The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin

The ages which provide the foundation and hope for a growing colony, if not a real colony, constitute only a small percentage on Sakhalin. There are only 185 persons in the entire colony between the ages of 15 and 20, 89 males and 96 females, which is 2 percent of the total popu- lation. Of these only 27 are natives of the colony born on Sakhalin or along the road to exile; the remainder are new- comers. But even those born on Sakhalin are only waiting for the time when their parents or husbands depart for the mainland in order to leave with them. Nearly all the 27 are the children of prosperous peasants who have com- pleted their scntences and remain on the island in order to have morc capital. Such, for example, is the Rachkov family in the Alexandrovsk settlement. Even Mariya Bara- novskaya, the daughter of a free settler, who was born in Chibisani and is now 18 years old, will not remain on Sa- khalin, and shc will leave for the mainland with her hus- band. Of those who were born on Sakhalin 20 years ago and are now ncarly 2 1 ycars of age, not one has remained on Sakhalin. On Sakhalin there are now 27 persons who arc 20 years of age. Of these i 3 were sentenced to penal servitudc, 7 arrived voluntarily with their husbands, and 7 arc thc sons of convicts, young pcople who have already be- comc acquainted with the roads to Vladivostok and the Amur.⁴

On Sakhalin there are 86o legally marricd familics and 782 illegal families. These figures sufficiently define the family status of exiles living in the colony. In general, almost half of the adult population enjoys the blessings of family life. The women in the colony are all taken. It fol- lows that the remaining half of thc colony, consisting of about 3,^x1 persons, must be made up on!y of men. This fortuitous ratio, howevcr, is constantly changing. So it happens that when a royal edict announces that a thousand new settlers will be released from prison and settled on homesteads, the percentage of single men in the colony is increased. When Sakhalin settlers were permitted to work on the Ussuriysky section of the Siberian railroad —and this happened soon after my departure—the per- centage decreased. Be it as it may, the development of family bonds is considered to be extremely feeble among the exiles, and the main reason why the colony has been unsuccessful up to the present time is that there is a large number of single men.⁵ The question arises: why has illegal or free cohabitation become so widespread in the colony? Why, when we examme the figures referring to the family status of the convicts, do we have the impression that the convicts obstinately refrain from legal marriage? If it were not for the free women who voluntarily followed their husbands, there would be four times as many illegiti- mate families as legitimate ones.⁰

While dictating information for my notebook, the Governor-General called this a "crying state of affairs" and narurally did not blame the convicts for it. Since the people are mostly deeply religious and patriarchal, the convicts prefer legal marriage. Illegally married partners often ask the administration for permission to remarry, but the majority of such requests must be denied for reasons which depend neither on the local administration nor upon the convicts themselves. The fact of the matter is that together with the loss of all his rights, the convict is deprived of all marital rights and no longer exists for his family; it is as though he were dead. Nevertheless, his right to marry in exile is not determined by circumstances resulting from his subsequent life, but by his legally married partner who remained in the homeland. It is imperative that the spouse consent to the dissolution of the marriage and grant a divorce, for only then can the convict be married again.

Usually the spouses at home do not give consent, some from the religious conviction that divorce is sinful, others because they consider the dissolution of the marriage as being unnecessary, an idle gesture, a whim, and this is especially true when both partners are approaching forty. "Does he still think he's of marriageable age?" the wife asks herself, when she gets a letter from her husband de- manding a divorce. "The old dog should be thinking of his soul." A third group of partners refuse because they are afraid of getting involved in such an extremely compli- cated, troublesome and expensive matter as a divorce, or simply because they do not know where and how to begin applying for a divorce.

The reason convicts do not marry is often due to a deficiency in the official records which in each case creates a whole series of tiresome formalities in the bureaucratic manner, which only lead to a situation where the convict who spends a considerable sum on stamps, telegrams and getting letters written for him finally gives up in despair and decides he will never have a legal f^ily. Many con- victs have no official records. Some records contain no reference to the marital status of the convict, or else the data is not clear or it is incorrect. Except for the official records, the convict has no other documents to prove his claims should he need them.'

Information on the number of marriages in the colony can be obtained from the church record books. However, since legal marriage is actually a luxury here, and is not accessible to just anybody, this information can scarcely serve as a determination of the real yearning for married life among the population. They do not get married here when they want to, but when they can. The average age of those getting married is a completely meaningless figure. It is impossible to ascertain the predominance of late or early marriages from the statistics or to draw any conclusions, since family life among the convicts begins long before the church marriage rite and usually the couples who get mar- ried already have children.

From the church records it is evident that during the past ten years the greatest number of marriages have taken place in January. Almost a third of the marriages take place in that month. The increase of marriages in autumn is so insignificant in comparison to January that no similarity can be drawn with our farming districts. Under normal conditions marriages of the free children of exiles always took place at an early age: the grooms were between 18 and 20 and the brides between 15 and 19. However, there are usually more young women between the ages of 15 and 20 than men, the latter having left the island before marriageable age. Perhaps because of the scarcity of young men and to a lesser extent because of economic depriva- tion, an excessive number of ill-matched marriages have occurred. Free young girls, stiJI almost children, were mar- ried off by their parents to older settlers and peasants. Noncommissioned officers, corporals, military medical corps-

252

men, clerks and guards frequently got married, but the objects of their felicity were only i 5 and 16 years old.⁸

Weddings arc modest and dull. They say that in the Tymovsk district weddings are sometimes mcrry and noisy, and the Ukrainians arc especially boisterous. In Alexan- drovsk, whcrc thcrc is a priming press, it is customary among thc convicts to scnd primed invitations before the wedding. Thc convict typescttcrs arc weary of priming prison ordcrs and are cager to demonstratc their art. In appcarancc and tcxt thcse invitations diffcr littlc from those in Moscow. Thc govcrnmcnt donatcs a botde of vodka for cach wcdding.

Thc convicts thcmsclvcs considcr the fecundity in the colony to bc cxccedingly high, and this lcads to constant ridiculc of thc womcn and to various profound observa- tions. Thcy say that on Sakhalin thc vcry climate disposes the womcn to prcgnancy. Old womcn givc birth, cvcn those who werc barrcn in Russia and had givcn up hopc of evcr having childrcn. l1ic womcn arc hastcning to increase the population of Sakhalin and oftcn givc birth to twins. Onc woman in childbcd in Vladimirovka, a middlc-agcd woman with a grown daughtcr, was ccrtain shc would havc twins whcn shc hcard about frcquent births of twins. Shc was most distrcssed whcn shc borc only onc child. "Look somc more," shc bcggcd the midwifc. The birth of twins, how- cvcr, is no morc frequcnt hcrc than in Russia. In thc tcn- year period to January i, 1890, 2,275 childrcn of both scxes wcrc born in thc colony. Thcrc wcre only 26 so-callcd multiplc births.11

All thc somcwhat cxaggcratcd rumors on thc cxccs- sivc fcrtility of womcn, twins, ctc., indicatc that thc convict population has a high intcrest in thc birth ratc and this is considcred of grcat importancc in Sakhalin.

Becausc thc numcrical composition of thc population is subject to fluctuation as thc rcsult of the constant coming and going, and is at thc mercy of chance like the coming and going on thc markctplace, a detcrmination of thc cocfficicnt of the gcneral birth rate in the colony for several years must be considcrcd an unattainablc luxury. It is all the more difficult to ascertain because the statistics gathered by myself and others are extremely limited in scope. Popu- lation figures of former years are unknown, and when I became acquainted with the office records I recognized that the task of digging them out would be like the labor of slaves in Egypt, and would have the most dubious results. Only approximate coefficients can be determined and these will apply only to the present time.

In 1889, 352 children of both sexes were born in all four parishes. Under ordinary circumstances in Russia an equal number of children is born annually in localities with a population of seven thousand.¹⁰ In 1889 the population of the colony was plus several more hundreds. Ob-

viously the local birth-rate coefficient is only slightly higher than in Russia generally ( 49.8) and in the Russian districts, as for example in the Cherepovets district ( 454). It may be accepted that the 1889 birth rate on Sakhalin was as large as that of Russia, and if there is a difference in coefficients, it will be quite small and probably of little consequence. Since out of two places with the same birth- rate coefficient the fertility of the women is greater in the place where there are comparatively less women, we may conclude that the fertility of women on Sakhalin is significantly greater than in Russia.

Hunger, yearning for the homeland, tendencies to de- pravity, slavery—the entire sum of unfavorable conditions in penal servitude—do not deprive the convicts of their reproductive capacity. But the high birth rate does not signify prosperity.

The reasons for the women's increased fertility and the high birth rate are: first, the indolence of the convicts, the compulsory housekeeping of husbands and cohabitants owing to the lack of seasonal trades and earnings, and the monotony of life with the satisfying of the sexual instincts often serving as the only means of diversion; and, second, the fact that the majority of women here are of reproduc- tive age. There are probably other remote causes in addition to these proximate ones, but up to the present time they have been inaccessible to direct observation. Perhaps the high fertility should be viewed as a means which nature bestows on the population in order to fight against harmful and destructive influences and against such enemies of the natural order as the small numbers of inhabitants and especially the scarcity of women. The greater the danger to the population, the more children are born, and in this sense the high birth rate may be explained by the unpropi- tious state of affairs.ⁿ

Of the 2,275 births in the ten-year period, the greater number were born in the autumn ( 29.2 percent) and a lesser number in the spring ( 20.8 percent). l\lore were born in winter ( 26.2 percent) than in summer ( 2 3.6 per- cent). The greater number of pregnancies and births to date have occurred between August and February, and evi- dently the short days and long nights were more favorable to reproduction than the gloomy and rainy spring and summer.

At present there are 2,122 children on Sakhalin, includ- ing adolescents who became fifteen years of age in 1890. Of these, 644 came from Russia with their parents, while 1.473 children were born on Sakhalin and on the way to penal servitude. There arc five children whose place of birth I do not know. The first group is almost one-third as large as the second. Most of them arrived on the island at an age when they were aware of their surroundings. They remember and love their homeland. Tie second group, those born on Sakhalin, never saw anything better than Sakhalin, which remains their burdensome native land. Doth groups differ significantly from each other. Tius, in the first group only 1.7 percent arc illegitimate; in the second group, 37.2 pcrccnt.¹²

The representatives of the first group call themselves free persons. The overwhelming majority were either born or conceived prior to the trial and therefore retain all their status rights. The children born in penal servitude fit into no category. In time they will be registered into the com- mon class and will call themselves either peasants or in- habitants of the towns. At present their social status is determined as follows: illegal son of a convict woman, daughter of a male settler, illegal daughter of a female settler, etc. They say that when a noblewoman, the wife of a convict, learned that her child was recorded in the parish register as the son of a settler, she burst into bitter tears.

There are almost no babies or children below 4 years of age in the first group; there is a preponderance of school- age children. In the second group, those born on Sakhalin, it is the exact opposite; the very youngest ages predomi- nate. Moreover, the older the children, the fewer there are of the same age. If we were to make a graph of the chil- dren's ages in this group, we would obtain an extremely sharply declining curve. In this group there are 203 chil- dren less than a year old; of those who are 9 or 10 years old therc are 4 5, of those from 1 5 to 16 there are only i i. As I have already mentioned, not one of the children born on Sakhalin who reached 20 years of age remained there. Thus the shortage of adolescents and young people is made up from the newcomers, who are the only ones from whose midst young brides and grooms are drawn.

The low percentage of older children born on Sakhalin is explained by the high child mortality and because there were fewer women on the island in the past years and, therefore, fewer children were born. But the greatest fault lies with the emigration. Those who leave for the mainland do not abandon their children on the island but take them along with them. The parents of a Sakhalin-born child usually begin serving their sentence long before he arrives, or before he is born, grows up and reaches the age of 10 years, and then most of them succeed in achieving peasant rights and depart for the mainland.

The position of a newcomer is completely different. \Vhen his parents are sent to Sakhalin, he is between 5 and io years old. While they are serving their sentence and then passing the years in settler status, he matures. While the parents are later petitioning for peasant rights, he has already become a laborer, and prior to the family's leaving for the mainland, he has already held several jobs in Vladivostok and Nikolayevsk. At any rate, neither the newcomers nor the native-born inhabitants of Sakhalin remain in the colony, and therefore all the Sakhalin posts and settlements should more properly be called temporary settlements rather than a colony.

The birth of a new child in a family is not accepted joyfully. Lullabies arc not sung over the cradle. They com- plain ominously when a child is born. The fathers and mothers say they cannot feed the children, that they will not learn anything good on Sakhalin, and "the best possible fate for them will be if the good Lord takes them away as soon as possible." If a child cries or is naughty, they scream at him maliciously, "Shut up; why don't you croak!"

But no matter how they speak and how they complain, the most useful, the most necessary and the most pleasant people on Sakhalin are the children, and the convicts them- selves understand this well and regard them highly. They bring an element of tenderness, cleanliness, gentleness and joy into the most calloused, morally depraved Sakhalin family. Notwithstanding their own purity, they love their impure mothers and criminal fathers more than anything else in the world, and if a convict who has become unaccus- tomed to tenderness in prison is touched by a dog's affec- tion, how much more must he value the love of a child!

I have already said that the presence of children gives moral support to the convicts. I will now add that often children arc the only tie that binds men and women to life, saving them from despair and a final disintegration.

Once I recorded two free women who voluntarily fol- lowed their husbands and were living together in one house. One of them, who was childless, continuously bemoaned her fate while I was in the hut. She disparaged herself, saying she was damned and foolish to have come to Sakha- lin. She kept squeezing her hands convulsively. All this took place in the presence of her husband, who gazed at me with a guilty expression. The other woman, who had several children, was a "childbearer"—so they are called here— and as she remained silent, it occurred to me that the pre- dicament of a childless woman must indeed be horrible. I remember that in one hut, as I was recording a three- year-old Tatar boy in a skullcap, his eyes wide apart, I said a few kind words to the child. Suddenly the languid face of the boy's father, a Kazan Tatar, brightened and he nodded his head merrily as if he agreed with me that his son was a very nice little fellow, and I had the feeling that this Tatar was a fortunate man.

The influences undcr which the Sakhalin children are rcared and the impressions which determine their spiritual activity must be obvious to the reader from what I have already said. What is terrifying in the cities and villages of Russia is commonplace here. Children look apathetically at groups of prisoners in chains. When children see chained convicts dragging a wheelbarrow full of sand, they hang onto the back of the barrow and laugh uproariously. play at being soldiers and prisoners. A little boy goes out on the street and yells to his playmates, "Fall in! As you were!" Or he will throw his playthings and a piece of bread in a sack and say to his mother, ''I'm going away to be- come a vagrant." "Be careful, or a soldier might shoot you," his mother answers jokingly. He goes out on the street and wanders about. His playmates, disguised as soldiers, capture him. Sakhalin children talk about vagrants, birch rods and lashes; they know the exact meaning of "executioner," "prisoners in chains" and "cohabitant."

While making the rounds of the huts in Verkhny Armudan I did not find any adults in one hut. Only a ten-year-old boy was at home, a towhead, round-shouldered and barefoot. His pale face was covered with large freckles and scemcd mottled.

'What is your father's name?" I asked him.

"I don't know," he answered.

"How so? You are living with your father and don't know his name? That's disgraceful."

"Hc's not my real father."

"What do you mean, he's not your real father?"

"He's my mother's cohabitant."

"Is your mother married or a widow?"

"A widow. She came because of her husband."

"What do you mcan, she came because of her husband?"

"She killed him."

"Do you remember your father?"

"I don't remember him. I'm illcgitimate. My mothcr gave birth to me in Kara."

Sakhalin children arc pale, thin and flabby. They wear rags and arc always hungry. As the reader will observe from what I have writtcn below, they die nearly always from diseases of the alimentary canal. Their half-starved exist- ence; their food, consisting only of turnips for months on end, the more prosperous among them eating salted fish; the low temperature and thc humidity, all thcsc waste away a child's organism slowly through emaciation; his tissues gradually degenerate. If it were not for the immigration, then within two or thrcc generations the colony would probably be beset by all kinds of diseases arising from the extremely unbalanced diet.

At present thc children of thc ^^rest settlers and con- victs receive a so-called f^^ allowance from the govcrn- ment. Children from 1 to 1 5 years of age arc given one and a half rubles per month, while orphans, cripples, twins and the deformed reccive thrce rubles per month. A child's right to this assistance is determined at the personal discretion of the officials, and each of them understands thc word "^wrest" in his own way.i³

Thc one-and-a-half- and thrce-rublc food allowances are spent at the discretion of the mothcrs and fathers. TIiis monetary aid, which depcnds on so many considerations and which rarely achieves its purpose because of the pov- erty and unscrupulousness of the parents, should have been abolished a long time ago. It docs not dccrease the poverty; it merely masks it. It gives uninformed people the impres- sion that provision has been made for the children on Sakhalin.

¹ Herewith is a table of age groups compiled by me: Years

From

To

Males

Females

0

5

493

473

5

IO

3I9

3I4

IO

15

2I5

234

I5

20

89

96

20

25

I34

136

25

35

I ,4 I9

68o

35

45

I ,405

578

45

55

724

236

55

65

3I8

56

65

75

90

12

75

85

I7

1

85

95

—

1

Of unknown age: males 142; females 35.

In the Cherepovets district, people of working age constitute 44.9 percent of the population; in the Moscow distrin, 45.4 per- cent; in the Tambov, 42.7 percent. See the by V. I. Nikolsky, The Tambov District. Statistics on Population and Morbidity

(1885).

In the Cherepovets distrin this figure is 37 .3 percent;in Tambov, about 39 percent.

* The table shows that in the children's ages the sexes are di- vided almost equally, while in the i 5-t0-20-year age group and from 20 to 25 there is even a slight surplus of women. In the 25-C0-35 age group there are almost twice as many men, while in the older age groups this preponderance may be called overwhelm- ing. The small number of aged men and the almost complete ab- sence of aged women indicate a lack of family experience and tradition on Sakhalin. Every time I visited the prisons I had the feeling that they harbored more old men than the colony.

Stable conditions in a colony do not depend principally on the development of families. Virginia's prospericy was established be- fore women settled in the colony.

Judging by the figures, we may conclude that marriage in church is most unsuitable for Russian convicts. We know from the governmem statistics of I 887 that there were 2 I i convict women in the Alexandrovsk district. Of these only 24 were legally mar-

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ried, while I 36 were cohabitants with convicts and settlers. In the same year, out of 194 convict women in the Tymovsk district, I I had legal husbands and I 6 I were cohabitants. In the Korsakov district not one convict woman was living with a husband; 115 were living in illegitimate unions. Of the 2 I fe^le senlers, only four were married.

In !tis The Problem o/ Organizing Sakhalin Island, Prince Shakhovskoy wrote: ''A g^^ deal of the difficulty in arranging marriages without let or hindrance lies with the family records, which often do not give the religion or the family status, and no one knows whether a divorce was obtained from the marriage partner who remained in Russia. h is almost impossible to find out, and it is even more difficult to petition for a divorce through the consistory from the island of Sakhalin."

