beds with feather mattresses and huge pillows, the kindness of the villagers, who were well-man- nered and as clean as their huts. People did not belch or scratch or put their fingers in the glass when they were offering you milk. He liked the white bread, and ate so much of it that "for some days I made a pig of myself." He was entranced by the dignity and good sense of these people. "My God," he exclaimed, "how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for the cold which deprives Siberia of any summer, and the officials who corrupt the peasants and the exiles, Siberia would be the richest and happiest place on earth."
One day not long after he set out from Tyumen he was nearly killed in a fantastic collision, which he related in one of those long letters he wrote regu]arly to his sister Maria:
During the night of May 6th, before dawn, I was being driven by a charming old man in a little tarantass with a pair of horses. I was drowsy, and having nothing more im- portant to do, I watched the gleaming, snakelike flames darting about in the fields and the birchwoods. This is the way people here burn the last year's grass. Suddenly I heard the broken sound of wheels. Coming toward us at full tilt like a bird, hurtling along, was a troika belonging to the mail service. The old fellow quickly turned to the right, the troika flew past, and then I saw in the shadows an enormous, heavy three-horse post wagon with the coach- man making the return trip. Behind this wagon I saw an- other tearing along, also at full speed. We hurriedly turned right, and then to my great amazement and horror this
xxli
troika turned not to the right, but to the left. I scarcely had time to think: "Good God, we're colliding!" when there was a horrible crash, the horses becoming entangled in a dark mass, the yokes fell away, my tarantass rose up in the air, and I lay on the road with all my trunks on top of me. But that was not the end. A third troika came dashing up. This last troika should really have reduced me and my trunks to pulp, but thank God I was not asleep and had not broken any bones in my fall, and so I was able to jump up quickly and run to one side. "Stop!" I yelled to the third troika. "Stop!" The third troika hurled itself on the second and came to a stop. Of course if I had been able to sleep in the tarantass, or if the third troika had flung itself immediately on the second, I would have returned home a cripple or a headless horseman. Results of the collision: broken shafts, torn harness, yokes and baggage on the ground, frightened and exhausted horses, and the terror of having experienced extreme danger. It appears chat the first driver had been whipping up his horses, while the coach- men of the other two troikas were fast asleep, with no one in command. After recovering from the excitement, my old driver and the drivers of the other three mail coaches be- gan swearing furiously at each other. How they cursed! I thought it would end up in a wild battle. You cannot im- agine how lonely I felt amid chat wild, blaspheming horde, in the open country, at dawn, beside the flames far and near which were devouring the grass without making the cold night air any warmer. And my soul was heavy within me! You listen to the curses, gaze down at the broken shafts and your own littered luggage, and you cannot help feeling you are in another world and at any moment you will be trampled to death. . . .
It was a landscape which seemed to have sprung straight out of Chekhov's short stories, at once commonplace and fantastical, where nothing of importance ever happened although at any moment there might be a strange gather- ing of forces, a lonely death, flames running along the grass. The road between Tyumen and Tomsk was a night- mare, full of ruts, so that he was always being jolted, yet flat and straight, seeming to go on forever. After five or six days the rains began, and then there was no end to them. It rained all day and all night, the bridges were washed away, the mud clung to the wheels, the cold wind froze him. The lrtysh was in flood, making strange hollow sounds as though thousands of coffins on the bed of the river were jostling together, lapping against the banks and then with- drawing quickly as though it could not tolerate a land in- habited only by toads and the souls of murderers. The ferrymen were insolent, the ferryboats terrifying with their long sweeps like the pincers of crabs, and there was some- thing about the swollen rivers which was like death on the soul.
\X'hen he reached Tomsk it was still pouring with rain, and the town was so uninviting, so dreary, so unbelievably without any redeeming features that he found himself willingly surrendering to the good offices of an assistant chief of police, who wrote plays and was having an affair with a married woman, on whose behalf he had written a petition to the Tsar pleading for a divorce. Chekhov read the petition, and was solemnly rewarded with an invitation to tour the local brothels. He returned to his lodging at two o'clock in the morning, more miserable and disgusted than ever.
The journey went better after Tomsk. He bought a light carriage for i 30 rubles, expecting to sell it later at a profit. In fact he sold it at a loss, and indeed all his finan- cial arrangements during his travels across Siberia were disastrous, because he was continually bribing his drivers to make up for lost time, paying them twice or three times the proper fee and feeling a great sorrow for them, for their work was as arduous as penal servitude. At intervals the carriage broke down, and in a mood of towering frus- tration he would have to wait until it was mended. But when he reached Krasnoyarsk on the river Yenisei his spirits revived, for the majestic river was like "a mighty warrior," far more powerful than the Volga and spectacu- larly beautiful, and Krasnoyarsk with its clean streets and white churches was like paradise after the muddy villages he had passed through. He felt better, no longer spitting blood. The rain had stopped, the birds were singing, the carriage thundered along well-made roads; he could even sleep in the carriage at night. After Krasnoyarsk came the taiga, the mysterious haunted forests of firs, larches and birch trees, and he would muse for hours on the little path- ways leading to forgotten villages, secret stills, perhaps gold mines, lost in the immensity of the silent forests. He de- lighted in the odor of resin, the blue, pink and yellow flowers bordering the road, the fuming mountains beyond. Lake Baikal, too, enchanted him, and he wrote to his mother that he would never forget his journey across the vast mirror-smooth surface of the lake on a clear sunny day, looking down two-thirds of a mile into the crystal-clear depths of turquoise blue and seeing the rock formations on the bottom. The wooded heights around the lake teemed with bears, sables and wild goats, and he so delighted in the lake and these mysterious mountainous forests that he spent two days on the shore, wildly contenc with a land- scape which reminded him of Finland, Switzerland and the banks of the Don. His spirits revived during these last days of the journey, and he was able to forget the horrors of the earlier days. ' God grant chat everyone make as good a journey as mine," he wrote, and he evidently meant it.
At Sretensk he boarded a river steamer for the thou- sand-mile journey on the Amur to the Pacific. He had a first-class cabin to himself, and now at last he could enjoy the companionship of his fellow travelers or lose himself in solitary dreams as he pleased. Summer had come, the heat and the wild shores stimulated him, and he was de- lighted with the frankness of speech of the people on the boat, now so far from St. Petersburg that they could say anything chat came into their heads without fear of punish- ment. For hours he gazed through his binoculars at the wild duck, wild geese, loons and herons. For the first time he met the Chinese, for the Amur was the frontier between China and Russia. He thought them a good-humored and happy people, and speaks about them with a kind of envy. But it was the landscape which absorbed him, all cliffs and crags and a wilderness of forests, and he confessed that he was awestruck before its beauty and could nm even begin to describe it. He had the feeling that he had escaped from Russia altogether: it was like being in Texas or Patagonia.
\\!hen he reached Nikolayevsk, there remained only the shart passage w Alexandrovsk, the administrative cap- ital of Sakhalin Island. On July 10, on a brilliant sunny day, he set sail on the S.S. Baikal across the Gulf of Tartary. On that day the real wrment began, for there were chained convicts on the ship and he saw the five-year-old daughter of a convict helping her father by holding up his chains, while she climbed the gangway.
When Sakhalin came in sight, it looked like Hell, for five enormous forest fires were burning, and there were more fires reddening the sky from behind the mountains. That flamc-lit inferno seemed to be ideally chosen for a prison colony. h was evening, there werc flames every- where, and no people in sight—only the belching flames and the dark clouds of smoke over an inhospitable island. He spent the night on board ship, and the next morning, July ii, he was taken by cuuer w the port of Alexandrovsk.
Altogether he had spent nearly three months—cxactly cighty-two days—on the journey from Moscow, and now he fclt like someone who had passed an examination and could go on to beuer things. He was elated with all the vast prospects which now opened out to him, and ready for the hardest work he had ever done in his life.
Ill
h is a mistake w believe that a writer cannot come to grips with a small country in a short space of time. In three months he may learn more than he will learn in three years. He comes with eyes which are not dulled with familiarity, with a sense of passionate involvement, with a devotion which remains intense even when he works calmly and systematically. The antennae of his mind spread out to capture the urgent and important, and skillfully avoid the transiwry and impermanent. Chekhov spent only three
xxvi
months on Sakhalin, and wrote a four-hundred-page book on his observations. Most of the time he was like a harpooner poised for the kill.
Although he had feared that the authorities might prove to be unsympathetic and uncooperative, he was pleasantly surprised by the assistance they gave him. They permitted him to go nearly everywhere he wanted to go and to see nearly everyone he wanted to see. He was not permitted to meet political prisoners. The officials sometimes told lies, but they were palpable lies. They lied mechanically, system- atically and senselessly, like bureaucrats everywhere, and Chekhov came in time to regard them as well-meaning peo- ple who seemed not to realize the intolerable stupidity of their actions. He was permitted to quote from their official documents and did so with a fine relish: some of the more fantastic passages in the book come from the official docu- ments quoted without comment.
Chekhov spent the first days in Alexandrovsk as the guest of a bewhiskered doctor who bore a curious resem- blance to Henrik Ibsen. He was a cantankerous man, always fighting against the administration, and he had in fact sent in his resignation only a few hours before Chekhov's ar- rival on the island. The doctor painted an alarming picture of the administration, and said the authorities would not be particularly pleased to learn that Chekhov was staying with him. But a visit with General Kononovich, the com- mandant of the island, proved on the contrary that the au- thorities were mildly amused by the presence of two unruly doctors in their midst. When Chekhov paid his courtesy call on General Kononovich, he was told: ''I'm glad you are staying with our enemy. You will be able to learn our short- comings." The general was very suave, very kind, very intel- ligent, and totally inefficient.
General Kononovich was an experienced administrator who performed the rituals of government in a polite vacuum. Like Baron Korf, the Governor-General, he spoke about "the civilizing mission" of the penal colony as though these words possessed an independent existence of their own. In fact, as Chekhov soon learned, the colony was an inferno and every prison was a shambles. "The civilizing mission" consisted of reducing the prisoners to the lowest common denominator of human indignity. Prisoners were flogged for no reason at all, or because it amused the guards, or because they had committed some minor infrac- tion of the rule book. Those who were not sent out in working parties lived in loathsome squalor, guarded by ignorant and sadistic guards. Some prisoners amassed small fortunes through the institution of the maidanshchik, a kind of pawnbroker's shop which was tolerated and even encouraged by the administration, and sometimes these rich prisoners became the real rulers of the prison. The most terrible fate of all was reserved for the "free" women who accompanied their husbands to Sakhalin. They received no assistance from the government and could only survive by selling themselves or their young daughters. Thirteen- year-old prostitutes were common. Any warden or govern- ment official could obtain a woman simply by requisition- ing one. In the same way he could requisition a whole flock of servants, and Chekhov mentions a warden who acquired a seamstress, a chambermaid, a children's nurse, a laundress and a scrubwoman, and in addition to these five female servants he acquired a footman, a shoemaker and a chef. In 1872 the use of convicts as servants was expressly forbidden by the Governor-General, but General Kononovich on his own authority permitted their employ- ment in order to maintain the supervision and upkeep of government property. "This is not penal servitude," Chek- hov commented. "It is serfdom."
The evils of the system were inherent in the theory of prison colonization, which involves the exploitation of natural resources by the use of forced labor and arbitrary standards of punishment. The prisoner becomes a statistic in the ill-kept books of statistics, and it is his fate to be- come totally demoralized, stupefied by the bureaucracy, and reduced to a state of imbecility. Again and again, as Chekhov talked with the prisoners, he seemed to be in the
XXVi'ii
presence of madmen. They were no longer men, but witless caricatures; and the prison officials were also witless carica- tures of humanity, although chey talked suavely and grammatically about their "civilizing mission." Madmen were exploiting madmen, but two emirely differem kinds of madness were involved; and somecimes, as he attempcs co describe the two opposing forms of madness, Chekhov seems to lose hean, abandoning all hope of a society in which bureaucrats reign over prisoners. He had no partic- ular sympathy for the prisoners: they were murderers, cutthroats and arsonists, the dregs of Russia, but he had less sympathy for their guards and the officials who saw them- selves as virtuous champions of the oppressed. Toward the end of the book he indicates that the only soludon lay in the abandonmem of the penal colony, with setders from Russia taking over the colonization of the island.
While the evils of the system were obvious, it was far more difficult to suggest any workable palliatives. Since the books of statistics were ill-kept, he decided to carry out his own census. Perhaps on the basis of these new statistics— for the census was imended to include an abbreviated biog- raphy of each prisoner and setder on the island—a more liberal policy might be worked out by the authorities in St. Petersburg. General Kononovich had no objection to the census. Cards were printed on the governmem priming press, so designed that many questions could be answered by simply striking out a word or inserting a single letter in the appropriate column. It was a peculiarly modern method of inquiry and Chekhov wem to great pains to devise a suitable list of questions. Apparemly he was not permined w make a census of the prisoners in confinement, but only of the settlers who worked in gangs as forced laborers or who lived in the settlements cloned all over the island, eking out a small living from the hard soil while attempt- ing to open out the virgin land. There were various cate- gories of setders, most of them being prisoners. The cate- gory of "peasams-formerly-exiles" referred to peasants who enjoyed considerable freedom but were not yet permitted to leave the island; co them went the least onerous tasks, although they still remained under supervision. The card devised by Chekhov had twelve entries:
Settlement
No. of house
Name
Age
Religion
Birthplace
Year of arrival
Principal occupation
Literate, illiterate, educated
Married in homeland, in Sakhalin, wid-
ower, bachelor
Docs he receive assistance from the prison? Yes. No.
Chekhov claimed that in three months he filled out io,ooo of these census cards, a claim which has been re- garded with reserve by his biographers. Yet it was not an impossible number. He would go through a settlement house by house, quickly interviewing everyone he met. He rose at five o'clock in the morning and worked till late in the night, wholly immersed in his task, driven by the need to explore deeper and deeper into the heart of the mystery. The census was intended to provide necessary sociological data, but it had other uses. Armed with his census cards, he entered the huts like a man with a well-defined purpose and a semiofficial status; he was treated with respect and sometimes with awe; and to this extent the census cards constituted his disguise. What he really wanted was an ex- cuse to enter the huts without incurring suspicion. He would ask all manner of questions, not only the questions on the card. Late at night he would record what they said to him in his notebooks, trying to catch the exact tone of voice, the expressions on the faces of these people who had become the playthings of an inefficient and ludicrously in- effective administration.
In this way he spent his days, going from one hut to another, often alone, but sometimes accompanied by a prison guard with a revolver or by a prison attendant. The presence of the guard or the attendant made him important in the eyes of the prisoners, and he did nothing to dispel the impression that he was in some way connected with the administration. Sometimes he thought of himself as an impostor, gathering information under false pretenses. At other times he regarded himself as a man with a load of mischief and did not know what dangerous stratagems he might find himself contemplating. He was working so hard that his eyelids developed a tic and he blinked continually, and there were ominous headaches.
The census cards, on which he worked so carefully, have survived, and are now preserved in the Lenin Library in Moscow. His method of filling in the cards was a very simple one. He would write as little as possible, simply underlining the appropriate words on the card, entering the names of the settlers carefully, and the rest hurriedly. It could not have taken him more than a few minutes to ask the questions, and it would take only a few seconds to complete the cards.
The journeys from one settlement to another were often nightmares. He would come at the end of the day to some godforsaken settlement in the backwoods, only to be de- voured by insects in some wretched prison house, the only place where he could be put up for the night. He speaks of whole walls covered with dark crepe, which stirred as if blown by a wind, boiling and seething with the energies of beetles, cockroaches and other insects; the loud rustling and whispering would keep him awake all night. Usually it was bitterly cold, and he was often drenched by the rain and had to sleep in his damp clothes. He was already suffering from tuberculosis, and these months on Sakhalin were at least partly responsible for his premature death.
