THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
Alexandrovski - A Moonlight Sledge Ride - The Governor of the Prison - A Scotch Prisoner - The Prisoners' Work and Wages - Their Shop - Their Theatre - Their Library - Married Convicts
BACK in Irkutsk I availed myself of the offer the governor-general of the province had made two months before, to visit the largest prison in Siberia, that of Alexandrovski.
The convict town lies just fifty miles to the north-west of Irkutsk, over hills and through a wild and wooded region. The journey was to be made by tarantass. As it was the closing days of October, and all Siberia lay beneath a cloak of snow, sledges were scudding through the broad streets of Irkutsk, everybody was wrapped in furs, and it was likely to be a cold trip. As companions I had the secretary of the inspector of prisons and a young German, who spoke Russian well, and who was delighted to have the opportunity, by acting in the capacity of interpreter, to see the inside of a famous prison.
It had been arranged that we were to start in the early afternoon, and reach Alexandrovski in time to have an evening meal with the governor.
But you must always allow a margin of a few hours in Russia. So I was not surprised at it being close on five o'clock and the daylight waning when I heard a great jangle of bells in the streets heralding the arrival of two tarantasses.
They were like great country carts, roughly built, with the back covered with a hood lined with skin. Everything had been done to secure comfort. The bottom of the cart was filled with hay, and over this had been thrown sheepskins. There were pillows under the hood, sheepskins to throw over us, and a big leather apron that buttoned three parts up the cart.
I donned a pair of clumsy, knee-reaching felt boots over my ordinary boots, and besides an ordinary top-coat, suitable for winter wear in England, I put on my sheepskin shuba, and on the top of that a mighty enveloping furskin travelling coat lent me by the prison inspector. Thus, with a warm Astrakan hat, I felt I might brave a visit to the North Pole, though I was as ungainly as a walrus.
My companions were clad much the same, but they carried revolvers, and threw them on their pillows ready for use; and at the last moment a friend pushed his revolver into my hand, and insisted on my taking it. There had been fourteen murders in the outskirts of Irkutsk the previous week. Desperadoes were about, and it was unwise to go unarmed.
It was just dark when we set off, the German and I, in the big tarantass, and the official following in a smaller tarantass. The six horses were fresh, and with much bell-ringing away we clattered into the country. The road was little other than a track, roughed up in the rains and now frozen hard, and with not sufficient snow to deaden the jolting. We jolted till I was certain my bones were splintered.
The night was beautiful. The moon, a great arc of light streaming upon a world of snow, gave a brightness almost as of day. We climbed into the hills that had a whiteness only broken by tufts of gaunt fir trees. There were long stretches of slow-going, then stretches at a rattling pace, then crawling again. There was no wind.
Around us was a great moon-swept silence but for the bells that sang crisply in the icy air. After fifteen miles we reached a posthouse, and were glad to throw off our heavy coverings and move our chilled limbs while the wife of the postmaster made tea.
Here we decided to have sledges.
Travelling by sledge on a moonlight night, through still woods, and with not a sound but the hoof pats of the horses and the merry ring of the bells, is a delicious experience. The driver forsook the road and took short cuts by copse sides, going gaily, with now and then a pelt of snow kicked by a horse striking us in the face. The bank was often steep, and our sledge swerved over like a yawl hit by a sudden gale, and the driver slipped to the ground and pushed back to prevent an upset. It was exciting and exhilarating.
The cold? Oh, it had become cold when midnight was past. It was the first time in my life I had any conception of what real cold was like. I malde no guesses at how many degrees of frost there were. But my cheeks felt as though they were being pared with a knife. The German and I lay at the bottom of the sledge and pulled sheepskins over us, though we were already swathed in furs. Yet the cold struck us, and seemed to freeze the marrow in our bones. We huddled, too numb even to speak.
When we finished the second stage of twenty miles we could hardly walk. We could not get rid of our wraps without aid. It was a full half-hour before any sensation came into my hands and I could lift a glass of tea to my lips. Then we went on by sledge again.
I remember the night was bright, and that I rebuked myself for not sitting up and musing poetically. Ugh! but all poetry was frozen.
It was four o'clock in the morning when we arrived at Alexandrovski, having, with two halts of an hour each, taken eleven hours to come from Irkutsk.
