This text was taken from In Russian and French Prisons, London: Ward and Downey; 1887.

<IT is not in vain that the word katorga (hard labour) has received so horrible a meaning in the Russian language, and has become synonymous with the most awful pains and sufferings. " I cannot bear any longer this kataorjnayalife," this life of moral and physical sufferings, of infamous insults and pitiless persecutions, of pains beyond man's strength, say those who are brought to despair before attempting to put an end to their life by suicide. It is not in vain that the word katorga has received this meaning, and all those who have seriously inquired into the aspects of hard labour in Siberia have come to the conclusion that it really corresponds to the popular conception. I have described the journey which leads to the katorga. Let us see now what are the conditions of the convicts in the hard-labour colonies and prisons of Siberia.

Some fifteen years ago, nearly all those 1500 people who were condemned every year to hard labour were sent to Eastern Siberia. One part of them was employed at the silver, lead, and gold mines of the Nertchinsk district, or at the iron-works of Petrovsk (not far from Kiakhta) and Irkutsk, or at the salt-works of Usolie and Ust-Kut; a few were employed at a drapery in the neighborhood of Irkutsk, and the remainder were sent to the gold-mines, or rather gold-washings, of Kara, where they were bound to dig out the traditional "hundred poods" (3200 lbs.) of gold for the " Cabinet of his Majesty," that is, for the personal purse of the Emperor. The horrible tales of subterranean work in the silver and lead-mines, under the most abominable conditions, under the whips of overseers who compelled each ten men to accomplish a work that would be hard even for double this number; of convicts working in the darkness, charged with heavy chains and riveted to barrows; of people dying from the poisonous emanations of the mines; of prisoners flogged to death, or dying under five and six thousand strokes of the rod, by order of traditional monsters like Rozghildeeff -- these tales, well known everywhere, are not tales due to the fancy of imaginative writers,they are true historical records of a sad reality.⁽¹⁾

And they are not tales of a remote past,for such were the conditions of hard labour in the Nertchinsk mining district no farther back than twenty-five years ago. They might be told by men still in life.

More than that ; many, very many, features of this horrible past have been maintained until our own times. Every one in Eastern Siberia knows of the terrible scurvy epidemics which broke out at the Kara gold-mines in 1857, when according to official reports perused by M. Maximoff--no less than a thousand convicts died in the course of one single summer, and the cause of the epidemics is a secret to nobody; it is well known that the authorities, having perceived that they would be unable to dig out the traditional hundred poods of gold, caused the convicts to work without rest, above their strength, until many fell dead in the very mines. And later on, in 1873, have we not seen again a similar epidemic, due to similar causes, breaking out in the Yeniseisk district, and sweeping away hundreds of lives at once? The places of torture, the proceedings were slowly modified, but the very essence of hard labour has remained the same, and the word katorga has still maintained its horrible meaning.

During the last twenty years the system of hard labour has undergone some modification. The richer silver-mines of the Nertchinsk mining district have been worked out; instead of enriching every year the Cabinet of the Emperor with 220 to 280 poods of silver (7000 to 9000 lbs.), as it was before, they yielded but five to seven poods (150 to 210 lbs.) in 1860 to 1863, and they were abandoned. As to the gold-washings, the mining authorities

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to Siberia, they are submitted to different kinds of treatment. A certain number of them (2700 to 3000) are locked up in the hard-labour prisons of Western and Eastern Siberia; whilst the remainder are transported, either to the Kara gold - washings, or to the salt-works of Usolie and Ust-Kut. The few mines and works of the Crown in Siberia being, however, unable to employ the nearly 10,000 convicts condemned to hard labour who ought to be kept in Siberia, a novel expedient was invented, in renting the convicts to private owners of gold-washings. It is easy to perceive that the punishment of convicts belonging to the same hard-labour category can be thus varied to an immense degree, depending on the caprice of the authorities, and a good deal on the length of the purse of the convict. He may be killed under the pletes at Kara or Ust- Kut, as also he may comfortably live at the private gold-mine of some friend, as "overseer of works," and be aware of his removal to Siberia only by the long delay in receiving news from his Russian friends.