Noncommissioned officers, especially guards, are considered ex- cellent catches on Sakhalin. They arc well aware of their value and conduct themselves with unbridled hauteur toward their brides and the brides' parents; N. S. Leskov despised such men and de- scribed them as "insatiable bishop-like ^^sts." [Nikolay Scmcno- vich Leskov ( 1831-95), the novelist, was an enemy of ecclesiasti- cal bureaucracy; the phrase was used in his book Spiritual Reguia- tions o/ Peter 1.] During the past ten years there were a number of mesalliances. A college regisuar married a convict s daughter, a court councillor married a scttlcrs daughter, a captain married a settler's daughter, a merchant married a pcasanr-formcrly-a-convict, and a noblewoman marricd a settler. The rare cases when a mem- ber of che intelligentsia marries the daughter of a convict are extraordinarily apjpealing and probably have a good influence on the colony. In January, i88o, a convict married a Gilyak woman in the Duĉ church. In Rykovskoye I recorded Grigory Sivokobylka, eleven years old, whose mother was a Gilyak. Marriages betwecn Russians and foreigners arc rare. I was cold of a guard who was living with a Gilyak woman who had given him a son, and now wants to become a Christian so that they can get married. Father lrakly knew a Yakut convict who married a Georgian woman. They knew very litdc Russian. As for Muhammadans, they do not renouncc poly&;amy even in exile, and some of them have two wivcs. Thus, in Alexandrovsk, Dzhaksanbecov has two wives —Batyma and Sascna—and in Korsakov, Abubakirov also has two wivcs—Ganosta and Vcrkhonisa. In Andrcyc-Ivanovskoye I saw an extraordinarily beautiful fifteen-year-old Tatar girl whose husband bought her from her father for a hundred rubles. When her husband is not at home she sits on the bed. The settlers gaze at her through the open door and ogle her.

The Code on Convicts permits conviCtS of both sexes to marry

one to three years after they have achieved a reformed status. Ob- viously a woman who enters the colony but is still on probation can only become a cohabitant, not a wife. Convict men are per- mitted to marry felons, but until they have achieved ^^&nt status females who have been deprived of all rights can only marry convicts. A free woman receives 50 rubles from the gov- ernment when she marries a convict in Siberia, if it is his first marriage. A settler in Siberia who is getting married for the first time with a convict woman is given 15 rubles outright and a loan of a similar sum.

The Code contains no provisions for marriages between va- grants. I do not know which d^^ments determine their family status and their age at marriage. I first learned they were being married on Sakhalin from the following note written in the form of a petition. '"To his Excellency the commander of Sakhalin Is- land. The certification of a settler of the Tymovsk district, settle- ment of Rykovskoye, Not-Remembering-His-Family Ivan 35 Years. I, Not-Remembering, was legally married to the settler Berezni- kova Maria last year on November 12." Two settlers were respon- sible for this illiterate statement.

⁰ These figures which I extracted from church baptismal records apply only to the Orthodox population.

According to Yanson, 49.8 or almost 50 births per thousand.

Such severe and impermanent catastrophes as crop failures, war, etc., decrease the birth rate; chronic afflictions like high infant mortaliry and perhaps also imprisonment, bondage, penal servi- tude, etc., increase it. In some families a higher birth rate g^ hand in hand with mental degeneration.

The illegitimate children in the first group are the offspring of convict women, the majority born in prison after the trial. There are no illegitimate children in the families which volun- tarily followed their mates and parents into exile.

The amount of assistance also depends on whether the official interprets "crippled and deformed children" to mean only the lame, the hunchbacks and those without arms, or whether it includes children suffering from tuberculosis, imbecility and blindness.

How can the Sakhalin children be helped? First of all, it seems to me that the right to assistance should not depend on suA conditions as "^^rest," "cripple," etc. Assistance should be given to all who request it and there should be no fear of fraud. It is better to be deceived than to deceive oneself. The kind of assitt-

262

ance is determined by local conditions. If it were up to me, I would use the money now distributed in "food allowances" to build teahouses at the posts and in the settlements for the use of all the women and children. I would distribute food and cloth- ing rations to all pregnant women and nursing mothers without exception, and I would only reserve the "food allowances" of one and one-half and three rubles a month for distribution to girls from thirteen years old and until they are married, and I would have this money given to them directly.

Every year philanthropists in St. Petersburg send sheepskin coats, aprons, felt boots, caps, accordions, pious books and pens to be distributed to children here. When these gifts are received, the island commandant invites the local ladies to take charge of distributing and apportioning them. They tell you that all these things are drunk up and gambled away by the fathers, that it would be better to send bread rather than accordions, etc. Such remarks should not disturb generous people. The children are usually delighted with their gifts, and the fathers and mothers arc everlastingly grateful. It would be altogether proper if the philan- thropists who are interested in the fate of the convicts' children could receive detailed information every year—as much informa- tion as possible—about the children of Sakhalin. This information would give their numbers, their ages and sexes, the number of those who can read and write, the non-Christians, etc. If, for example, a philanthropist knows how many children can read and write, he will then know how many books or pencils to send so that no one would feel hurt by being left out. He could ascertain the number of toys and the amount of clothing necessary if he knew their sexes, ages and nationalities. It is imperative that philanthropy on Sakhalin be removed from the jurisdiction of the police administration, which is overwhelmed with work without all this added responsibility, and the organizing of assistance should be left in the hands of the local intelligentsia. There arc many people who would be glad to take on the responsibility of this benevolent activity. Amateur productions are sometimes pre- sented in Alcxandrovsk, the proceeds going to the children. Not long ago the officials of the Korsakov Post collected subscriptions and bought various kinds of sewing materials. Their wives sewed clothing and underwear and distributed them to the children.

Children are an economic burden, and they are God's punish- ment for sin. This does not prevent the childless convicts from raking and adopting someone else's children. Families with chil- dren hope their children will die, while childless families take orphans and raise them as their own. It sometimes happens that convicts adopt orphans and por children because they receive a food allowance and all kinds of assistance, or because an adopted child can be sent out on the street to beg. Yet most of the convicts are probably motivated by good intentions. Not only children, but even adults and the aged, become "adopted children." Thus the settler Ivan Novikov the First, sixty years of age, is the adopted son of settler Evgeny Yefimov, forty-fo years old. In Rykov- skoye, Elisey Maklakov, seventy years old, agreed formally to be- come the adopted son of Ilya Minayev.

According to the Code 011 Convicts, minor children who ac- company their convict or resettled parents to Siberia are supposed to travel by horse-drawn cart. One cart is assigned to every five persons. The Code does not state which children are deemed to be minors. Children who accompany their parents receive cloth- in.., footwear and food allowances during the entire trip. If a family voluntarily accompanies a prisoner into penal servitude, fourteen-year-old children are sent along only at their own request. Children who attain seventeen years of age can leave the penal servitude location and return to their homeland without their parents" approval.

X VIII Occupations of Convict; -

Agriculture - Hunting - Fishing - Migratory Fish: Whales and Herring - Prison Fishing - Craftsmanship

AS I SAID before, the idea of adapting convict and settler labor to agriculture arose at the beginning of penal servitude on Sakhalin. The idea is a very appealing one. Agricultural work obviously has the advantage of keeping the convict occupied, attaching him to the land and reform- ing him. The work is suitable for the great majority of the convicts, for prisoners sentenced to penal servitude are chiefly recruited from the peasants, and only a tenth of the convict and settler population do not come from the agri- cultural class. The idea was successful; and up to the present time agriculture has been the chief occupation of the exiles on Sakhalin, and the colony has continued to call itself an agricultural colony.

The soil has been tilled, and grains have been sown annually during the entire existence of the Sakhalin colony. There was no interruption, and with the growth of the population the arable land annually increased. The labor of the local farmer was compulsory, and it was also hard labor. If compulsion and the taxing of physical strength are considered the basic criteria for penal labor, i.e., forced labor, it would be difficult to find a more suitable occupa- tion for criminals than agriculture on Sakhalin. The sternest punitive aims have been satisfied.

But is it productive? Does it fulfill the aims of coloniza- tion? From the beginning of Sakhalin penal servitude to the present day, the most varied and extreme opinions have been expressed. Some regarded Sakhalin as a fertile island and so described it in their reports and correspondence. I was told that they even sent excited telegrams to the effect that the convicts were at last in a position to feed them- selves, no longer requiring government assistance. Others were skeptical about agriculture on the island and stated flatly that agriculture was impossible. Such differences of opinion arose because Sakhalin agriculture was nearly always judged by people who knew nothing about actual conditions.

The colony was founded on an island which had never been explored. It was terra incognita from the scientific point of view, and the natural conditions and the possibility of farming were judged by such indications as geographic latitude, the close proximity to Japan, and the fact that there were bamboos, cork uees, etc. Occasional correspond- ems frequencly passed judgments based on first impressions, depending on whether they saw the island in g^^ or bad weather, depending on the bread and butter they were served in the huts, or depending on whether they first arrived in a foggy place like Due or in a cheerful place like Siyantsy. The great majority of the officials placed in charge of the agricultural colony were neither landowners nor peasants before entering the service and they knew absolutely nothing about agriculture. In their repons they used the information obtained for them by inspectors. The local agronomists were ill-trained and did nothing, or their reports were distinguished by conscious prejudices, or, hav- ing come to the colony straight from the school bench, they limited themselves merely to the theoretical and formal aspects of the maner and their reports always relied on information which had been gathered for the office by the lower echelons.¹

It would appear that the best information might be obtained from the people who plow and sow the land. but even this source proved unreliable. Fearing that their relief allotments would be stopped, and that seeds would no longer be provided on credit, and that they would be forced to remain on Sakhalin for the rest of their lives, the exiles usually said they had less land under cultivation and a smaller yield than was actually the case. The more pros- perous exiles, who did not need relief allowances, also did not tell the truth; they did not tell lies because they were afraid, but from the same motive which compelled Polo- nius to agree that a cloud simultaneously resembled a camel and a weasel. They carefully watched the prevailing weather of ideas and if the local administration did not believe in agriculture, they, too, did not believe in it; but if a con- trary position became fashionable in the administration, they found themselves agreeing, glory to God, that it was possible to live on Sakhalin, the crop yields were good, and there was but one problem—the people were becoming hopelessly spoiled, etc.—and to please the administration they told the most whopping lies and employed every con- ceivable kind of stratagem. So they picked the largest cars of grain from the field and brought them to Mitsul, who g^^-naturedly believed them and drew thc proper conclu- sion about the excellent harvest. Newcomers were shown potatoes as large as a head, watermelons, radishes weighing half a pood, and the newcomers who vicwed thcse monsters found thcmselvcs believing in a fortyfold yield of wheat on Sakhalin.²

During my stay thc agricultural question on Sakhalin had reached a stagc wherc it was difficult to understand anything. The Govcrnor-Gcncral, thc island commandant and thc district officials had no faith in the productivity of Sakhalin farmers. They wcre in no doubt that the attempt to adapt prisoners scntenccd to pcnal servitude to agricul- ture was a complcte failure and at the same time thcy insisted that if the colony should remain an agricultural colony, at whatever the cost, then government funds would be spent unproductively and the people would continue to be subjected to useless torture. This is what the Governor- General dictated to me:

"A prisoners' agricultural colony is quite impracticable on the island. The people must be given the means of earning a living; agriculture can only be an additional form of revenue."

The younger officials expressed the same opinion and fearlessly criticized the island's past in the presence of their superiors. When asked how things were going, the exiles themselves answered nervously, hopelessly, with bitter gri- maces. And regardless of their definite and unanimous attitude concerning agriculture, the exiles continue to plow and sow, the administration continues to give seeds on credit, and the island commandant, who has less belief than anyone in the future of farming in Sakhalin, issues orders in which "for the sake of getting the exiles interested in agriculture," he affirms that the achievement of peasant status by settlers who show no prospect of success in their farm work on the plots assigned to them "can never occur" (Order No. 276, 1890).

Up to the present, the amount of cultivated land has been shown by inflated and carefully selected figures (Order No. 366, 1888), and nobody can say cxactly what the aver- age amount of land is per homesteader. The agricultural inspector says the average amount of land per plot is 1,555 square sazhcns, or about two-thirds of a dcsyatin, and in a better district, i.e., Korsakov, the average is 935 square sazhcns. These figures arc probably incorrect, and they have minimal significance because the land is apportioned ex- trcmcly unequally among thc homesteaders. People who arrived from Russia with money or profited as rich peasants have three to five and even eight dcsyatins of arable land, and therc are many homesteaders, especially in the Korsa- kov district, who have only a few square sazhcns. Obviously the quantity of arable land increases each year, but the averagc arca of the plots docs not increase and threatens to remain constant.³

They sow government seeds which are always obtained on credit. In the best district, that is, in Korsakov, "the entire proportion of sown grain amounting to 2,060 poods contained only i 65 poods raised by thc homesteaders them- selves, and of the 610 persons who sowed the grain, only 56 men had their own seeds" (Order No. 318, 1889.) According to the agricultural inspcctor's data, an average of only 3 p^^s, i 8 pounds of grain is sown per adult in the Southern section. It is interesting to note that in the district with the best climatic conditions agriculture is less succcssful than in the Northern districts, but this does not prevent it from being thc best district.

In thc two Northcrn districts not oncc was a sufficicnt amount of warm wcathcr obscrvcd for thc full ripcning of oats and wheat, and thcrc wcrc only two ycars whcn it was warm cnough for thc barlcy to ripen.⁴

Spring and thc bcginning of summcr arc nearly always cold. In 1889 therc werc frosts in July and August, and bad autumn weathcr began on July 24 and continued to the cnd of Octobcr. Onc may combat thc cold, and thc acclima- tization of grains on Sakhalin would bc a vcry worthwhilc endeavor if it wcrc not for thc exceptionally high humidity, and thcrc may ncvcr bc any effcctivc way of combating humidity. During thc pcriod whcn thc shoots arc growing, flowcring and ripcning, and cspccially during thc timc of ripcning, thc number of foggy days on thc island is dispro- portionally largc, and for this reason thc earth yiclds insuffi- cicntly ripened, watery, wrinklcd and lightweight sccds. Or else, becausc of thc numcrous rains thc grain pcrishes, rots or germinatcs on the shcavcs in thc ficld. Thc timc for harvcsting grains, cspecially summcr wheat, always coin- cidcs with thc rainy scason and sometimcs thc cntirc harvcst remains in thc ficld bccausc of thc constant rains from August dcep into thc autumn. Thc rcport of thc agricul- tural inspcctor contains a tablc of crops for thc past five years bascd on data which thc island commandant calls "mcrc invcntion." From this tablc wc may conclude that thc avcragc grain harvcst is approximatcly thrccfold, a fact which may be corroboratcd by anothcr figurc: in i 889 thc harvcstcd grains avcragcd somc i i poods pcr adult pcrson, being a thrcefold yield of grain. Thc harvcstcd grain was poor. One day whilc cxamining samplcs of thc grain brought by scttlers to bc cxchangcd for flour, thc island commandant found that some of them wcre complctcly unfit for sowing and thc othcr grain samplcs contained a significant numbcr of unripcned and frost-killcd grain (Order No. 41, 1889).

In vicw of such poor yiclds, the Sakhalin homesteader, if hc is to be wcll fed, must have no lcss than four dcsya- tins of fertile land, must not stint in his own efforts, and must not pay any money to workers. In the not too distant future when the one-field system without fallow land and without fertilization will bring about the exhaustion of the soil and the exiles "recognize the necessity for changing to a more rational method of working the fields and to a new system of crop rotation," more land and more labor will be required, and the growing of grains will perforce be aban- doned as being unproductive and unprofitable.

Vegetable-raising, the branch of agriculture whose suc- cess does not depend so much on natural conditions as on the individual efforts and knowledge of the homesteader himself, obviously produces good results on Sakhalin. The success of local gardening is evident in that sometimes entire families live on turnips during the entire winter. In July a woman in Alexandrovsk complained to me that her flowers had not yet bloomed, while in one Korsakov hut I saw a bucket full of cucumbers.

From the agricultural inspector's report it appears that the 1889 harvest in the Tymovsk district yielded four and one-tenths poods of cabbage and about two ^^^ of various root vegetables per adult; in Korsakov the yield was four poods of cabbage and four and one-eighth ^^s of root vegetables. That same year the potato yield per adult in Alexandrovsk was about 50 poods, in Tymovsk it was 16 poods and in Korsakov it was 34 p^^s. Potatoes generally give abundant yields and this is not only corroborated by statistics biit by personal impressions. I did not see bins or bags of grain: I did not see settlers eating wheat bread althoiigh more wheat is sown here than rye; but I did see potatoes in every hit and heard complaints that many potatoes rotted during the winter.

With the development of city life on Sakhalin there is a slowly increasing need for marketplaces. An area has already been set aside in Alexandrovsk where women sell vegetables, and it is not rare to meet exiles on the streets selling cucumbers and various greens. In some Southern areas, as in First Drop, truck gardening has already become a serious business.⁵

Agriculture is considered the main occupation of the exiles. Secondary occupations, which provide additional earnings, are hunting and fishing. From a hunter's point of view, vertebrates are plentiful on Sakhalin. Sable, fox and are the animals most valuable to merchants, and they inhabit the island in especially large numbers.⁰ Sable over- run the entire island. I was told that recently, as a result of forest fires and the cutting down of timber, the sable have abandoned the populated areas for more distant forests. I do not know how true this is. In my presence an inspector fired his revolver at a sable crossing a log over a stream just outside the Vladimirovka setclement, and the exile hunters with whom I was able to talk usually hunt quite close to the setdcments. In former times bears did not attack people or domestic animals and were considered rather meek ani- mals, but when the exiles began setding along the head- waters of thc rivers, cutting down the forcsts and barring their access to the fish which were their chief food, the Sakhalin church records and the official rcports began to record a new cause of dcath: "Clawed by a bear." The bear is now regarded as a dangerous natural phenomenon, and thc war against bears is not regarded as a sport. They also find deer and musk deer, otter, wolverine and lynx, rarely a wolf, and even more rarely an ermine or a tiger.⁷ In spite of this wcalth of game, hunting as a commercial endeavor is virtually nonexistent in the colony.

The exiled kulaks who are making a fortune in tradc deal in furs which they obtain from the nativcs for a pittance, in exchange for alcohol. This has nothing to do with hunting, however, but with another kind of industry. There arc so few hunters that they can be counted. The majority arc not professional hunters but men who have a passion for hunting, sportsmen who hunt with inferior weapons and wichout dogs merely for the pleasure of it. They dispose of their game at an absurdly low price or squander it on alcohol. One setder in Korsakov who tried to sell me a dead swan asked for "three rubles or a botde of vodka."

We must assume that hunting in the exile colony will never become a commercial venture, just because it is an exile colony. In order to hunt professionally a person must be free, courageous and healthy, but the overwhelming ma- jority of convicts are people of weak characters, neurotic and indecisive. They were not hunters in their homeland, and they do not know how to handle guns. This free under- taking is so alien to their depressed souls that a settler would rather butcher a calf taken on credit from the gov- ernment, even though he is then threatened with dire punishment, than go out and shoot wood grouse or rabbits. Then there is the question whether the widespread develop- ment of hunting is desirable in a colony where the ma- jority of the people sent here for correction are murderers. A former murderer should not be permitted to kill animals frequently, nor should he be permitted to do the bestial things which are very nearly necessities in hunting, like stabbing a wounded deer, or cutting the throat of a downed partridge, etc.

Sakhalin's chief wealth and its hope for the future, which may perhaps become auspicious and enviable, lies with the migratory fish, not the game animals, nor the coal, as some think. Some or perhaps all of the fry carried by the rivers into the ocean return annually to the mainland as migratory fish. The keta, a fish of the salmon family which in size, color and taste resembles our own salmon and inhabits the northern Pacific Ocean, enters the Sibe- rian and North American rivers at a certain period of its development ar.d with irrepressible strength, in absolutely incalculable numbers, swims upstream against the current, reaching the very highest mountain streams. On Sakhalin this occurs at the end of July or in the first third of August. The mass of fish observed at this time is so great and its run is so precipitous and so extraordinary that anyone who has not seen this magnificent phenomenon cannot actually understand it. The swiftness and density of the run can be judged by the surface of the river, which seems to be seething. The water has a fishy taste, the oars are jammed, and the blades propel the obstructing fish into the air.