It was not only the sounds of the insects which dis- turbed him at night. Sometimes he heard the prisoners moaning in their sleep, the endless litany of lament which ended only with the cold dawn, and at such times the full horror of the prison system would come to him out of the darkness. At Derbinskoye, which he reached after a mis- erable journey through the rain, he was given lodging in a warehouse incomprehensibly filled with Viennese furniture. It was clean, there were no insects, and after visiting some huts he spent many hours poring over the official records before turning to bed. He wrote about that night and the next mornmg:
The rain fell continually, rattling on the roof, and once in a while a belated prisoner or soldier passed by, slopping through the mud. It was quiet in the warehouse and in my soul, but I had scarcely put out the candle and gone to bed when I heard a rustling, whispering, knocking, splashing sound, and deep sighs. Raindrops fell from the ceiling onto the latticework of the Viennese chairs and made a hollow, ringing sound, and after each such sound someone whis- pered in despair: ''Oh, my God, my God!" Next to the warehouse was the prison. Were the convicts coming at me through an underground passage? But then there came a gust of wind, the rain rattled even more strongly, some- where a tree rustled—and again, a deep, despairing sigh: "Oh, my God, my God!"
In the morning I went out on the steps. The sky was gray and overcast, the rain continued to fall, and it was muddy. The warden walked hurriedly from door to door with his keys.
"''ll give you such a ticket you'll be scratching yourself for a week," he shouted. 'Tll show you what kind of ticket you'll get!"
These words were intended for a group of twenty pris- oners who, from the phrases I overheard, were pleading to be sent to the hospital. They were ragged, soaked by the rain, covered with mud and shivering. They wanted to demonstrate in mime exactly what ailed them, but on their pinched, frozen faces it somehow came out false and crooked, though they were probably not lying at all. "Oh, my God, my God!" someone sighed, and my nightmare seemed to be continuing. The word "pariah" comes to mind, meaning that a person can fall no lower. . . . I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation, lower than which he cannot go.
xxxii
The sight of the prisoners miming their illnesses on that rainy morning afflicted Chekhov more deeply than any act of physical brutality he saw on the island. He saw men being flogged within an inch of their lives, he saw pris- oners chained to wheelbarrows, but a man in chains can possess a human dignity, and a man who is flogged and drenched in his own blood also possesses dignity; but the poor devils miming their illnesses had none. They were whining silently, begging the merciless to give them mercy, more like dogs than human beings. Chekhov was not re- volted by them. He was revolted by the machine which in- evitably produced them.
He had studied human degradation and knew it well. Acutely sensitive to suffering, he was equally sensitive to the degradation of the human spirit. In his book he de- scribes a flogging with an almost clinical detachment, but there was no detachment when he spoke about the strange miming in the rain-swept courtyard. Only a few years be- fore he had written his credo in a letter to his friend Alexey Pleshcheyev: "My Holy of Holies are the human body, health, intelligence, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom from violence and lying in whatever forms they may manifest themselves." Against those who degraded men, he was prepared to wage implacable war.
So he spent his days on the island, looking keenly at the evidence of a degradation so complete that he some- times hoped the whole island would be swept off the face of the earth. He spent two months in the central part of the island and another month of exploring in the south- ern part, which was to belong to Russia for a few more years, coming under Japanese domination at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War. Having visited all the prisons and settlements except a few very small and isolated com- munities, he would claim that he had talked to every settler and convict, studied all the church records, all the regula- tions and all the laws, and there was no aspect of life on Sakhalin which was foreign ro him. The claim was very nearly true, and it only remained to put all his notes in order and write the book.
On October 13, on a cold, blustery day, he was rowed from the Korsakov landing to the S.S. Petersburg anchored in the Tatar Strait, and a few hours later he saw the moun- tains of Sakhalin sinking below the horizon. The ship was bound for Odessa with pors of call at Hong Kong, Singa- pore and Ceylon, where there was time to make a journey into the interior. Ceylon was paradise; he enjoyed the palm groves and the sight of the bronze-hued women walking in the paddy fields, and in later years he liked to remember a brief romance with a Ceylonese girl in the moonlight. It was here in Ceylon that the journey really came to an end. He wrote to his friend Leontiev-Shcheglov in December when he reached Moscow: "I am so filled with joy and satisfaction that it would not bother me in the least if I succumbed to paralysis or departed this world by way of dysentery. I can say: l have lived! l have had et:erything l want! I have been in Hell, which is Sakhalin, and in Paradise, which is the island of Ceylon!"
IV
Chekhov was never a social reformer, and had no in- terest in revolutionary theories. \X'hile he hoped to be instrumental in changing the penal system in Sakhalin, he had no illusions about the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise. The roots of the system lay deep in Russian his- tory, in the peculiar forms of brutality which had been en- couraged by generations of autocrats for their own protec- tion. Not only the monarchy and the bureaucracy were implicated; the Russian character and the Russian people were equally responsible. There were no easy panaceas, and soon Chekhov resigned himself to the knowledge that at the very best he could only help to change the situation a little. If he had lived to see the Bolsheviks come to power, he would have learned that the system was virtually unchangeable.
Because the system was evil, and because he was deter- mined to fight it with all his available energy, he gave him- self up to the book with passionate absorption. But the form escaped him. He complained that he had seen so much, and had so much to say, that it was difficult to know how to begin. The truth was that he was never quite sure whether he was writing a treatise or a book for popular consumption, and until the end he hovered uncertainly between two entirely different kinds of book. In May, 1891, when he was engrossed in the early chapters, he wrote to Suvorin that he was having difficulties. "Still, I was able to get the devil by the tail. I have described the climate so well that you will shiver with cold when you are reading it. How unpleasant it is to have to give statistics." Unpleasant or not, Chekhov insisted on giving them in abundance. He offers the reader every statistic he can lay his hands on, compares them, adds them up, and not having a mind which moves easily among numbers, he sometimes reduced them to bathos. Writing again a few days later to Suvorin, he said he had discovered the main cause of the trouble. "I had the illusion that my Sakhalin book was intended to teach certain things," he wrote. "I realized I was holding something back, not letting myself go. But no sooner had I begun to recount the funny things I saw on Sakhalin—the pigs, too—the work went splendidly." He added regret- fully that he found some difficulty in getting any humor into the book.
He planned to complete the book and see it through the press by the autumn of 1891, but fate was against him. There were stories to be written, and there were delays caused by the purchase of a small estate in Melikhovo, fifty miles south of Moscow. Then he fell ill. In 1892 there was a cholera epidemic, and he became a doctor superin- tending relief work in an entire district. Sakhalin was forgotten in the presence of an even more dangerous tribula- tion, and since the epidemic continued well into the follow- ing year, many months passed before he could return to his manuscript. Chapters from the book appearec:l. in a volume of essays and stories called Help for the Starving, published in aid of victims of the famine which followed the cholera epidemic, and in the magazine Russian Thought, but the complete work was not published until the summer of 1895. Writing to Suvorin in the spring when the last pages were being written, he said: "Well, it mrns out to be a very fat book, with a lot of notes, anecdotes, statistics, etc. Per- haps it will do well. And if not, it's nothing to worry about —death will come anyway."
In this mood, half hopeful, wholly detached, Chekhov gave his book to a world which preferred his short stories. It is a strange work, brilliant and wayward, scrupulously honest and unpretentious, lit by a flame of quiet indigna- tion and furious sorrow. The horror is made all the more credible because he refuses to dramatize it. This is how it is, he says, leaving to the reader the task of changing the conditions on the island, for he has presented all the evi- dence—the geography, the geology, the ecology, all the statistics in the prison records and the very souls of the people suffering under a ferocious administration—and there is nothing left for him to do. It was perhaps his greatest work, and certainly he expended more energy and affection on it than on any other. "It gives me joy," he wrote, "that this harsh convict's robe shall have a place in my literary wardrobe."
So he wrote long before the book was completed, know- ing that it would rank among the best, and certain that in this quiet contemplative account of a prison colony there were the seeds of a future revolution which would eventu- ally bring about the end of prison colonies in Russia. The book had no immediate effect. It did not change the Tsarist prison system, and it had no effect on the altogether more terrible prison systems of the Bolsheviks. Yet he had lit the fuse, and it is still burning.
In a story written a few weeks after leaving Sakhalin, Chekhov spoke of "the huge bull without eyes," the ulti- mate horror, the symbol of all that was powerful, degrad- ing and meaningless in life. The Island describes his de- liberate confrontation with the bull and his attempt to tame
XXXVI
it and reduce it to human proportions. The bullring was an obscure wind-swept island in the north Pacific; the bull- fighter had no weapons except his bare hands and his native intelligence. He fought because he had to fight, and it never occurred to him that his health or his reputation might suffer. What concerned him was the act of protest, the need to protect the humiliated and degraded, the slow burning of the fuse. In this sense he was a greater revolutionary than many of those who came after him.
Rob"t Payne
SEAOF JAPAN
SEA OF OKHOTSK
The Island
A Journey to Sakhalin
1 verst 1 sazhen 1 vershok 1 arshin 1 desyatin
I ^^
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES USED IN TEXT
o.66 mile 7 feet 1.7; inches 28 inches
2.7 acres 40 pounds
Ttmptratures art givtn in Centigradt'
I Nikolayevsk-on-the-Arnur - The Steamship Baikal - Cape Prange and the Est11ary Inlet - The Sakhalin Peninsula - La Perouse, Broughton, Krusemtern and Nevelskoy - Japanese Explorers - Cape Dzhaore - The Tatar Coast - De Kastri
on july 5, 1890, I arrived by ship at Nikolayevsk, one of the easternmost outposts of our Fatherland. Here the Amur is very wide and the sea is only 27 versts away. It is a majestic and beautiful place. Stories told abom the past, the tales told by my companions abom the vicious winters and the no less vicious local pastimes, the proximity of the convict camps and the very aspect of the filthy, dying town completely banished any desire to enjoy the landscape.
Nikolayevsk was founded not too long ago, in 1850, by the famous Gennady Nevelskoy: this was probably the only bright spot in the town's history. In the '50S and '6os, when, sparing neither soldiers, prisoners nor emigrants, civilization was being planted along the Amur, residences were maintained in N ikolayevsk b)' the governing officials of the region. Many Russian and foreign adventurers came here, and colonists settled here, attracted by the abundance of fish and game, and so the town was obviously not devoid of human interest; this was illustrated by the fact that a visiting scholar found it necessary and possible to give a public lecture at the club.
Now almost half of the houses have been abandoned by their owners. They stand dilapidated, the dark frameless windows staring like the eye sockets of a skull. The in- habitants pursue a somnolent, drunken existence and gen- erally live hand to mouth on whatever God has provided. They subsist by supplying fish to Sakhalin, stealing gold, exploiting non-Russians and selling deer antlers, from which the Chinese make stimulating medicines. On the
1
way from Khabarovka to Nikolayevsk I met a number of smugglers. They do not conceal their profession. Showing me gold dust and a pair of antlers, one of them proudly taid me, "My father was also a smuggler!" The exploitation of non-Russians, in addition to customarily turning them into drunkards, hoaxing them and the like, is occasionally quite original. Thus the now deceased Nikolayevsk trader Ivanov yearly took a trip to Sakhalin and exacted tribute from the Gilyaks. He tonured and hanged those who did nor pay up promprly.
There is no hatel in the town. At the club permission was granted me to rest after dinner in a low-ceilinged room where, they taid me, balls were given during the winter. They only shrugged their shoulders when I asked where I could spend the night. There is nothing one can do. I was obliged ro spend two nights on the boat. \'V'hen it depaned on the retum voyage to Khabarovka, I found myself stranded like a crayfish on the sand. Where should I go? My baggage was on the pier. I walked along the shore and did not know what to do. Exactly opposite the town, some rwo or three versts away, lay the Baikal, the boat on which I would voyage down the Tatar Strait, but they said it would not sail for four or five days, although the departure flag already waved from the mast. Perhaps I should go on board the Baikal? But that is awkward; suppose they don't allow it—they'll say it is too early.
The wind began to blow. The Amur turned dark and threatening, like the sea. I became melancholy. I went to the club and took a long time over my dinner and listened to people at the neighboring table talking about gold and antlers, about a juggler who had arrived in Nikolayevsk, and about a Japanese who does not pull teeth with pliers but with his fingers. If one listens carefully and long, then, 0 my God, how remote is this life from that of Russia!
Everything here, from the cured back of salmon which is taken with vodka to the quality of the conversation, is native to the place, not Russian. While sailing along the Amur I had the distinct impression that I was not in Russia at all but somewhere in Patagonia or Texas. Without even considering the strange, non-Russian aspects of my sur- roundings, it constantly seemed to me that the composition of our Russian life was alien to the native Amurians, that here Pushkin and Gogol were incomprehensible and there- fore unnecessary, that our history was boring, and that we who came from Russia were indeed foreigners. I noted complete indifference to religion and politics.
The priests I saw on the Amur eat meat during Lent. I was told that one who was dressed in a white silk cassock was a gold smuggler who competes with his spiritual charges. If you want to bore an Amurian and stan him yawning, talk to him of politics, the Russian government or Russian art. Moreover, morality here is quite peculiar, unlike our own. Chivalrous behavior toward women has become a cult, but at the same time it is not considered reprehensible to relinquish one's wife to a friend in ex- change for money. Here is an even better illustration: there are no class prejudices, for exiles here are considered equals, but at the same time it is not regarded as a sin to shoot some Chinese beggar met in the forest, killing him like a dog, or to engage in secret hunting parties against escaping convicts.
However, I will continue relating my experience;,. Not having found shelter, toward evening I decided to board the Baikal. But there was a new problem. A strong swell had developed and the Gilyak boatmen refused to row me over no matter how much money I offered them. I wan- dered along the shore, and did not know what to do. Mean- while the sun was setting and the waves of the Amur were darkening. On both banks of the river the Gilyak dogs were howling frantically. "Why have I come here?" I asked myself, and my journey seemed to be utter folly. The knowledge that the convict camps were nearby, that in a few days I would disembark on Sakhalin soil without pos- sessing even a letter of recommendation, and that they might force me to rurn back, disturbed me unpleasantly. Finally the Gilyaks agreed to carry me for a ruble and I arrived safely on the Baikal in a rowboat constructed of three planks nailed together.
This is a seagoing ship of medium size, a trading vessel, which was quite bearable after the Baikal and Amur boats. It travels between Nikolayevsk, Vladivostok and Japanese pons, carries mail, soldiers, convicts, passengers and freight, especially government freight. On contract to the Treasury, which pays it a considerable subsidy, it is obliged to voyage to the island of Sakhalin several times each summer, put- ting in at the Alexandrovsk and the southern Korsakov posts. The tariff is extremely high and is probably not to be matched anywhere else in the world. It is completely incomprehensible why such high tariffs are exacted when colonization primarily requires freedom and ease of travel.
The wardroom and the cabins on the Baikal were small but clean and were completely furnished in European style; there was even a piano. The members of the crew were Chinese, wearing long queues; they are called "boy" in the English manner. The chef is also Chinese but his cuisine is Russian, although all the food is bitter with curry and smells somewhat like corilopsis.1
Having read a great deal about the storms and ice floes in the Tatar Strait, I expected to meet on the ship hoarse- voiced whalers spitting out tobacco juice as they talked. In fact I met fully cultured people. L., the ship's captain, a native of a western country, has been sailing the northern seas for over thirty years and has crossed them lengthwise and crosswise. During his lifetime he has seen many won- derful things, is very knowledgeable and recounts events interestingly. Having spent half of his life around Kam- chatka and the Kurile Islands, he could speak perhaps with greater authority than Othello of barren wastes, terrifying chasms, insurmountable cliffs. I am obliged to him for a great deal of information included in this journal. He had three assistants—the nephew of an eminent astronomer and two Swedes, Ivan Martynich and Ivan Venyaminich, both fine and affable persons.
The Baikal gat under way on July 8 before dinner. Traveling with us were 300 soldiers under the command of an officer, and several prisoners. One prisoner was accom-
panied by his five-year-old daughter, who clung to his
shackles as he came up the gangway. One woman convict attracted attention because her husband was voluntarily fol- lowing her into penal servitude.2
In addition to myself and the officer there were several first-class passengers of both sexes and even one baroness. The reader should not be amazed at such a number of cul- tured people here in the wilderness. Along the Amur and in the Primorskaya region the percentage of intellectuals is quite large with respect to the generally small population, and there are relatively more intellectuals here than in any Russian guberniya. On the Amur there is one city with six- teen active and inactive generals. Perhaps there are even more today.
The day was calm and bright. It was hot on deck and stuffy in the cabins; the temperature of the water was + i8°. Such weather would rather be expected on the Black Sea. On the right bank a forest was on fire. The dense green mass belched scarlet flames; clouds of smoke merged into an elongated, black, stationary column which hung over the forest. The conflagration was enormous, but all around was quiet and tranquil; nobody cared that the forests were being destroyed. Obviously the green wealth belongs to God alone.