There was a great forbidding building. But all was quiet except that on the corners of the wall tramped soldiers with rifles.
Lights shone in a house. This was a club for the prison officials. The attendants, all good-conduct convicts, helped us to remove our burdensome clothes, showed us our bedrooms clean and warm, pulled off our boots, and brought slippers, and in a quarter of an hour had a meal of cutlets and coffee on the dining-room table.
Whilst at breakfast, five hours later, I was called upon by the governor of the prison, the governor of the "étape" or distributing station, the chief medical officer, and other officers.
Had it not been for his uniform, epaulettes, top boots, and military cap, I might have taken the governor for the conductor of a German orchestra - a smallish, well-set, grey man, with long, iron-streaked hair thrown straight back, and features that reminded me of the portraits of Liszt before he became a very old man.
We set out in a group, tramping the snow to see the village, the governor on the way telling me that all the men I saw about, except those in uniform, were convicts whose conduct had been good enough to warrant their being allowed out of prison to act an workmen or servants. Now and then, he said, a man escaped. But Siberia is a difficult place to get out of, because everybody may be called upon by the police to show their passports. The only way a man has any chance of freedom is to waylay a peasant and murder him to get possession of his passport. Convicts do not try to escape in the winter. The climate is too terrible for them to live in the woods while making a long cut across country, sometimes a thousand or twelve hundred miles, to some spot where they are not likely to be recognised. Unless they have got a passport arrest is certain. In that case they remain dumb. They will neither give their names, nor say where they have come from. There is no direct evidence that they are escaped prisoners, and, although all efforts are made to identify them, and often successfully, quite a large number gain their liberty after a few months, because it is impossible to keep a man in prison on suspicion of being a runaway, however well founded the suspicion may be.
The governor said he had very little trouble with escapees. With a smile, he assured me that the men were much better cared for and fed in a prison than they would be out of it. The usual plan for convicts is to serve so many years in prison and then be obliged for so many years to live in a particular district of Siberia before they are at full liberty to return to Russia. Very few of them do so, for by the time they have full liberty they have probably a good situation, or are settled in business. In the case of deserving men, the governor himself tries to get them situations, for he recognises the evil of turning men loose with instructions to shift for themselves. All the hotel porters and many of the workmen in Irkutsk are ex-convicts.
The Russian prison authorities have recognised, as I pointed out in the chapter describing a visit to Irkutsk prison, that the present system is a bad one. The convicts, excepting the political exiles, are in many cases of the usual degraded class, who do not return to Russia when they have the chance, but hang round the towns, a danger to the community. The evil reputation of Irkutsk is entirely due to the fact that half of the population are liberated cut-throats, or their children. The respectable Siberians object to their country being the dumping ground of the villainous riff-raff of all Russia, and so gradually the practice of sending convicts to Siberia is being stopped.
Right opposite the club-house is a fine brick Greek church, entirely built by the convicts. All the carvings, decorations, even the sacred pictures, are convict work. The centre of the church is open, but the back part is heavily barred, and so is the gallery. It is here that the prisoners are marched to their devotions.
Then we walked down the street to the soldier-guarded entrance of the prison, where 1,260 men, from all parts of Russia, even the utmost corners of Turkestan, were undergoing penal servitude for all the worst crimes against society.
There is no need for me becoming wearisome by giving a detailed account of what I saw.
The great thing that got wedged into my mind was, how different everything was from the popular idea in England of what a Siberian prison is sure to be.
Alexandrovski gaol is a great square building, severely plain. The passages are high, colour-washed, and with sand on the floors. The prisoners were all in long, grey, and ill-fitting coats. The dormitories had about fifty men in each. These men jumped to their feet, and in a chorus returned our "good morning." They were mostly heavy-jowled, brutish men, who eyed us with sullen gaze.
The governor, whose manners were not official but friendly, picked out a man here and there, asked him what was his crime, gave a grieved "tut-tut" when it was horrible, now and then patted a young fellow on the shoulder, and when a prisoner showed a stick he had been carving he admired it as a father would admire the work of his boy.
I saw no restraint or cheek. Several of the men came up and said they were shoemakers, or tailors, or carpenters, and asked that they might be given work - for a reason I will presently explain.