The keta (Siberian salmon) are healthy and strong when they enter the mouth of the river, but the constant struggle against the fierce current, the compact throng of fish, hunger, friction, collisions with bushes and rocks, all these exhaust them; they become gaunt, their bodies are covered with bruises, the meat becomes white and flaccid, and the teeth protrude. The keta so completely change their characteristics that the uninitiated assume they have be- come another fish, and they call it not keta but lancet fish. The keta slowly weaken and can no longer battle against the current. They submerge or hide behind bushes with their mouths buried in the soil. At such times you can pick them up with your hands; even a bear can reach them with his paw. Finally, exhausted by their sexual cravings and by their hunger, they die. By this time many dead fish can be seen halfway along the stream, but the banks of the upper reaches of the rivers are covered with dead fish exud- ing a foul stench. All the sufferings endured by the fish during their erotic journey culminate in "a nomadic thrust wward dcath," for they always lead w death, and not a single fish returns w the ocean; all perish in the rivers. Hillendorf says: "The irresistible impulse of an erotic craving for death is the basic concept of nomadism; such indeed are the ideas of these stupid cold fish!"

The herring runs which periodically occur along the seacoast in the spring, usually in the second half of April, are no less extraordinary. The herring arrive in enormous shoals, "in absolutely unbelievable quantities," in the words of one observer. The approach of the herring can always be detected: a circular band of white foam covering a tre- mendous stretch of sea, flocks of gulls and albatrosses, whales spouting, herds of sea lions. The scene is magnifi- cent! The number of whales following the herring imo the Aniva is so great that Krusenstern's ship was encircled by them, and it was only "with extreme caution" that they could reach the bank. During the herring run the sea ap- pears to be boiling over.⁸

It is impossible to give an approximate figure to the amount of fish which can be caught here whenever there is a run in the Sakhalin rivers or along the shore. Only maximum figures would be appropriate.

At all events it may be said without exaggeration that fishing on Sakhalin during the runs, properly organized on a broad foundation for the markets which have long existed in Japan and China, would produce untold profits. When the Japanese controlled Southern Sakhalin and their fishing had barely begun to develop, they were already earning half a million rubles profit annually. According to Mitsul, blub- ber oil from Southern Sakhalin filled 6ii caldrons and up to i sazhens of wood were burned in order to render the blubber, while the herring alone brought 295,806 rubles annually.

\X'ith Russia's occupation of Southern Sakhalin, fishing went into the decline which continues to the present day. L. Dcytcr° wrote in 1880: "Where life recently seethed, providing food for the native Ainus and substantial profits for the entrepreneurs, there is now a wilderness." The fish- ing by our exiles in both Northern districts is insignificant; it cannot be described in any other way. I was on the Tym when the keta run had already arrived at the upper reaches, and here and there on the green banks I saw occasional fishermen pulling out half-dead fish with pothooks attached to long poles.

Seeking means of providing earnings for the settlers, the administration in recent years has begun to order salted fish from them. The settlers obtain salt at reduced prices and on credit; the prison then purchases the fish from them at high prices in order to encourage them. I mention these insignificant earnings only because the prisoners say the prison soup cooked with fish cured by the local settlers is noted for its particularly repulsive taste and unbearable stench. The settlers do not know how tO fish or how to cure the fish, and nobody teaches them. According to the present custom the prison takes over the best fishing grounds and the settlers are left with rapids and shallows, where their cheap homemade nets arc torn to pieces by bushes and rocks. When I was in Derbinskoye the con- victs were catching fish for the prison.

The island commandant, General Kononovich, ordered the settlers to appear before him. In his speech he re- proached them for having sold unedible fish to the prison last year. He stated, "The convicts are your brothers and my sons. In cheating the prison you harm your brothers and my sons." The settlers agreed with him, but their faces showed that next year their brothers and his sons would again be eating stinking fish. Even if the setders learn to preserve the fish properly, the new earnings will still be meaningless to the settlers since sooner or Iater the sanita- tion authorities will be forced to forbid the consumption of fish caught in the upper sources of rivers.

I visited the prison fishery in Derbinskoye on August 25. The interminable rain brought misery to all nature. It was difficult to walk along the slippery shore. \Y/e first en- tered the shed, where sixteen convicts were salting fish under the supervision of Vasilenko, a former Taganrog fisherman. They had already salted 150 barrels, some two thousand poods. It would seem that if Vasilenko had not happened to be convicted, nobody would know how to handle the fish. There was a slope leading down from the shed to the shore, and on this six convicts were cleaning fish with sharp knives; the water was red and turbid. There is a strong stench of fish and mire mixed with fish blood. A bit farther on, a group of convicts, soaking wet and barefoot, were casting a small seine. They pulled it out twice while I was there, and both times the seine was full. All the keta looked extremely suspect. They all had protruding teeth, their spines were humped and their bodies were covered with bruises. The bellies of almost all the fish were stained brown or green, and a water excrement was being secreted. The fish cast on shore died very quickly, if they were not already dead in the water or had not died while struggling in the net. The few fish which remained un- blemished were called serebryanka [silver fish]. These were carefully set aside. They were not meant for the prison kettle, but would be especially "cured."

They do not know very much here about the natural history of the fish which enter the rivers periodically. They are not yet convinced that they should be caught at the mouth of the rivers and in their lower waters. The fish become unfit for consumption farther upriver.

While sailing on the Amur, I heard complaints from old inhabitants that at the mouth of the river real keta can be caught, but they only get lancet fish. On the boat I also heard people saying it was about time the fishing was regu- lated; they meant that it should be forbidden in the lower rcaches.¹"

While the prisoners and the settlers were catching gaunt, half-dead fish in the upper reaches of the Tym, the Japanese were illegally fishing at the mouth of the river after blocking it with palings, while in the lower reaches the Gilyaks were catching fish for their dogs, and these fish were incomparably healthier and tastier than those which were being salted in the Tymov district for the people. The Japanese were loading junks and even larger ships, and the beautiful ship which Polyakov met at the mouth of the Tym in 1881 probably came again this summer.

For fishing to become a serious enterprise, the colony must be moved closcr to the mouth of the Tym or the Poronaya. But this is not the only thing that has to be done. It is imperative that the free inhabitants not be allowed to compete with the exiles, because wherever there is a con- flict of interests the free will always have the advantage over the exiles.

Moreover, the settlers arc faced with competition from the Japanese, who arc either fishing illegally or paying ex- port taxes, and from the officials who have acquired the best fishing grounds for fishing by the prisoners. The time is drawing ncar for the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad and the large-scale development of shipping, and then people will hear about the incredible abundance of fish and game, and free people will be attracted to the island. Immigration will begin, and regular fishing enter- prises will be organized; in these the exiles will participate not as owner-entrepreneurs but merely as hired hands. And then it will happen, if we can judge by past occurrences, that complaints will be raised that the labor of the exiles is yielding place to the labor of free people, perhaps the Chinese and Koreans. The exiles will be regarded as an economic burden on the island, and with the increasc in immigration and the development of a settled industrial life the government will find ir more equitable and advan- rageous to be on the side of the free population, and penal servitude will be discontinued. In this way fish becomes the foundation of Sakhalin prospcrity, but that has nothing to do with thc penal colony.ⁿ

I have alrcady rcferred to rhe harvesting of sea cabbage when I was dcscribing the Mauka settlemcnt. From March i to August i a settler earns from i 50 to 200 rubles during the harvesting. A third of his carnings arc spent on food and hc brings two-thirds home. Thcsc are good wages; un- fortunatcly thcy arc only possible for settlcrs in the Korsa- kov district. Thc workcrs arc paid according to thcir capaci- ties, and thcir carnings rcflcct thcir expericnce, diligcnce and conscicntiousncss—qualitics which arc far from bcing common among thc cxilcs. It follows that not evcryone gocs to Mauka.¹²

Thcrc arc many carpcntcrs, cabinctmakcrs, tailors and so on among the cxiles, but most of thcm do nothing or thcy are farmers. Onc convict locksmith makcs Bcrdan riflcs and hc has alrcady sold four on thc mainland. Another makes unusual stccl watch chains, whilc anothcr smlpturcs on gcsso. Thcsc riflcs, chains and cxpcnsivc gcsso boxes throw no morc light on thc colony's cconomic stams than thc information that thcrc is a settler in the South who gathers whalcbonc along thc coast and another who digs for mollusks. All of this is incidcntal. Those clegant and cxpensive w^^cn articlcs which wcrc shown at the prison cxhibition demonstrate only that somctimcs fine cabinet- makcrs arc sentcnccd to penal servitude. They have no conncction with the prison, since it is not the prison which finds a market for thcm and it is not the prison which teaches craftsmanship to thc convicts. The prison has prof- itcd from the work of these skilled craftsmen, but the sup- ply of their work is considerably greatcr than the demand. One convict told me, "You can't even sell forged documents here!" Carpenters work for 20 kopecks a day and pay for their own f^^, while tailors sew for vodka.¹³

If we add up the average income of the settler from selling grain to the government, from hunting, fishing, etc., we obtain the pitiful figure of 29 rubles, 21 kopecks.¹⁴ Moreover, the average debt of each homesteader to the government is 3 i rubles, 5 i kopecks. Since the total income includes fodder and the government allowance and sums of money received through the mail, and since the exile's income chiefly consists of earnings received from the gov- ernment, which occasionally pays inflated prices, a good half of his income is purely fictitious and the debt he owes the government is in fact larger than the figures suggest.

¹ In a resolution based on the agriculrural inspector's report of 1890, the island commandant wrote: "At last there exists a docu- ment which is perhaps far from being perfect, but is firmly based on observed data gathered by a specialist and offered without the dcsire to please any special interests." He calls this report "the first step in the right direction." The implication is that all the reports prior to 1890 were written with the desire to pleasc spe- cial interests. General Kononovich adds that "idle fabrications" were the sole source of information on agriculture in Sakhalin before 1 890.

The official agronomist on Sakhalin is given the tide of In- spector of Agriculture. It is a Class IV position with a good sal- ary. The present inspector made his report after spending two years on the island. This is a short work which does not contain the author's personal observations, and his conclusions are not distinguished by their clarity. The report does, however, supply some brief information about meteorology and flora, and presents an adcquatc picrure of narural conditions in the popoulated parts of the island. This report has been published and will probably be included in the literarure relating to Sakhalin. As for the agronomists who served earlier, they were all very unforrunate. I have already mentioned M. S. Mitsul several times. He had been an agronomist, later he became a director, and he finally died of angina pectoris before the age of forty-five. I was told that another agronomist attempted to prove that agriculrure was impossible on Sakhalin, and sent out a fl^^ of documents and telegrams, and it appears that he suffered a severe nervous disorder. People now recall him as having been an honest and knowledgeable person, but insane. The third director of the Agronomy Department was a Pole: he was discharged by the island commandant and there was a scandal rare in official annals. By an official order his travel expenses were allowed only on condition that "he produce an agreement with the driver of a sleigh taking him to Nikolayevsk." Obviously the administration feared that after receiving his travel expenses the agronomist would continue to remain on the island (Order No. 349, 1888). Father Irakly told me about the fourth agronomist, a German, who did nothing and knew hardly anything at all about agronomy. Once, after an August frost which killed off the grain, he drove to Rykovskoye, called a meeting and pompously demanded, "What for did you have a frost?" A most intelligent man stepped out of the crowd and said, "We do not know, your excellency; probably it was brought about by God's grace." Thc agronomist was completely satisfied with this answer, mounted his carriage and departed for home, conscious that he had performed his dury.

A correspondent writes in Vladivostok ( 1886), No. 43: "A newly arrived agronomist on Sakhalin (a Prussian subject) or- ganized and opened a Sakhalin agricultural exhibition on Octo- ber 1 in his own honor, the exhibitors being the settlers of the Alexandrovsk and Tymovsk districts, as well as the prison gar- dens. . . . The grain seeds exhibited by the settlers werc not ex- ccptional unless you include among the yakova seeds grown on Sakhalin other seeds mixed with them which have been ordered from the famous Grachev [Yefim Andreyevich Grachev, 1826-77, a renowned agronomist] for sowing. Scnler Sychov of the Ty- movsk district exhibited wheat with a certificate from the Tymovsk administration that he has a current harvest of sevenry poods. He was charged with perpetrating a fraud for exhibiting only carc- fully selected kernels of wheat." Issue No. 50 of the same news- paper also describes the exhibition: '"Everyone was astonished by the extraordinary vegetables: for example, a hcad of cabbage weighing twenty-two and a half pounds, radishes weighing thir- teen pounds, potatoes weighing three pounds, etc. It can safely be said that Central Europe cannot boast of better vegetables."

With the increase in population it becomes all the more diffi- cult to find suitable land. Riparian valleys covered with deciduous forests—elms, hawthorn, elders, etc.—where the topsoil is deep and fertile are rare oases among the tundras, bogs, mountains cov- ercd with burning forests, and lowlands with coniferous forests and poorly draining subsoil. On the southern portion of the island these valleys, or yelans, alternate with mountains and bogs on which the sparse vegetation differs little from the polar. Thus the vast region between the Takoye valley and Mauka, which are cultivated areas, is covered with absolutely unusable marshlands. Perhaps it will be possible to build roads through these marshes, but it is not within human power to change the grim climate. As great as the area of Southern Sakhalin obviously is, until the pres- em time only 405 desyatins of land suitable for grain fields, gar- dens and farmsteads have been discovered (Order No. 3 i 8, i 889). But the commission headed by Vlasov and Mitsul, which had studied the problem of the suitability of Sakhalin for an agricul- tural penal colony, found that in the cenual section of the island "there should be considerably more than 200,000 desyatins of land" capable of being brought under cultivation and that "ex- tends to 220,000" in the southern section.

Details are recorded in Report on the Status of Agriculture or^ Sakhalin Island in 1889 by Von Friken.

For some reason only onions have been difficult to raise up to the present time. The scarcity of this vegetablc in the exile's diet has been compensated for by wild ramson [bear garlic]. This onion-type plam with a suong garlic odor was once considered by soldiers and exiles an excellem remedy for scurvy, and we can judgc the prevalence of the disease by the hundreds of poiociss which the military and prison commands kept in stock every win- ter. They say that ramson is tasty and nutritious, but not every- one likes its odor. I felt suffocated when a man came ncar me in a room or even in the open after eating ramson.

The amount of land devoted 10 hayficlds on Sakhalin is still unknown, although the agricultural inspcctor's repon docs cite figures. No mauer what figures arc quoted, however, it is in- disputable that few homesteaders know in the spring where they will mow in summer, and it is indisputable that there is insuffi- cient hay, and that by the end of winter the catdc become ema- ciated from lack of feed. The best hayfields are taken by the strongest—i.e., the prison and the military commands. The mead- ows remaining for the use of settlcrs arc either very distant or they cannot be harvested with a scythe but must be cut with a sickle. Because of the poor permeability of the subsoil, the majority of the meadows are marshy, and are always wet, thus producing sour grass and sedge; this makes for a coarse hay, containing little nourishment. The agricultural inspector says that the local hay in terms of nuuition can scarcely be compared with half the same amount of ordinary hay. The exiles find the hay poor, and they do not feed it to their animals without adding flour or potatoes. I will not make a judgment about whether the giant grasses in the forest valleys, of which so much is spoken, can be regarded as good fodder. I note that the seeds of one of these grasses, known as Sakhalin buckwheat, are now available to consumers in Russia. The report of the agriculrural inspector does not even mention whether grass-sowing is necessary or even possible on Sakhalin.

Now, as to cattle-raising. In 1889 there was one milk cow for every two and a half homesteads in the Alexandrovsk and Korsa- kov districts, and one for every three and a third in the Tymovsk. Practically the same figures apply to draft animals, that is, horses and oxen; in addition, the lower figures in this case apply to the best district, the Korsakov. These figures do not denote the actual conditions, however, since all the Sakhalin cattle are distributed very unequally among the homesteaders. The ownership of all the cattle is concentrated in the hands of the rich homesteaders who have large plots of land or else are engaged in trade.

⁰ Details may be found in A. M. Nikolsky, Sakhalin lsland and Its Vertebrate Fauna.

⁷ Wolves keep far away from dwellings because they fear do- mestic animals. As this may appear incredible, I cite a further example: Busse writes that when the Ainus saw a pig for the first time, they were terrified. Millendorf informs us that when sheep were first raised along the Amur, the wolves did not bother them. Wild deer are especially numerous on the western shore of the northern part of the island. During the winter they gather on the tundra, but in the spring, according to Glen, when they go down to the sea to lick salt, they can be seen in vast herds on the broad plains in this part of the island. As to birds, there are limitless numbers of geese, various species of ducks, white grouse, wood grouse, hazel grouse, curlews and woodcocks. The migration lasts until June. I arrived on Sakhalin in July, when there was deathly silence in the taiga. The island seemed lifeless, and I had to take the word of observers that the Kamchatka nightingale, the tit- mouse, the thrush and the siskin may be found here. There are many black ravens, but no magpies or starlings. Polyakov saw only one country swallow on Sakhalin, and in his opinion it arrived on the island by accident after losing its way. One day I thought ] saw a quail in the grass, but upon looking more closely ] saw a pretty tiny animal which they call a chipmunk. This is the smallest mammal in the northern districts. According to A. M. Nikolsky there are no house mice. Reports relating to the early days of the colony mention "food particles, sawdust and mouse holes."

^R One writer describes a Japanese seine which "spanned an area of three versts in the sea and, being strongly anchored to the shore, resembled a funnel through which herring were systemati- cally extracted." Busse says in his notes: "The Japanese sweep- seines are often seen and extremely large. One seine encircled an area of 70 sazhens offshore. I was amazed when, having pulled the seine to ten sazhens from shore, the Japanese left it in the water because at ten sazhens the seine was so full of herring that even with the combined labor of 6o workmen, they were unable to pull the seine any closer to shore. . . . When placing their oars in the oarlocks, the rowers threw a number of herring out of the boat, complaining that the herring made it difficult to row." The herring run and the catch by the Japanese is described in detail by Busse and Mitsul.

^,J Marine Gazelle ( 1 88o), No. 3-

The fishing industry is very poorly organized on the Amur, although there is a vast wealth of fish. The reason would seem to be that the fishing entrepreneurs are too miserly to import spe- cialists from Russia. For example, they catch huge quantities of sturgeon bur are completely unable to prepare the roe so that it resembles Russian caviar, at least in outward appearance. The art of the local entrepreneur stops with curing the keta and goes no further. General L. Deyter wrote in the Marine Gazette ( 1880), No. 6, that it was believed that a fishing enterprise was formed at one time on the Amur by a group of capitalists, and the busi- ness was built on a large scale, and the owners served caviar to cach other at a cost, according to his informant, of 200 to 300 rubles per pound, paid in silver.

Fishing can be a supplement to homesteading and can provide some profits for the exiles now living at thc mouths of small rivers and by the sea. Good nets must be provided, and only those who lived by the sea in their homeland should be settled on the seacoast.

At present, the Japanese boats which arrive in Southern Sa. khalin for fishing pay a duty of seven kopecks in gold per pood. All products of fish are similarly taxed^^.g., manure fertilizer, herring oil and cod liver oil—but the profits from all these taxes do not amount to 20,000 rubles. This is almost the only profit we obtain for the exploitation of the wealth of Sakhalin.

In addition to keta, other species related to the salmon run periodically in the Sakhalin rivers, such as the humpbacked salmon and fish locally known as kundzha, goy and chevirsa. Trout, pike, brcam, carp, gudgeon and the smelt, which is called ogurechnik [cucumber fish] because it has the strong odor of a fresh cucum- ber, are always found in the fresh waters of Sakhalin. Besides her- ring, the salt-water fish caught here are cod, plaice, sturgeon and the goby, which is so big here that ir swallows a smelt whole. In Alexandrovsk one convict deals in delicious long-tailed crustaceans which are locally called chirims or shrimps.