We arrived at Cape Pronge after dinner, at six o'clock. Asia comes to an end. One could say the Amur flows into the Pacific Ocean here, if Sakhalin Island did not bar its passage. The estuary spreads out broadly before your eyes. Scarcely visible ahead is a hazy strip of land; this is the penal island. To the left, dropping away in its own convo- lutions, the shore disappears into the haze on its way to the unknown North. This seems to be the end of the world, and there is nowhere else to go. The soul is seized with the same emotion which Odysseus must have experienced when he sailed an unknown sea, filled with melancholy forebod- ings of encounters with strange creatures. On the right, where the river falls into the estuary and a Gilyak village stands sheltered on the bank, strange creatures were rowing out to us in two boats, yelling in an unknown language and waving something at us. It was difficult to see what they were holding in their hands, but when they approached closer I recognized some gray birds. "They want to sell us live geese," someone said.
We turned to the right. Markers indicated the waterway along the entire course. The captain did not leave the bridge nor did the engineer come up from the engine room The Baikal began to go slower and slower, and practically groped its way forward. Great care was required because it was extremely easy to get caught on a sandbank. The ship drew i 2 Y2/2 feet of water and in some spots it had only 14 feet in which to navigate. There was even a moment when we heard the keel scrape the sand. This shallow waterway and the peculiar contours of the Tatar and Sakhalin coasts were the main reasons for the long-held belief in Europe that Sakhalin was a peninsula.
In June, 1787, the famous French navigator Count de la Perouse landed on the western bank of Sakhalin, above 48° longitude, and talked with the natives. We learn from his nates that he found not only Ainus but also Gilyaks who came as traders, and they were experienced people well acquainted with Sakhalin and the Tatar shore. Drawing a sketch on the sand, they taid him the land where they lived was an island and the island was separated from the main- land and Iesso (Japan) by the straits.3
Later, while sailing farther north along the western bank, he expected to find a passage from the North Japa- nese Sea into the Okhotsk Sea and thus to shorten consider- ably the distance to Kamchatka. But the farther north he sailed, the more shallow became the strait. The depth de- creased by one sazhen each mile. He sailed northward as far as the dimensions of his ship permitted and stopped on reaching a depth of 9 sazhens. The gradual rise of the bot- tom and the almost imperceptible current in the strait convinced him that he was not in a strait but in a bay and that Sakhalin is connected with the mainland by an isth- mus.
In De Kastri he again encountered Gilyaks. When he drew a sketch of the island for them on paper, one of them took the pencil and, drawing a line across the strait, ex- plained that at times the Gilyaks must portage their boats across this isthmus and that grass even grows on it: that was La Perouse' understanding. This made him even more certain that Sakhalin was a peninsula.4
The Englishman V. Broughton visited the Tatar Strait nine years after La P^rouse. He had a small ship which drew no more than 9 feet of water, thus enabling him to sail farther north than La P^rouse. Stopping at two sazhens, he sent his assistant to take soundings farther north. On his trip the latter found deep water among the shallows but they gradually decreased and kept leading him alternately, back and forth, to the Sakhalin shore and then to the low sandy shores of the other side. The picture he obtained was that both shores seem to merge. It seemed that the bay ended here and that there was no through passage. There- fore Broughton also was forced to the same conclusion as La Perousc.
Our own celebrated Krusenstern, who explored the shores of the island in 1805, fell into the same error. He sailed to Sakhalin with a preconceived notion, since he was using La P^rouse' map. He sailed along the eastern coast and, after passing Sakhalin's northern capes, he entered the strait, sailing from north to south. It seemed that he was very close to solving the riddle, but the gradual decrease of soundings to 3Y2 sazhens, the specific gravity of the water and especially his preconceived notion also forced him to admit the existence of an isthmus which he was unable to find. But his conscience bothered him. He wrote: "It is obvious that Sakhalin was previously an island and perhaps even in not too distant times." He returned with a restless spirit. When he first saw Broughton's notes in China, he was "quite overjoyed."-r'
The error was rectified by Nevelskoy in 1849. The authority of his predecessors was so great, however, that when he reported his discoveries in Petersburg, they did not believe him. They considered his conduct as imperti- nent and subject to punishment, and they "concluded" that he should be degraded. Nobody knows how this would all have ended if the Tsar himself had not come to his de- fense. The Tsar decided that Nevelskoy had acted with courage, nobility and patriotism.0
Nevelskoy was an energetic, highly temperamental man, well-educated, unselfish, humanitarian, completely per- meated with an idea and fanatically devoted to it, and possessing high principles. One of his acquaintances wrote: "I never met a more honorable man." In five years he made a brilliant career for himself on the eastern shore and on Sakhalin, but he lost his daughter, who died of starvation, and he soon grew old. His wife aged and lost her health. She had been "a young, lovely and amiable person," who had borne all her privations heroically.7
In order to conclude the discussion on the question of thc isthmus and the peninsula, I consider it rather impor- tant to note a few more details. In 1710, by order of the Chinese Emperor, missionaries in Peking drew a map of Tatary. The missionaries made use of Japanese maps. This is obvious since at that time the passage through the La Perouc and Tatar Straits was known only to the Jap- anese. The map was sent to France and became widely known because it was included in the atlas compiled by the geographer dAnville.8
To a small mistake on this map Sakhalin owes its name. On the western bank of Sakhalin, exactly across from the mouth of the Amur, the map includes a name given by the missionaries: "Saghalien-angahata," which means "The Cliffs of the Black River" in Mongolian. This name probably re- fers to some crag or cape at the mouth of the Amur. In France it was understood differently, and believed to be the name of the island. Hence the name Sakhalin, which was retained by Krusenstern on Russian maps. The Japa- nese called Sakhalin Karafto or Karaftu, which means "Chinese Island."
The works of the Japanese either reached Europe very late when they were no longer needed or they were sub- jected to erroneous corrections. On the missionaries' map, Sakhalin was an island, but d'Anville, who mistrusted their map, placed an isthmus berween the island and the main- land.
The Japanese were the first to explore Sakhalin, begin- ning in 1613, but so little significance was attached to their explorations in Europe that when the Russians and the Japanese attempted to decide who owned Sakhalin, only the Russians wrote and spoke about the rights deriving from this first expedition."
A new survey containing all possible details of the Tatar and Sakhalin shores has long been necessary. The present maps arc unsatisfactory, as we know from the fact that both naval and commercial vessels often run aground on sand and rocks, and this occurs much more frequently than re- portcd in thc ncwspapcrs. Due chiefly to the inaccuracy of existing maps, thc ships' captains hcre arc very cautious, overanxious and ncrvous. The captain of the Baikal docs not belicvc the official maps and follows his own map, which he draws and corrects cach trip.
To avoid bcing strandcd on the sand, the captain de- cided not to sail that night and aftcr sunsct wc anchorcd off Cape Dzhaorc. On the cape itsclf there was a lone cabin inhabited by the naval officer in charge of placing and maintaining markers along thc waterway. Behind thc cabin lay the impassable, somnolent taiga. The captain sent him some fresh meat. I took advantage of the situation and went to shore with the launch. Instead of a pier thcre werc only large slippcry rocks, and it was necessary to jump over them. There were stcps to the cabin, made of timber struck almost perpendicularly into the ground, so that in climb- ing it was necessary to take strong handholds. It was awful! By the time I climbed the hill and reached the cabin I was surrounded with swarms of mosquitoes; the air was black with them. My hands and face smarted and there was no way to defend myself. I believe that if one had to sleep here under the bare sky without being surrounded with bonfires, one would perish or at the very least go insane.
The cabin was cut in half by a hallway. To the left lived the sailors; to the right, the officer and his family. The master was not at home. I met an elegantly gowned, cul- tured lady, his wife, and his two little daughters, who were covered with mosquito bites. All the walls of the rooms were festooned with fir branches, gauze was stretched over the windows, there was a strong odor of smoke, yet the mosquitoes were oblivious to all these precautions, and hov- ered over everything, and stung the poor little girls. The furnicure of the room was poor, composed only of camp equipment, but the decorations were charming and taste- ful. There were sketches on the wall, among them one of a woman's head done in pencil. It appeared that the lieuten- ant was an artist.
"Do you live well here?" I asked the lady.
"We live well, except for the mosquitoes."
She was not pleased with the gift of fresh meat. She said that she and the children had grown accustomed to salted meat long ago, and they did not like fresh meat.
"However, I did cook trout yesterday," she added.
A sullen sailor accompanied me to the launch. As though he had guessed the question I proposed to ask him, he sighed and said, "One doesn't come here voluntarily!"
The next morning we resumed the journey in complete calm. The weather was warm. The Tatar shore was moun- tainous, and there were many sharp, conical peaks. The coast was lightly covered with a bluish haze, the smoke from distant forest fires. They say the haze is sometimes so thick here that it is just as dangerous as sea mist to the sailors. If a bird should fly straight from the sea over the mountains, it would probably not encounter a single house or a single living person within 500 versts and more. The green shore glistens merrily in the sunshine and is obviously quite content to be uninhabited.
At six o'clock we were in the narrowest part of the strait, between Capes Pogobi and Lazarev, and we saw both banks at close hand. At eight o'clock, we passed near Nevelskoy Head, a mountain with a kind of protuberance on the top like a little hat. The morning was clear and sparkling, and my pleasure was enhanced by the proud knowledge that I was gazing on these shores.
At two o'clock we entered De Kastri Bay. This is the only place where ships sailing the strait can gain shelter during a storm. Without this bay, it would be impossible to sail along the completely inhospitable Sakhalin shore.10 There is even an expre«ion: "to scamper into De Kastri." The bay is beautiful, a made-to-order narural phenomenon. It is a round lake, three versts in diameter, with high banks which give shelter from the winds and form a wide outlet to the sea. If one judges from outward appearances, this bay is ideal—but, alas, it only seems so. Seven months of the year it is covered with ice, is barely sheltered from the eastern winds and is so shallow that ships must cast anchor some two versts from the shore. The outlet to the sea is guarded by three islands, or, more accurately, reefs, which endow thc bay with an original bcauty. One of them is named Oyster Reef from thc very large, plump oysters which abound on it.
On the shore there were scveral small houscs and a church. This is the Alexandrovsk command post. The commandant, his factor and thc telegraph operators live here. Onc of the local officials who camc to dine on board, a boring and bored man, talkcd constantly at thc table, drank a great deal and related thc old anecdote about the geese who, having eaten berries used in making liqueur, became drunk, were taken for dead, plucked and thrown outside, and later, after slecping off thc cffects of the alco- hol, returned home completely nude. The official swore that the event with thc gccse took place at De Kastri, in his own home.
There is no residcnt priest at the church; when one is required, a priest comcs from Mariinsk. Good weather is as rare here as in Nikolayevsk. They say that a surveying com- mission worked here this past spring and that thcre were only three sunny days during all of May. How can anyone work without thc sun!
At sca we passed the naval vessels Borb and Ttmnis and two torpedo boats.
I recall still another detail. Wc had scarcely dropped anchor when the sky darkened, thunder clouds gathered and the water turned an unusual, bright green. The Baikal had to unload 4,^^ poods of government cargo and therefore we remained at De Kastri overnight. To pass the time more quickly, the machinist and I fished from the deck and we caught some very large, fat-headed gobies, the like of which I had never caught either in the Black Sea or in the Sea of Azov. We also caught some plaice.
The unloading of cargo from ships is always tiresomely slow, accompanied by exasperation and bad blood. Further- more, this is the bitter lot of all our eastern ports. At De Kastri the cargo is unloaded on small barges which can only reach the shore during high tide and therefore the loaded barges often run aground on the sand. Sometimes because of this the ship must sit and wait out the tide for the sake of a few hundred pounds of flour.
In Nikolayevsk everything was even more inefficient. While standing on the deck of the Baikal, I saw a tugboat, which was towing a large bargc with 200 soldiers, lose its tow rope. The barge floated out with the tide and headed straight for the anchor chain of a steamship which was anchored close to us. With sinking hearts we awaited the next moment, when the barge would be ait in half by the chain, but, fortunately, some good people caught the tow ropc in time and the soldiers only suffered from severe fright.
1 A flower of the astcr family with a distinctive odor—TRANS.
On the Baikal and on the Amur ships the prisoners generally stay on deck with third-class passengers. Once when I went up on the forecastle at dawn to stretch my legs I saw soldiers, women, children, two Chinese and convicts in shackles sleeping soundly, all huddled together; dew fell on them and it was chilly. The guard was standing amid the heap of bodies, asleep and holding his rifle in his hands.
3 La Perouse wrote that they called their island Choko, but the Gilyaks were probably referring to another place with this name and he did not understand them. On a map drawn by our Krash- cheninnikov ( 1752) the Chukha River is shown on the western coast of Sakhalin. Chukha appears to be quite similar to Choko. Le Perouse says that when the Gilyak drew the island and called it Choko, he also drew a small river. Choko means "we."
Regarding this, I would like to cite Nevelskoy's observation: the natives usually draw a line between the shores to show that the opposite shores can be reached by boat—in other words, that a strait actually exists between the shores.
a» The fact that three serious explorers made exactly the same mistake speaks for itself. If they did not find the entrance to the Amur, it is because they had the most meager means for explora- tion at their disposal and also because they were talented people who had certain misgivings and almost guessed at the truth, while failing to reckon with all the evidence. The fact that the isthmus and the Sakhalin peninsula are not myths, but at one time actu- ally existed, has now been proved.
A detailed history on the exploration of Sakhalin is contained in A. M. Nikolsky, Sakhalin island and lts Fau,/a of Vertebrate Animals. This book also contains an extensive bibliography on Sakhalin.
The details can be found in Nevelskoy's book: The Exploits of Russian Naral 0/ficers in the Easternmost Part of Russia (1R49- 55).
' On her journey from Russia to join her husband, although ill, Nevelskoy's wife, Ekatcrina Ivanovna, rode 1,1 oo versts on horse- back in 23 days over swamps, through wild, mountainous tai.cas, and over the glaciers of the Okhotsk route. The most capable of Nevelskoy's associates, N. K. Boshnyak, who discovered Imperial Harbor [a town on the mainland opposite Uglegorsk, now known as Soviet Harbor—TRANS.] whcn he was only 20 years old, "a dreamer and a child"—as he is called by one of his colleagues— related in his notes: "We ail went together to Ayan on the trans- port Baikal, and thcre we transferred to the decrepit barque Shelekhov. When the barque started to sink, nobody could con- vince Mme. Nevelskaya to be the first to leave the barquc. 'The commander and the officers are the last to leave,' she said. 'I too will leave the ship only when there isn't a single woman or child left on board.' And that's exactly what she did. The barque was already lying on its side. . . ." Boshnyak writes further that al- though they were often in Mmc. Nevelskaya's company, he and his friends "never hcard a word of complaint or reproach—on the contrary, there was often observed a calm and proud awareness of that bitter but lofty position which was predestined for her by Providcnce." She usually passed the winter alone since the men were out on various missions. The temperature in her quarters was
When provision ships did not arrive from Kamchatka in 1852, they were all in a desperate position. There was no milk for nurs- ing babies, there was no fresh food for the sick, and several per- sons died of scurvy. Nevelskaya arranged that milk from her cow should be given to all of them. She conducted herself towafd the natives with such simplicity and paid so much attention to them that even the uncouth savages noticed it. And she was then only 19 years old" (Lieutenant Boshnyak, "Expedition into the Amur Countryside," Naval Collection, 1859, II). Her husband also men- tions her touching treatment of the Gilyaks in his notes. He writes: "Ekaterina lvanovna sat them [the Gilyaks] down on the floor in a circle ncar a large urn filled with gruel or tea in the one room in our quarters which served as reception room, sitting room and dining room combined. Enjoying more of the same hospitality, they very often slapped their hostess on the back, sending her to get tamcha [tobacco] or tea."
Nouvel Atlas de la Chine, de la Tartaire, Chinoise et de Thibet (1737).
In 1 8o8, when the Japanese surveyor Mamia-Rinzo sailed along the western bank of the island, he reached the Tatar shore at the very mouth of the Amur and made thc journey from the island to the mainland and back many times. He was the first to prove that Sakhalin is an island. The Russian naturalist F. Shmidt praised his map highly, saying it was "altogether admirable since it was obviously based on independent surveys."