These men in the large dormitories do nothing but lounge and talk the day away. They get brown bread and tea for breakfast, soup and chunks of meat in it for dinner and more bread, and in the evening bread and tea again - the usual food of the artisan Russian, but much better in quality, as I know from experience. The sanitary arrangements were the best I have seen, and I raised a smile by wishing that at my hotel in Irkutsk they were but a tithe as good.
In one great hall all the Mohammedan prisoners wore together-thick-lipped, slothful-eyed men. In another were all Jews, and on one side was the ark so they might worship. I walked along between a double row of them casting casual glances to right and left, when suddenly a little bead-eyed prisoner, in a coat much too big for him and trailing the ground, stepped up to me and said, "Are you from England, sir?"
I was startled to be addressed in perfect English in a far-off Siberian prison. So I replied, "Hello! where do you come from?"
"I belong to Glasgow," he answered, "and my father is manager of the _ Hotel in Edinburgh."
"Well, you've got a long way from home, haven't you?" I added.
"Yes, sir, I have," he replied. I couldn't well ask him what was his offence, but I said, "How long are you in residence here?"
He smiled back, "Oh, I'm here for ten years, and another six years to serve." I afterwards asked the governor about him, and learnt that he was a forger from Riga.
Then to the workshops. There was one large room where a band of men were making boots for their fellow prisoners, and another where rough and ready tailoring was in progress. The largest work-shop was that devoted to carpentry. Tables and chairs and wardrobes were to be seen in course of manufacture. Also there was iron-work, largely the making of cheap bedsteads.
There was another big and well-lighted room devoted to men who had a faculty in a particular direction. I spent half an hour here. There was one old man bookbinding, another was engaged in the designing of patent locks; one man was mending watches; the man next him was making a concertina, whilst still another was busy with crewel work.
The idea that I was in a prison - one of the dread Siberian prisons, in truth - slipped from my mind. Instead of convicts, the workers looked like a body of well-contented artisans. There was no hindrance to conversation, and many of the men were smoking cigarettes. This led to explanations.
There is not enough work to be found for all the men, and idleness palls on even the hardened convict. They are anxious to work. The governor, who knew all about the prison system in England, held that men should not be given hard labour just for the sake of the hard labour.
"I never set a man to do anything," he said, "that is not useful; that he himself cannot appreciate. Picking oakum demoralises a man, but teach him bookbinding and you are making a useful man, who appreciates his usefulness, and who will have something better than robbery to turn to when he has finished his term."
Everyone engaged in work at Alexandrovski receives a wage; very small, but still a wage. This is entered up to him, and it can accumulate till he leaves; or he can spend it while he is in prison. This led to a visit to the prison shop, very much like any other shop, with a counter and all sorts of things stacked round. Here a prisoner could buy niceties up to the amount of the balance standing in his name - white bread, cheese, sausages, sardines, cigarettes, etc.
My exclamation was that the prisoners were a great deal too well treated.
"No, no," replied the governor, "if we are doing anything to make the lives of these poor fellows a little brighter, we are doing right."
Then he button-holed me with both hands, and turning his kindly grey eyes up to my face, he said, "I know you are a journalist, and that you will be writing about your visit. All I ask is that you tell the truth. I am sickened and grieved at times when I read what is said in English and American papers about our prisons. A prison is a prison, and we have to be very, very severe with certain types of prisoners. But that we prison officials are vindictive and cruel, well - well, all I ask is that you will tell what you have seen."
I was struck by the sincerity and kindness of the old man, and I remarked, half in jest, "It is a wonder you don't have a theatre."
"We have," was his immediate reply. "This is the only prison where there is such a thing, but I believe in amusing my men. Would you like to see it?"
So we climbed to a big upper room, and there was the stage and scenery and drop curtain complete. This was luxury indeed.
"I cannot give you a special performance," said the governor, "but we are very proud of our singing here. Would you like to hear it?"
We sat down and smoked cigarettes while a messenger was sent to hunt up half a dozen singers. They came in their prison garb, six intelligent-looking men, and they sang three part-songs as finely and with as much verve and expression as many a renowned choir.