The sea mammals existing in large quantities in Sakhalin waters are whales, sea lions, seals and sea bears. When we were approaching Alexandrovsk on the Baikal I saw many whales swimming and frolicking in pairs in the strait. Near Sakhalin's western bank a lone crag called Danger Rock rises above the sea.

An eyewitness on the schooner Yermak wanted to examine the rock, and wrote: "One and a half miles before reaching the rock we saw that the crag was occupied by some exceptionally large sea lions. The roaring of this enormous wild herd astounded us. The animals had grown to such a fabulous size that from the dis- tance they seemed to be crags themselves. The sea lions were cwo sazhens large and greater. . . . In addition to the sea lions, the crag and the sea around it teemed with sea bears" (Vladivostok, 1886, No. 29).

The possible dimensions of the whaling and seal-hunting busi- ness in our northern seas are demonstrated in figures quoted by one of our writers. He says that according to the calculations of American owners of whalers in the fourteen years previous to 1861, sperm oil and whalebone worth two hundred million rubles were shipped from the Okhotsk Sea (V. Zbyshevsky, "Observa- tions on the Whaling Industry in the Okhotsk Sea," Marine Miscellany, 1863, No. 4). h should be noted that in spite of their brilliant future, these industries will not bring additional wealth to the penal colony just because it is a penal colony.

According to Drem's testimony, "seal-hunting is a vast, merci- less slaughter carried out with vulgarity and extreme insensibiliry. This is the reason why they do not 'hunt seals,' but use the expres- sion 'to beat seals.' The most savage tribes hunt in a far more humane manner than a civilized European." When they slaughter the sea bears with cudgels, their brains splatter on all sides and the eyes of the poor creatures jump out of their sockets. The exiles, especially those sent here for murder, should not be per- mitted to participate in similar spectacles.

!2 On account of the sea cabbage and the comparatively mild climate, I consider the southwestern shore to be the only area on Sakhalin where a penal colony is possible. In 1885 an interesting paper relating to the sea cabbage was read at one of the meetings of the Society for the Study of the Amur Region. This was writ- ten by the present owner of the business, Y. L. Semenov, and pub- lished in Vladivoirok ( 1885), Nos. 47 and 48.

¹³ At the present time these craftsmen can earn money only by working for the officials and the rich exiles at the posts. The local intelligentsia deserves an accolade for always paying generously for services rendered by the craftsmen. Stories are told about the doctor who kept the shoemaker in the infirmary, pretending that he was ill so that he could make boots for his son, and about the official who assigned himself a dressmaker to sew clothes for his wife and children free of charge, but these stories are regarded as unhappy exceptions to the rule.

14 According to information given by the agricultural inspector.

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XIX Convicts' Food - What and How the Prisoners Eat - Clothing - Church - School - Literacy

while the sakhalin convict is on prison rations hc rcccivcs daily 3 pounds¹ of bakcd brcad, 40 zolotniks of meat, about 15 zolotniks of groats, and various addi- tional rations worth 1 kopcck. On a fast day 1 pound of fish is substitutcd for the mcat.

Thc acccpted departmental method is most inadcquate to dctcrminc how far this ration satisfics the convict's actual necds, if only bccausc it draws conclusions from compara- tive as wcll as purcly cxternal cvaluations of statistics which apply to the f^^ rations of various groups of popu- lations both abroad and in Russia. If prisoncrs in Saxon and Prussian prisons reccivc meat only three times a weck, always to the cxtcnt of less than onc-fifth of a pound, and if thc Tambovsky peasant cats four pounds of bread a day, this docs not mean that the Sakhalin convict receives a large amount of mcat and litdc bread; it only mcans that the Gcrman prison officials arc afraid of bcing accuscd of misguidcd philanthropy and that thc Tambovsky peasant's dict differs in that it contains more bread. From the practi- cal point of view, it is very important that the evaluation of the rations of any given group begin with a qualitative, not with a quantitativc, analysis. This would permit a simultancous study of the natural and living conditions in which the group livcs. If a strict individuality is not ad- hercd to, the solution of the problem will be one-sided, and I imagine it will be regarded as conclusive only by dry-as-dust formalists.

One day the agricultural inspector, Mr. Von Friken, and

I were returning to Alexandrovsk from Krasny Yar, I in a tarantajj² and he on horseback. It was hot and the taiga was sweltcring. Prisoners wcrc working hatless on the road be- twecn the post and Krasny Yar, their shirts drcnched with pcrspiration; they probably thought I was an official when I drovc up bcsidc them uncxpectedly. They stopped my horses and complaincd to me that they wcrc being given bread which was impossible to cat. Whcn I told thcm to appcal to thc authoritics, thcy answcrcd:

"Wc told thc scnior guard Davydov, and he callcd us mutincers."

Thc bread actually was tcrriblc. \X'hcn brokcn opcn, it glistcncd in the sun with minutc drops of watcr, stuck to thc fingcrs and lookcd likc a dirty, slimy mass, repulsivc to hold in thc hands. Scvcral picccs of brcad werc brought to mc, and it was all undcrbakcd and madc from badly millcd flour. Quitc obviously therc was a vast difTcrcncc in thc wcight of thc flour which rcachcd thc bakcr and thc brcad madc from it. It was bakcd in Novo-Mikhaylovka under thc supcrvision of scnior guard Daivydov.

Thc thrcc pounds of bread which arc included in thcir rations contain much lcss flour than thc rcgulations rc- quirc,³ owing to the misusc of thc wcight diffcrcntial be- twccn thc flour and thc bread. Thc convict bakcrs in thc abovc-mcntioncd Novo-Mikhaylovka sold their own por- tions of bread and gorgcd thcmsclves on thc surplus. In thc Alcxandrovsk prison tbc pcoplc who arc fcd from thc com- mon kcttle rcceivc dcccm brcad; thosc living in thcir own quartcrs arc issucd inferior brcad, and thosc who work out- side the post rcccivc cven worse brcad. In other words, the only brcad that is fairly good is that which might bc secn by thc island commandant or thc inspector.

In order to incrcasc thc amount of bread obtained from the flour, the bakcrs and the guards connectcd with food rationing use various devices which had been improved upon by Siberian practices, with thc scalding of flour being one of the least harmful. At onc time che flour was mixed wich sifted clay in the Tymovsk district, to increase the weight of the bread.

Similar abuses are all the easier because the officials cannot sit in the bakery all day and inspect and keep watch over every loaf of bread. Furthermore, almost no complaints are voiced by the prisoners.⁴

Whether the bread is good or bad, not all of it is eaten by the prisoners. They ration themselves prudently, because it has long been the custom among exiles and in our prisons to use government bread as small change. The prisoner pays bread to the person who cleans his cell, to the man who substitutes for him at work, to the sharer of his frailties. He pays with bread for needles, thread and soap. To vary his dull, extremely monotonous and perpetu- ally sahy diet, he saves his bread and then exchanges it at the maidan for milk, a white roll, sugar, vodka. . . . The majority of people born in the Caucasus become ill from the black bread and so they attempc to barter it. Thus, if the three pounds of bread listed in the regulations seem com- pletely adequate quantitatively, when we realize the quality of the bread and the living conditions in prison, the value of the food allotment is seen to be a delusion and the sta- tistics lose their meaning. Only salted meat is provided; the fish, too, is salted.⁵ They are served boiled, in a soup.

The prison soup looks like a semiliquid porridge made of groats and potatoes cooked to a pulp, with little red pieces of meat or fish floating in it. Some of the officials praise it, but they do not dare to eat it themselves. The soup, even when it is prepared for the sick convicts, is extremely salty. If visitors are expected in the prison, if the smoke of a ship is visible on the horizon, or if the guards and cooks have been having an argument in the kitchen—all these things have their effect on the taste, color and odor of the soup. It is disgusting stuff, and not even pepper and bay leaf could improve it. The salted fish soup is regarded as exceptionally bad, and it is easy to understand why. First, it spoils quickly, and so they try to make use of the already decaying fish as quickly as possible. Second, the polluted fish which the exiles catch at the head- waters is also thrown into the kettle. At one time the convicts in the Korsakov prison were fed with a soup made of salted herring. According to the physician in charge of the medical department, this was supremely tasteless; the cooked herring quickly disintegrated into tiny pieces, while the presence of small bones made swallowing difficult and caused inflammation of the alimentary canal. No one knows how often the prisoners throw the soup away because it is unpalatable, but it is known that they do so.^c

How do the prisoners eat? There is no mess hall. The prisoners line up at noon in the barracks or at the lean-to where the kitchen is located, as though they were at a railroad ticket office. Each one holds some sort of recep- tacle. By this time the soup is usually ready and being over- cooked: it is kept "steeping" in the covered ketcles. The cook has a long pole with a scoop attached to it, and with this he ladles the stew from the caldron and gives each person his portion. He can scoop up two portions of meat at a time, or no meat, exaccly as he pleases. By the time the people at the end of the line reach him, the soup is no longer soup, buc a thick tepid mass at the bottom of the kettle. This weak stew is then diluted with water.⁷

After receiving their portions the prisoners leave. Some eat while walking, others eat sitcing on the ground, and still others eat on their plank beds. There is no supervision co make certain that they cat everything, and that they refrain from selling and exchanging their portions. Nobody asks whether everyone has eaten, or whether anyone fell asleep before ration cime. And if you tell the people in charge of the kitchen that among the depressed and mentally ill people serving terms of penal servitude there are many who must be supervised to make certain they eat and must even be force fed, such an observation only evokes a per- plexed expression on their faces and the answer: "How could I know, your worship?"

Of those receiving government rations, only 25 to 40 percent⁸ are fed from the prison kettle; the remainder ob- tain provisions where they are. This majority is divided into two categories: some consume their rations in their own quarters with their families or with their co-owners; others, who have been commandeered for work far from the prison, eat where they are working. After finishing his work quota each worker of the second category cooks his own meal separately in a tin pot unless it is raining and unless he falls asleep after his hard labor. He is fatigued and hungry, and to save himself trouble he will often eat the meat and fish raw. The guard does not care whether he falls asleep during the mcal, or whether he sold his rations, or squandered them in card-playing, or whether the food was spoiled or the brcad sodden with rain. Sometimes they will eat thrce to four days' rations in one day, and then they eat bread or starve. The supervisor of the medical depart- mcnt says that when they are working by the seashore or on the riverbanks thcy arc not squeamish about eating mus- sels or fish, while thc taiga provides roats of various kinds if thcy arc famished. According to the mining engineer Keppcn, workcrs in thc mincs have becn known to eat tal- low candles.⁹

For two and pcrhaps thrce years aftcr being relcased from hard labor thc scttlcr reccives an allowance from the trcasury. After this he must feed himself at his own ex- pensc and his own risk. There are no figurcs or documcnted data eithcr in thc existing litcrature or in the official files regarding thc nutrition of settlers. If onc may judge from personal imprcssions and from the fragmentary accounts which can be gathered on the spot, potatoes are the main food of the colony. Potatoes and roat vegetablcs, such as turnips and rutabagas, are often thc only food a family has for a ver' long while. Thcy eat frcsh fish only during the runs, and bccause of its price, salt fish can be obtained only by the more prosperous.¹⁰

There is nothing that can be said about the meat. Thosc who have cows prefer to sell the milk rathcr than drink it themselves. They do not store it in crocks but in bottles, which signifies that it is for sale. In general, the settler sells the food produce of his homestead very eagerly, even at the expense of his own health, because he considers money more necessary to him than health. If you do not save enough money, you will not be able to leave for the main-

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land, where you can eat your fill and recover your health while living in freedom.

The uncultivated plants used as food are ramson and various berries such as the cloudberry, bog whortleberry, cranberry, moss berry and others. It can be said that the exiles living in the colony eat vegetables exclusively, and this is true at least of the overwhelming majority. At any rate, their food is characterized by its low fat content, and it is questionable whether this is better than the food ra- tioned from the prison kettles.¹¹

The prisoners obviously receive sufficient clothing and footwear. Both men and women prisoners are issued an overcoat and a sheepskin coat each year. Soldiers, who work just like the prisoners on Sakhalin, receive a uniform every three years and a heavy coat every two years. A prisoner uses up four pairs of shoes and two pairs of work boots a year; a soldier wears out one pair of leggings and two and a half pairs of leather soles. But the soldier has better sani- tary conditions. He has a bed and a place where he can dry his clothes during bad weather. The convict has of neces- sity to wear bedraggled clothes and footwear, because he does not have a bed, sleeps on his overcoat, all his rotten rags foul the air with their evil-smelling emanations, and he has no place where he can dry his wet clothes. Until such time as they provide more humane living conditions for the convicts, the question as to the adequacy of the quantity of clothing and footwear must remain open. As to the quality, history repeats itself here; the same history ap- plies to the issue of bread. \Vhoever lives in sight of the officials receives better clothing; whoever is commandeered for distant work receives worse clothing.¹²

Now, as to the spiritual life and the satisfaction of needs of a higher order. The colony is called a reform colony, but it contains no institutions or persons who spe- cialize in reforming criminals. There are no instructions or articles in the Code on Convicts regarding religion unless we include the few instructions to convoy officers or non- commissioned officers on whether to use weapons against convicts, or how the priest should "edify them with teach- ings on their duties to their faith and to morality," and explaining to the convicts "the importance of the commu- tations of their sentences," etc.

No definite opinions are ever expressed on this subject. It is accepted that the primary responsibility for reform belongs to the church and to the schools, and then to the members of the free population, who through their author- ity, tact and personal example contribute significantly to ameliorating the condition of the prisoners.

In church affairs Sakhalin belongs to the diocese of the Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kurile Islands and Blagovesh- chensk.¹³ Bishops repeatedly visited Sakhalin, traveling as simply and suffering the same discomforts and privations as the ordinary priest. During their visits, while organizing churches, blessing various edifices,!"' and making the rounds of prisons, they spoke words of solace and hope to the con- victs. The character of their guidance can be judged by the following excerpt from a resolution by the Most Reverend Gury in one of the letters which has been kept by the Korsakov Church. "'If not all of them [i.e., the convicts] have faith and contrition, then, at any rate, many whom I personally saw do have. Nothing else but the very feeling of contrition and faith made them weep bitterly when I delivered a sermon to them in 1887 and i 888. In addition to punishing their crimes, the task of the prison is to arouse morally sound sentiments in the prisoners, and especially to prevent them from falling into complete despair during their imprisonment." This point of view was also inherent in the younger representatives of the Church. The Sakhalin priests always keep themselves aloof from punishment and conduct themselves with the convicts not as with criminals but as with people, and in this respect they demonstrate more tact and understanding of their duties than the doc- tors or agronomists, who often interfere in what is none of their business.

The most prominent place in the history of the Sakha- lin Church is held by Father Simeon Kazansky, or, as he is called by the people, Papa Simeon, who was the pastor of the Aniva or Korsakov church in the seventies. He was active during those "prehistoric" times when there were no roads in Southern Sakhalin and the Russian population, especially the military, was scattered in small groups over the entire South. Pop Simeon spent almost all his time in the wilderness, traveling from one group to another by dog sleigh or reindeer sleigh, and in the summer by sail- boat or by walking through the taiga. He was frozen, was snowbound, was stricken by illness, was tormented by mos- quitoes and bears, his boats were overturned in the swift rivers and he had to swim in the cold water, but he en- dured all this with unusual grace, delighted in the beauty of the wilderness, and never complained of his harsh existence. He behaved like an excellent friend in his rela- tions with officials and officers, never refused to join in a party, and during gay discussions always knew how to interpolate an apt biblical text. His opinion of convicts was: "To the Creator of the world all men are equal," and so he wrote in an official letter.¹⁵

During his tenure the Sakhalin churches were very poorly furnished. Once when blessing the iconostas in the Aniva church he spoke of its poverty in this way: "We have no bell, we have no books of divine worship, but what is important is—God is here!" I mentioned him pre- viously when I described Popovskiye Yurty. Through sol- diers and exiles his fame has spread all over Siberia and now Pop Simeon is a legend in Sakhalin and far beyond.

At the present time there are four parish churches on Sakhalin: in Alexandrovsk, Due, Rykovskoye and Korsa- kov.¹⁰ The churches are not poor. The priests receive a salary of i,ooo rubles a year. Each parish has a choir of singers who read music and are dressed in appropriate kaftans. Services are held only on Sundays and on great holy days. Matins and lauds are sung first, and then at nine o'clock in the morning Mass is celebrated. There are no vespers. The local priests do not have any special obligations arising from the exceptional composition of the population and they behave exactly like our village priests—that is, they confine themselves to church services on holy days, to

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religious ceremonies and to school duries. I did not hear of any conferences, admonitions, etc.¹⁷

During Lent the convicts prepare for Holy Communion. They are allowed three days to accommodate all the con- victs. When the chained convicts or those living in the Voye- vodsk and Due prisons prepare for the Sacrament, the church is encircled by sentries. They say this produces a dispiriting impression. The unskilled laborers among the convicts usually do not attcnd church bccause they take advantage of the holy days to rcst, make repairs or go berry- picking. The local churches are small, and somehow it has become customary only for those who are dressed in the garb of frec men to go to church. Only the "clean" people go there.

\X'hen I was at Alexandrovsk the front half of the church at Mass was occupied by officials and their families. Then followed a mixed row of soldiers' and guards' wives and free womcn with thcir children. Then came guards and soldicrs, and bchind all thesc along the walls were thc sct- tlers drcsscd in city clothcs and thc convict clerks. Can a convict with a shaved hcad and onc or more stripes down his back, wearing shacklcs or with a ball and chain around his feet, go to church if hc so desircs? I asked onc of the priests and he answered, "I don't know."

Thc settlers prepare for the Sacrament, get married and baptizc their childrcn in churches if they are living close enough to a church. Priests visit distant settlements to see that thc cxilcs kcep rhe fast and pcrform other duties. Father Irakly had "vicars" in Vcrkhny Armudan and in Malo-Tymovo; these were the convicts Voronin and Yako- venko, who rcad the lauds on Sundays. \'V'hen Father Irakly arrived at a settlement to conduct services, a peasant went up and down the strcct shouting at the top of his voice, "Comc for prayers!" When thcre is no church or chapel, serviccs are held in cells or in huts.

One evening while I was living in Alexandrovsk the local priest, Father Yegor, visited me and after staying a short while he left to conduct a marriage ceremony at the church. And I accompanied him. The candelabrum was already being lit and the choristers were standing in the choir, their faces expressing indifference as they waited for the bridal couple. There were many women, both convict and free, and they kept glancing impatiently at the door. A whisper was heard. Somebody at the door waved his hand and whispered excitedly, "They're driving up!" The singers began to clear their throats. A wave of people were pushed back to clear the door, someone yelled, and finally the bridal couple entered. He was a convict typesetter, twenty- five years old, wearing a jacket with a hard collar bent at the edges and a white tie. The convict woman, three or four years older, wore a blue dress with white lace and a flower in her hair. They laid a kerchief on the rug. The groom stepped on it first. The best men, who were type- setters, also wore white ties. Father Yegor came down from the altar and leafed through the book on the lectern for a long time. "Blessed be our God . . ." he sang, and the marriage ceremony started.

When the priest placed wreaths on the groom and bride and begged God to wed them in glory and honor, the faces of all the women who were present expressed tenderness and joy, and it seemed that they had forgotten that the ceremony was taking place in a prison church, in penal servitude, far, far from home. The priest said to the bridegroom, "Exalt yourself, bridegroom, as did Abra- ham. . . ." The church emptied after the wedding and the air was filled with the scent of burning candles, and the guard hastened to extinguish them, and melancholy set in. We went out on the steps. Rain! Near the church a crowd of people stood in the darkness and two springless carriages waited outside the church. In one sat the bride and bridegroom, the second was empty.

