We had hoped to find some place of abode where we should not be constantly under official surveillance; and I did not see how we were secretly to make the acquaintance of the political convicts if we consented to become the guests of the governor of the prisons. As there did not, however, seem to be any alternative, we accepted Major Potulof's invitation, and in ten minutes were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easychairs, and a piano. The Kara prisons and penal settlements, at the time of our visit, contained, approximately, 1800 hard-labor convicts. Of this number about one-half were actually in close confinement, while the remainder were living in barracks, or in little cabins of their own, outside the prison walls. The penal term of a Russian convict at the mines is divided into two periods or stages. During the first of these periods he is officially regarded as "on probation," and is held in prison under strict guard. If his conduct is such as to merit the approval of the prison authorities, he is released from confinement at the end of his probationary term and is enrolled in a sort of ticket-of-leave organization known as the "free command." He is still a hard-labor convict; he receives his daily ration from the prison, and he cannot step outside the limits of the penal settlement without a permit; but he is allowed to live with other "reforming" criminals in convict barracks, or with his family in a separate house of his own; he can do extra work for himself in his leisure hours, if he feels so disposed, and he enjoys a certain amount of freedom. At the end of this second or "reforming" period he is sent as a "forced colonist" to some part of Eastern Siberia for the remainder of his life. The prisons connected with the Kara penal establishment at the time of our visit were seven in number, and were scattered along the Kara River for a distance of about twenty miles. The slow but steady movement of the working convict force upstream in the search for gold had left the Lower Diggings and Ust Kara prisons so far behind that their inmates could no longer walk in leg-fetters to and from the placers, and a large number of them were therefore living in enforced idleness. The direct supervision of the common-criminal prisons was intrusted to smatritels (smah-tre'tels), or wardens, who reported to Major Potulof; and 1 According to the annual report of the Chief of Prison Administration the number of convicts in the Kara prisons and penal settlements on the 1st of January, 1886,-about two months after our visit,- was 2507. This number, however, included 600 or 800 women VOL. XXXVIII.-23. of a carefully selected prison guard of 140 gendarmes. The political prisons had also their free command, which at the time of our visit consisted of twelve or fifteen men and women, who had finished their terms of probation and were living in little huts or cabins of their own on the outskirts of the Lower Diggings. All of these facts were known to us long before we reached the mines, and we shaped our course in accordance with them. The objects that we had in view at Kara were, first, to go through the common-criminal prisons and see the criminals actually at work in the mines; secondly, to make the acquaintance of the political convicts of the free command; and, thirdly, to visit the political prison and see how the condemned revolutionists and children who had come to the mines voluntarily with their husbands and fathers. (See Report of the Chief of Prison Administration for 1886, pp. 46, 47. St. Petersburg: Press of the Ministry of the Interior, 1888.) TYPE OF HARD-LABOR CONVICT - SENT TO SIBERIA AT THE AGE OF 65. lived, even if we were not permitted to talk with them. That we should succeed in attaining the first of these objects I felt confident, of the second I was not at all sure, and of the third I had little hope; but I determined to try hard for all. What instructions Major Potulof had received with regard to us I did not know; but he treated us with great cordiality, asked no awkward questions, and when, on the day after our arrival, I asked permission to visit the prisons and mines, he granted it with out the least apparent surprise or hesitation, ordered out his horses and droshky, and said that it would give him great pleasure to accompany us. It is not my purpose in the present paper to describe minutely all of the prisons in Kara that we were permitted to inspect, but I will sketch hastily the two that seemed to me to be typical, respectively, of the worst class and of the best. The Ust Kara prison, which in point of sanitary condition and overcrowding is perhaps the worst place of confinement in the whole Kara Valley, is situated on low, marshy ground in the outskirts of the penal settlement of the same name, near the junction of the Kara River with the Shilka. It was built nearly half a century ago, when the Government first began to work the Kara gold placers with convict labor. As one approaches it from the south it looks like a long, low horse-car stable made of squared but unpainted logs, which are now black, weather-beaten, and decaying from age. Taken in connection with its inclosed yard it makes a nearly perfect square of about one hundred feet, two sides of which are formed by the prison buildings and two sides by a stockade has a suggestion of damp decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement about twenty-five feet in height, made of closely set logs, sharpened at the top like colossal leadpencils. As we approached the court-yard gate, and still you will have no adequate idea of an armed Cossack who stood in the black- it. To unaccustomed senses it seems so satubarred sentry-box beside it presented arms to rated with foulness and disease as to be almost Major Potulof and shouted, "Starshe!" (Star'- insupportable. As we entered the corridor, shay)- the usual call for the officer of the slipped upon the wet, filthy floor, and caught day. A Cossack corporal ran to the entrance the first breath of this air, Major Potulof turned with a bunch of keys in his hand, unlocked to me with a scowl of disgust, and exclaimed, the huge padlock that secured the small door "Otvratitelni tiurma! " (Ot-vra-te'tel-nee in the larger wooden gate, and admitted us to tyoor-ma')" It is a repulsive