Then to the library. All the men are allowed several hours of liberty each day, and those who can read - not a large proportion - make for the library. As we walked along the corridor I noticed a number of pictures upon the walls. They all portrayed the evil consequences of drink. There were some thirty men in the reading-room, and had it not been for the prison garb, I, might have been visiting a small public library at home. There were heavy books, novels, and, strangest of all, newspapers.
The talk turned to the wives of prisoners. The governor told me that the authorities quite appreciated the evil straits to which a woman might be put through being stranded and alone while her husband was sent for a long term of years to Siberia. When a man is banished from Russia to Siberia his wife may claim divorce by right. But should she prefer to follow her husband the government will pay the passage for herself and children to the town where the prison is situated. After that the woman must shift for herself, though the government make a meagre contribution of about three-farthings a day towards the maintenance of each child. As far as is possible, the prison finds work for the women in the shape of washing and sewing. A married convict who behaves himself is allowed to work outside the prison, to live, indeed, with his own family, provided he reports himself every day, and pays a certain proportion of his wages to the authorities.
Sledges were waiting for us, and away the horses scampered up a hill, where we visited the school for the children of convicts, clean, neat, and in charge of a gentle-natured matron. The little girls, who were sewing, made us dainty curtseys as we entered the schoolroom.
It happened to be the hour when the boys had finished schooling, but we found them in adjoining workshops, all busy learning trades. Though there was a pathetic side to it, a smile crept to the lips on seeing a chubby little chap, aged seven, mending a big boot, and doing it awkwardly and with flushed cheek - for the high prison authorities and a couple of foreigners were looking on.
Next a quick ride to another part of the town to the "étape," guarded by a wooden wall of fir trees standing close and on end, and all sharpened on the top. Every twenty yards there marched hither and thither through the snow a soldier with musket across his shoulder. This was a distributing station, to which batches of convicts are sent from all parts of the Russian Empire to await decision where they shall spend the years of their punishment. Just as we entered a batch of forty men, muffled in heavy grey coats, were starting out in the custody of exactly the same number of soldiers, to walk seventy miles to a small prison up country.
I was not favourably impressed with the "étape." The rooms were overcrowded, and the stench almost choked me. The men looked dirty and ill-cared for. They had no work; they were just huddled together, waiting often six or eight months before they wore sent off.
In the yard I caught sight of six young fellows in ordinary civilian clothes, and with certainly nothing of the criminal about them.
Afterwards, on entering one of the rooms, the brightest and cleanest in the "étape," these young men stood up and greeted us. Meeting them was the one thing, during my visit to Alexandrovski, that filled me with sorrow. They were boys, the youngest seventeen, the eldest twenty-two, bright and intelligent. They were political exiles! They had taken part in some boyish socialistic demonstration against the government. For this they had already been in prison for a year, and were on their way to the dreary frozen province of Yakutsk, under banishment for ten years.
There is much the traveller is forced to admire about Russia. It is a pleasure to find things so much better than sensational writers describe. But for a mighty government to wreak vengeance on boys inclined to socialism is so mean and paltry, so very stupid!
The lads, however, didn't seem to mind. With money supplied by their friends they have had what food they liked; they had plenty of books and newspapers. One of them had a little writing table, and on it were photographs of his mother and father.
It was now afternoon, and the governor invited me to dinner with his family and the chief prison authorities.
It was a bleak, snowy afternoon. But the Russians are full of hospitality, and at the table the talk drifted to more pleasant things than convict life. After dinner the governor got out his violin, the doctor produced his cello, and with the governor's daughter at the piano we had an hour of Mozart's trios.
It wts a little strange: in far Siberia, in a pleasant drawing-room, a young lady at the piano, and the governor of the biggest prison in Siberia - who ought I suppose, to have been a brutal-visaged man devising cruelties - throwing back his long hair, while his grey eyes sparkled in the cestacy of musical enjoyment, and then just across the road the dark walls of the prison, with hooded soldiers standing on guard.
It was night again when I bade good-bye to Alexandrovski and climbed my sledge, and from beneath bundles of furs waved an adieu to my friends of a day, and started back on a fifty-mile ride through a snow-slashed land to the city of Irkutsk.
Chapter XXIII: The Homeward Journey and Some Opinions
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