"Father, please!" voices were calling, and scores of hands stretched out toward Father Yegor as if to seize him.

"Please! Honor us!"

Father Yegor settled down in the carriage and they drove him to the home of the bride and groom.

On September 8, a holy day, I was leaving the church after Mass with a young official, and just then a corpse was brought in on a stretcher. It was carried by four ragged convicts with coarse, livid faces resembling our own city beggars. They were followed by two more ragged men, who formed the reserve, and by a woman with two children and a gloomy Georgian, Kelbokiani, who was dressed in a free man's clothing (he was a clerk and they called him Prince). They were all obviously in a hurry, afraid of miss- ing the priest at church. \Y/e learned from Kelbokiani that the deceased was a free woman named Lyalikova whose husband, a settler, had gone to Nikolayevsk. She had rwo children, and now Kelbokiani, who had been living in Lyalikova's quarters, did not know what to do with the children.

My companion and I had nothing to do, so we went ahead to the cemetery, not waiting for the funeral service to end. The cemetery is a verst from the church, behind the Slobodka and close to the sea on a high steep hill. \Y/hen we were climbing the hill the funeral cortege was already catching up with us. Obviously only rwo or three minutes were required to sing the service. From the summit we could sec the coffin jogging on the stretcher, and the little boy, who was being led by the woman, was holding back and pulling away from her.

From one side there is a broad view of the post and the surrounding country, from thc other side the sea, calm and shimmering in thc sunlight. There are many graves and crosses on the hill. Here you will find two large crosses side by side. They are thc graves of Mitsul and the guard Selivanov, who was killed by a prisoner. The small crosses standing over the graves of convicts are all exactly the same and all are silent. They will remember Mitsul for a while, but nobody will find it necessary to remember all the dead who are lying under the little crosses, those who have murdered, who tried to escape, who clanged their chains. Perhaps only somewhere in the Russian steppe around a campfire or in the forest will an old wagon driver begin telling a story out of boredom about the crimes com- mitted by so-and-so in their village. The listener, staring into the darkness, shudders, a night bird will suddenly shriek—and this is the only way he will be remembered. The cross which indicates where a convict medical assistant lies buried bears the verses:

Pauer-by! May thij verse remind you

That all in time under the jky, etc.

And at the end there is the line:

Forgive me, my friend, until that joyful morning!

Y. Fedorov

The newly dug grave was one quarter filled with water. The convicts, puffing and panting, their faces perspiring, loudly discussed something which had nothing to do with the funeral. Finally they carried up the coffin to the edge of the grave. The coffin was made of boards hastily nailed together and unpainted.

"Well?" said one.

They quickly dropped the coffin, which plopped into the water. Clods of clay knocked against the lid, the coffin shuddered, water splashed, and the convicts working with their shovels continued their own discussions. Kelbokiani looked at us perplexedly, stretching out his hands and com- plaining helplessly.

"What shall I do with the children? I'm saddled with them! I went to the warden and begged him to give me a woman, but he won't give me one!"

The woman was leading the little boy, Aleshka, three or four years old, by the hand, and he st^^ there, gazing down at the grave. He wore a woman's blouse with long sleeves many sizes too large for him, and faded blue trousers. His knees were covered with bright-blue patches.

"Aleshka, where is your mather?" asked my companion.

"They b-b-buried her!" said Aleshka as he laughed and then he waved his hand toward the grave.^lS

There are five schools on Sakhalin, not counting Der- binskoye, where there were no classes for lack of a teacher.

295

From 1889 to 1890 they had 222 students: 144 boys and 78 girls, with an average of 44 pupils at ea^ school. I visited the island during the school vacations. No classes were being held during my stay and therefore the conduct and behavior in the schools, no doubt very original and interesting, remain unknown to me. They say that Sakhalin schools are ^ror, miserably furnished, not compulsory, living out a haphazard existence, and their status completely indefinite because nobody knows whether they will continue to exist or not. They are supervised by one of the function- aries in the office of the island commandant. He is an edu- cated young man; nevertheless he is a king who reigns but does not rule, for in fact the schools are supervised by the district commandants and the prison wardens who select and assign the teachers. The schoolteachers are convicts who were not teachers in the homeland. They have little knowledge of teaching and have not been trained for it. They receive ten rubles a month. The administration finds it impossible to pay more and does not invite free persons to act as teachers because it would have to pay them at least 25 rubles. Teaching school is considered a very mean occu- pation, for the guards hired among the exiles, whose duties are vague and who act as errand boys for the officials, re- ceive 40 and sometimes 50 rubles a month.¹⁰

The literate male population, counting both adults and children, comprises 29 percent; the literate female popula- tion is 9 percent. And even this 9 percent refers exclusively to those of school age, and so it can be said of the adult Sakhalin woman that she can neither read nor write; en- lightenment has not touched her; she embarrasses you with her crude illiteracy, and it seems to me that nowhere else have I seen such stupid and dull women as I found among the criminal and oppressed population of Sakhalin. Among the children who came from Russia 25 percent are literate, but only 9 percent of those born on Sakhalin are literate.²⁰

¹ A Russian pound is about o/J.o of the American pound; a zolot- nik is ^ of a pound.—^^NS.

2 A large, low, half-covered, four-wheeled carriage without springs.—TRANS.

"A Table of Food Rations for Convict Men and Women" was composed on the basis of Regulationi on Provisions and Addi- tional Food Rations for the Armies, as approved by His Imperial Majesty on July 3 i, i 87 1.

The weight differential between flour and bread is a seductive demon whose wiles, it appears, are very difficult to resist, and as a result many people have lost their scruples and even their lives. The guard Selivanov, whom I have already mentioned, became a victim of the weight differential when he was killed by a convict baker, while giving a tongue-lashing to the convict for having ob- tained a low weight differential. This is really worth being dis- turbed about. Let us suppose that bread is baked for 2,870 persons in the Alexandrovsk prison. If they hold back only i o zolotniks from each ration, that amounts to 300 pounds a day. These tricks with bread are generally very profitable. Thus, in order to em- bezzle 1 o,ooo poods of flour, it would take only 2 to 3 years to conceal this amount with flour taken in small amounts from pris- oners' rations.

Polyakov wrote: "The bread was so bad in the Malo-Tymov- skoye settlement that not even the dogs could bring themselves to eat it. It contained a great deal of unground whole grain, chaff and straw. One of my associates, who accompanied me during my bread inspection, said rightly: With this bread it is just as easy to tie up all your teeth with straw as to finJ a toothpick to clean them." •■

⁵ Soup is occasionally cookeJ v.'ith fresh meat in the prison. This only happens when a bear has killed a cow, or some accident has happened to an ox or cow belonging to the government. But the prisoners often consiJer this butchered meat to be carrion and refuse to cat it. Here are some lines from Polyakov: "The lotal corned beef was always very bad. It was prepared from the meat of government oxen which had grown exhausted by work on poor and difficult roads. They were butchered the day before they would have expired, unless it happened that their throats were cut when they were already half dead." During the run of migratory fish the prisoners are fed fresh fish at the rate of one pound per person.

⁰ The administration knows all about this. At any rate, here is the opinion of the island commandant himself: "In the local operations of distributing food rations to convicts, circumstances exist which unwittingly cast a suspicious shadow" (Order No. 3 i 4, i 888). If an official says he has been eating prison food for a week or a month and still feels well, this means that his food has been especially cooked for him in the prison.

From the quantities which are placed in the caldron one can see how easily the cooks can make mistakes and prepare a volume of soup which is greater or lesser than the required number of por- tions. On May 3, 1890, 1,279 prisoners were fed from the caldron, which contained i 3 poods of meat, 5 poods of rice, i poods of flour for thickening, i pood of salt, 24 poods of potatoes, pound of bay leaf and pounds of pepper. On September 29, for 67 5 persons in the same prison the caldron contained i 7 poods of fish, 3 poods of groats, i pood of flour, pood of salt, i 2Y2 poods of potatoes, V11 pound of bay leaf and pound of pepper.

On May 3, of the 2,870 persons in the Alexandrovsk prison, 1,279 were fed from the common caldron; on September 29, of the 2,4 32 prisoners, only 67 5 were fed from it.

The administration and the local doctors have found the prison rations to be quantitatively inadequate. According to data which I obtained from a medical report, the rations measured in grams are as follows: albumen-i42.9;fats-3 7 .4; carbohydrates-659.9 on meat days and 164.3, 40.0 and 67 1.4 on fast days. According to Erisman, the diet of our factory workers on meat days contains 79.3 grams of fat, and on fast days, 67.4. Hygienic rules demand that the morc a man works, the greater and more prolonged the physical strain he undergoes, the more fat and carbohydrates must be taken in. The reader can judge by the foregoing how little trust can bc placed in the nourishment obtained from the bread and the soup. Prisoners working in mines receive increased rations during the four summer months—i.e., 4 pounds of bread and i pound of meat and 24 zoloitiiki of groats. Through the interces- sion of the local administration the same rations were ordered for the laborcrs working on roads.

In 1887, at the suggestion of the Director of the Prison Ad- ministrative Headquarters, questions were raised about ''the possi- bility of changing the existing regulations in Sakhalin in order to decrease the cost of provisioning convicts without impairing nutri- tion," and experiments were conducted in a manner recommended by Dobroslavin. As can be seen from his report, the late professor found it inconvenient "to limit the amount of food which has been issued for so many years to the convicts without entering into a more detailcd srudy of the working and prison conditions into which the prisoners have been placed, since it is very difficult to form an exact opinion here on the quality of the meat and bread which are issued locally." Nevertheless, he still found it possible to limit the use of expensive meat rations during the year and proposed three sets of regulations: two for meat days and one for fast days.

On Sakhalin these tables were proposed for consideration by a commission appointed under the chairmanship of the director of the medical department. The Sakhalin physicians who partici- pated in the commission proved to be at the height of their calling. Without equivocation they asserted that in light of the working conditions on Sakhalin, the severe climate and the intense physical exertion during all seasons of the year and in all types of weather, the present rations were insufficient and that the provi- sions proposed by Professor Dobroslavin's tables, notwithstanding the rcduction in meat portions, would be far morc expensive than those now being issued according to the existing tables.

Answering the main point of the problem with regard to decreasing the cost of the rations, they proposed their own tables, which failed to bring about the savings demanded by the prison administration. "There will be no material savings," they wrote. "Rather thcre can be expectations of improvement in thc quantity and quality of prison labor, a decrease in the number of the sick and infirm; the general health of the prisoners will be improvcd, and this will reflect favorably on the colonization of Sakhalin by providing vigorous and healthy settlers to achieve this goal." This "Statement from the Office of the Commandant of Sakhalin Island" refers to changes in the tables brought about in order to decrease costs, and contains twenty different reports, ratios and laws. It deserves close study by persons interested in prison hygiene.

Smoked keta is sold in stores at 30 kopecks each.

As I have already said, the local natives use a great deal of fat in their food, which undoubtedly aids them in combating the low tcmperatures and the excessive humidity. I was told that in some places along the eastern shore and on our neighboring islands the Russian traders are slowly beginning to use whale blubber in their diet.

'2 When Captain Mashinsky was cutting a road along the Poro- naya for thc telegraph line, his convict laborers were sent short shirts which could only fit children. The prison clothing is made according to a routine, clumsy pattern which does not permit ease of movement by a working man and therefore you will never see a convict wearing his long overcoat or khalat when shipping cargo or doing roadwork. However, discomforts arising from the cut of the clothing are easily remedied by selling or exchanging it. Since the most comfortable clothing for work and life in general is the usual peasant garb, the majoricy of the exiles wear the same cloth- ing as free men.

!3 Since the Kurile lslands went to Japan, the Bishop should now properly be called Bishop of Sakhalin.

h Regarding the blessing of the Krilon lighthouse by Bishop Martimian, see Vladivostok ( 1883), No. 28.

¹¹⁵ The tone of his letters is very original. Requesting the admin- istration to provide him with a convict assistant to act as a lay reader, he wrote: ''As to the reason why I do not have a reader, this is explained by the fact that the Consistory has no trained readers and even if there was one, a psalmist would be unable to exist under the living conditions of the local clergy. The past has come to an end. lt seems that I will soon have to depart from Korsakov into my beautiful wilderness, saying unto you: 'I am leaving your house empty.' "

There is another church in the Rykovskoye region, located in Malo-Tymovo, where a service is held only on the feast day of Anthony the Great. In the Korsakov region there arc three chapels: in Vladimirovka, Krcsty and Galkino-Vraskoye. All the Sakhalin churches and chapels were built by convict labor on prison time. Only the Korsakov church was built by funds donated by the Vsadntk and Vostok commands and by the military living at the post.

Professor Vladimirov says in his Textbook on Criminal that when a convict joins the ranks of the reformed, a ceremony takes place. He probably had Article 301 of the Code on Convicts in mind. According to this article the convict is to be informed of his transfer to the designated category in the presence of higher prison officials and the invited priest, who . . . etc. In practice, however, this article is impracticable, because the priest would have to be invited daily, and such ceremonies do not coincide with working conditions. The law which permits prisoners to be excused from work on holy days is also disregarded. According to this law, convicts in the reformed category should be excused more frequently than those on probation. Differentiation of this kind would require a great deal of time and trouble.

The only usual activity of the local priests is connected with their missionary obligations. While I was on the island, the priest- monk Irakly was still living there. A Buriat by birth, clean-shaven, he had come from the Posolsky Monastery in Zabaikal. He has spent eight years on Sakhalin and in recent years he was the pas- tor of the Rykovskoye parish. His missionary duties obliged him to travel to Nyisky Bay once or rwice a year and along the Poro- naya to baptize, hold services and preside at the marriages of natives. He instructed some of the 300 Orochi tribesmen. He could scarcely expect any comforts in his travels over the taiga, especially in winter. At night Father Irakly customarily crawled into a sheepskin sleeping bag with his watch and tobacco. His traveling companions built a fire two or three times a night and warmed themselves with hot tea while he slept in his sleeping bag.

According to the records, the Orthodox comprise 86.5 percent, Catholics and Lutherans combined 9 percent, Muhammadans 2.7 percent, the remainder being Hebrews and Armenians of the Gregorian [Latin] rite. A Catholic priest comes once a year from Vladivostok and then the Catholic convicts are "herded" down from the northern districts to Alexandrovsk, and this occurs during the spring season when the roads are terrible. The Catholics com- plained to me that their priest comes very seldom. Their children remain unbaptized for a long time, and many parents turn to the Orthodox priest so that their children may not die unbaptized. I actually encountered Orthodox children whose fathers and mothers werc Catholics. When Catholics die, because they have no priest of thc-ir own, they invite a Russian priest to sing the '"Holy God, have mcrcy upon us."

In Alexandrovsk I was visited by a Lutheran who was sentenced in St. Petersburg for arson. He said that the Lutherans on Sakhalin have a society and as proof showed me a seal on which there had becn carved: "The Seal of the Lutheran Society on Sakhalin." The Lutherans gather at his home for prayers and for exchanging ideas.

The Tatars choose a mullah from among themselves, the Hebrews choose a rabbi, but they do this unofficially. A mosque is being built in Alexandrovsk. Mullah Vas-Khasan-Mamet, a handsome dark-haired man of thirty-eight who was born in Dage- stan, is erecting it at his own expense. In the Peysikovskaya Slo- bodka in Alexandrovsk there is a windmill which is utterly neglected. They say a Tatar and his wife chopped down the trees themselves, dragged the logs to the site and made the boards. Nobody helped them and they continued to work for three years. On obtaining peasant status the Tatar moved to the mainland, donating the mill to the government rather than to his own Tatars, because he was angry at them for not having selected him as mullah.

After fulfilling the island commandant's order to seek settlers or reliable persons of free status who could be substituted for the convicts presently carrying out the obligations of teachers in the village schools, the commandant of the Alexandrovsk district states in his report of February 22, 1890, that in the district under his jurisdiction there is nobody either among the free people or among the settlers who could qualify as a teacher. He writes: "Since I have encountered insurmountable difficulties in selecting people who by education would be eligible to some extent for teaching, I do not presume to designate anybody from among the settlers or ^^ants-formerly-exiles living under my jurisdiction who could be entrusted with teaching duties." Although the honorable com- mandant of the district does not presume to entrust teaching duties to convicts, they still continue as teachers with his knowledge and by his appointment. To avoid similar contradictions it would seem that the simplest solution would be to invite qualified teachers from Russia or Siberia and to specify the same salary as that received by jailers. This would require a radical change of attitude to teaching, making it at least as important as guard duty.

²⁰ If we are to judge by fragmentary records and suggestions made on the spot, literate persons bear their punishment better than the illiterate. Apparently there are more habitual criminals among the latter, while the former obtain their peasant rights more readily. In Siyantsy I recorded I 8 literate males, of whom I 3—that is, almost all the literate adults—have achieved peasant status. As yet it is not cuscomary to teach reading and writing ro adults although there are days in the winter when the prisoners sit helplessly in the prison because of the bad weather and lan- guish there with nothing to do. On such days they would eagerly study reading and writing.

Because so many convicts are illiterate, letters home are usually written for them by the more literate convicts, who act as scribes. They describe the sad local life, their poverty and misfortune, they beg their wives for divorces, etc., but in such a way that they seem to be describing yesterday's drunken revels: ''Well, finally I am writing a little bit of a letter to you. . . . Free me from marriage ties," etc., or else they wax philosophical and it is difficult to understand what they mean. One such scribe in the Tymovskoye district \\'as named Baccalaureate by the other scribes because of his florid style.

The Free Population - The Lower Ranks of the Local Military Command - Guards The Jntelligentsia

SOLDIers are called "Sakhalin pioneers" because they lived here before the establishment of penal servitude.¹ Beginning with the fifties, when Sakhalin was first occu- pied, and almost to the eighties, the soldiers performed all the work now being done by the convicts in addition to their military duties. The island was a wilderness. It had no dwellings, no roads, no cattle, and the soldiers were obliged to build barracks and houses, cut roads through the forest and carry burdens on their shoulders. If an official engineer or scientist arrived on Sakhalin, he was assigned several soldiers who were used in place of pack horses. The mining engineer Lopatin wrote: "Planning to go into the interior of the Sakhalin taiga, I couldn't even think of rid- ing horseback and transporting my baggage by pack horse. Even on foot I encountered great difficulties in climbing over the steep Sakhalin mountains, which are covered either with dense windfalls or by the local bamboo. In this man- ner I traveled over i,6oo versts on foot.² And following him walked soldiers lugging his heavy baggage on their backs.

The entire small force of soldiers was scattered over the western, southern and southeastern shores. The sites where they lived were called posts. Abandoned and forgotten to- day, at that time they played che same role as the settle- ments of today and were regarded as the nuclei of a future colony. A company of riflemen was stationed at the Murav- yevsky Post; three companies of the Fourth Siberian Bat- talion and a mining battery platoon were at the Korsakov

Post. The remaining posts, such as, for example, Manuisky and Sortunaisky, contained only six soldiers. The six men, separated from their company by a distance of several hun- dred versts and under the command of a corporal or even a civilian, lived like real Robinson Crusoes. Life was primi- tive, extremely monotonous and boring. If the post was situated on the seashore, a boat arrived in the summer with provisions and departed. In the winter a priest came to supervise the fast. Dressed in fur trousers and jacket, he looked more like a Gilyak than a priest. Misfortune brought the only variety into their life: a soldier was carried out to sea on a hay raft, or he was clawed by a bear, or he was snowbound, or he was attacked by escaped convicts, or scurvy insidiously crept upon him. Or, getting bored with sitting in the snow-covered shack or with walking around the taiga, he began manifesting "uproariousness, drunken- ness, impertinence," or was caught stealing or embezzling ammunition, or was coun-martialed for disrespect rendered to somcbody"s convict mistress.:!