The present and future importance of this bay is described in K. Skalkovskoy, Russkaya Torgovlya v Tikhom Okeane [Russian Commerce in the Pacific Ocean], p. 7 5.
JI A Short Geography - Arrival in Northern Sakhalin - Fire - The Pier - In the Village - Dinner with Mr. L. - Acq11aintances - General Kononovich - The Arrival of the Governor- General - Dinner and the Illumination
sakhalin lies in the Okhotsk Sca, protecting almost a thousand vcrsts of castcrn Sibcrian shorclinc as wcll as thc emrancc imo the mauth of the Amur from thc ocean. It is long in form, running from north to south; its shapc in the opinion of one author suggests a sturgeon. Its geographic location is from 45*54' to 54*53' latitude and from 141 °40' to 144 "53' longitudc. The northcrn scction of Sakhalin, which is crossed by a belt of permafrost, can be compared with Ryazan guberniya, the southcrn scction with the Crimea. Thc island is 900 vcrsts long, its widest ponion measuring 125 vcrsts and its narrowcst 25 versts. It is twice as largc as Grcccc and onc and a half timcs thc sizc of Dcnmark.
The formcr division of Sakhalin imo northcrn, cenual and southcrn disuicts was impracticable, and it is now dividcd only imo nonhcrn and southern. Thc upper third of the island prccludes colonization due to its climatic and soil conditions. Thc ccmral section is called Northern Sakhalin and thc lower, Southcrn Sakhalin. There arc no rigid boundaries bctwcen thcm. At the presem time con- victs inhabit the northcrn scction along the Duyka and Tym Rivers; thc Duyka falls imo the Tatar Strait and the Tym imo thc Okhotsk Sea; bath rivers meet at their sourcc according to thc map. Convicts also live along the western bank in a small area above and below the Duyka estuary. Administratively, Norhern Sakhalin is composcd of two districts: Alexandrovsk and Tymovsk.
After spending the night at De Kastri, we sailed at noon on the next day, July 10, across the Tatar Strait to the mouth of the Duyka, where the Alexandrovsk com- mand post is situated. The weather again was calm and bright, a rare phenomenon here. On the completely be- calmed sea whales swam past in pairs, shooting fountains into the air. This lovely and unusual spectacle amused us the entire trip. But I must admit my spirits were depressed and the closer I got to Sakhalin the more uncomfortable I became. The officer in charge of the soldiers, learning of my mission in Sakhalin, was greatly amazed and began to argue that I had absolutely no right to visit the penal set- tlement and the colony since I was not a government offi- cial. Naturally I knew he was wrong. Nevertheless, I was greatly troubled by his words and feared that I would probably encounter the same point of view on Sakhalin.
\X'hen we cast anchor at nine o'clock, huge fires were burning at five different places on the Sakhalin taiga. I could not see the wharf and buildings through the darkness and the smoke drifting across the sea, and could barely dis- tinguish dim lights at the post, two of which were red. The horrifying scene, compounded of darkness, the silhouettes of mountains, smoke, flames and fiery sparks, was fantastic. On my left monstrous fires were burning, above them the mountains, and beyond the mountains a red glow rose to the sky from remote conflagrations. It seemed that all of Sakhalin was on fire.
To the right, Cape Zhonkiyer reached out to sea, a long, heavy shoulder similar to the Crimean Ayu-Dag. A lighthouse shone brightly on the summit, while below in the water between us and the shore rose the three sharp reefs—"The Three Brothers." And all were covered with smoke, as in hell.
A cutter with a barge in tow approached the ship. Con- victs were being brought to unload the freight. We could hear Tatar being spoken, and curses in Russian.
"Don't let them come on board," someone shouted. "Don't let them! At night they will steal everything on the boat."
"Here in Alexandrovsk it is not so bad," said the engi-
i6
neer, as he saw how depressed I was while gazing to shore. "Wait until you see Due! The cliffs are completely vertical, with dark canyons and layers of coal; fog everywhere! Sometimes we carried two to three hundred prisoners on the Baikal to Due and many burst into tears when they saw the shore!"
"We are the prisoners, not the convicts," said the cap- tain. "It is calm here now, but you should see it in the fall: wind, snow, storms, cold, the waves dash over the side of the ship—and that's the end of you!"
I spent the night on board. At five o'clock in the morn- ing I was noisily awakened with, "Hurry, hurry! The cutter is making its last trip to shore! We are leaving at once!" A moment later I was sitting in the cutter. Next to me was a young official with an angry, sleepy face. The cutter sounded its whistle and we left for the shore towing two barges full of convicts. Sleepy and exhausted by their night's labor, the prisoners were limp and sullen, completely silent. Their faces were covered with dew. I now recall several Cauca- sians with sharp features, wearing fur hats pulled down to their eyebrows.
"Permit me to introduce myself," said an official. "I am the college registrar D."
He was my first Sakhalin acquaintance, a poet, author of a denunciatory poem entitled "Sakhalino," which begins: "Tell me, Doctor, was it not in vain . . . ." Later he often visited me and accompanied me around Alexandrovsk and nearby places, relating anecdotes and endlessly reading his own compositions. During the long winter nights he writes progressive stories. On occasion he enjoys informing people that he is the college registrar and is in charge of the tenth grade. When a woman who had visited him on business called him Mr. D., he was insulted and angrily screamed, "'m not Mr. D. to you, but 'your worship.'" While stroll- ing along the shore I questioned him about life on Sakhalin, about what was happening, but he only sighed ominously and said, "You will see!"
The sun was high. Yesterday's fog and darkness, which had so terrified me, vanished in the brilliance of the early morning. The dense, clumsy Zhonkiyer with its lighthouse, "The Three Brothers" and the high, craggy shores which were visible for tens of versts on both sides, the transpar- ent mist on the mountains and the smoke from the fires did not present such a horrifying scene in the bright sun- light.
There is no harbor here, and the coast is dangerous. This fact was impressively demonstrated by the presence of the Swedish ship Atlas, which was wrecked shortly be- fore my arrival and now lay broken on the shore. Boats usually anchor a verst from shore and rarely any nearer. There is a pier, but it is only usable by cutters and barges. It is a large pier, several sazhens long, and T-shaped. Thick log piles had been securely driven into the sea bottom, in the form of squares, which were filled with stone. The top was covered with planking, and there were freight-car rails running the length of the pier. A charming building, the pier office, sits on the wide end of the T; here also stands a tall black mast. The construction is solid, but not perma- nent. I was told that during a heavy storm the waves some- times reach the windows of the building and the spray even reaches the yardarm of the mast; the entire pier trembles.
Along the shore near the pier some 50 convicts were wandering, obviously idle; some were in overalls, others in jackets or gray cloth coats. When I approached, they all removed their caps. It is possible that no writer has ever previously received such an honor. Somebody's horse was standing on shore harnessed to a springless carriage. The convicts loaded my luggage in the carriage; a black- bearded man in a coat with his shirt tail hanging got up on the box. We took off.
"Where do you wish to go, your worship?" he asked, turning around and removing his cap.
I asked him if it would be possible to rent lodgings here, even if it was only one room.
"Certainly, your worship, rooms can be rented."
For the two versts from the pier to the Alexandrovsk Post I traveled along an excellent highway. In comparison co the Siberian roads this is a clean, smooth road with gutters and street lights; it is absolutely luxurious. Ad- jacent to it runs a railway. However, the scenery along the way is depressing in its barrenness. Along the tops of the mountains and hills encircling the Alexandrovsk valley, through which the River Duyka flows, charred stumps and trunks of larch trees, dried out by fire and wind, project like porcupine quills, while in the valley below there are hillocks covered with sorrel—the remains of swamps which until recently were impassable. The fresh slashes in the earth made by the gutters rcveal the complete barrenness of the swampy scorched earth with its half-vershok laycr of por soil. There are no spruce trces, no oaks, no maples —only larches, gaunt, pitiful, frettcd in precise shapes, and they do not beautify thc forests and parklands as they do in Russia, but serve only to emphasize the poor marshy soil and the severe climate.
The Alexandrovsk Post, or Alexandrovsk for short, is a small, pretty Siberian-rype town with 3,^x1 inhabitants. It does not contain even one stonc building. Evcrything is built of chiefly of larch—the church, the houses and
the sidewalks. Here is located the residence of the islands commandant, the center of Sakhalin civilization. The prison is situated near the main strect. Its exterior is quite similar to an army barracks, and as a result Alexandrovsk is com- pletely free of the dismal prison atmosphere which I had cxpected.
The driver took me to the Alexandrovsk residential district in the suburbs, to the home of one of the peasant exiles. Here I was shown my lodgings. Thcre was a small yard, paved Sibcrian fashion with timbers and surrounded with awnings. The house contained five spacious, clean rooms and a kitchen, but not a stick of furniture. The landlady, a young peasant woman, brought out a table, and a chair camc about five minutes later. "With firewood the price is 25 rubles; without firew^^, 15,'' she said.
About an hour later, she brought a samovar and said with a sigh:
"So you have come to visit this godforsaken hole!"
She had come as a little child with her mother, foUow- ing her father, a convict who has not yet served out his sentence. Now she is married to one of the exiled peasants, a gloomy old man whom I glimpsed crossing the yard. He had some sort of sickness and spent his time lying under the awning and groaning.
"At home in Tambovsk guberniya they are probably reaping," she said. "Here there is nothing to look at."
And truly there is nothing interesting to look at. Through the window you could see rows of cabbage plants, and some ugly ditches nearby, and beyond these a gaunt larch tree withering away.
Groaning and holding his side, the landlord entered and began complaining of crop failure, the cold climate, the poor soil. He had completed his prison term and exile, and now owned two houses, some horses and a cow. He employed many workmen and did nothing himself. He had marricd a young woman and, most important, he had long since been granted permission to return to the main- land—but still he complained.
At noon I sauntered in the suburbs. On the edge of the suburbs there was a pretty little house with a little garden in from and a brass nameplate on the door. Near the house in the same yard was a small shop. I entered to buy some- thing to eat. "Commerce" and "Trade Commission Ware- house" was thc description of this modest shop on a primed and handwritten price list which I saved. It was owned by a settler, a former officer of the guard who had been sentcnced to penal servitude for murder by the Petersburg Regional Court twelve years ago. He had com- pleted his sentence and was now engaged in business and he also fulfilled various commissions for road-making and other matters. For this he received a senior supervisor's salary. His wife was a free woman, belonging to the nobility, and worked as a doctor's assistant in the prison hospital. The shop sold the little stars which go on epaulets, Turkish delight, crosscut saws, sickles and "most up-to-date ladies' summer hats, very fashionable, from 4 rubles 50 kopecks to 12 rubles each." While I was speaking with the clerk, the owner entered the shop. He was dressed in a silk jacket and bright tie. We intro- duced ourselves.
"Won't you be so kind as to have dinner with me?" he asked.
I agreed and we entered the house. His home is com- fortable, with Viennese furniture, flowers, an American Ariston musical box and a rocking chair on which he rocks after dinner. In addition to the housewife there were other guests in the dining room—four officials. One of them, an old man without a mustache but wearing gray whiskers and resembling the dramatist Ibsen, proved to be the junior physician at the local hospital. Another, also an old man, introduced himself as a staff officer of the Orenburg Cossack Army. From his very first words this officer im- pressed me as a very good man and a great patriot. He is meek and good-naturcdly judicious, but when politics are discussed he comes out of his shell and begins a serious exposition of Russian military power and speaks scorn- fully of the Germans and the English, whom he has nevcr seen in his life. The story is told that when he was in Singapore en route to Sakhalin he wanted to buy his wife a silk shawl. He was told to exchange his Russian money for dollars, and became grossly insulted. "How do you like that!" he said. "Do I have to exchange my Orthodox money for some kind of Ethiopian money?" And the shawl was not purchased.
At dinner they served soup, chickens and ice cream. Winc was also served.
"When, roughly, was the last snowfall?" I asked.
"In May," the shopkeeper replied.
"That's a lie, it was in June," said the doctor who re- sembled Ibsen.
"I know a settler," said the shopkeeper, "who had a twenty-fold yield from California wheat."
And again there was an objection from the doctor: "That's a lie! Your Sakhalin gives nothing. It is a cursed land."
"However, permit me," said one of the officials. "In '82 there was a forty-fold wheat yield. I know this person- ally."
"Don't believe it," said the doctor. "They're pulling wool over your eyes."
At dinner the following legend was related. When the Russians occupied the island and began to offend the Gil- yaks, the Gilyak shaman cursed Sakhalin and predicted that no good would ever come of it.
"So it has come to pass," sighed the doctor.
After dinner, the shopkeeper played the music box. The doctor invited me to stay with him and that very evening I moved to the post's main street. It was one of the houses close to the business district. That evening began my initiation into the mysteries of Sakhalin. The doctor told me that just before my arrival, during a medical in- spection of livestock at the pier, there had been a serious misunderstanding between him and the island's comman- dant, and the general had even raised his stick against him. The following day his resignation was accepted, although he had not tendered it. The doctor showed me a huge pile of papers written by him, evidence of how he had spoken in defense of truth and humanity. There were copies of requests, complaints, reports and denunciations.1
"The general won't be pleased at your staying with me," said the doctor, winking at me knowingly.
The following day I paid a visit to the commandant of the island, V. 0. Kononovich. Notwithstanding his fatigue and lack of time, the general greeted me most courteously and conversed with me for almost an hour. He is cul- tured, well read, and in addition has a great deal of prac- tical experience, since he was the prison commandant at Kara for eighteen years before being appointed to Sa- khalin. He speaks and writes beautifully and gives the impression of being a sincere man with benevolent aspira- tions. I cannot forget how satisfied I was with our con- versation and how favorably I was impressed by his aversion to corporal punishment, a subject to which he referred many times. George Kennan describes him glow- ingly in his famous book.
Learning that I planned to spend several months on Sakhalin, the general warned me that life here was dif- ficult and boring.
"Everyone tries to escape from this place—the convicts, the settlers and the officials," he said. "I have no desire to escape yet, but already I am exhausted by the great amount of mental exertion demanded of me, chiefly be- cause there are so many matters to attend to."
He promised me full cooperation but asked that I wait a few days, because Sakhalin was preparing for the forthcoming visit of the Governor-General and everyone was busy.
"I'm glad you are staying with our enemy," he said, as we parted. "You will learn our weak points."
Up to the time of the Governor-General's arrival I lived in the doctor's apartment in Alexandrovsk. Life was not completely normal. When I awoke in the morning the very diversity of sounds reminded me where I was. Under my windows the convicts passed along the street to the measured clanging of their irons. Opposite the apartment, in the military barracks, musicians were learning the marches with which they would greet the Governor- General. The flute played passages from one song, the trombone from another, and the bassoon from still an- other, and the result was inconceivable cacophony. In our rooms the canaries whistled continually and my doctor host paced from corner to corner, thumbing through law- books and thinking out loud.
"If on the basis of this particular section I submit a request to the department ..." and so on.
Or he sat with his son and labored over more petti- fogging statements.
It was unbearably hot in the street. They were com- plaining about the drought, and the officers were walking about in their single-breasted jackets. But this was not true of every summer. The traffic on the streets was much greater than in our provincial towns. This could be ex- plained by the preparations for welcoming the Governor- General, and also by the preponderance of people of work- ing age, who spent most of the day out of doors. The prison, with over i,ooo inhabitants, and the barracks, with 500 soldiers, were grouped together in a very small area. Workmen were rapidly building a bridge over the Dukya, they were constructing archways, cleaning, painting, sweep- ing, marching. Troikas and two-horsed carriages with bells were driving along the streets; these horses were being made ready for the Governor-General. They were all in such a hurry to be ready that they were even working on holidays.
Along the street a group of Gilyaks, the native aborig- ines, were being taken to the police station. They were being angrily barked at by the meek Sakhalin mongrels, who for some reason only bark at the Gilyaks. And there was another group: fettered prisoners, some wearing hats, some bareheaded, clanging their chains, dragging a heavy barrow filled with sand. Little boys latched on to the back of che barrow; sweaty, red-faced guards strode along with rifles on their shoulders. After pouring out the sand on the little square in from of the general's residence, the convicts recurned along the same road, the clang of chains never stopping. A prisoner in overalls, with diamond- shaped markings on the back to indicate that he was a convict, wem from courtyard to courtyard selling blue- berries. When you go down the street, everyone who is sitting stands up and everyone you meet doffs his hat.