prison!" the prison court-yard. Three or four convicts, The Cossack corporal who preceded us threw with half-shaven heads, ran hastily across the open the heavy wooden door of the first kayard as we entered, to take their places in their mera (kah'mer-ah) and shouted, "Smirno!" cells for inspection. We ascended two or three (Smeer'no)-"Be quiet!" the customary warnsteps incrusted with an indescribable coating ing of the guard to the prisoners when an offiof filth and ice an inch and a half thick, and cer is about to enter the cell. We stepped entered, through a heavy plank door, a long, across the threshold into a room about 24 feet low, and very dark corridor, the broken and de- long, 22 feet wide, and 8 feet high, which concaying floor of which felt wet and slippery to the tained 29 convicts. The air here was so much feet, and where the atmosphere, although warm, worse than the air in the corridor that it made was very damp, and saturated with the strong me faint and sick. The room was lighted by peculiar odor that is characteristic of Siberian two nearly square, heavily grated windows with prisons. A person who has once inhaled that double sashes, that could not be raised or odor can never forget it; and yet it is so unlike opened, and there was not the least apparent any other bad smell in the world that I hardly provision anywhere for ventilation. Even the know with what to compare it. I can ask you brick oven, by which the cell was warmed, to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has drew its air from the corridor. The walls of been half a dozen times through human lungs the kamera were of squared logs and had and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it 1 This picture is the reproduction of a rough, hasty sketch made by Mr. Frost from memory. The number of prisoners that the cell contained has been intention once been whitewashed; but they had become dark and grimy from lapse of time, and were blotched in hundreds of places with dull red blood-stains where the convicts had crushed ally diminished in order not to hide the nares, or sleeping-platforms. The point of view is the threshold of the door. bed-bugs. The floor was made of heavy planks, and, although it had recently been swept, it was incrusted with dry, hard-trodden filth. Out from the walls on three sides of the room projected low sloping wooden platforms about six feet wide, upon which the convicts slept, side by side, in closely packed rows, with their heads to the walls and their feet extended towards the middle of the cell. They had neither pillows nor blankets, and were compelled to lie down upon these sleeping-benches at night without removing their clothing, and without other covering than their coarse gray overcoats. The cell contained no furniture of any kind except these sleeping-platforms, the brick oven, and a large it gave me an impression of freshness and comparative purity. We then went through hastily, one after another, the seven kameras that composed the prison. They all resembled the first one except that they varied slightly in dimensions, in shape, or in the number of prisoners that they contained. In the cell shown in the illustration on page 171 I noticed a shoemaker's bench on the sleepingplatform between the windows, and the foulness of the air was tempered and disguised, to some extent, by the fresh odor of leather. Even in this kamera, however, I breathed as little as possible, and escaped into the corridor at the first opportunity. The results of breathing such air for long periods of time may be seen in the Kara prison hospital, where the prevalent diseases are scurvy, typhus and typhoid fevers, anæmia, and wooden When the door was locked for the night each one of these 29 prisoners would have, for 8 or 10 hours' consumption, about as much air as would be contained in a packing-box 5 feet square and 5 feet high. I could discover no way in which a single VIEW NEAR UPPER KARA, AND HOUSES OF THE FREE COMMAND. cubic foot of fresh air could get into that cell after the doors had been closed for the night. We remained in the first kamera only two or three minutes. I think I was the first to get out into the corridor, and I still vividly remember the sense of relief with which I drew a long breath of that corridor air. Heavy and vitiated as it had seemed to me when I first entered the prison, it was so much better than the atmosphere of the overcrowded cell that consumption. No one whom we met in Kara attempted to disguise the fact that most of these cases of disease are the direct result of the life that the convicts are forced to live in the dirty and overcrowded kameras. The prison surgeon admitted this to me frankly, and said: "We have more or less scurvy here all the year round. You have been through the prisons, and must know what their sanitary condition is. Of course such uncleanliness and overcrowding result in disease. We have 140 patients in the hospital now; frequently in spring we have 250."1 1 In 1857, when the famous, or infamous, Razgildeyef (Raz-gil-day yef) undertook to get for the Tsar out of the Kara mines 100 poods (about 3600 pounds) of gold, more than 1000 convicts sickened and died in the Kara prisons from scurvy, typhus fever, and overwork. Alexander the Liberator was then Tsar, and it might be supposed that such awful misery and mortality in his own mines would inevitably attract his attention, and that he would devote at least a part of the gold bought with a thousand men's lives to the reformation of such a murderous penal system. Nothing, however, was done. Ten years passed, and at the ex Most of these cases come from a prison population of less than one thousand; and the hospiration of that time, according to Maximoff (Max-imoff), there were at the Kara mines "the same order of things, the same prisons, and the same scurvy." (Sec "Siberia and Penal Servitude," by S. Maximoff, Vol. I., p. 102. St. Petersburg: A. Transhel, 1871.) Nearly twenty more years had elapsed when we visited the mines in 1885, and the report still was, "We have more or less scurvy here all the year round." The number of cases of sickness treated in the Kara prison hospital and lazarets in 1886 was 1208. The average daily number was 117. (See Report of the Chief Prison Administration for 1886, pp. 46, 47.) |