Leaving aside, however, these exceptional favours and a variety of subdivisions of less importance, the hard-labour convicts in Siberia can be classified under three great categories: those who are kept in prison; those who are employed at the gold-mines of the Imperial Cabinet or of private persons: and those who are employed at the salt-works.

The fate of the first is very much like the fate of those who are locked up in central prisons in Russia. The Siberian gaoler may smoke a pipe, instead of a cigar, when flogging his inmates; he may make use of lashes, instead of birch rods, and flog the convicts when his soup is spoiled, whilst the Russian gaoler's bad temper depends upon an unsuccessful hunting: the results for the convicts are the same. In Siberia, as in Russia, a gaoler "who pitilessly flogs" is substituted by a gaoler "who gives free play to his own fists and steals the last coppers of the prisoners;" and an honest man, if he is occasionally nominated as the head of a hard-labour prison, will soon be dismissed, or expelled from an administration where honest men are a nuisance.

The fate of those 2000 convicts who are employed at the Kara gold-mines is not better. Twenty years ago the official reports represented the prison at Upper Kara as an old, weather-worn log-wood building, erected on a swampy ground, and impregnated with the filthiness accumulated by long generations of overcrowded convicts. They concluded that it ought to be pulled down at once; but the same foul and rotten building continues to shelter the convicts until now; and, even during M. Kononovitch's reasonable rule, it was said to be whitewashed only four times each year. It is always filled up to double its cubical capacity, and the inmates sleep on two stories of platforms, as also on the floor that is covered with a thick sheet of sticky filth, their wet and nasty clothes being mattresses and coverings at once. So it was twenty years ago; so it is now. The chief prison of the Kara gold-washings, the Lower Kara, was described by M. Maximoff in 1863, and by the official documents I perused, as a rotten nasty building where wind and snow freely penetrate. So it is described again by my friends. The Middle Kara prison was restored a few years ago, but it soon became as filthy as the two others. For six to eight months, out of twelve, the convicts remain in these prisons without any occupation; and it is quite sufficient, I imagine, to the private mines, and many of them are loaded with chains; at Kara, they have moreover to walk five miles from the prison to the excavation, adding thus a nearly three hours' march to the day's task. Sometimes, when the auriferous gravel and clay are poorer than was expected, and the quantity of gold calculated on could not be extracted, the convicts are literally exhausted by overwork; they are compelled to work until very late in the nights, and then the mortality, which is always high, becomes really horrible. In short, it is considered as a rule, by all those who have seriously studied the Siberian hard-labour institutions, that the convict who has remained for several years at Kara, or at the salt-works, comes away quite broken in health, and unfit for ulterior work, and that he remains thenceforth a burden on the country.

circulation of the last drop of blood in an emaciated body. They submitted themselvesto the unavoidable hundred pletes, returned again to Transbaikalia, and next spring tried again the same journey, with more experience. Other thousands have been hunted down, seized, or shot by the Buryates, the Karyms, or some Siberian trapper. Others again were seized a few days after having reached the soil of their "mother-Russia," after having thrown themselves at the feet of their old parents, in the village they had left many years ago, to satisfy the caprice of the ispravnik or the jealousy of the local usurer. . . . What an abyss of suffering is concealed behind those three words: " Escape from Siberia"!

I have now to examine the situation of political exiles in Siberia. Of course I shall not venture to tell here the story of political exile since the year 1607, when one of the forefathers of the now reigning dynasty, Vassiliy Nikitich Romanoff opened the long list of proscriptions, and terminated his life in an underground cell at Nyrdob, loaded with sixty-four pounds' weight of heavy chains. I shall not try to revive the horrible story of the Bar confederates arriving in Siberia with their noses and ears torn away, and—so says, at least, the tradition—rolled down the hill of the Kreml at Tobolsk tied to big trees; I shall not tell the infamies of the madman Treskin and his ispravnik Loskutoff ; nor dwell upon the execution of March 7th, 1837, when the Poles Szokaski, Sieroczynski, and four others were killed under the strokes of the rods; nor will I describe the sufferings of the "Decembrists" and of the exiles of the first days of Alexander II.'s reign ; neither give here the list of our poets and publicists exiled to Siberia since the times of Radischeff until those of Odoevsky, and later on, of Tchernyshevsky and Mikhailoff. I shall speak only of those political exiles who are now in Siberia.