The prisoners and the exiles, with some exceptions, walk the streets freely, without chains and without guards; you meet them in groups and singly every step of the way. They are everywhere, in the streets and in the houses. They serve as drivers, watchmen, chefs, cooks and nurse- maids. I was not accustomed to seeing so many convicts, and at first their proximity was disturbing and perplexing. You walk past a construction site and you see convicts with axes, saws and hammers. "Well," you think, "they are going to haul off and murder me!" Or else you are visiting an acquaintance and, not finding him at home, you sit down to write a note, while his convict servant stands waiting behind you, holding the knife with which he has been peeling potatoes in the kitchen. Or it may happen hat at about four o'clock in the morning you will wake ip and hear a rustling sound, and you look and see a con- rict approaching the bed on tiptoe, scarcely breathing.
"What's the matter? What do you want?"
"To clean your shoes, your worship."
Soon I became accustomed to this. Everyone becomes Lccustomed to it, even women and children. The local adies think nothing of permitting their children to go out ind play in the care of nursemaids sentenced to exile for ife.
One correspondent writes that at first he was terrified »f every bush, and groped for the revolver under his coat it every encounter with a prisoner on the roads and path- vays. Later he calmed down, having come to the conclusion hat "the prisoners are generally nothing more than a herd »f sheep, cowardly, lazy, half-starved and servile." To be- ieve that Russian prisoners do not murder and rob a >asserby merely out of cowardice and laziness, one must be :ither a very poor judge of men or not know them at all.
The Governor-General of the Amur region, Baron (orf, arrived on Sakhalin on July 19 on the warship 3obr. He was formally received in the square which lies >etween the commandant's house and the church. There vas an honor guard, many officials and a crowd of exiles nd prisoners. The same band played which I described a ittle while ago. A handsome old man, Potemkin by name, . former convict who had grown rich on Sakhalin, pre- ented bread and salt on a silver platter of local workman- hip. My doctor host was present. He wore a black swallow- ail coat and a cap, and held a petition in his hand. Here I aw the Sakhalin crowd for the first time, and its mournful haracter made a deep impression on me. There were men md women of working age, old folks and children, but here were absolutely no young people. It seemed that here was no^^y on Sakhalin between thirteen and twenty ears of age. And I reluctantly asked myself, "Doesn't this nean that when the young people are old enough they eave the island at the first opportunity?"
The day following his arrival, the Governor-General began to inspect the prisons and the settlements of the exiles. Everywhere the exiles, who had awaited him with the greatest impatience, presented him with petitions and made oral requests. Everyone spoke for himself or one spoke for the entire settlement. Since oratorical art flour- ishes on Sakhalin, there were not a few speeches. At Derbinsk, the settler Maslov several times in his speech re- ferred to the officials as "our most gracious governors." Unfortunately, almost none of those who approached Baron Korf made sensible requests. Here, as in similar situations in Russia, the intolerable ignorance of the peasants was revealed. They did not ask for schools, or justice, or wages. Instead they asked for trifles. Some asked for more rations, some asked that their children be adopted; in other words, they presented petitions which could have been granted by the local authorities. Baron Korf listened to their peti- tions with complete attention and goodwill. Deeply moved by their poverty-stricken circumstances, he made promises and raised their hopes for a better life.2
When the assistant superintendent at the Arkovo prison reported that all was well in the Arkovo settlement, the baron mentioned the winter and summer grain yields and said, "All is well except there is no bread in Arkovo."
In honor of his arrival the Alexandrovsk prison in- mates were fed fresh meat and even venison. He visited all the cells, accepted petitions and ordered the chains re- moved from many of the convicts.
On July 22, after the Te Deum and a parade (it was a holiday), the superintendent hastened to my lodging and announced that the Governor-General wished to see me. I went to meet him. Baron Korf received me most gra- ciously and spoke with me for about half an hour. Our conversation took place in the presence of General Konon- ovich. Incidentally, he asked whether I had some sort of official assignment. I said, "No!"
"Do you not at least have an assignment from some scientific society or newspaper?" the baron asked.
I had a correspondent's card in my pocket, but since I had no intention of printing anything about Sakhalin in the press and did not wish to delude the persons dealing with me, I naturally answered with complete honesty,
"I permit you to visit anywhere and anyone you wish,"' the baron said. "We have nothing to hide. You can ex- amine everything. You will be given free access to all the prisons and settlements, you may make use of any docu- ments needed for your work. In other words, all doors will be open to you everywhere. There is but one permission which I cannot gram. I have no right to allow you to have any communication whatsoever with political prisoners."
In dismissing me, the baron said:
"We will talk again tomorrow. Bring some writing paper."
On the same day I attended a gala dinner at the home of the island commandant. I met almost the entire Sakhalin administrative staff. Music was played during dinner, and there were speeches. When they toasted his good health, Baron Korf made a short speech, the words of which I still recall.
"I am convinced that the 'unfortunates' live better on Sakhalin than in any other place in Russia or even in Europe. In conjunction with this, much still remains to be done, and we are confronted with an endless road leading to their welfare."
He had visited Sakhalin five years earlier and now found significant progress surpassing all his expectations. His words of praise omitted any reference to hunger, habitual prostitution by women exiles, and terrible corpo- ral punishments, but the audience was forced to believe him. In comparison with what had transpired five years ago, the present situation was almost the beginning of a golden age.
There were illuminations during the evening. Until late at night soldiers, settlers and prisoners milled around in throngs along the streets lit with lamps and Bengal lights. The prison was open. The Duyka River, always piti- ful and dirty with its bleak and barren banks, was now decorated on both sides with multicolored lanterns and
Bengal lights, and their reflections in the water were lovely that evening, majestic and ludicrous, like a cook's daughter dressed up in the gown of a baroness. Music was being played in the general's garden, and there were singers. They even shot off the cannon, and the cannon burst.
In spite of all this gaiety, it was dull on the streets. There were no songs, no accordions, not even one drunk- ard. The people wandered around like shadows and were as silent as shadows. Convict life, even with Bengal lights, remains convict life; and music which is heard from afar by a person who will never return to his homeland only evokes deadly melancholy.
When I arrived with my writing paper to keep my appointment with the Governor-General, he gave me his opinions on penal servitude in Sakhalin and on the colony, and suggested that I record everything he said. I agreed most willingly. He suggested that I entitle my inquiry: "A Record of the Life of the Unfortunates." From our previous conversation and from his dictation I received the imprcssion that he was a magnanimous and honorable man, but that the "life of the unfortunates" was not as well known to him as he thought. Here are several sentences which he dictated to me:
"Nobody is bereft of the hope of enjoying his full rights; there is no such thing as perpetual punishment. Penal servitude for an indefinite period is limited to twenty years. Convict hard labor is not onerous. Forced labor gives no personal gain to the workers; herein lies its burden, and not in physical oppression. There are no chains, no guards, no shaved heads."
The days were beautiful with a bright sky and clear air, reminiscent of fall in Russia. The evenings were magnifi- cent. I remember the glowing western sky, the dark-blue sea and a completely white moon rising over the moun- tains. On such evenings I enjoyed driving along the valley between the post and the viUage of Novo-Mikhaylovka; the road is smooth, straight; alongside is a railway and a telegraph line. The further we drove from Alexandrovsk, the more the valley narrowed, the shadows deepened; there were giant burdocks in tropical luxuriance; dark moun- tains rose on all sides. In the distance we could see the flames from coke fires, and there were more flames from a forest fire. The moon rose. Suddenly a fantastic scene. Coming toward us along the railway was a convict, riding in a small cart, dressed in white and leaning on a pole. He stopped abruptly.
"Isn't it time to turn back?" asked my convict driver. Then he turned the horses, and glancing up at the mountains and the fires, he said:
"It is lonesome here, your worship. It is much better at home in Russia."
Following is a sample of a denunciation via telegraph: ''It is my bounden duty, according to the seven hundred and twelfth article of volume three of the criminal code, to trouble your honor to come to the defense of justice against impunity for extortion, forgery and torturc perpetrated by X."
The hopes were not unattainable. At one settlement, speaking of the fact that peasant exiles were now permitted to move to the mainland, he said, "And later you can go back to your homeland, to Russia."
III The Census - Contents of the Statistical Form - My Questions and the Answers Received ■ The Huts and Their Inhabitants - The Exiles' Opinions of the Census
in order to be able to visit all the settlements possible and to become intimately acquainted with the majority of the exiles, I devised a method which seemed the only possible one for achieving my purpose. I took a census. In the settlements I went into each hut and recorded the names of the owners, the members of their families, and who lodged with them and worked with them. I was graciously offered assistance to lighten my work and save time, but since my chief aim in taking the census was not to produce a final record but to gain impressions through the recording process itself, I used help only on the rarest occasions. All this was done by one man in three months, and cannot really be called a census. The record cannot be considered accurate and complete. However, since more competpnt data does not exist either in literature or in the Sakhalin administrative offices, it is possible that my figures may be useful.
To record the census I used forms printed for me at the printing shop of the police department. The arrange- ment was as follows. On the first line of each form I noted the name of the post or settlement. On the second line was the number of the house according to the prison list of homesteads. The third line noted the status of the person interviewed: convict, settler, peasant formerly ex- iled, free person. I recorded free persons only if they directly participated in an exile's household—for example, if they were married, legally or illegally, and generally belonged to his family, or lived in his house as workers, lodgers, etc.
Great significance is attached to status according to Sakhalin customs. A convict is unquestionably ashamed of his status. To the question "What is your status?" he answers, "I am a worker." If he had been a soldier before his imprisonment, he always adds, "A soldier, your wor- ship." Having completed, or as he himself expresses it, served his term, he becomes a forced settler. This new status is not considered lowly because the term used for a settler is not too dissimilar to the term for a peasant, but does not possess, naturally, the rights which go with being a peasant.
Asked "What are you?" a settler always answers, "A free man." After ten years, or, under favorable circum- stances provided by the laws of exile, after six years, the settler gains the status of 'peasant formerly exiled." When asked his status, the peasant answers with dignity, as if he should not be included with the others and is in some way remarkably different from them, "I am a peasant." But he does not add "formerly exiled."
I did not question the exiles on their former status since the administrative offices have sufficient information on this. They themselves, except for the soldiers, never mention their lost status, as if it were something they had already forgotten. There was not one among the lower- middle-class people, those town people, tradesmen and pricsts, who did not describe his former state as "freedom." If someone starts a conversation about his past, he always begins, "When I was free. . . ."
The fourth line contains the given name, the patro- nymic and the surname. As to names, I can only recall that it appears that I did not record even one female Tatar name correctly. In a Tatar family with many daughters and the father and mother scarcely understanding Russian, it is difficult to make sense and I had to make my records by guesswork. Tatar names are also incorrectly written in the prison records.
When I asked an Orthodox Russian peasant his name, he answered, "Karl." He was not being facetious. He was a vagrant who had borrowed his name from a German. I remember that I recorded two of those: Karl Langer and Karl Karlov. One convict was called Napoleon. There was a female vagrant Praskovya, although her real name was Maria. As to surnames, for some strange reason there were many Bogdanovs [God-given] and Bespalovs [\X!ithout Fingers] on Sakhalin. There were many curious names: Shkandyba [Limper], Zheludok [Stomach], Bezbozhny [Godless] and Zevaka [Yawner].
I am told that Tatar tides are still retained in Sakhalin, disregarding the fact that everyone has forfeited all rights to status, prefixes and particles which denote high status. I don't know how correct this is, but I recorded many khans, sultans and oglis. The most common name among the vagrants is Ivan, and the most common surname is Nepom- nyashchy [Unremembered]. Here are some of the vagrants' names: Mustafa Nepomnyashchy, Vasily Bezotechestva [Countryless], Franz Nepomnyashchy, Ivan Nepomnyashchy 20 Years, Yakov Besprozvaniya [Nameless], Vagrant Ivan 35 Years' and Chelovek Neizvestnovo Zvaniya [Man with Unknown Name].
On the same line I noted the relationship of those I interviewed to the master of the house: wife, son, mistress, worker, lodger, son of lodger, etc. ln recording children I noted the legal and illegal offspring, their own and adopted. Adopted children are frequently encountered on Sakhalin and I was not only obliged to record adopted children, but also foster parents.
The relationship of many of those living in the huts toward the master of the house was that of co-owner or half-owner. In both of the northern districts there were two or even three proprietors to a land allotment and so it was in more than half of the households. A settler takes possession of a piece of land, builds a house and starts farming. In two or three years the authorities assign a co- owner, or they give one plot to two settlers at the same time. A convict who has served his term sometimes requests that he be permitted to settle at a certain post or settlement where there is no more room available for settlement, and they are forced to assign him to an already existing home- stead. The number of co-owners especially rises after the announcement of an imperial edict. At such times the administration is forced to find places immediately for several hundred persons.
The fifth line notes age. Women who have passed forty do not easily remember their age and must think before answering the question. The Armenians from Erivan guber- niya never know their age. One answered, "Maybe thirty, maybe I'm even fifty." In such instances there had to be an approximation to the age, which was later verified by the records. Usually youngsters of fifteen and older decrease their age. Some who are already married or who have been prostitutes for a long time say they are thirteen or fourteen. The reason for this is that infants and children in the poorest families receive food from the prison, which is distributed only to those below fifteen years of age, and thus the young people and their parents are forced to tell lies.
The sixth line pertains to religion.
The seventh: "\Vhere were you born?" This quesu'on was answered without difficulty and only the vagrants answered with a quip or merely "I don't remember." When I asked a girl, Natalya Nepomnyashchaya, from which guberniya she had come, she told me, "A bit from all of them."
Fellow countrymen usually stay together, they pass the time together, and when they escape, they also escape together. A Tulyak prefers to become a co-owner with a Tulyak; a Bakinets with another Bakinets. Obviously socie- ties of fellow countrymen exist. When questions had to be asked about an absentee, his fellow countrymen gave the most detailed information about him.
The eighth line asked: "Which year did you arrive on Sakhalin?" Very few of the Sakhalin dwellers answered this question immediately, without strain. The year he acrived on Sakhalin was the year of dire misfortune. Fur- thermore, they don't even know the year, or have forgotten it. I asked an old convict woman when she had arrived on Sakhalin and she answered dully, without thinking, "\Vho knows? Maybe in '83." Either her husband or her lover interrupts, "So why do you wag your tongue for nothing? You came in '85." "Maybe in '85,'' she agrees with a sigh. We begin counting, and the peasant is correct. Men are not as listless as the women, but they do not answer immedi- ately. They ponder and discuss.
"When did they send you to Sakhalin?" I asked a settler.
"I came in the same group with Gladky,'' he answers uncertainly, looking at his friends.
Gladky came in the first group, and the first group— i.e., the first "volunteers"—came to Sakhalin in 1879. Thus I record it. Or they say, "I was in prison for six years, but I have been a settler for three years. So figure it out." "That means you have been on Sakhalin nine years?" "Not at all! Before Sakhalin I was in the central prison for two years." And so forth. Or they say, "I came in the year when they killed Derbin," or "Mitsul died that year."
It was extremely important that I should receive correct answers from those who had come in the '6os and '70S. I did not want to miss a single one. In all probability I was unsuccessful. How many have survived of those who came here twenty to twenty-five years ago is a question which can be said to be fateful for Sakhalin colonization.
On the ninth line I recorded the main occupation and trade.
On the tenth: literacy. Usually the question is phrased in the form: "Are you literate?" Instead I asked: "Can you read?" which often saved me from incorrect answers because peasants who cannot write and can only read printed words say they are illiterate. There are even those who from modesty say rudely, "What's the use of reading? What is literacy?" and only after the question is repeated, they say, "I was able to read print at one time, but now, you know, I've forgotten. We are a stupid people—we are only peasants." Those who are blind or see only with diffi- culty also call themselves illiterate.
The eleventh line pertained to family status: married, widowed or single. If married, where: in the homeland or on Sakhalin? The words "married, widowed, single" do not define family status on Sakhalin. Here very frequently mar- ried men are doomed to a solitary, unmarried life because their wives live back home and refuse to give them a divorce, while single men and widows live a family life together and have half a dozen children. Therefore, even though they did not live alone and even though they con- sidered themselves married, I did not consider it super- fluous to describe them as "single."