Due to the diversity of his labors, the soldier did not have the time to improve his military training and forgot what he had bcen taught. The officers also became careless, while the drill unit was in a truly deplorable state. Reviews were always accompanied by misunderstandings and ex- pressions of dissatisfaction by the authorities.⁴

The service was harsh. People coming off sentry duty immediately went out on a convoy, from the convoy back to sentry duty or to the hayfields or to unload government cargo. There was no rest day or night. They lived in tight, cold and dirty quarters which differed little from the prisons. Until 1875 the Korsakov Post sentry lived in the penal prison. The military guardhouse was also situated there; it was nothing more than a dark and wretched hovel. "Perhaps such crowding is permissible for convicts as a punitive measure," writes Dr. Sintsovsky. "But a sentry is something else again and knows why he should be

made to suffer similar punishment."^

They ate the same wretched f^^ as the prisoners, and were dressed in tatters because no clothing could have with- stood the wear and tear resulting from their work. The soldiers who chased escaped convicts over the taiga tore their clothing and shoes so much that on one occasion in Southern Sakhalin they themselves were mistaken for es- caped convicts and shot at.

At the present time the island's military defense con- sists of four commands: Alexandrovsk, Due, Tymovsky and Korsakov. As of January, 1890, there were 1,548 men in the lower ranks of all four commands. As before, the sol- diers carry a heavy burden of work incommensurate with their strength, their intelligence and the requirements of military regulations. True, they no longer cut roads through the forest nor build barracks, but, as in former times, a soldier who returns from sentry duty or from drill can never depend on getting any rest; he may immediately be ordered out on a convoy, or sent to mow hay, or com- manded to capture escaped convicts. Supply requirements divert a significant number of soldiers, and this results in a constant shortage of men for convoy duty, and the sentries cannot be scheduled in three shifts. \'\'hen I was in Due at the beginning of August, Go men of the Due command were out mowing hay, half of them having marched out to hayfields 109 versts distant.

The Sakhalin soldier is meek, taciturn, obedient and sober. The only drunken soldiers who acted boisterously on the streets were those I saw at the Korsakov Post. They sing rarely, and it is always the same song: "Ten girls, and only one man. Where the girls go, there go I. ... The girls go into the forest, I'm right behind them. . . ." This is a gay song they sing with such ennui, such boredom that when you hear them you begin pining for your homeland and you feel all the wretchedness of the Sakhalin countryside. They humbly bear all privations, and they are indifferent to the dangers which so often threaten their lives and their health. But they are coarse, backward and confused, and from lack of opportunity they never come to be inspired with any military skills and have no conception of honor, and therefore they are continually commming the same mistakes as those enemies of order whom they are called upon to guard and to pursuc.⁰ They disclose their limita- tions in sharp relief when they find themselves unable to fulfill those obligations which demand some intelligence, as happens when they become prison guards.

In compliance with Article 27 of the Code ott Convict.r, prison surveillance in Sakhalin is maintained "by senior and junior guards, based on one senior guard for each 40 per- sons and I junior guard for each 20 prisoners, these being appointed yearly by the Main Prison Administration." There arc in fact 3 guards, I senior and 2 juniors, for 40 persons, that is, 1 to 13. If you imagine 13 men working, eating and passing their time in prison under the constant supervision of one conscientious and experienced man, and that over him in turn there is a superior officer in the per- son of the warden, and over the warden there is the district commandant, and so on, then you can rest content with the thought that everything is wonderfully under control. But in fact supervision is the worst aspect of the penal system in Sakhalin.

At present there arc some i 50 senior guards on Sakha- lin and twice as many junior guards. The senior guards are literate noncommissioned officers and privates who com- pleted their terms of service in local regiments, and in- cluded among them arc a few intellectuals who do not belong to the privileged classes. Lower ranks in service constitute 6 percent of the total number of senior guards, but the functions of these junior guards is almost exclu- sively carried out by privates who have been detached from local regiments. \'\'hen there is not a full complement of guards, the Code permits appointments from the lower ranks of the local regiments to perform guard duty. Thus young Siberians regarded as being incapable of convoy duty arc ordered to perform guard duty. This is a "temporary measure" and "within the limits of dire necessity," but this "temporary measure' has been dragging on for dozens of years and "the limits of dire necessity" are constantly ex- panding so that the lower ranks of the local military de- tachments already comprise 73 percent of the junior guards and nobody can guarantee that within two to three years this figure will not grow to ioo percent.⁷

There are many guards in prison but there is no order, and the guards are a constant drag on the administration, as the island commandant himself has said. He penalizes them nearly every day in his daily orders, decreases their salary or discharges them. He will discharge one for un- reliability and nonperformance of duties, a second for im- morality, unlawful behavior and stupidity, a third for stealing government supplies entrusted to him, a fourth for hiding them. A fifth, who was assigned w a barge, nm only did not keep the prisoners in order but set them a bad example by stealing Greek nuts; a sixth is under judicial examination for selling governmcnt oxen and nails; a sevemh has more than once been observed in the illegal use of forage for the govcrnmcnt caulc; an eighth for repre- hensible behavior toward convicts.

We learn from the daily orders that one senior guard from the ranks who was on duty in the prison tok the libcny of entcring the women's barracks through the win- dow after bending back the bars, the aim being a romamic alliance. Another guard on night duty allowed a private, also a guard, to cmcr the quaners where unmarried women prisoners were being held.

The guards' amorous adventures arc not only limited to thc cramped area of the women's barracks and their private quartcrs. I found adolesccnt girls in thc guards' quaners, and when I asked them who they were, they said, "I am a cohabitam." You cmer the quartcrs occupied by a guard, and you find a man who is thick-set, well-fed and fleshy, his waistcoat unbuuoned and wearing squeaky new boots; he is siuing at a table and drinking tea. A pale fourteen- year-old girl with a weary face sits at the window. He usually calls himself a noncommissioned officer, a senior guard, and says that the girl is the daughter of one of the convicts, that she is sixteen years old, and is his cohabitant.

While on duty at the prison the guards permit the prisoners to play cards and they join in themselves. In the daily orders we hear of violent behavior, insubordination, extremely impertinent behavior toward superiors in the presence of convicts, and we also hear of prisoners being beaten over the head with canes, which cause head wounds.

These guards are callous and backward; they are drunk- ards and play cards with the convicts, eagerly accept love and liquor from the female convicts, are undisciplined and unscrupulous and thus can exert only a negative type of authority. The exile population does not respect them and acts with contemptuous indifferencc toward them. They call them mkhamiki [dried biscuits] to their faces and address them with the familiar second pcrson singular. The ad- ministration does nothing to raise their prestige, probably becausc it feels that such attempts would bc useless. The officials addrcss the guards familiarly and revile them in from of thc convicts. In this way we often hear: "What are you looking at, you idiot?" or "You don't undcrstand any- thing, you blockhead!" How little the guards are respectcd is dcmonstratcd by the fact that many arc assigned "tasks which do not conform with thcir status," mcaning that thcy act as flunkeys and errand boys for the officials. As though ashamcd of their duties, thc guards belonging to the privi- legcd class attcmpt to distinguish thcmselvcs from the rest, and so you find one wearing widcr braid on his shoulders, another wears an officer's cockade, and a third, the college registrar, does not rcfcr to himself as a guard in official documents, but as a "dircctor of labor and laborers."

Sincc thc Sakhalin guards never had any idea of the meaning of surveillance, it followed inevitably that the very purposes of surveillance degenerated slowly, over a period of time, to thcir present low status. Surveillance deterio- rated to such a degree that all the guard does now is to sit in a ward, see that "thcy don't raise a hullabaloo," and complain to the authorities. \'V'hile on duty he i/ armed with a revolver, which he fortunately does not know how to use, and a sabre, which he has difficulty in drawing from its rusty sheath. He hovers around, watches them at their work without participating in it, smokes and feels bored. In the prison he is merely a servant who opens and closes doors, and when the prisoners are out on a job he is super- fluous.

Ahhough 3 guards are supposed to be assigned to every 40 prisoners, 1 senior and 2 junior guards, ncvenheless you always encoumcr 40 to 50 men working under the super- vision of one guard, or with no guard at all. If 1 of the 3 guards is out at work, the second stands at the governmem store and salutes passing officials, and the third languishes in somebody"s vestibule or, ahhough it is not required of him, he stands at auemion in the infirmary waiting room.^H

Very Jittle can be said about the imdlcctuals. To have to punish your fellowmen because you are under oath and in duty bound to do so, constantly violating your feelings of repugnance and horror, knowing that you are far away from anywhere, ill-paid and bored, in cominual proximity with shaved heads, chains, executioners, bribes, fights, and with the knowledge of your complete helplessness to com- bat the encompassing evil—all these things make service in the penal administration exceptionally difficult and for- bidding. There was a time when these civil scrvams were slovenly, ncgligem and slothful, and it made no difference to them where they served so long as they could cat, drink, sleep and play cards. Then, of necessif, respectable people were employed, but they left their posts at the first oppor- tunity or else they became confirmed drunkards, or went insane, or committcd suicide. Slowly they were engulfed in the poisonous atmosphere, as by an eight-armed octopus, and they, too, began stealing and beating prisoners savagely.

If we are to judge by official repons and correspond- ence, the Sakhalin imclligentsia in the '6os and '70S was distinguished by its nihilism. Under the officials then in charge the prisons became nests of corruption and gam- bling dens. Debauched, hardened and unrepentant peo- ple were sometimes beaten to death. The most extraordi- nary administrator was a certain Major Nikolayev, who was the warden of the Due prison for seven years. His name is often mentioned in the correspondence.^,J He had been a serf recruit. There is no information concerning those abilities which smoothed the road for this gross, uncouth man, and so enabled him to attain the rank of major. When one correspondent asked him if he had ever visited the interior of the island and what he saw there, the major answered, "A mountain and a valley—a valley and again a mountain; obviously the soil is volcanic, and it erupts." When asked to describe something called ramson, he an- swered, "First of all, it is not a thing, it is a plant, and secondly, it is most beneficial and tasty; it is true it pro- duces wind in the bclly, but we don't care a rap about that; after all, wc don't go into the company of ladies."

He substituted barrels for whcclbarrows as a means of transporting coal, so that it would be easier to roll them along gangways. He also placed convict offenders in barrels and ordcred them to be rolled along the shore. "You know, when thcy roll that sweetheart around for an hour, the fellow becomes as gentle as silk." Desiring to teach the soldiers their numbers, he resorted to playing lotto. "When a number is called, whocver cannot cover it himself must pay a grivemiik [ten-kopeck silver coin]. Hell pay once or twicc, and thcn hc'll undcrstand that it isn't profitable. The ncxt time you'll find him laboriously studying his numbcrs and he learns them in a week." Similar absurdities reacted unfavorably on the Due soldicrs; at times they sold their weapons to thc convicts. When the major was about to give a thrashing to a convict, hc announced that the man would not come out of it alive and, in fact, the offender died immediately after the beating. Following this incident Major Nikolayev was tricd and sentenced to penal servitude.

When you ask an old settler if there have ever been any good people on the island in his time, he remains silent for a while, as if remembering, and finally he says, "There were all kinds." Nowhere are past times so quickly for- gotten as on Sakhalin, and this is because of the extraordi- nar/ turnover in the convict population, which changes basically every five years, and partly because of the lack of accurate archives in the local offices. What transpired twenty to twenty-five years ago is considered to belong to a dark antiquity, already forgotten, lost to history. What survived consists only of a few buildings, Mikryukov, about a score of anecdotes, and also some figures which cannot be trusted because there was not even one department which knew how many prisoners there were on the island, how many had escaped, died and so on.

"Prehistoric" times continued on Sakhalin until 1878, when Prince Nikolay Shakhovskoy, a distinguished admin- istrator and an intelligent and honorable man,¹⁰ was ap- pointed the leading authority over the penal convicts in the Primorskaya oblast. He left a work which is exemplary on many accounts. A copy of The Problem of Organizing Sakhaliii Island is to be found in the office of the island commandant. By preference the Prince was a man who kept to his desk. Under him the prisoners were no better off than they were before, but the observations which he shared with the administration and his staff, and his book, which was thoroughly candid and quite uninfluenced by outside sources, served as the forerunner of new and more beneficent ideas.

In 1879 the Voluntary Fleet began to function and slowly positions on Sakhalin began to be filled by natives of European Russia. In 1884 a new order was instituted on Sakhalin which stimulated an intensified influx, or as they say here, an infusion of new people. ¹¹

At the present time we have three district towns in which officials and officers reside with their families. So- ciety is already so varied and well-educated that in Alex- androvsk, for example, they were able to present an amateur production of Zhenitba [The Wedding] in 1888. For the usual entertainments offered by officials and military officers on the great feast days in Alexandrovsk, they have now substituted gifts of money to poor convict families and poor children. The subscription list usually contains about forty signatures.

Sakhalin society makes a favorable impression on a visitor. It is cordial and hospitable, and can stand compari- son with our own social communities in all respects. It considers itself the most vivacious and interesting on the eastern shore. At any rate, officials here are reluctant to transfer to Nikolayevsk or De Kastri. But just as violent storms occur in the Tatar Suait and the sailors proclaim that these are the ahermath of a cyclone raging in the Chinese or Japanese seas, so in the same way the recem past and the proximity of Siberia reverberate on this so- ciety's life.

The type of rascals who came to work here aher the reforms of 1884 can be seen from the dismissal notices, from accoums of trials, and from official repons on acts of disorderly conduct which reached the poim of "insolem corruption" (Order No. 87, 1890). These are also evidem from anecdotes told about them, like the one about the weahhy convict Zolotarev, who associated with officials, caroused and played cards with them. When this man's wife found him in the company of the officials, she took to rebuking him for associating with people who could be a bad influence on his morals.

Even now we find officials who think nohing of beating a convict over the face, even when he belongs to the privi- leged class, and when a convict has failed to remove his cap quickly enough, he is told "to go to the guard and tell him to give you thirty lashes." Even tday we hear of such irregularities as the fact that two prisoners were believed t be absem at some unknown place for a year when they were actually receiving rations and being assigned to work (Order No. 87, 1890).

No every warden knows exacdy how many prisoners live in the prison at any particular dme, exacdy how many are fed from the common kettle, how many escaped and so on. The island commandam himself declares: "The general condition of affairs in all branches of administra- tion in the Alexandrovsk disuict leaves a distressing im- pression and requires many serious improvemems." Con- cerning the actual conduct of affairs, it was leh too much to the discretion of the clerks, who "run things without any comrol over them, judging by some accidemally dis- covered forgeries" (Order No. 314, 1888).¹²

I will speak in an appropriate place of the grievous plight in which the department of investigation finds itself in Sakhalin.

At the post and telegraph office the officials are rude and ill-disposed to their clients. Mail is distributed four or five days after its receipt. The telegraph men are ignorant; telegraph secrecy is nm maintained. I did not receive even one telegram which was no mutilated in the most barbaric fashion. Once when a piece of someone else's telegram was somehow included in mine, and I asked that the error be rectified so that I could find out the meaning of both tele- grams, they told me it could only be done at my expense.

An obvious role is being played in Sakhalin's new his- tory by representatives of the late administrative structure of the island, mixtures of Dcrzhimorda¹³ and Iago—men who in their dealings with inferiors recognize nothing but fists, lashes and abusive language, while they propitiate their superiors by their intellectualism and even by their liberalism.

Neverthcless, the "House of the Dead' no longer exists. Among the intellectuals working in office positions on Sa- khalin I met intelligent, good and honorable people whose presence is sufficient guarantee that the past cannm come back again. They no longer roll convicts in barrels and a prisoner can no longer be beaten to death or driven to suicide without shocking the local community and without its being discussed along the Amur and all over Siberia. Every evil action comes to the surface sooner or later, and becomes notorious; the proof of this lies in the grim past, when, in spite of all efforts to conceal them, these crimes aroused a good deal of talk and reached the newspapers, thanks to the intelligentsia of Sakhalin. Good people and good deeds are no longer a rarity. Recently a woman who had been a doctor's assistant died in Rykovskoye. She had served many years on Sakhalin because of her desire t devme her life to the suffering. One day while I was in Korsakov a convict was carried out to sea on a hay raft. The prison warden, Major S., went out on the sea in a cutter and, although caught in a storm which threatened his life, he spent the night until two o'clock in the morning at sea until he was able to locate the hay raft and rescue the convict.¹⁴

The reforms of 1884 demonstrated that the more nu- merous the administration in the penal colony, the better. The complexity and dispersion of affairs demand a complex mechanism and the participation of many people. It is important that minor matters should not distract officials from their main duties. Furthermore, because the island commandant has no secretary or government employee always available, he has to spend the greater part of the day issuing orders and preparing documents, and this com- plicated and tedious office work takes up almost all the time which should be spent in visiting prisons and making the rounds of settlemems.

In addition to being in charge of the police depan- ments, the district commanders must distribute food rations to the women, participate in all kinds of commissions, inspections, etc. The prison wardens and their assistams are charged with the duties of investigation and policing. Under such conditions the Sakhalin official must either work beyond the Iimits of his strength and, as the saying goes, until he goes insane, or he can throw up his hands and place the entire burden on his convict clerks, as most often happens. In local offices the convict clerks are not only kept busy copying, but they also have to write out impor- tant documents. Since they are often more experienced and more energetic than the officials, and this is true especially of novices, the convict or settler sometimes has to do all the work of the office, writing up all the account books, and doing all the necessary investigation. Then, after work- ing for many years, the clerk, through either ignorance or malice, mixes up all the documents, and since he is the only one who can make head or tail of the mess, he be- comes indispensable and irreplaceable; the result is that the administration cannot do without his services. There is only one way to get rid of such a clerk—by replacing him with one or two honest officials.

\Vhere there exists a large number of educated people, a public opinion inevitably arises; and then there is no question of anyone, even a Major Nikolayev, setting him- self up with impunity against the moral law and customary

ethical behavior. And as community life develops, so gov- ernment service slowly begins to lost its forbidding charac- ter, and the number of insane, drunkards and suicides decreases.¹^

See N. V. Busse, Sakhalin Island and the Expedition of 1853- '854•

Lopatin, ''Report to the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia/' Mining Journal (1870), No. io.

At the Korsakov Police Department I saw the following per- taining to I 870:

List for the lower ranks stationed m the Post at the Putyatinsky coal mines on the Sortunay River.

Vasily Vedernikov—as the senior, he is a ^^tmaker, and serves as the baker and cook.

Luka Pylkov—demoted from senior for negligence and arrested for drunkenness and impertinence.

Khariton Mylnikov—was not caught at anything, but is lazy.

Evgraf Raspopov—an idiot and incapable of any work.

Fedor Cheglokov} ^{Wefe caught stea}'^{ing mone}y ^an.d ^{in my}

G rig₀fy I _vanov ( P^fesence were observed behavmg vio- ' I ent ly, bemg d runk and insu bofdinate.

—The Post Commandant at the

Putyatinsky coal mine on Sakhalin Island, DISTRICT SECRETARY F. LITKE

N. Sm iy tells the story that not so long ago, in 1885, a

general who was reviewing the Sakhalin army asked a soldief pfison guafd:

"Why afe you caffying a fevolvef?"

"To intimidate the penal convicts, youf wofship!"

"Then shoot at that tfee stump," the genefal commanded.