Kara is the place where those condemned to hard labour were imprisoned, to the number of 150 men and women, during the autumn of 1882. After having been kept from two to four years in preliminary detention at the St. Petersburg fortress, at the famous Litovskiy Zamok, at the St. Petersburg House of Deten-tion, and in provincial prisons, they were sent, after their condemnation to the Kharkoff Central Prison. There they remained for three to five years, again in solitary confinement, without any occupation. Then they were transferred, for a few months to the Mtsensk depot —where they were treated much better—and thence they were sent to Transbaikalia. Most of them performed the journey to Kara in the manner I have already described—on foot beyond Tomsk, and chained. A few were favoured with the use of cars, for slowly moving from one etape to another. Even these last describe this journey as a real torture, and say: —"People become mad from the moral and physical tortures endured during such a journey. The wife of Dr. Bielyi, who accom-panied her husband, and two or three others, have had this fate."

The prison where they are kept at Middle Kara is one of those rotten buildings I have already mentioned. It was overcrowded when ninety-one men were confined in it, and it is still more overcrowded since the arrival of sixty more prisoners; wind and snow freely enter the interstices between the rotten pieces of logwood of the walls, and from beneath the rotten planks of the floor. The chief food of the prisoners is rye-bread and some buckwheat ; meat is distributed only when they are at work in the gold-mine, that is, during three months out of twelve, and only to fifty men out of 150. Contrary to the law and custom, all were chained in 1881, and went to work loaded with chains.

There is no hospital for 'c the political," and the sick, who are numerous, remain on the platforms, side by side with all others, in the same cold rooms, in the same suffocating atmosphere. Even the insane Madame Kovalevskaya is still kept in prison. Happily enough, there are surgeons among them. As to the surgeon of the prison, it is sufficient to say of him that the insane Madame Kovalevskaya was kicked down and beaten under his eyes during an attack of madness. The wives of the prisoners were allowed to stay at Lower Kara, and to visit their husbands twice a week, as also to bring them books. The greater number are slowly dying from consumption, and the list of deaths rapidly increases.

But the most horrible curse of hard labour at Kara is the absolute arbitrariness of the gaolers; the prisoners are completely at the mercy of the caprices of men who were nominated by the Government with the special purpose of "keeping them in urchin-gloves." The chief of the garrison openly says he would be happy if some "political" offended him, as the offender would be hanged ; the surgeon doctors by means of his fists ; and the adjutant of the Governor-General, a Captain Zagarm, loudly said, "I am your Governor, your Minister, your Tsar," when the prisoners threatened him with making a complaint to the Ministry of Justice. One must read the story of the "insurrection" at the Krasnoyarsk prison, provoked by this Captain Zagarin to be convinced that the right place for such an individual would be a lunatic asylum. Even ladies did not escape his mad brutality, and were submitted by him to a treatment which revolted the simplest feelings of decency; and, when the prisoner Schedrin, in defence of his bride, gave him a blow on his face, the military Court condemned Schedrin to death. General Pedashenko acted in accordance with the loudly expressed public feeling at Irkutsk, when he commuted the sentence of death into a sentence of incarceration for a fortnight, but few officials have the courage of the then provisional Governor-General of Eastern Siberia. The blackholes, the chains, the riveting to barrows, are usual punishments, and they are accompanied sometimes with the regulation "hundred pletes." I shall kill you under the rods, you will rot in the blackholes," such is the language that continually sounds in the ears of' the prisoners. But, happily enough, corporal punishment has not been used with political prisoners. A fifty years' experience has taught the officials that the day it was applied "would be a day of great bloodshed," as the publishers of the Will of the people said when describing the life of their friends in Siberia.