Nowhere else in Russia is illicit marriage so widely and notoriously prevalent, and nowhere else does it take the peculiar form it docs on Sakhalin. Illicit marriage or, as it is called here, free cohabitation does not find objectors among either the officials or the priesthood, but, on the contrary, it receives encouragement and is sanctioned. There are settlcments where not even one legal marriage is encountercd. Free couples form a household under the same conditions as legally married couples. They beget children for the colony and therefore there are no reasons to pass separate laws for them at registration.
Finally, the twelfth line: "Docs he receive assistance from the prison?" Based on the answers received to this question, I wanted to find out which portion of the popu- lation was unable to exist without material aid from the prison, ur, in other words, who feeds the colony? Does it feed itself or does the prison feed it? Assistance is received from the prison in the shape of food, equipment or money by all the convicts, by the settlers in the first years after serving their sentence, by paupers and by children of the poorer families. In addition to these o!Ticially recognized pensioners, I noted those exiles living at the expense of the prison who receive wages from the prison for the services they rendered as teachers, clerks, jailers, etc. How- ever, the answers were not quite complete. In addition to the customary allotments, i.e., food and wages, another wide- spread practice is the distribution of assistance which could not always be recorded on the form. For example: assist- ance given to couples when they marry, the purchase of grains from the settlers at deliberately high prices, and, chiefly, the distribution of seeds, livestock and the like on credit. A settler might be in debt to the prison for several hundred rubles which he will never repay, but I was forced to record him as not receiving aid.
I drew a red pencil line along the bottom of each form involving a female and found this to be more convenient than a special heading indicating sex. I only recorded the people who were actually living with the family. If they said that their oldest son had gone to work in Vladivostok and the second son is a laborer in the Rykovsk settlement, I did not record the first at all, and the latter I recorded at his present residence.
I went alone from one hut to the next. Sometimes I was accompanied by a convict or a settler who had taken upon himself the role of guide only to relieve his boredom. Sometimes a guard armed with a revolver followed me like a shadow, keeping close to me or keeping his distance. If I wanted him to, he would come and clarify their answers for me. When I did ask him about anything, his forehead was immediately covered with sweat, and he said, "I couldn't possibly know, your worship!" Usually my barefoot and hatless companion, bearing my inkstand in his hands, would go running out in front of me, loudly banging open the doors, and then taking the opportunity to whisper something to the master of the house inside the doorway: probably his opinions of my census. Then I entered the house.
On Sakhalin there are all types of huts, depending on who built them—a Siberian, a Khokhol [Ukrainian} or a Chukhonets [Finn]. Most frequently it was a small frame box 14 feet by 14 feet, having two or three windows, with- out any exterior decorations, the roofs covered with straw or bark, and occasionally some thin planks. There is no courtyard, and there are no trees. Shacks and Siberian-type bathhouses are rare. If there are dogs, they are gentle, not vicious, and, as I have already stated, they only bark at the Gilyaks—probably because their footwear is made of dog fur. Therefore these tame, harmless dogs are not tied up. If these people own a pig, it has a lock and chain around its neck. A rooster is also tied up by its leg.
"Why are your pig and rooster tied up? " I asked a householder.
"In our Sakhalin everything is chained," he replied jokingly. "That's the kind of land it is."
The hut consists of one room with a Russian stove. The floor is of wood. There is a table, two or three stools, a bench, a bed with bedding, or the bedding is placed directly on the floor. Sometimes there is absolutely no fur- niture and only a featherbed lies in the middle of the floor, and it is obvious that it has just been slept on. A cup with remnants of food stands on the windowsill. The con- ditions are such that it is not a home, not a room, but, more accurately, a cell for solitary confinement.
Where there are women and children, no matter how impoverished, the hut does resemble a household full of peasant life. Nevertheless there is a persistent feeling that something important is missing; no grandmother, no grand- father, no old paintings, no inherited furniture; conse- quently, the household contains nothing from the past, nothing traditional. There is no beautiful icon corner, or if there is, it is very barren and dreary, without a lamp or any decorations. Here normal customs no longer exist. The furnishings are haphazard and it seems that the family is not living in its own home but in someone else's, or it has just arrived and has not yet had the opportunity to settle down. There is no cat, and on cold evenings no crickets can be heard. And this is all due to the fact that we are no longer in Russia.
The scenes which I ordinarily observed did not indicate good housekeeping, comfort and stability in the households. Most frequently I found a single inhabitant, lonesome and forlorn, who seems to have grown numb from forced idle- ness and boredom. He is dressed as a free man, but from habit his coat is thrown over his shoulders in prison fashion and if he has recently been released from prison, his peaked prison cap, minus its peak, has been tossed on the table. His stove is not lit; his only kitchenware consists of a small pot and a bottle stopped with paper. He reacts scornfully, with icy contempt, concerning his own life and his house- hold. He says that he has tried everything but nothing makes sense. There's but one thing left: ignore everything. While I am speaking with him his neighbors gather in the house and a conversation commences on various subjects: about the administration, the climate, women. . . . From boredom they are all willing to talk and listen endlessly.
Occasionally, in addition to the householder, you find a whole crowd of lodgers and workmen in the hut. On one threshold sits a convict-lodger with a ribbon tied around his hair, sewing shoes; a strong odor of leather and cob- bler's wax permeates the air. In the doorway his children lie on rags. Here also in a dark, tight corner his wife, who had voluntarily accompanied him, is making vareniky [Ukrainian dumplings} from blueberries, while working on a tiny rable. This family had just recently arrived from Russia.
Further, in the house itself are five men who call them- selves a lodger, a worker or a cohabitant. One stands near the stove. With cheeks puffed our, eyes popping, he is soldering something. Another, obviously a buffoon with a deliberately moronic expression, is muttering something while the rest are laughing boisterously into their hands. On the bed sits a Babylonian whore, the mistress of the house herself, Lukerya Nepomnyashchaya, tousled, ema- ciared, covered with freckles. She attempts to answer my questions flippanrly while swinging her legs. Her lack- luster eyes are not pretty, and from her hollow-cheeked, apathetic face I can imagine how much she has suffered during her short life in prisons and convict stations, and from her many illnesses. This Lukerya sets the tone of life in the house, and because of her the entire atmosphere reveals the close proximity of an insane, debauched vaga- bond. There is no possibility of a normal household here.
Occasionally I came upon a group of people in a hut who had been playing cards before I arrived. Their faces show confusion, boredom and expectation; perhaps they are anxious to return to their cards as soon as I leave? At other times I walk into a cabin completely devoid of furnishings; the stove is bare, and on the floor, along the wall, Cherkess men sit in a row, some wearing hats, others with bare, shaven, rigid heads, who stare at me without blinking. If there was only one woman in the hut, she was always lying in bed; and she would answer questions while yawning and stretching herself, and when I left she would lay down again.
The convict population regarded me as an official and thought the census was just one more of the many formal inquisitions which never lead to anything. However, the fact that I was not a local man, not an official of the Sakhalin government, awakened some curiosity among the convicts, and they would ask me, "Why are you taking a census of all of us?"
And then there would be various conjectures. Some said that the high authorities probably wanted to distribute aid among the convicts, others that the authorities had probably finally decided to resettle everyone on the main- land. It is generally believed that sooner or Iater the prison and the settlers will be moved to the mainland. A third group, pretending skepticism, said they never expected any- thing because God Himself has abandoned them, and they would say this in order to force me to raise an objection to their theory. And then, from either the doorway or the top of the stove, as if mocking all our hopes and conjec- tures, there could be heard a voice, full of fatigue, boredom and annoyance at being disturbed, saying, "They keep writ- ing, they keep writing, they keep writing, Oh, Queen of Heaven!"
I did not suffer hunger or any inconvenience during my travels round Sakhalin. I had read that supposedly the agronomist Mitsul suffered terrible privations while sur- veying the island, and was even forced to eat his dog. Since then the situation has changed considerably. Your present- day agronomist rides on good roads, and even in the very poorest settlements there are guardhouses, or so-called quarters, where a warm lodging, a samovar and a bed can always be found.
When explorers set out for the interior of the island, into the taiga, they take with them American canned goods, red wine, plates, forks, pillows and anything else they can pack on the backs of convicts, who are used on Sakhalin in place of draft animals. Some people still eat rotten wood with salt, and even practice cannibalism, but this does not apply to tourists or officials.
In the following chapters I will describe the posts and the settlements and will acquaint the reader with the various types of convict labor and the prisons to the extent that I was able to know them in a short time. Convict labor on Sakhalin is extremely varied. The labor is not special- ized; it does not depend on coal- or gold-mining, but encompasses the entire range of Sakhalin life and is spread throughout the populated areas of the island. Digging out stumps in the forest, building houses, draining swamps, fishing, mowing, loading and unloading cargo on ships are all types of convict labor which have necessarily merged with the life of the colony to such a degree that they cannot be isolated. Convict labor can be discussed as something existing independently on the island only if we embark on a precise survey of the location of mines and the organiza- tion of factory work.
I will commence with the Alexandrovsk valley and the settlements along the Duyka River. This valley was first chosen for settlement in Northern Sakhalin not because it had been explored better than all the others or because it satisfied the aims of colonization, but purely by chance, because it was closest to Due, where penal servitude was first established on Sakhalin.
1 The length of the sentence was added to his name. He was actually 48 years old.
IV The Duyka River - The Alexandrovsk Valley - The Alexandrovka Slobodka - Vagrant Krasivy - The Alexandrovsk Post - Its Past - Yunts - The Sakhalin Paris
when the duyka river, also called the Alexandrovka, was charted by the zoologist Polyakov, it was some 70 feet wide in its lower reaches. Its banks were luxuriant with tremendous stands of trees reaching down to the water; the lowlands were covered with forests of fir, larch, alder and willows, and surrounded by impassable swamps. Now the river is only a long, narrow puddle. In its width, barren shores and slow current it resembles the Moscow canal.
It is only necessary to read Polyakov's account of the Alexandrovsk valley and then glance at it today to under- stand what a tremendous amount of hard and forced labor has already been expended on cultivating this area. "From the heights of neighboring mountains," writes Polyakov, "the Alexandrovsk valley is stifling, dark and heavily forested . . . a tremendous fir and pine forest covers a sig- nificant portion of the valley bottom."
He writes of swamps, impassable marshes, forbidding quagmires and forests where "in addition to tremendous trees standing in their bare roots, the ground is often covered with huge, half-rotten trunks fallen from age or storms. Moss-covered hillocks often protrude amid the roots of the fallen trees, beside the gulleys and ravines."
Now an entire city stands on the former taiga with its swamps and ravines; roads have been built, there are green meadows, rye fields and market gardens are harvested, and already complaints are heard of the scarcity of trees.
The appalling labor and struggle of the convicts who worked in waist-high swamps, in freezing cold, in icy rain, lonely for home, suffering all manner of indignities, beaten by birch rods—all this makes a horrifying impression. It is not surprising that one kindly Sakhalin official always reads aloud to me from Nekrasovs sad poem "The Railroad" while we are driving to some destination.
A small stream, called the Malaya Alexandrovka, falls into the Duyka on the right side, at its very mouth. On both sides of the stream lies the Alexandrovka settlement, or the Slobodka, which I have already mentioned. It lies in the suburbs of the post and has already merged with it. However, since it differs from the post in a number of peculiar ways and has an independent life, it must be described separately.
This is one of the oldest settlements. Colonization began here soon after penal servitude was instituted in Due. This area was chosen, as Mitsui writes, because of its luxurious meadows, good timber, navigable river and rich soil. "Obviously," writes this fanatic who considered Sa- khalin the promised land, "it was impossible even to doubt that colonization could be successful; however, of the eight men who were sent for this purpose to Sakhalin in 1862, only four settled near the Duyka River." And what could those four possibly do? They worked the soil with pickaxes and spades, sowed winter grain in the spring rather than summer grain, and the result was that they were soon plead- ing to return to the mainland. In 1869 an agricultural farm was organized on the present site of Slobodka. A very im- portant question was to be resolved here: Could forced labor by convicts be successfully used in agriculture?
For three years the convicts dug out stumps, built cabins, drained the swamps, made roads and plowed the soil. At the end of their term none wished to remain, and they petitioned the Governor-General to be allowed to return to the mainland because agriculture was unproductive and there was no way to make a living. Their petition was granted. However, the so-called farm continued to exist. In time the Due convicts became settlers. Convicts arrived from Russia with their families and had to be placed on the land. Orders were issued that Sakhalin was to be regarded as a fertile land and suitable for agriculture. Wherever life could not be maintained by natural resources, it slowly but surely expanded artificially, through coercion, at the cost of a vast expenditure of money and human labor.
In 1879, Dr. Augustinovich found 28 cabins m Slo- bodka.1
At the present time thcre are 15 households in Slo- bodka. The houses are covered with planks, are spacious, and sometimes contain several rooms. The outbuildings are solid and each household has its own vegetable garden. There is one bathhouse for each two dwellings.
My ccnsus rcvealcd 39% desyatins of land under tillage and 24Y2 desyatins in hay, 23 horses, and 47 head of live- stock, including horncd cattle, oxen, sheep, goats and pigs.
Owing to the status of the householders, Slobodka is considered an aristocratic settlement. One of the house- holders is a court councillor married to a settler's daughter, another is a free man who followed his convict mother to the island, seven are peasants formerly exiled, four are settlers, and only two are convicts.
Of the 24 families residing there, only 4 are illcgal.
The age groups of Slobodka are almost normal; the working age is not so sharply predominant as in other settlements. There are children, young people and old people over sixty-five and even over seventy-five.
The question is, how can one explain the comparatively prosperous standing of Slobodka cven in the light of state- ments made by the local homesteaders, who say it is impos- sible to make a living there by farming. It is, however, possible to indicate some of the factors which under ordi- nary circumstances would be conducive to a normal, settled and prosperous life. For example, Slobodka contains a large percentage of older inhabitants who arrived on Sa- khalin prior to 1880 and have already grown accustomed to this land and feel at home. It is also very important that wives followed 19 of the men and almost everyone who settled on a plot already had a family. There are enough women, and only nine of the men are bachelors, though none is living in solitude. Generally speaking, Slobodka was lucky, one of the fortunate circumstances being that a large percentage of the inhabitants was literate: 26 men and i i women.
Excluding the court councillor, who is working as a surveyor on Sakhalin, why are the homesteaders with a free status and the peasants formerly exiled not departing for the homeland when they have the right to do so? They say they are remaining in Slobodka because they are successful farmers, but this does not apply to everyone. Not all, but only some of the homesteaders use the meadows and plow- land in Slobodka. Only 8 homesteaders have meadows and cattlc, 12 work the soil, and no mattcr how you look at it, the amount of farming here is not extensive enough to explain its exceptionally fine economic position. There are no ways to earn money on the side, they do not engage in tradc, and only one man, a former officer, keeps a small shop. There is no official data which would reveal why the inhabitants of Slobodka are rich and the only way to solve the problem is to consider the one remaining fac- tor—its bad reputation.
Formerly there was widespread bootlegging of alcohol in Slobodka. The import and sale of alcohol are strictly forbidden on Sakhalin, and these prohibitions gave rise to peculiar methods of acquiring contraband. The alcohol was smuggled into the island in tin cans meant to hold sugar loaves and in samovars, and the smugglers were very nearly carrying it in their belts, but most frequently it was deliv- ered in barrels and in the usual bottles since the lower officials were bribed and the higher officials looked the other way.
In Slobodka a bottle of cheap vodka was sold for six and even ten rubles. It was from here that all the prisons of Northern Sakhalin obtained their vodka. Even the drunk- ards among the officials were not squeamish about it. I know one official who was on a drinking spree and gave all thc money he had to some prisoners for a botde of spirits.
At the present time the illicit traffic in alcohol has considerably subsided. Now they gossip about another enterprise—trade in prisoners' used clothing, which is called barakhlo. They buy dressing gowns, shirts and jackets for a pittance and dispose of all these rags in Nikolayevsk. They also maintain clandestine pawnshops.
Baron Korf once called the Alexandrovsk Post "The Sakhalin Paris." Everything that exists in this noisy and famished Paris—fornication, drunkenness, gambling, sick- ness, the buying of spirits and the sale of stolen goods, or selling one's soul to the devil—all this leads directly to Slobodka.