Gfeat confusion followed. The soldief was unable to with- dfaw the fevolvef ffom his holstef no mattef how he tfied, and he succeeded only when someone came to his assistance. He faised the revolver and was handling it so inexpeftly that the ofdef was countefmanded. Instead of hitting the tree stump he could easily have sent a bullet into an onlookef.

—Kronstadt Newr (1890), No. 23

Sintsovsky, "Hygienic Conditions of the Convicts," Health (1875), No. 16.

⁶ In the Voyevodsk prison I was shown a convict, a former convoy soldier, who had aided vagrants to escape in Khabarovka and had escaped with them. In the summer of i 890 a free woman accused of arson was being held in the Rykovskoye prison. The prisoner Andreyev, who was in the neighboring cell, complained that he could not sleep nights because the convoy guards were visiting this woman and carousing. The district commandant solved the problem by replacing the lock on her cell and taking the key with him. The guards found another key to fit the lock, and the district commandant could no longer control them. The nightly orgies continued.

' This gives rise to an obvious injustice: The better soldiers who remain with their regiments receive only their soldiers' rations, while the less skilled soldiers serving at the prison receive both their rations and a salary. Prince Shakhovskoy complained in his book The Probtem of Orgonizing Sakhalin Islond: "The main con- tingent of the guards (66 percent) consists of privates from local regiments who receive a government salary of twelve rubles and 50 kopecks per month. Their illiteracy, low level of intelligence, and their complaisant attitude toward the bribes which fall within the scope of their activity, and also their complete lack of military discipline and their incomparably greater freedom of action result not infrequently in unlawful arbitrary treatment of the prisoners or in undue degradation before them." The present commandant of the island is of the opinion that "many years of experience have demonstrated the utter unreliability of guards detached from the local regiments."

^M The senior guards receive 480 rubles and the junior guards 2 16 rubles annually. After some time this salary is increased by one- third and then by two-thirds, and is sometimes even doubled. Such a salary is considered excellent, and minor officials such as tele- graph operators are tempted to leave their posts to become guards at the first oppormnity. It is feared that if schoolteachers are even- rually assigned to Sakhalin and paid the customary 20 to 25 rubles per month, they will definitely leave their positions to be- come guards.

Because it was impossible to find free people locally who would take on guard duty and equally impossible to recruit more men from the local regiments without seriously diminishing their ranks, the island commandant in i 888 decided to enlist settlers and peasants who were formerly convicts into guard duty, if they were found to be reliable and could pass the tests. But this measure was unsuccessful.

⁹ See Lukashevich, "My Acquaintances in Due on Sakhalin," Kronstodt News (1868), Nos. 47 and 49.

Prior to 1875, penal servitude on Northern Sakhalin was under the direction of the supervisor of the Due Post, an officer whose superior lived in Nikolayevsk. After 1875 Sakhalin was divided into two districts: Northern Sakhalin and Southern Sakha- lin. Both districts, which were part of the Primorskaya Oblast, were subject to the military governor in civil affairs and to the commander of the army of the Primorskaya Oblast in military affairs. Local administration was entrusted to district commandants. The title of Commandant of Northern Sakhalin was given to the supervisor of convicts on Sakhalin Island and Primorskaya Oblast, who resided in Due, and the title Commandant of the Southern District was given to the officer in command of the 4th East Siberian Line Battalion, who resided in Korsakov. The local gov- ernment, both military and civil, was concentrated in the hands of the district commandants. The administration was entirely military.

According to this new state of affairs the chief governing power over Sakhalin was entrusted to the Governor-General of the Pria- mur region, and the local government was entrusred to the island commandant, who was appointed from among the military gen- erals. The island was divided into three districts. The prisons and settlements in each disrrict were under the aurhority of district commandants, who correspond to our district police captains. They were in charge of the police administration. Each prison and the nearby settlements were administered by a prison warden. When settlements arc administered by a special official, he is called the supervisor of settlements. Both of these positions correspond to our district police officer. Working under the island commandant is an office manager, a bookkeeper and treasurer, an agricultural inspec- tor, a land surveyor, an architect, a translator of the Ainu and Gilyak languages, the supervisor of the central warehouses and the chief of the medical department. Each of the four military com- mands must have a staff officer, two officers, and a physician. In addition there is an adjutant for administering the armed forces on Sakhalin Island, his aide and an auditor. There are also four priests and those other employees who are not directly connected with the prison, such as the manager of the post and telegraph office, his assistant, the telegraph operators and two lighthouse keepers.

One day of rummaging through office materials is sufficient to drive one to despair over the inflated figures, false totals and the "idle fabrications" of the various assistants to the wardens, senior guards and clerks. I was completely unable to find any reports on the year 1886. I find penciled annotations in the reports reading: "Obviously this is untrue." Particularly extensive fabrications were noted in sections dealing with the convicts' family status, children and the lists of crimes committed by the convicts. The island commandant told me that one day when he wanted to know how many prisoners arrived yearly from Russia on the ships of the Voluntary Fleet, beginning with I 879, he was forced to re- quest this information from Prison Administrative Headquarters because the local offices did not have the requisite figures. The island commandant complains in one of his reports: "Regardless of repeated requests, no information on I 886 has been produced. I am placed at an even greater disadvantage because it is im- possible for me to establish the exact information because of the lack of data. No data was collected in former years. Thus, at present it is extremely difficult to learn the number of personnel as of January 1, 1 887, as well as of settlers and peasants."

1³ The obscene police captain in Gogol's play Revizor.—TRANS.

h In fulfilling their duties the local officials are often exposed to serious dangers. When he traveled on foot along the entire length of the Poronaya River and back, Butakov, the commander of the Tymovsky district, contracted dysentery and almost perished. One day Bcly, the commander of the Korsakov district, was traveling by whaleboat from Korsakov to Mayka. A storm rose, and they were forced out to sea. The boat was battered by waves for almost forty-eight hours, and Mr. Bely himself, his rower, who was a convict, and a soldier who found himself on the whaleboat by chance decidcd that the end had come. They were cast ashore near the Krilon lighthouse. When Bely met the lighthouse keeper and saw himself in a mirror, he found gray hairs where there were none before. The soldier fell asleep and could not be awakened for forty hours.

¹⁵ Today such diversions as amateur plays, picnics and evening parties are becoming frequent. Formerly it was difficult even to organize a game of preference. Intellectual interests arc also being increasingly cared for. Journals, newspapers and ^roks are on order. Telegrams come daily from eastern agencies. There are pianos in many homes. Local ^^ts find readers and audiences. At one time a handwritten journal, Butonchilz [Little Bud], was pub- lished in Alexandrovsk, but it stopped with the seventh issue. Senior officials are provided by the government with warm and spacious accommodation; they have chefs and horses. Minor offi- cials rent quarters from the settlers, taking either an entire house or furnished rooms with all the necessary appurtenances. The young official, a ^^t, whom I mentioned at the beginning rented a room decorated with numerous paintings, a fancy bed with a canopy, and there was even a tapestry on the wall depicting a horseman shooting a tiger.

The island commandant receives 7 ,ooo rubles, the director of the medical department 4,ooo, the agricultural inspector 3,500, the architect 3,100, and the district commanders 3,500 rubles each. Every three years an official is granted six months' leave of absence, his position remaining secure. In five years he gets a 25 percent raise in salary. In ten years he goes on pension. Two years is counted as three years of service. Travel allowances are also not skimpy. A prison warden's assistant who has no rank receives a travel allowance from Alexandrovsk ro Petersburg in the amount of 1,945 rubles, 68 ^ kopecks. This is a sum which would be sufficient to make a trip around the world in complete comfort (Orders No. 302 and 305, 1889). Travel allowances are also issued on retirement and to those who take a leave of absence, both five and ten years after entering the service. They do not have to take a leave of absence, and these travel allowances serve as additional compensation. Priests receive travel allowances for all the members of their families. An official going into retirement usually requests a travel allowance during the winter to Petro- pavlovsk, which is some 8,500 miles away, or to Kholmogorsky Uyezd, which is 7,000 miles away. Simultaneously while applying for retirement he sends a telegram to the Prison Administrative Headquarters with a request for passage for himself and his family to Odessa on a ship belonging to the Voluntary Fleet. It should be added that while an official serves on Sakhalin, his children are educated at government expense.

Nevertheless, the local officials are dissatisfied with life. They are irritable, argue among themselves over trifles, and are bored. A predisposition to consumption, and nervous and psychic dis- orders can be observed among them and among members of their families. During my stay in Alexandrovsk one young official, a kindly man, always carried a tremendous revolver, even in day- time. When I asked him why he carried such a cumbersome weapon in his pocket, he said seriously:

"Two officials are planning to beat me and have already attacked me once."

"And what can you do with the revolver?"

"It's very simple. I won't stand on ceremony, and I'll kill them like dogs."

XXI The Morality of the Exile

PopJilation - Crimes - Investigation and Trial ; Punishment - Birch Rods and Lashes - The Death Penalty

some convicts bear their punishment with fortitude, readily admit their guilt, and when you ask them why they came to Sakhalin, they usually answer, "They do not send anyone here for their good deeds." Others astonish you with their cowardice and the melancholy face they show to the world. They grumble, they weep, are driven to despair, and swear they are innocent. One considers his punishment a blessing because, he says, only in penal servitude did he find God. Another attempts to escape at the first opportu- nity, and when they catch up with him, he turns on his captors and clubs them. Accidental transgressors, "un- fortunates," and those innocently sentenced' live under one roof with inveterate and incorrigible criminals and outcasts.

When the general question of morality is discussed, we must admit that the exile population produces an extremely mixed and confusing impression, and with the existing means of research it is scarcely possible to form any serious generalizations. The morality of a population is usually judged by statistics of crimes, but even this normal and simple method is useless in a penal colony. The strictly nominal infractions of the law, the self-imposed rules and the transgressions of the convict population living under abnormal and exceptional conditions—all these things which we consider petry violations are regarded as serious crimes in Sakhalin, and conversely a large number of seri- ous crimes committed here are not regarded as crimes at all, because they are considered perfectly normal and inevitable phenomena in the atmosphere of the prison.²

The vices and perversions which may be observed among the exiles are those which are peculiar to enslaved, subjected, hungry and frightened people. Lying, cunning, cowardice, meanness, informing, robbery, every kind of secret vice—such is the arsenal which these slavelike peo- ple, or at least the majority of them, employ against the officials and guards they despise, fear and regard as their enemies. The exile resorts to deceit in order to evade hard labor or corporal punishment and to secure a piece of bread, a pinch of tea, salr or tobacco, because experience has proved to him that deceit is the best and most dependable strategy in the struggle for existence. Thievery is common and is regarded as a legitimate business.

The prisoners grab up everything that is not well hid- den with the tenacity and avarice of hungry locusts, and they give preference to edibles and clothing. They steal from each other in the prison; they steal from settlers, and at their work, and when loading ships. The virtuosity of their dexterous thieving may be judged by the frequency with wbich they practice their art. One day they stole a live ram and a whole tub of sour dough from a ship in Due. l1ie barge had not yet left the ship, but the loot could not be found. On another occasion they robbed the com- mander of a ship, unscrewing the lamps and the ship's compass. On still another occasion they entered the cabin of a foreign ship and stole the silverware. During the un- loading of cargo whole bales and barrels vanish.^:i

A convict takes his recreation secretly and furtively. In order to obtain a glass of vodka, which under ordinary cir- cumstances costs only five kopecks, he must surreptitiously approach a smuggler and if he has no money he must pay in bread or clothing. His sole niental diversion—card- playing—can only be enjoyed at night in the light of candle stubs or in the taiga. All secret amusements, when repeated, slowly develop into passions. The extreme imita- tiveness among the convicts causes one prisoner to infect another and finally such seeming inanities as contraband vodka and card-playing lead to unbelievalie lawlessness. As I have already said, kulaks among the convicts often amass fortunes. This means that alongside convicts who possess 30,000 to 50,000 rubles, you find people who systematically squander their f^^ and clothing.

Card-playing has infected all the prisons like an epi- demic. The prisons are large gambling houses, while the settlements and posts are their branches. Gambling is ex- ceptionally widespread. They say that during a chance search the organizers of the local card games were found to be in possession of hundreds and thousands of rubles, and they are in direct communication with the Siberian prisons, notably the prison at Irkutsk, where, so the prisoners say, they play "real" cards.

There are several gambling houses in Alexandrovsk. There was even a scandal in a gambling house on Second Kirpichnaya Street, which is characteristic of similar haunts. A guard lost everything and shot himself. Playing faro dulls the brain and acts like a narcotic. The convict loses his food and clothing, feels neither hunger nor cold, and suffers no pain when he is beaten. And how strange it is that even when they are loading a ship, and the coal barge is bumping broadside against the ship, and the waves are smashing against it and they are growing green with sea- sickness, even then they play cards on the barge and casual everyday expressions are mingled with words which arise purely from card-playing: "Push off!" "Two on the side!" "''ve got it!"

Furthermore, the subservient status of the woman, her poverty and degradation, are conducive to the develop- ment of prostitution. When I asked in Alexandrovsk if there were any prostitutes there, they answered, "As many as you want.'"⁴ Because of the tremendous demand, neither old age, nor ugliness, nor even tertiary syphilis is an impediment. Even extreme youth is no hindrance. I met a sixteen-year-old girl on a street in Alexandrovsk, and they say she has been engaged in prostitution since she was nine years old. The girl has a mother, but a family background on Sakhalin does not always save a young girl from disaster. They talk about a gypsy who sells his daughters and even haggles over them. One free woman in Alexandrovsk has an "establishment," in which only her own daughters operate. In Alexandrovsk corruption is generally of an urban char- acter. There are "family baths" run by a Jew, and the names of the professional panderers are known.

According to government data, incorrigible criminals, those who have been resentenced by the district court, comprise 8 percent of the convicts as of January 1, 1890. Among the incorrigibles were some who have been sen- tenced three, four, five and even six times. There are 175 persons who through their incorrigibility have spent twenty to fifty years in penal servitude—i.e., 3 percent of the total. But these are exaggerated figures for incorrigibles, since the majority of them were shown to have been resentenced for attempts to escape. And these figures are inaccurate with regard to attempted escapes, because those who have been caught are not always brought to trial but are most frequently punished in the usual fashion. The extent to which the exile population is delinquent or, in other words, criminally inclined is presently unknown.

True, they do try people here for crimes, but many cases are dismissed because the culprits cannot be found, many are rerurned for additional information or clarifica- tion of jurisdiction, or the trial remains at a standstill be- cause the necessary information has not been received from the various Siberian offices. Finally, after a great deal of red tape, the documents go into the archives upon the death of the accused, or if nothing more is heard of him after his escape. Credence is attached to evidence by young people who have received no education, while the Khabarovsk court tries people from Sakhalin in absentia, basing its verdict only on documents.

During 1889, 243 convicts were under juridical in- vestigation or on trial, that is, one defendant for every 25 convicts. There were 69 settlers under investigation and on trial, i.e., one in 55. Only 4 peasants were under investigation, i.e., one in 1 15. From these ratios it is evi- dent that with the easing of his lot and with the transition of the convict to a starus giving him more freedom, the chances of being brought to trial are decreased by half each time. All these figures penain to persons on trial and under investigation, but do not necessarily represem crimes com- mined in 1889, because the files dealing with these crimes refer to trials begun many years ago and not yet completed. These figures give the reader some idea of the tremendous number of people on Sakhalin who languish year after year in the courts and under investigation, because their cases have been drawn oll[ over a period of years. The reader can well imagine how destrunively this system reans on the economy and on the spirit of the people."

Investigation is usually emrusted to the prison warden's assistam or to the secretary of the police depanmem. Ac- cording to the island commandam, "investigations are begun on insufficient information, they are conducted slug- gishly and clumsily, and the prisoners are detained without any reason." A suspect or an accused person is arrested and put in a cell. \'\!hen a settler was killed at Goly Mys, four men werc suspened and arrested.⁰ They were placed in dark cold cells. In a few days three were released, and only one was detained. He was put in chains and orders were issued to give him hot food only every third day. Then, by order of thc warden, he was given 100 lashes. A hungry, frightened man, he was kept in a dark cell until he con- fessed. The free woman Garanina was detained in the prison at the same time on suspicion of having murdered her husband. She was also placed in a dark cell and received hot food every third day. When one official questioned her in my presence, she said that she had been ill for a long time and that for some rcason they would not permit a dotor to see her. When the official asked the guard in charge of the cells why they had not troubled to get a donor for her, he answered, "I wem to the honorable warden, but he only said, 'Let her croak.' "

This incapacity to differemiate imprisonmem before trial from puniti%'e imprisonmem (and this in a dark cell of a convict prison), the incapacity to differentiate between frce people and convicts amazed me especially because the local district commander is a law-school graduate and the prison warden was at one time a member of the Petersburg Police Department.

I visited the cells a second time early in the morning in the company of the island commandant. Four convicts sus- pected of murder were released from their cells; they were shivering with cold. Garanina, in stockings and without shoes, was shivering and blinking in the light. The com- mandant ordered her transferred to a room with good light. I saw a Georgian flitting like a shadow around the entrance to the cells. He has been held for five months in the dark hallway on suspicion of poisoning and is awaiting investi- gation. The assistant prosecutor does not live on Sakhalin and there is nobody to supervise an investigation. The direction and speed of an investigation are totally depend- ent on various circumstances which had no reference to the case itself. I read in one report that the murder of a certain Yakovleva was committed "'with the intent of rob- bery with a preliminary attempt at rape, which is evidenced by the rumpled bedding and fresh scratches and impres- sions of heel spikes on the backboard of the bed." Such a consideration predetermines the outcome of the trial; an autopsy is not considered necessary in such cases. In 1888 an escaped convict murdered Private Khromarykh and the autopsy was only conducted in 1889 on the demand of the prosecutor when the investigation had been completed and the case brought to trial.⁷

Article 469 of the Code permits the local administration to specify and carry out punishment without any formal police investigation for such crimes and offenses by crimi- nals for which punishment is due according to the general criminal laws, not excluding the loss of all personal rights and privileges in imprisonment. Generally the petry cases on Sakhalin are judged by a formal police court which is under the authoriry of the police department. Notwith- standing the broad scope of this local court, which has jurisdiction over all petry crimes as well as over a multi- tude of cases which are only nominally regarded as petry, the local communiry does not enjoy justice and Jacks a court of law. Where an official has the right, according to law, to flog and incarcerate people without trial and with- out investigation and even to send them to hard labor in the mines, the existence of a court of law has merely formal significance.⁸

Punishment for serious crimes is decided by the Primorskaya district court, which settles cases only on documentary evidence without questioning the defendants or witnesses. The decision of a district court is always pre- sented for approval to the island commandant, who, if he disagrees with the verdict, settles the case on his own authority. If the sentence is changed, the fact is reported to the ruling senate. If the administration considers a crime as being more serious than it appears to be on the official record, and if it regards the punishment as insuffi- cient according to the Code on Convicti, then it petitions for arraignment of the defendant before a court-martial.

The punishment usually inflicted upon convicts and set- tlers is distinguished by extraordinary severity. Our Code 011 Convicti is at odds with the spirit of the times and of the laws, and this is especially evident in the sections con- cerning punishment. Punishments which humiliate the of- fender, embitter him and contribute to his moral degrada- tion, those punishments which have long since been regarded as intolerable among free men, are still being used here against settlers and convicts. It is as though exiles were less subject to the dangers of becoming bitter and callous, and losing their human dignity. Birch rods, whips, chains, iron balls, punishments which shame the victim and cause pain and torment to his body, are used extensively. Floggings with birch rods and whips are habit- ual for all kinds of transgressions, whether small or large. It is the indispensable mainstay of all punishment, some- times supplementing other forms of chastisement, or used alone.