As to the prescriptions of the law with regard to exiles, they are openly trampled upon by the higher and lower authorities. Thus, Uspenskiy, Tcharoushin, Semenovskiy, Shishko were liberated from the prison and settled in the Kara village after having reached the term of "probation" established by the law. But in 1881, a ministerial decision, taken at St. Petersburg without any reasonable cause, ordered them to be again locked up. The law being thus trampled under foot, and the last hopes of amelioration of the fate of the prisoners having thus vanished, two of them committed suicide. Uspenskiy, who endured horrible sufferings in hard labour since 1867, and whose character could not be broken by these pains, was unable to live more of this hopeless life, and followed the example of his two comrades. If the political convicts at Kara were common murderers, they would still have the hope that, after having performed their seven, ten, or twelve years of hard labour for having spread Socialist pamphlets among work-men, they would finally be set at liberty and transferred to some province of Southern Siberia, thus becoming settlers, according to the prescriptions of our penal system. But there is no law for political exiles. Tcherny-shevsky, the translator of J. S. Mill's "Political Economy," terminated in 1871 his seven years of hard labour. If he had murdered his father and mother, and burned a house with a dozen children, he would be settled at once in some village of the government of Irkutsk. But he had written economical papers; he had published them with the authorization of the Censorship ; the Government considered him as a possible leader of the Constitutional Party in Russia,—and he was buried in the hamlet of Viluisk, amidst marshes and forests, 500 miles beyond Yakutsk. There, isolated from all the outside world, closely watched by two gendarmes who lodged in his house, he was kept for ten years, and neither the entreaties of the Russian press nor the resolutions of an Inter-national Literary Congress could save him from the hands of a suspicious Government. Such will be, too, without doubt, the fate of those who are now kept at Kara. The day they become poselentsy will not be for them a day of libe-ration : it will be a day of transportation from the milder regions of Transbaikalia to the tundras within the Arctic Circle.

However bitter the condition of the hard-Iabour convicts in Siberia, the Government has succeeded in punishing as hardly, and perhaps even more so, those of its political foes whom it could not condemn to hard labour or exile, even by means of packed courts, nominated ad hoc. This result has been achieved by means of the "Administrative exile," or transportation to "more or less remote provinces of tbe Empire" without judgment, without any kind or even phantom of trial, on a single order of the omnipotent Chief of the Third Section.

Every year some five or six hundred young men and women are arrested under suspicion of revolutionary agitation. The inquiry lasts for six months, two years, or more, according to the number of persons arrested in connection of, "the affair."with, and the importance One-tenth of them are committed for trial. As to the remainder, all those against whom there is no specific charge, but who were repre-sented as "dangerous" by the spies; all those who, on account of their intelligence, energy and "radical opinions," are supposed to be able to become dangerous; and especially those who have shown during the imprisonment a ''spirit of irreverence"—are exiled to some more or less remote spot, between the peninsula of Kola and that of Kamchatka. The open and frank despotism of Nicholas I. could not accommodate itself to such hypocritical means of prosecution ; and during the reign of the 'iron despot' the Administrative exile was rare. But throughout the reign of Alexander II., since 1862, it has been used on so immense a scale, that you hardly will find now a hamlet, or borough, beyond the fifty-fifth degree of latitude, from the boundary of Norway to the coasts of the Sea of Okhotsk, not containing five, ten, twenty Administrative exiles. In January, 1881, there were 29 at Pinegra, a hamlet which has but 750 inhabitants, 55 at Mezen (1800 inhabitants), 11 at Kola (740 inhabitants), 47 at Kholmogory--a village having but 90 houses, 160 at Zaraisk (5000 inhabi-tants), 19 at Yeniseisk, and so on.

The causes of exile were always the same; students and girls suspected of subversive ideas; writers whom it was impossible to prosecute for their writings, but who were known to be imbued with " a dangorous spirit ;" workmen who have spoken "against the authorities ;" persons who have been "irreverent" to some governor of province, or ispvavnik, and so on, were transported by hundreds every year to people the hamlets of the "more or less re-mote provinces of the Empire." As to Radical people suspected of "dangerous tendencies," the barest denunciation and the most futile suspicions were sufficient for serving as a motive to exile. When girls (like Miss Bardine,Soubbotine, Lubatovich, and so many others) were condemned to six or eight years of hard labour for having given one Socialistic pamphlet to one workman ; when others (like Miss Goukovskaya, fourteen years old) were condemned to exile as poselentsy for having shouted in the crowd that it is a shame to condemn people to death for nothing; when hard labour and exile were so easily distributed by the courts, it is obvious that only those were exiled by the Administrative, against whom no palpable charge at all could be produced. (4) In short, the Administrative exile became so scandalously extended during the reign of Alexander II. that, as soon as the Provincial Assemblies received some liberty of speech during the dictatorship of Loris-Melikoff, a long series of representations were addressed by the Assemblies to the Emperor, asking for the immediate abolition of this kind of exile, and stigmatizing in vigorous expressions this monstrous practice. (5)