In the area between the seashore and the post, in addi- tion to Slobodka and the railroad, there was still another curiosity. This was the ferry across the Duyka. Instead of a rowboat or ferryboat, there was a large, completely square box. The captain of this unique craft was convict Krasivy Family-forgotten. He was already seventy-one years old. Hunchbacked, shoulder blades protruding, one rib broken, a thumb missing, his whole body was covered with scars from lashings and beatings suffered a long time ago. He had almost no gray hair; his hair seemed faded, his eyes were blue, sparkling, and he wore a happy, good-natured expression. He was dressed in rags and was barefoot. Very lively and talkative, he enjoyed laughter.
In 1855 he had deserted from the army ''out of foolish- ness" and had become a vagabond, calling himself "Family- forgotten/' He was captured and sent to Zabaikal, or, as he says, "into Cossack country." He said:
"At that time I imagined that people lived underground in Siberia," he told me. "I took off and fled down the road from Tyumen. I reached Kamyshlov, where I was captured and sentenced, your worship, to twenty years of hard labor and ninety lashes. They sent me to Kara, gave me the ninety lashes, and then sent me to Korsakov on Sakhalin. I escaped from Korsakov with a friend, but I only got as far as Due. I became ill and couldn't go any farther. My friend reached Blagoveshchensk. Now I am serving my second term and have been living on Sakhalin twenty-two years. My only crime was that I deserted from the army."
"Why do you still hide your real name? Why do you have to do it?"
"I told my real name to an official last year."
"What happened?"
"Nothing! The official said, 'Before we make the cor- rection you'll be dead. Just live as you have been living. Why do you want to change now?' And it's true, that's no mistake. . . .I don't have long to live anyway. But still, my good sir, my family would at least know where I am."
"What do they call you?"
"My name here is Vasily Ignatyev, your worship."
"And your real name?"
Krasivy pondered and said:
"Nikita Trofimov. I come from Skopinsky district, Ryazan guberniya."
I began crossing the river in the box. Krasivy pushed against a long pole along the river bottom, straining his whole emaciated bony body. The work was not easy.
"Isn't it too difficult for you?"
"That's all right, your worship. Nobody is rushing me. I take my time."
He told me that in his twenty-two years on Sakhalin he has never been beaten, nor has he been imprisoned.
"Thats because when they send me to saw wood, I go. When they give me this pole in my hand, I take it. When they order me to fire up the office stove, I fire up. One must obey. To tell the truth and not anger God, life is good! Glory to Thee, 0 Lord!"
In the summer he lives in a yurt near the crossing. In his yurt are rags, a loaf of bread, a rifle and a stuffy, sour odor. When I asked him why he needs a rifle, he said, "To defend myself from thieves, and to shoot snipe," and laughed. The rifle is broken and is only for show. In winter he reverts to being a wood carrier and lives in the office at the pier. One day I saw him, trousers rolled high, displaying his veined, pale white feet. With a Chinaman he was pull- ing a net filled with sparkling humpbacked salmon, each the size of our perch. I shouted to him and he answered me joyfully.
The Alexandrovsk Post was founded in 188 i. One official who has been living on Sakhalin for ten years wid me that when he first came he almost drowned in the mud. The priest-monk lrakly, who lived in Alexandrovsk umil 1886, said that at first there were only three houses. The small barracks where the musicians now live was the prison. The street was filled with tree stumps. Where the brickyard now stands they used to hum sables in 1882. The sentry booth was offered to Father lrakly as a church, but he de- clined, pleading lack of space. In good weather he cele- brated Mass in the open on the square; in bad weather, he celebrated Mass in prison or wherever possible.
"You are conducting services, and suddenly you hear the clanging of chains," he said. "It's noisy and hot from the boiler. Here I'm saying, 'Glory w the Holy Consubstantial,' and next w you somcone yells, 'I'll break your. . . .' "
The actual growth of Alexandrovsk stems from the time when new regulations were made regarding Sakhalin, and many new official posts were designated, including that of a general. New accommodation was required for the new people and their offices since Due, which to that time housed the prison administration, was very crowded and gloomy. Six versts from Due, Slobodka already existed in a cleared area, a prison already stod along the Duyka, and then slowly a residential section began to grow in the neigh- borhood: houses for officials and offices, a church, ware- houses, shops and other buildings. With these arose some- thing without which Sakhalin could not live—a wwn, the Sakhalin Paris, where congenial company, atmosphere and a piece of bread could be found by wwn folk who could only survive when they breathed town air and engaged in town enterprises.
The building of the town, the clearing of stumps and the draining of the soil were done by the convicts. Umil 1888, before the present prison was built, they lived in yurt dugouts. These were made of boards dug into the ground two or two-and-a-half arshins deep with double-pitched clay roofs. The windows were small and narrow, level with the ground. It was dark, especially in winter when the yurts were covered with snow. As a result of water rising from the soil to the floor and the perpetual moisture in the clay roofs and the crumbling, rotting walls, the dampness in these graves was wretched. The people slept in their sheep- skin coats. The surrounding ground and the well water were always filthy with human excrement and all kinds of garbage because there were neither privies nor rubbish pits. The convicts lived with their wives and children in these yurts.
At the present time Alexandrovsk covers an area of some two square versts. However, since it has merged with Slobodka and since one of its streets has already extended almost to Korsakov, the aim being to merge with it in the not too distant future, its measurements can only be sug- gested. It has several straight, wide streets which are called not streets but slobodkas, the name used in ancient times. In Sakhalin the custom is to name streets in honor of living officials. They do not use only the surname, but the Chris- tian name and the patronymic are also used.2
By some happy chance, however, Alexandrovsk has not yet immortalized even one official and its streets have to date retained the names of the slobodkas from which they developed: Kirpichnaya [kirpich = brick], Peysikovskaya, Kasyanovskaya [Kasyan = a man's name], Pisarskaya [pisar = clerk], Soldatskaya [soldat = soldier]. The deri- vation of all these names except Peysikovskaya can easily be understood. They say that it was so named by convicts in honor of the ringlets of hair worn by a Jew who traded here when the slobodka was still in the taiga. Another ver- sion is that a woman settler named Peysikova lived and traded there.
Wooden sidewalks line the streets. Everything is very clean and orderly. Even in the farthest streets where the poor huddle together there are no puddles or rubbish heaps.
The main part of the post comprises the official dis- trict: the church, the residence of the island commandant, his office, the mail and telegraph offices, the police depart- ment with its printing shop, the home of the district com- mander of the area, the store run by the Colonial Fund, the military barracks, the prison hospital, the military infirmary, a mosque with a minaret under construction, government buildings in which officials are housed, and the penal-servi- tude prison with its numerous warehouses and workshops. The majority of the houses are new, built in the European style, roofed with iron, and often painted on the exterior. There is no lime or good stone on Sakhalin, and therefore there are no stone buildings.
If we exclude the officials' and officers' quarters as well as the Soldatskaya Slobodka—their inhabitants, being tran- sient, are changed almost yearly—there is a total of 298 households in Alexandrovsk. There are 1499 inhabitants, 923 of whom are men, and 576 women. If we include the free population, the military and the convicts who sleep in the prison and do nor participate in households, we obtain a total figure of 3,000.
In comparison with Slobodka, Alexandrovsk contains very few peasants. The prisoners comprise one-third of the entire population. Convict regulations permit convicts to live outside the prison, but these regulations apparently apply only to reformed prisoners, who are permitted to settle in households. However, this law is regularly ignored because of its impracticability. The huts are not only inhabited by reformed criminals but by probationers, long-term and even life-term convicts. In addition to the clerks, draftsmen and skilled artisans who cannot live in prison because of their work, there arc many convicts with families on Sa- khalin, husbands and fathers, whom it would be impractical to confine in prisons without their families. This would make for severe confusion in rhe life of the colony. Fam- ilies would also have to be detained in prisons, or they would have to be provided with living quarters and food at prison expense, or they would have to be maintained in their homeland during the entire prison term served by the father of the family.
Convict probationers live in huts and therefore often have lighter punishmenrs than reformed prisoners. Here the concept of proportionality of punishment is grossly vio- lated. However, this irregularity finds justification in the conditions implicit in the life of the colony, and so pro- portionality of punishment is easily set aside. All that remains is to move the rest of the convicts from prisons into huts. Referring to convicts with families, it is impos- sible to become reconciled to another muddle: the waste- fulness of the administration when it permits tens of families to settle where there is neither a homestead nor arable land nor hayfields, while other district settlements, which have more favorable conditions, are inhabited by single men and the farmsteads are completely barren be- cause of the lack of women. In Southern Sakhalin, where there are yearly harvests, there are some settlements with- out even one woman, while i 58 free women, who have followed their husbands into exile voluntarily, live in the Sakhalin Paris.
There is no more arable land in Alexandrovsk. For- merly, when it was still spacious, 100 to 200 and even 500 square sazhens were allocated per family; now only 12 saz- hens or even 9 or 8. I counted 161 homesteads which are nestled together, buildings and gardens, on lots no larger than 20 square sazhens each. The main fault lies in the natural conditions of the Alexandrovsk valley: it is impos- sible to move back toward the sea because of the unfertile soil, while mountains rise on both sides of the post, and it can only grow in one direction, beside the Duyka River along the Korsakov road. Here the huddled homesteads stretch in a long line.
According to data on the homestead list, only 36 homesteaders work arable land and 9 work hayfields. The size of the plots of arable land varies between 300 sazhens and i desyatin. Almost everyone plants potatoes. Only 16 homesteaders have horses, 38 have cows. Furthermore, the livestock is owned by peasants and settlers who do not engage in farming but practice trades.
It must be concluded from these few figures that the Alexandrovsk homesteads are not supported by agriculture. The poor soil has so little attraction that there are practi- cally no older settlers here. None remain of those who settled on a plot in i 88 i; only 6 remain of those settled since 1882; four since 1883; thirteen since 1884; sixty- eight since 1885. This means that the remaining 207 came after 1885. Judging by the small number of peasants, only 19, the conclusion is that each householder stays on his plot only so long as it is necessary for him to acquire peasant rights—that is, the right to abandon the home- stead and leave for the mainland.
I have still not fully resolved the question as to how the Alexandrovsk population survives. Let us assume that the householders, their wives and children, eat only pota- toes, like the Irish, and that thcy have enough to last the whole ycar. But what do the 241 inhabitants and 358 convicts of both sexes cat who livc in the huts as cohabi- tants, male and female, lodgers and workers? It is true that almost half of the population rcccivcs aid from the prison in the form of prison rations and children's food allot- ments. They also carn somcthing. More than one hundrcd pcrsons work in govcrnmcnt workshops and offices. I have many artisans listcd on my forms without whom a city could not cxist: cabinetmakers, upholstcrcrs, jcwelcrs, watchmakcrs, tailors, ctc. Articlcs made of wood and mctal arc vcry expensivc in Alexandrovsk and it is customary to tip nothing less than a rublc.
But arc prison rations and mcager earnings sufficient for daily life in thc town? Thc artisans' earnings far cxcced their nceds, but unskilled laborers, as, for example, ordinary carpentcrs, carn tcn kopecks a day for food. The population exists haphazardly; ncverthcless they still drink tea daily, smoke Turkish tobacco, wear thc clothcs worn by free men and pay for their living quartcrs. They purchase houses from peasants who are leaving for thc mainland and build new ones. Shops carry on a brisk business, and various kulaks who have emerged from prison make profits in thc tens of thousands.
Much is murky here, and I have reached the conclu- sion that Alexandrovsk is settled in the main by those who arrived from Russia with money and that the largest por- tion of thc livelihood of the population is gained by illegal means.
The purchase of prisoners' personal possessions and their sale in large quantities in Nikolayevsk, the exploita- tion of foreigners and newly arrived convicts, whiskey smuggling, lending money at high interest, gambling at cards for high stakes—these are the men's occupations. The women, on the other hand, both the exiles and the free women who voluntarily followed their husbands, earn money by prostitution. When a free woman was asked at a hearing where she obtained her money, she answered, "I earned it with my body."
There is a total of 332 families: 185 are legally married, 147 are cohabitants. The comparatively large number of families is not explained by any exceptional qualities of the homesteads being conducive to good home and family life, but to the following circumstances: the foolishness of the local administration which settles families on plots in Alexandrovsk and not in more suitable areas; and, owing to his proximity to the authorities and the prison, the com- parative ease with which a local settler can procure a woman.
When life arises and flows along artificial channels rather than normal ones, and when its growth depends not so much on natural and economic conditions as on the theory and the arbitrary behavior of individuals, then it is forced to accept these circumstances as essential and in- evitable, and these circumstances acting on an artificial life assume the aspects of laws.
Augustinovich, "Several Accounts of Sakhalin." Extracted from the travel journal Sovremennojt [The Contemporary) (i88o), No. i. He also wrote the article "Prebyvaniye na o. Sakhaline" [A Sojourn on Sakhalin Island) in the Pravitelstvemty Vestnik [Government Herald) (1879), No. 276.
If an official's name is Ivan Petrovich Kuznetsov, then one street will be named Kuznetsova Street, another lvanova Street, and a third lvanovo-Petrovska Street.
The Alexandrovsk Penal Servitude Prison - The Prison Wards - Convicts in Chains - The Golden Hand - The Latrines - The Maidan - Convict Labor in Alexandrovsk - Servants - Workshops
i visited thc penal servitude prison in Alexandrovsk soon aftcr my arrival.1 It is a largc four-cornercd courtyard enclosed by six wooden prison-typc barracks and connect- ing walls. The gates are always open, with a sentry pacing nearby. The courtyard is swcpt clean; thcre is no rubbish, no garbagc, no puddles or slops. This exemplary clcanliness gives a good imprcssion.
The doors of all the buildings are widc open. I enter onc of thc doors into a small corridor. To thc right and left arc doors Icading to prison wards. Over the doorways hang
black placards with white lettering: cell no. .
cubic volume of air . number of prisoners
. At the end of thc corridor thcre is another door
leading into a small ccll which holds two political prisoncrs in unbuttoncd waistcoats, shocs over stockinglcss feet, who arc hastily plumping up their straw-fillcd mamesses. A book and a picce of black brcad lic on the windowsill. The district commander who actcd as my guidc informcd mc that thcse two prisoncrs had been givcn pcrmission to live outside thc prison, but having no desirc to be different from the other convicts, they refused to take advantage of this permission.
"Attention! Stand up!" shouted the guard.
\Ve cnter a ward. The premises seem quite large, meas- uring somc 200 cubic sazhens [ 1,400 cubic feet]. It is very light; the windows are open. The walls are dark and un- painted, full of splinters, with tow between the logs; only the tiles of the Dutch stoves are white. The floor is wood, unpainted, completely dried out. Down the center of the entire ward runs one long continuous plank bed, sloped on either side, so that the convicts sleep in a double row, head to head.
The convicts' places are not numbered and do not differ from one another, so that 70 or even 170 people can sleep on one plank bed. There is no bedding. They sleep on the bare boards or lie down on old torn sacks, on their own clothing and on all sorts of rotten rags, and it is all horrible to look at. The plank bed is covered with hats, footwear, bits of bread, empty milk bottles stoppered with paper or rags, boot trees; under the plank bed lie trunks, dirty sacks, bundles, instruments and old rags. A well-fed cat wanders near the plank bed. The walls are hung with clothing, pots and instruments, and on the shelves there are teapots, bread and boxes filled with all kinds of things.
On Sakhalin free men do not remove their hats on en- tering a prison. This courtesy is only obligatory for prison- ers. We walk along the plank bed wearing our hats while the prisoners stand, hands at their sides, and gaze silently at us. We also remain silent and observe them and the im- pression is that we have come to buy them. We go to another ward. Here again is that horrible misery which can no more be hidden under all these rags than a fly can be hidden under a magnifying glass. It is a beastly exist- ence, it is nihilistic, a negation of proprietary rights, pri- vacy, comfort and restful sleep.
Prisoners in the Alexandrovsk prison enjoy relative freedom. They do not wear fetters, they can leave the prison during the day and go wherever they please, without guards, and they do not wear uniforms, but wear whatever they possess, depending on weather and their work. Persons under investigation who have recently been returned after attempting to escape and those who for some reason are under temporary arrest are held under lock and key in a separate building which is called "The Irons." The most frequently used threat on Sakhalin is: Tll put you in The Irons." The entrance to this terrifying place is guarded by
54
sentries and one of them reported to us that all was well in The Irons.