The most frequently used punishment is flogging with birch rods.⁹ As shown in the official report, this punishment was imposed on 282 convicts and settlers in Alexandrovsk in 1889 by orders of the administration: corporal punish- ment, i.e., with birch rods, was inflicted on 265, while 17 were punished in other ways. The administration used birch rods in 94 out of 100 cases. In fact, the number of criminals suffering corporal punishment is far from being accurately recorded in the reports. The reports of the Tymovsky district for i 889 show that only 57 convicts were beaten with birch rods and only 3 are recorded in Korsakov; although the truth is that they flog several peo- ple every day in both districts, and sometimes there are 10 a day in Korsakov.

All sort of transgressions my result in a man's getting thirty to a hundred strokes with birch rods: nonperform- ance of the daily work quota (for example, if the shoe- maker did not sew his required three pairs of shoes), drunkenness, vulgarity, insubordination. . . . If 20 to 30 men fail to complete their work quota, all 20 to 30 are beaten. One official told me:

The prisoners, especially those in irons, like to present absurd petitions. When I was appointed here, I toured the prison and received 50 petitions. I accepted them, and then announced that those whose petitions do not deserve atten- tion would be punished. Only 2 of the petitions proved to be worthwhile, the remainder were nonsense. I ordered 48 men to be flogged. The next time 2 5 were flogged, and later fewer and fewer, and now they no longer send me petitions. I cured them of the habit.

In the South, as a result of a convict's denunciation, a search was made of another convict's possessions and a diary was found which was presumed to contain drafts of correspondence carried on with friends at home. They gave him fifty strokes with birch rods and kept him i 5 days in a dark cell on bread and water. With the knowledge of the district commander, the inspector in Lyutoga gave cor- poral punishment to nearly everyone. Here is how the island commandant describes it:

The commander of the Korsakov district informed me about the extremely serious instances of excessive authority used by X., who ordered some settlers to receive corporal punishment far beyond the limits set by the law. This in- stance, shocking in itself, is even more shocking when the circumstances which provoked the punishment are analyzed. There had been a quite commonplace and futile brawl be- tween exiled setders; and it made no difference to him whether he punished the innocent or the guilty, or pregnant women. [Order No. 258, 1888.}

Usually an offender receives 30 to 100 strokes with birch rods. This depends on who gave the order to punish him, the district commander or the warden. The former has the right to order up to 100, thc lauer up to 30. One warden always gave 30. Once when he was required to take the place of the district commander, he immediately raised his customary allotment to 100, as though this hun- dred strokes with birch rods was an indispensable mark of his new authorif. He did not change the number until the district commander returned, and then in the same con- scientious manner he resumed the old figure of 30. Because of its very frequent application, flogging with birch rods has become debased. It no longer causes abhorrence or fear among many prisoners. They tell me that there arc quite a number of prisoners who do not feel any pain when they arc being flogged with birch rods.

Lashes are used far less frequently and only after a sen- tence passed by the district courts. From a report of the director of the medical department it appears that in 1889, "in order to determine the ability to endure corporal pun- ishment ordered by the courts," 67 prisoners were exam- ined by the doctors. Of all the punishments exacted on Sakhalin this punitive measure is the most abominable in its cruelty and abhorrent circumstances, and the jurists of European Russia who sentence vagrants and incorrigible criminals to be flogged would have renounced this mode of punishment long ago had it been carried out in their presence. But these floggings are prevented from being a scandalous and outrageously sensational spectacle by Article 478 of the Code, which specifies that the sentences of the Russian and Siberian courts must be executed in the place where the prisoner is confined.

I saw how they flog prisoners in Due. Vagrant Pro-

328

khorov, whose real name was Mylnikov, a man thirty-five to forty years of age, escaped from the Voyevodsk prison, and after building a small raft, he took off for the mainland. On shore they noticed him in time, and sent a cutter to imercept him. The investigation of his escape began. They took a look at the official records and then they made a dis- covery: this Prokhorov was actually Mylnikov, who had been semenced last year by the Khabarovsk district court to 90 lashes and the ball and chain for murdering a Cos- sack and his two grandchildren. Owing to an oversight the semence had not yet been carried out. If Prokhorov had not taken it imo his head co escape, they might never have noticed their error and he would have been spared a flog- ging and being chained to an iron ball. Now, however, the execution of the semence was inevitable.

On the morning of the appoimed day, August 13, the warden, the physician and I leisurely approached che prison office. Prokhorov, whose presence in the office had been ordered the previous evening, was sitting on the porch witb a guard. He did not know what awaited him. Seeing us, he got up. He may have understood then what was going to happen, because he blanched.

"Imo the office!" the warden ordered.

\Y/e emered the office. They led Prokhorov in. The doc- tor, a young German, ordered him to strip and listened to his heart to ascertain bow many lashes the prisoner could endure. He decides this question in a minute and then in a businesslike fashion sits down to write his examination report.

"Ob, the poor fellow!" he says sorrowfully in a thick German accent, dipping the pen imo the ink. "The chains must weigh upon you! Plead with the honorable warden and he will order them removed."

Prokhorov remains silem. His lips are pale and trem- bling.

"Your hope is in vain," the doctor cominues. "You all have vain hopes. Such suspicious people in Russia! Oh, poor fellow, poor fellow!"

The report is ready. They include it with the documems on the investigation of the escape. Then follows utter si- lence. The clerk writes, the doctor and the warden write. Prokhorov does not yet know exactly why he was brought here. Is it only because he escaped, or because of the escape and the old question as well? The uncertainty depresses him.

"\Vhat did you dream of last night?" the warden asks finally.

'I forgot, your worship."

"Now listen," says the warden, glancing at the official documents. "On such and such a date you were sentenced to 90 lashcs by thc Khabarovsk district court for mur- dcring a Cossack . . . . And today is the day you are to get them."

Then he smacks the prisoner on his forchead with the flat of his hand and admonishcs him:

"Why did all this have to happcn? It's bccause your hcad nceds to bc smartcr than it is. You all try to escapc and think you will be bettcr off, but it turns out worse."

We all entcr thc "guardhouse," which is a gray bar- racks-fpe building. The military mcdical assistant, who stands at the door, says in a whccdling voice as though asking a favor:

"Your worship, please lct me see how they punish a prisoner."

In thc middle of the guardroom there is a sloping bench with apertures for binding the hands and feet. Thc cxecu- tioner is a tall, solid man, built like an acrobat. His name is Tolstykh.¹⁰ He wears no coat, and his waistcoat is un- buttoncd. Hc nods at Prokhorov, who silently lies down. Tolstykh, taking his timc, silcntly pulls down the prisoner's trousers to the knees and slowly ties his hands and feet to the bench. The warden looks callously out the window, the doctor strolls around the room. He is carrying a vial of mcdicinal drops in his hands.

"\Vould you like a glass of water?" he asks.

"For God's sake, yes, your worship."

At last Prokhorov is tied up. The executioner picks up the lash with three leather thongs and slowly straightens it.

"Brace yourself!" he says softly, and without any ex- cessive motion, as though measuring himself to the task, he applies the first stroke.

''One-ne," says the warden in his chanting voice of a cantor.

For a moment Prokhorov is silent and his facial expres- sion does not change, but then a spasm of pain runs along his body, and there follows not a scream but a piercing shriek.

"Two," shouts the warden.

The executioner stands to one side and strikes in such a way that the lash falls across the body. After every five strokes he goes to the other side and the prisoner is per- mitted a half-minute rest. Prokhorov's hair is matted to his forehead, his neck is swollen. After the first five or ten strokes his body, covered by scars from previous beatings, turns blue and purple, and his skin bursts at each stroke.

Through the shrieks and cries there can be heard the words: "Your worship! Your worship! Mercy, your wor- ship!"

And Iater, after 20 or 30 strokes, he complains like a drunken man or like someone in delirium:

"Poor me, poor me, you are murdering me. . . . Why are you punishing me?"

Then follows a peculiar stretching of the neck, the noise of vomiting. Prokhorov says nothing; only shrieks and wheezes. A whole eternity seems to have passed since the beginning of the punishment. The warden cries, "Forty- two! Forty-three!" It is a long way to 90.

I go outside. The street is quite silent, and it seems to me that che heartrending sounds from the guardhouse can be heard all over Due. A convict wearing the clothing of a free man passes by and throws a fleeting glance in the direction of the guardhouse, terror written on his face and on his way of walking. I return to the guardhouse, and then go ouc again, and still the warden keeps counting.

Finally, 90! Prokhorov's hands and feet are quickly released and he is lifted up. The flesh where he was beaten is black and blue with bruises and it is bleeding. His teeth are chattcring, his face yellow and damp, and his eyes are wandering. \X'hen they give him the medicinal drops in a glass of water, he convulsively bites the glass. . . . They soak his head with water and lead him off to the infirmary.

"That was for the murder. He'll get another one for escaping," I was taid as we wcnt home.

'I love to sec how thcy executc punishment!" the mili- tary medical assistant exclaims joyfully, extremely pleased with himself because he was satiatcd with thc abominable spcctaclc. "I love it! They arc such scum, such scoundrels. They should be hanged!"

Not only do thc prisoners become hardened and bru- talized from corporal punishmcnt, but thosc who inflict the punishmcnt become hardened, and so do the spectators. Educatcd people arc no exception. At any rate, I observed that officials with university training reacted in exactly the same way as the military medical assistants or those who had completed a course in a military school or an ecclesi- astical seminary. Others become so accusromed to birch rods and lashes and so brutalized that in the end they come to enjoy the floggings.

They tell a story about one prison warden who whistled when a flogging was being administered in his presence. Another warden, an old man, spoke to the prisoner with happy malice, saying, "God be with you! Why are you screaming? It's nothing, nothing at all! Brace yourself! Beat him, beat him! Scourge him!" A third warden ordered the prisoner to be tied to the bench by his neck so that he would choke. He administered five or ten strokes and then went out somewhere for an hour or two. Then he came back and gave him the rest.¹¹

The courts-martial are composed of local officers ap- pointed by the island commandant. The documents on the case and the court's verdict are sent to the Governor-Gen- eral for confirmation. In the old days prisoners languished in their cells for two and three years while awaiting con- firmation of the scntence; now their fate is decided by telegraph. The usual sentence of the courts-martial is death by hanging. Sometimes the Governor-General reduces the semence to a hundred lashes, the ball and chain and deten- tion for those on probation with an indefinite term. If a murderer is sentenced to death, the sentence is very seldom commuted. "I hang murderers!" the Governor-General told me.

On the day before an execution, during the evening and throughout the entire night, the prisoner is prepared for his last journey by a priest. The preparation consists of con- fession and conversation. One priest told me:

At the beginning of my priestly career, when I was only twenty-five, I was ordered to prepare two convicts for death at the Voyevodsk prison. They were to be hanged for murdering a settler for i ruble 40 kopecks. I went into their cell. The task was a new one for me, and I was frightened. I asked the sentry not to close the door and to stand outside. They said, "'Don't be afraid, little father. We won't kill you. Sit down."

I asked where I should sit and they pointed to the plank bed. I sat down on a water barrel and then gaining courage, I sat on the plank bed between the two criminals. I asked what f!.«bern/)'rt they came from and other qucstions, and then I began to prepare them for death. \Vhile they were confessing I looked up and saw the men carrying the beams and all the other necessities for the gallows. They were passing just below the window.

"What is that?" the prisoners asked.

"They're probably building something for the warden," I said.

"No, little father, they're going to hang us. What do you say, little father, do you think we could have some vodka?"

"I don't know," I said. "1'lI.go and ask."

I went to Colonel L. and told him the prisoners wanted a drink. The colonel gave me a bottle, and so that no one should know about it, he ordered the turnkey to remove the sentry. I obtained a whiskey glass from a guard and re- turned to the cell. I poured out a glass of vodka.

"No, little father," they said. "You drink first, or we won't have any."

I had 10 drink a jigger, but there was no snack to go with it.

"Well," they said, "the vodka brightened our thoughts."

After this I continued their preparation. I spoke with 333

them an hour, and then another. Suddenly there was the command: "Bring them out!"

After they were hanged, I was afraid to enter a dark room for a long time.

The fear of death and the conditions under which exe- cution are carried out have an oppressive effect on those sentenced to death. On Sakhalin there has not been a single casc where the condemned man went to his death courageously. \Vhen the convict Chernosheya, the murderer of the shopkeeper Nikitin, was being taken from Alexan- drovsk w Due bcfore execution, hc suffered bladder spasms. Hc would suffer a spasm and have to stop. One of the ac- cessorics in the crime, Kinzhalov, went mad. Before the exccution thcy werc clothed in a shroud and the death sen- tencc was read out. Onc of the condemned men fainted whcn thc dcath scntcnce was bcing read out. Aftcr Pazhukin, the youngest murdcrer, had bccn dressed in his shroud and thc death sentencc was rcad out, it was announccd that his scntencc had bccn commutcd. How much this man lived through during that brief space of time! The long conver- sation with the pricsts at night, thc ceremony of confession, the half-jiggcr of vodka at dawn, the words "Bring them out," and then the shroud, and then listening to the death sentcncc, and all this followcd by the joy of commutation. Immediately after his fricnds were exccuted, he received a hundred lashes, and after the fifth stroke he fell in a dead faint, and then he was chained w an iron ball.

Eleven men were sentenced to death for the murder of some Ainus in the Korsakov district. None of the officers and officials slept on the night before the execution; they visited each other and drank tea. There was a general feel- ing of exhaustion; nobody found a comfortable place to rest in. Two of the condemned men poisoned themselves with wolfsbane—a tremendous embarrassment to the mili- tary officials responsible for the execution of the sentences. The district commander heard a tumult during the night and was then informed that the two prisoners had poisoned themselves. When everyone had gathered around the scaf- fold just before the execution, the district commander found himself saying to the officer in charge:

"Eleven were sentenced to death, but I see only nine here. Where are the other two?"

Instead of replying in the same official manner, the officer in charge said in a low, nervous voice: "Why don't you hang mel Hang me . . . ." It was an early October morning, gray, cold and dark. The faces of the prisoners were yellow with fear and their hair was waving lightly. An official read out the death sentence, trembling with nervousness and stuttering because he could not see well. The priest, dressed in black vest- ments, presented the Cross for all nine to kiss, and then turned to the district commander, whispering: "For God's sake, let me go, I can't. . . ." The procedure is a long one. Each man must be dressed in a shroud and led to the scaffold. \X'hen they finally hanged the nine men, there was "an entire bouquet" hang- ing in the air—these were the words of the district com- mander as he described the execution to me. When the bodies were lifted down the doctors found that one was still alive.

This incident had a peculiar significance. Everyone in the prison, all those who knew the innermost secrets of the crimes committed by the inmates, the hangman and his as- sistants—all of them knew he was alive because he was innocent of the crime for which he was being hanged.

"They hanged him a second time," the district com- mander concluded his story. "Later I could not sleep for a whole month."

Mr. Komarsky, the prison inspector under the local Governor- General, told me: "In the final analysis, if fifteen or twenty out of a hundred convicts turn out to be decent people, this is not due to the liberal measures we practice so much as to our Russian courts, which send these upstanding and reliable people to us."

A natural and unquenchable yearning for the supreme blessing of freedom is here regarded as an indication of criminal tendencies, and an attempt at escape is a serious criminal offense punished by penal servitude and flogging. A setder who is prompted by pure compassion, in the name of Christ, to offer shelter for the night to an escapee is punished with penal servirude. If a seeder is lazy and fails to live a sober life, the island commandant may sentence him to hard labor in the mines for a year. On Sakhalin even indebtcdness is considered a criminal offense. Settlers may not be transferred to pcasant status as a punishment for indebtedness. The island commandant permitted the police to sentence a settler to hard labor for a year on the grounds of his laziness and negligence in maintaining his homestead and deliberately evading the payment of debts due the government, for which the settler may be assigned immediatcly to the "Sakhalin Company" in order to earn the moncy to pay his debts (Order No. 4 5, 1890). In brief, an exile is often sentenced to penal servitude and liogging for offenses which in ordinary circumstances would only necessitate a repri- mand, arrest or imprisonment. On the other hand, robbery, which is so often committed in the prisons and settlements, is rarely punished, and if one may judge by the official statistics, we arrive at thc completely false deduction that exilcs are more respectful of other pcople's propcrty than free men.

The convicts throw bags of flour into the water and probably retrieve them from the bottom at night. An assistant officer on one of the ships told me: "You turn your back and find the place strippcd. Whcn they are unloading barrcls of salted fish, they all try to stuff fish into their pockets, their shirts, their pants. . . . When we find them, we go to work on them! We take the fish by thc tail and then smack them over thc mouth, and we keep on smacking them. . . ."

The police administration, however, gave me a list that con- tained the names of only thirty prostitutes. They are examined weekly by the physician.

^r> There were 17 1 convicts on trial and under investigation in 1889 for attempting to escape. The case of a certain Kolosovsky was begun in July of 1886 and remained at a standstill because thc witnesses did not appear for interrogation. Some cases con- ccrning prison escapes were started in September, 1883, and were given by the public prosecutor for disposition at the Primorskaya Regional Court in July, 1889. The case of Lesnikov was begun in March, 1885, and was concluded in February, 1889, etc. The largest number of cases in 1889 involved escapes—70 percent. After this came murder and implication in murder—14 percent. If cases involving escape were omitted, half the total would be connected with murder, which is probably the most frequent crime committed on Sakhalin. Half the convicts have been sentenced for murder, and the local murderers commit murder with singular ease. When I was in Rykovskoye one convict slit another con- vict's throat with a knife while working the government garden. He explained that he murdered the man because he would not have to work, since persons under investigation sit in their cells and do nothing. In Goly Mys the young carpenter Plaksin killed his friend for a few silver coins. In 1885 escaping convicts attacked an Ainu village and then, for no better reason than that their own strong passions were aroused, they tortured the men and women, then raped the women, and hanged the children on the crossbeams. Most murders are shocking in their senselessness and brutality. Murder cases are extremely prolonged. Thus, one case begun in September, 1881, was completed only in April, 1888. Another case was begun in April, 1882, and completed in August, 1889. The trial of the murderers of the Ainu families has still not been completed. "The case of the Ainu murders was decided by the military field court and eleven of the accused convicts were sen- tenced to death. The verdict of the military field court with respect to the remaining five prisoners of the police department is not known. Prescntations of documents were made in reports to the island commandant dated June 1 3 and October 23, 1889."

Cases on "changing given names and surnames" are especially prolonged. One case was begun in March, 1880, and is still con- tinuing, because information has not yet been received from the Yakutsk Regional Government. Another case was begun in 1881, a third in 1882. Eight convicts are on trial and under investigation "for forging and selling counterfeit banknotes." They say that counterfeit money is printed on Sakhalin itself. \Vhen prisoners unload cargo from foreign ships, they buy tobacco and vodka from the barmen and usually pay with counterfeit bills. The Jew from whom 56,000 rubles were stolen on Sakhalin was sent here for counterfeiting money. He has completed his sentence and wanders around Alexandrovsk in a hat, a coat and a gold chain. He always speaks sotto voce or in a whisper to officials and guards. This disgusting fellow denounced a peasant with a large family, who was also a Jew, and the peasant was arrested and put in chains. He had previously been sentenced to an undetermined term by a military court "for sedition," but on his way across Siberia the term was reduced to four years. This was done by forging official records. A case "involving stealing from the armory of the Korsakov Local Command Post" is also described in "Infor- mation Concerning Men Being Investigated and Placed on Trial During the Year 1889." The case of the accused has been drag- ging on since 1884 but "there is no information on the beginning and conclusion of the investigation in the reports of the former commander of the Southern Sakhalin district and ir is unknown when the case was brought to trial." By order of the island com- mandant the case was referred to the district court in 1889. And it seems that the accused will be tried for a second time.