It is known that nothing has been done, and after having loudly announced its intention of pardoning the exiles, the Government has merely nominated a commission which examined the cases, pardoned a few—very few—and appointed for the greater number a term of five to six years, when each case was to be re-examined. (6) They have been re-examined indeed, and for very many the detention was prolonged for three years, after which term their cases will be re-examined again. A great many did not wait for the new re-examination, and last year there was a real epidemic of suicides in Siberia.

One will easily realize the conditions of these exiles if he imagines a student, or a girl from a well-to-do family, or a skilled workman, taken by two gendarmes to a borough numbering a hundred houses and inhabited by a few Lapo-nians or Russian hunters, by one or two fur-traders, by the priest, and by the police official. Bread is at famine prices; each manufactured article costs its weight in silver, and, of course, there is absolutely no means of earning even a shilling. The Government gives to such exiles only four to eight roubles (eight to ten shillings) per month, and immediately refuses this poor pittance if the exile receives from his parents or friends the smallest sum of money, be it even ten roubles (1L.) during twelve months.To give lessons is strictly forbidden, even if there were lessons to give, for instance to the sianovoy's children. Most of the exiles do not know manual trades. As to finding employment in some private office—in those boroughs where there are offices—it is quite impossible:-
"We are afraid of giving them employment" (wrote the Yeniseisk correspondent of the Russkiy Kurier), "as we are afraid of being ourselves submitted to the supervision of the police. . . . It is sufficient to meet with an Administrative exile, or to exchange a few words with him, to be inscribed under the head of suspects. . . . The chief of a commercial undertaking has recently compelled his clerks to sign an engagement stating that they will not be acquainted with 'political,' nor greet them in the streets. "

More than that, we read in 1880 in our papers that. the Ministry of Finance brought forward a scheme for a law "to allow the common-law and political Administrative exiles to carry on all kinds of trades, with the per-mission of the Governor-General, which permission is to be asked in each special case." I do not know if this scheme has become law, but I know that formerly nearly all kinds of trade werc prohibited to exiles, not to speak of the circumstance that to carry on many trades was quite impossible, the exiles being severely prohibited from leaving the towm even for a few hours. Shall I describe, after this, the horrible, unimagitable misery of the exiles?— "Without dress, without shoes, living in the nastiest huts, without any occupation, they are mostly dying from consumption," was written to the Golos of February 2nd, 1881. "Our Aministrative exiles are absolutely starving. Several of them, having no lodgings, were discovered living in an excavation under the bell tower," wrote another correspondent. "Administrative exile simply means killing people by starvation "--such was the cry of our press when it was permitted to discuss this subject. "It is a slow, but sure execution," wrote the Golos.

And yet, misery is not the worst of the condition of the exiles. They are as a rule submitted to the most disgraceful treatment by the local authorities. For the smallest complaint
addressed to newspapers, they are transferred to the remotest parts of Eastern Siberia. Young girls, confined at Kargopol, are com-pelled to receive during the night the visits of drunken officials, who enter their rooms by violence, under the pretext of having the right of visiting the exiles at any time. At another place, the police-officer compels the exiles to come every week to the police-station, and "submits them to a visitation, together with street-girls." (7) And so on, and so on!

Such being the situation of the exiles in the less remote parts of Russia and Siberia, it is easy to conceive what it is in such places as Olekminsk, Verkhoyansk, or Nijne-kolymsk, in a hamlet situated at the mouth of the Kolyma, beyond the 68th degree of latitude, and having but 190 inhabitants. For, all these hamlets consisting of a few houses each, have their exiles, their sufferers, buried there for ever for the simple reason that there was no charge brought against them sufficient to procure a condemnation, even from a packed court. After having walked for months and months across snow. covered mountains, on the ice of the rivers, and in the toundras, they are now con-fined in these hamlets where but a few hunters arc vegatating, always under the apprehension of dying from starvation. And not only in the hamlets--it will be hardly believed, but it is so—a number of them have been confined to the ulusses, or encampments of the Yakuts, and they are living there under felt tents, with the Yakuts, side by side with people covered with the most disgusting skin diseases. "We live in the darkness," wrote one of them to his friends, taking advantage of some hunter going to Verkhoyansk, whence his letter took ten months to reach Olekminsk; "we live in the darkmess, and burn candles only for one hour and a half every day; they cost too dear. We have no bread, and eat only fish. Meat can be had at no price." Another says : "I write to you in a violent pain, due to periostosis. . . . I have asked to be transferred to a hospital, but without success. I do not know how long this torture will last; my only wish is to be freed from this pain. We are not allowed to see one another, although we are separated only by the distance of three miles. The Crown allows us four roubles and fifty kopeks—nine shillings—per month." A third exile wrote about the same time: " Thank you, dear friends, for the papers; but I cannot read them : I have no candles, and there are none to buy. My scurvy is rapidly progressing, and having no hope of being transferred, I hope to die in the course of this winter."

" I hope to die in the course of this winter! " That is the only hope that an exile confined to a Yakut encampment under the 68th degree of latitude can cherish !

When reading these lines we are transported back at once to the seventeenth century, and seem to hear again the words of the protopope Avvakum :—" And I remained there, in thecold block-house, and afterwards with the dirty Tunguses, as a good dog lying on the straw; sometimes they nourished me, sometimes they forgot." And, like the wife of Avvakum, we ask now again : "Ah, dear, how long, then, will these sufferings go on ?" Centuries have elapsed since, and a whole hundred years of pathetic declamations about progress and humanitarian principles, all to bring us back to the same point where we were when the Tsars of Moscow sent their adversaries to die in the toundras on the simple denunciation of a favourite.

And to the question of Avvakum's wife, repeated now again throughout Siberia, we have but one possible reply: No partial reform, no change of men can ameliorate this horrible state of things; nothing short of a complete transformation of the fundamental conditions of Russian life.

(1) The Kutomara and Alexanilrovsk silver-mines have always been renowned for their insalulbrity, on account of " the arsenical emanations from the ore; not only men, but also cattle, suffered from them, and it is well known that the inhabitants of these villages were compelled, for this reason,to raise their young cattle in neighboring villages. AS to the quicksilver emanations, every one who has consulted any serious work on the Nertchinsk mining district knows that the silver-ore of these mines is usually accompanied with cinnabar-especially in the mines of Shakhtama and Kul-tuma, both worked out by convicts who were poisoned by mercurial emanations-and that attempts to get mercury from these mines have been made several times by the Government. The Akatui silver-mines of the same district have always had the most dreadful reputation for their , unhealthiness.
(2) "Siberia as a Colony," p. 207 St. Petersburg, l882.
(3) See Appendix.
(4) One of the most characteristic cases out of those which became known by scores in 1881, is the following :—in 1872, the Kursk nobility treated the Governor of the pro-vince to a dinner. A big proprietor, M. Annenkoff, was entrusted with proposing a toast for the Governor. He proposed it, but added in conclusion :—"Your Excellence, I drink your health, but I heartily wish that you would devote some more time to the affairs of your province." Next week a postcar with two gendarmes stopped at the door of his house; and without allowing him to see his friends, or even to bid a farewell to his wife, he was transported to Vyatka. It took six months of the most active applications to powerful persons at St. Petersburg, on behalf of his wife and the marshals of the Fatesh and Kursk nobility, to liberate him from this exile ( Gotos, Poryadok, &c. for February 20th and 21st, 1881).
(5) Extracts from the speech of M. Shakeeff at the sittings of the representatives of the St. Petersburg nobility are given in the Appendix C.
(6) In the course of 1881, 2837 cases of "politicals," exiled by order of Administration, were examined; out of them 1950 were in Siberia (Poryadok, September 17th, 1881)
(7) Golos, February 12th,' 1881. Since April, 1881, the editors of newspapers were severely prohibited from publishing anything about the Administrative exiles; and all newspapers having the slightest pretension to be independent were suppressed.