There is the rattling of a huge, awkward padlock, cer- tainly bought from an antique dealer, and we enter a small cell where at present twenty men are incarcerated. They have recently been caught attempting to escape. They are bedraggled, unwashed, in chains, in hideous foot coverings made of rags and ropc. One half of their heads displays a disheveled mass of hair; the other half is shaven, and al- ready the hair is beginning to sprout. All are emaciated and shabby, but their gazc is couragcous.
There is no bedding. They slecp on the barc floor. In the corner stands a chamber pot. Each prisoner must take care of his natural needs in thc prescnce of twenty wit- nesses. One begs to be released and vows he will never again attempt an escapc. Anothcr begs to have his irons removed. A third complains that he does not gct cnough bread.
There are cells occupied by two or thrce prisoners, as well as cells for solitary confincment. Thcre are many interesting people to be found hcre.
Of the prisoncrs in solitary, one who evokes special attention is the notorious Sophia Bluvshtein, 'The Golden Hand," who was sentcnced to thrce ycars' hard labor for escaping from Siberia. She is a small, thin, already graying woman, with a crumpled, aging facc. Her hands are fet- tered. On her plank bed there is a gray sheepskin jacket which serves as both warm clothing and bedding. She paces hcr cell from corner to corner, and seems to be constantly sniffing the air, like a mouse in a mousetrap, and even her facial expression secms mouselike. Looking at hcr, one finds it unbelievable that not long ago shc was still beautiful and could charm her jailers, as she did in Smolensk, when a guard aided hcr to escape and even accompanied her on her flight. On Sakhalin she lived outside the prison at first, like all the other women prisoners, in free living quarters. Dressed as a soldier, she attempted to escape again, and was caught.
While she was at liberty, several crimes were committed in Alexandrovsk. The shopkeeper Nikitin was murdered, and the Jewish settler Yurkovsky was robbed of fifty-six thousand rubles. The Golden Hand was suspected and ac- cused of these crimes, as either a direct participant or an accessory. The local investigating authorities have entangled her and themselves in such a thick mesh of incongruities and errors that it is impossible to learn anything definite. Nevertheless, the 56,000 rubles have not been found and the most extraordinary tales are told about the money.
I will describe the kitchen where dinner was prepared in my presence for 900 persons, and I will describe the food and how the prisoners eat, in a separate chapter. I will now devote a few words to the latrines.
As everyone knows, this accommodation is located in full sight of the overwhelming majority of Russian houses. In villages there are no privies. At monasteries, fairs, inns and at all kinds of industries where sanitary inspections have not yet been established, they are absolutely disgust- ing. Disdain for privies has also been carried to Siberia by the Russians. From a study of prison history it is obvious that these latrines were the cause of nauscating stenches and of diseases, and it is equally obvious that the prison- ers and the prison administrators became easily reconciled to this.
In 1872, as Vlasov wrote in his report, one of the prisons at Kara had no latrine whatsoever and the prison- ers were led out to relieve themselves in the square. Furthcrmore, this was not done according to their indi- vidual needs but only when several persons had been gathered together for this purpose. I could cite a hundred such cases.
In Alexandrovsk the latrine is an ordinary cesspool located in the prison yard in a separate outhouse between the prison buildings. During its construction the primary concern, evidently, was to build it as cheaply as possible, but in comparison to the past it represents significant prog- ress. At least it is not disgusting. The latrine is unheated and is ventilated by wooden pipes. The toilets line the side. They cannot be stood upon but must be sat on, which is what saves this outhouse from filth and damp. It is malo- dorous but not too much so, since the odor is masked by the usual treatment of tar and carbolic acid. This latrine is open at night as well as during the day, thus obviating the need for a chamber pot, the latter only being used in The Irons.
Outside the prison there is a well by which the depth of the water level can be ascertained. Owing to the peculiar composition of the local soil, the water level rises in the cemetery, which is located on a mountain overlooking the sea. The water rises so high that during a dry spell I saw graves half filled with water. The soil around the prison and throughout the post is drained by canals which are not sufficiently dcep, and the prison is not at all free of damp.
On sunny warm days, which are rare, the prison is wcll ventilated. The windows and doors are thrown widc open, and the prisoners for the most part spend their timc out- doors or far away from the prison. In winter and in bad weather, which averages ten months of the year, they must be satisfied with only small ventilating windows and stoves. Larch and fir are used in the construction of the prison and its foundations, and these give good but unreliable natural vcntilation. As a resulr of the high humidity of the Sakhalin climate and the abundance of rain as well as of interior evaporation, the water accumulated in the wood freezes during the winter. The prison is poorly ventilated, and there is insufficient air per inmate.
In my diary I noted: "Ward No. 9. Cubic volume of air—187 sazhens [1,309 cubic feet]. Contains 65 prison- ers." This applies to summertime, when only half the pris- oners sleep in the prison. Here are the figures from the 1888 medical report: "The total cubic capacity of air for the prisoners in the Alexandrovsk prison is 970 sazhens [6,790 cubic feet]; the largest number of prisoners is 1,950, the smallest number is 1,623 and the average is 1,785. 740 were in the prison during the night, giving a toral of 1.31 sazhens [9.17 cubic feet] of air per person."
During the summer there are comparatively few prison- ers in the prison, for they are commandeered to work on the roads and in the fields. The largest number is to be found in the fall, when they return from their work and the "volunteer" ship brings new convicts, totaling from 400 to 500 persons. These are always held in the Alexandrovsk prison before being assigned to other prisons. This means that there is less air per inmate when there is the least amount of ventilation.
The convict returns to the prison to sleep after his work, which is most frequently performed in bad weather. His clothing is soaked and his footwear filthy; there is no place to dry anything. He hangs some of his clothing near the plank and uses the rest, when it is still wet, for bedding. His sheepskin coat smells of sheep and his foot- wear smells of leather and tar. His underwear, completely saturated with excretions from his skin, is wet and has not been washed for a long time. The smelly, sweaty rags from his feet are jumbled up with old sacks and rotten old cloth- ing. He has not had a bath for a long time, is full of lice, smokes cheap tobacco and constantly suffers from flatulence. Bread, meat and salted fish—which he often cures right here in the prison—crumbs, bones, oddments and leavings are all piled together in his kettle. He squashes the bugs on the plank bed with his fingers. All this makes the prison air fetid, foul and acid. The air beco^s permeated with a very high degree of water vapor, so that during extreme frosts the windows are covered with ice on the inside and the prison grows warm. Hydrogen sulphide, ammonia and other gases mix in the air with the water vapor and then, as one observer said, "Your soul curdles."
Under the system of communal wards it is impossible to maintain cleanliness in the prison, and hygiene can never break through the bounds set by the Sakhalin climate and the convicts' working conditions. Notwithstanding the fine intentions of the administration, they will always be power- less and they will never be rid of unfavorable criticism. Either we must condemn the communal wards as being obsolete and exchange them for another kind of living space—and this is in fact being partially brought about, since many convicts do not live in prison but in huts—or else we must reconcile ourselves to the unavoidable and necessary evil of filth, and leave the measuring of foul air by cubic sazhens to those who regard hygiene only as an empty formality.
It is very nearly impossible, I believe, to say anything good about the communal system. The people living in a communal ward arc neither a community nor an associa- tion, where the individual members have responsibilities: they are nothing more than a crowd exempt from any responsibility toward their living space, their neighbors or the surrounding objects. It is impossible to order a convict not to bring in dirt and muck on his feet, not to spic on the floor and nat to carry lice. If the cell is smelly and thievery is rampant and they sing filthy songs, then every- body is guilty, or, in other words, nobody is guilty.
I ask a convict, a former respectable citizen, "\X'hy are you so slovenly?" He answers, "Because here it would be useless to be neat." And, indeed, of what value is personal cleanliness to a convict if tomorrow they bring in a new group of prisoners and give him a neighbor smelling to high heaven, with insects crawling out of him in all direc- tions?
The communal ward allows no privacy to the prisoner —that privacy whicb is so necessary for prayer, for reflec- tion and for that self-analysis which is considered obligatory by all the advocates of reform. They play violent card games with the consent of bribed guards, employ foul lan- guage, laugh boisterously, and there is always a clatter and banging of doors, and the night-long clanging of chains from The Irons, and all these things prevent the fatigued prisoner from sleeping and make him irritable. Naturally his stomach and his sou] are not left without any ill effects.
That gregarious, animal-like existence with its gross amusements, and the inevitable influence of the evil on the good, has long been acknowledged to affect the morals of the criminal in the most corrupt fashion. It slowly forces him to lose the habits of domesticity, those very qualities which must be preserved above all by a convict who on his release from prison becomes a self-sufficient member of a colony, where from the very first day he is obliged by law and under threat of punishment to become a good house- holder and a good family man.
These communal wards are places where slander, mur- der, informing on prisoners and peculation are tolerated and excused. Kulachestvo [peculation by rich peasants] is the term employed to describe the phenomenon of the maidan,2 which was introduced to Sakhalin from Siberia. A prisoner who possesses and loves money and has been con- victed because he loves it too much, being a rich peasant, a miscr and a swindler, arranges to pay his fellow convicts for a monopoly on supplying provisions to the prisoners, and if the prison is large and well populated, the profits can be on the order of several hundred rubles a year.
The man who owns the maidan is officially called the parashechnik [parashka = chamber pot], since he takes upon himself the duty of emptying the chamber pots, if any, and keeping the place clean. On his plank bed there can usually be found a small trunk about 1 arshins [42 inches] square, either green or brown; near it and under it are displayed small pieces of sugar, small loaves of white bread about the size of a fist, cigarettes, bottles of milk, and other products wrapped in paper and dirty rags.3
Concealed behind these humble pieces of sugar and loaves of white bread is an evil which exerts its influence far beyond the limits of the prison. The maidan is a gam- bling house, a tiny Monte Carlo, which engenders in the prisoners a contagious passion for faro and other gambling games. The maidan and the card players employ the willing services of brutal and implacable pawnbrokers. Prison pawnbrokers demand 10 percent interest per day and even per hour; if a pawn ticket is not redeemed in a day, the property becomes the possession of the pawnbroker. After completing their terms, the maidanshchiks and the pawn- brokers are assigned to settlements, where they continue their profitable activities, and it is no wonder that there are settlers on Sakhalin who have had 56,000 rubles stolen from them.
In the summer of 1890, during my sojourn on Sakhalin,
60
there were some 2,000 convicts in the Alexandrovsk prison, only 900 of whom lived in the prison. Here are some chance figures: on May 3, 1890, at the beginning of the summer, 1,279 prisoners were being fed and housed in the prison; on September 29, at the end of the summer, there were only 675 prisoners.
As to the work done by the prisoners in Alexandrovsk, this was observed to consist of building and various public works: new houses were put up, others were altered, and they maintained the streets and public squares. Carpentry was considered the most difficult work. A prisoner who had been a carpenter in his homeland really suffers here, and in this respect he is far worse off than a painter or a roofer. The difficulty does not lie with carpentering so much as in the fact that every piece of lumber must be hauled out of the forest by the carpenter himself.
At the present time the logging area is about five miles from the post. During thc summer the people are harnessed to logs by chains and they have to haul thcse logs, which arc a foot wide and several fect long, and it is horrible to watch; thcir faces become contorted, and this is especially truc of natives of the Caucasus. It is said that in winter their hands and fect arc frozen stiff, and some freeze to dcath before they have accomplished thc grueling task of hauling the logs to the post.
Carpentry also presents difficulties to the administration because there arc very few people available on Sakhalin for systcmatic hard labor, and there is always an insufficient supply of labor, although there are thousands of convicts. General Kononovich told me that it is very difficult to undertake new construction and to erect new buildings. There are just not enough people. If there are enough carpenters, there are not enough people to haul the logs. If they send people out for logs, there are not enough car- penters. The woodmen who cut wood every day, stack it and light the stoves before dawn when everyone is still asleep, also have to work excessively hard.
In order to judge the intensity of the labor and its diffi- culty, it is necessary to consider not only the physical effort expended, but also the working conditions and the charac- ter of the work as it arises from these conditions. The extreme cold in the winter and the humidity at Alexan- drovsk—and it is humid throughout the year—place the worker in a very nearly unbearable position. A woodcutter in Russia experiences nothing like this.
The law prescribes "working conditions" for convicts similar co those of an ordinary farm or factory worker.4 It permits the burden to be eased in various ways for con- victs who have reformed. Practice, however, does not always conform to the law, especially in view of local conditions and the peculiarities of the work. You cannot determine how many hours a convicc musc haul logs during a snow- storm, you cannot release him from night work when he is indispensable, you cannot excuse a reformed prisoner from working on a holiday if he is working in a coal pit with a probationer, because chen it would be necessary tO excuse both of them and stop the work.
As a result of the incompetent, stupid and coarse people placed in charge of these projects, much more effon is expended than is necessary. For example, the loading and unloading of ships, which does not require exceptional physical strengch on the parc of laborers in Russia, is vir- wally a form of martyrdom for the people in Alexandrovsk. There is no specially trained force to work on ships. Every time new people are taken for the job, and as a result there is often terrible confusion in a heavy sea. On the ships the convicts lose their tempers and break out in wild curses, and all the time the barges bump against the ship's sides, and the people stand or lie down, their faces green and distorted. They are all seasick, and meanwhile the oars they have relinquished are floating around the barges. For this reason the work takes a long cime, much time is losc and the people suffer unnecessarily. One day during the unload- ing of a ship I heard a prison overseer say, "My people have not eaten all day."
Much convict labor is expended on required work in prisons. Daily work is done by cooks, bakers, tailors, shoe- makers, water carriers, floor scrubbers, orderlies, herdsmen, etc. The military, telegraph and geodetic offices also use convict labor. Some fifty persons have been commandeered for the prison infirmary, but it is uncertain in what capacity and for what reason. I do not know how many are used as servants by the officials.
As far as I was able ro discover, every official, even those who are only office workers, can obtain an unlimited number of servants. The docror with whom I was quar- tered lived alone with his son; he had a chef, a yard man, a cook and a chambermaid. This is extremely luxurious for a junior prison docror. One prison warden had eight serv- ants on his staff: a seamstress, a shoemaker, a chambermaid, a footman who delivered messages, a children's nurse, a laundress, a chef and a scrubwoman. The problem of serv- ants on Sakhalin is an offensive and grievous one. It is prob- ably the same wherever there is penal servitude, and it is not new. In "A Short Description of the Disorganization Existing in Penal Servitude," Vlasov describes how when he arrived on the island in i 87i he "was astounded above all by the fact that, with the permission of the former Governor-General, convicts were being used as servants for the commandant and the officers." In his words, women were assigned as servants to members of the administration, not even excluding bachelor guards.
In i 872, Sinelnikov, the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, forbade the use of convicts as servants. But this prohibition, which is still law here, is bypassed in the most flagrant manner. The college registrar assigns half a dozen servants to himself, and when he goes out on a picnic, he sends scores of convicts ahead with the provisions. General Gintse and General Kononovich, the commandants of the island, fought against the evil, but not energetically enough. At any rate, I found only three orders regarding the ques- tion of servants, these being such that an interested person could interpret them as he pleased. Apparently abolishing the Governor-General's order, General Gintse in 1885 permitted officials to employ convict women as servants if they paid them two rubles a month, the money to be re- turned to the treasury (Order No. 95). In 1888, General
Kononovich annulled his predecessor's order and wrote: "Convict males, as well as females, are not to be assigned as servants to officials, and no money is to be paid to the women. Since the government buildings and the services connected with them cannot remain without supervision and upkeep, I permit the necessary number of men and women to be assigned to each building, their duties to be properly indicated, i.e., guards, wood carriers, floor scrub- bers, etc., following the requirements" (Order No. 276). But since the government buildings and services connected with them related to the official quarters, this order was interpreted as a permit to employ convict servants at no cost at all. At any rate, when I was on Sakhalin in 1890, all the officials, even those who had no connection whatever with the prison administration (for example, the manager of the post and telegraph office), employed convicts to take care of their private needs in the most blatant manner. Furthermore, they paid no salary to these servants, who were fed at the expense of the treasury.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги