CHAPTER XVIII

BY WAY OF THE CONVOY-STATIONS—A CLUMSY OFFICER—THE VAGABOND—A MAN-HUNT

The real hardships of the journey now began for the “politicals.” From Moscow to Tomsk, over three thousand miles, the conditions of travelling had been more or less European; but henceforward we were to go entirely by road, crawling from one halting-station to another by short stages. In the terrible Siberian cold, in the glowing heat of summer, in all weathers, without regard to the fitness or unfitness of the road, parties of a hundred prisoners are despatched from Tomsk regularly on fixed days of the week, parties which consist alternately of men only, and of families—men, women, and children. The day’s march is a stage of from sixteen to twenty miles, and every third day is a rest. At this tortoise-like pace—on an average about thirteen miles a day—the long wandering lasts for many weeks and months, under the most wretched conditions of life.

In the damp rooms of the convoy-stations, the air of which is loaded with every evil odour imaginable, the convicts lie squeezed together on the bare boards of the two sloping wooden shelves, one above the other, which do duty for bed-places. These invariably swarm with myriads of parasites; sleep is probably impossible for half the night, and early in the morning the prisoners are driven forth to begin afresh the weary march. Long before sunrise the criminal contingent will be standing drawn up in the yard, to wait there in the cold until the roll is called, 159and at last the signal to start is given. At the head of the procession march the older criminals, seasoned rascals most of them, the “Ivans.” The majority of them have trodden this path more than once already, and know every brook and copse on the way. They go at a quick pace, in serried ranks, and easily do their four miles an hour, or even more. Behind them the other criminals straggle painfully along in irregular groups separated by long stretches of road. Then come carts with the sick and exhausted and the baggage; and lastly, the “politicals” in the rear, two or three together in each one-horse cart, under the charge of their special escort.

IN A SIBERIAN PRISON

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This strange procession extends itself along the road for about three-quarters of a mile, and raises clouds of dust, from which we in the rearguard have most to suffer. To add to our woes there is the special scourge of those regions, the Siberian midge. Swarms of those terrible little creatures kept us company, not only attacking our hands and faces, and getting into mouth, nose, ears, and eyes, but inserting themselves beneath our clothing, and inflicting tortures of irritation. The only—and even these inefficient—means of protection are nets of horsehair, with which we had taken care to provide ourselves.

After the first ten miles or so there is a halt in some woodland clearing, or by a spring or stream. The criminals here break their fast, usually only on dry bread, and perhaps some of them have not even that. Their feeding is managed in this way: each man receives daily five to twelve kopecks,[60] according to the locality through which they are passing (where prices depend on the result of the last harvest), and also according to the “rank” of the prisoner, for even here there are class distinctions and privileges. This allowance is only under the most favourable circumstances sufficient to satisfy hunger; it covers, at a pinch, the cost of bread, tea, and a few vegetables. But gambling is so deeply rooted a passion among the criminal 160prisoners that they will stake their last coin, and he who loses everything has to go hungry. His only resource then is to beg; and whenever we passed through a village some of the most destitute always went begging, under the soldiers’ supervision. They would station themselves before a hut and start a pitiful song, when the Siberian women would throw out pieces of bread to them. Travellers, too, whom we met would give them alms, and these gifts were shared among the whole party, for the criminals too had their artèl, or union.

After the short rest the party would set out again in the same marching order, and try to reach the halting-station before the noonday heat began. As soon as they arrived at the station the advance party would crowd round the door, ready to rush in directly it was opened; and then would begin the battle for the best sleeping-places, the weaker being thrust aside or trampled down by the stronger. At our first sight of this mad fighting and struggling among some hundred men in a narrow space we thought they would kill each other, but generally the wild tumult of blows, kicks, and curses did not result in anything serious. Of course the “Ivans” came off triumphant, having secured the best places for themselves, while the old and weak had to be content with the worst corners. The crowding, dirt, stench, and noise made these prisons veritable hells on earth.

The halting-stations were usually tumbledown, one-storied buildings made of rough-hewn tree-trunks, and were divided inside by passages into two, three, or four rooms. Near this prison building would be a house for the officer in command and another for the soldiers, the whole enclosed by a stockade of posts about fifteen feet high, closely fitted together, and pointed at their upper ends. There are two classes of halting-stations:—larger ones, where the days of rest are spent, and where an officer is always in residence, and smaller ones, which are only used as lodging for one night.

ROLL-CALL OF PRISONERS AT A HALTING-STATION

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161When the question of places had been settled the prisoners would all come out into the yard. Here there were generally market-women with their wares outspread, and a regular bargaining would ensue. Of course, the convicts were always ready to cheat the women and steal from them, and the latter would then raise loud cries of lamentation; as, however, in such cases the convicts all stuck together like one man, no inquiry could ever elicit any evidence in favour of the complainants.

Washing and cooking also went on in the yard, a big fire being kindled in the middle of it; and no one ever thought of danger to the wooden buildings and stockade.

The “politicals” were given a separate room; and our first task on arrival was always to screen off a part with sheets and rugs to make a place for our ladies. The position of these poor women, obliged to camp out in such close proximity to us men, was in many ways very uncomfortable, especially as soldiers were often quartered with us; but we did our best to spare them any unpleasantness that could be avoided.

For some of our party the greatest hardship of our long journey was the early rising; they needed sleep beyond everything, and from force of habit could not get it early in the night. As the ordinary criminals liked early hours—and the earlier the better—there were often disputes between us on the subject. We usually arranged the evening before with the officer of the convoy, and also with the headman of the ordinary convicts, and appointed six a.m. as the hour for starting; but once we had a regular battle on this point. We “politicals” seldom made use of the courtyard until the criminals were shut up for the night; there was no room for us till then, and it was therefore only toward nightfall that we could get out into the open air. One evening, however, some of us were in the yard, when the officer came up and ordered us to go inside. We were exceedingly surprised at this piece of gratuitous interference, and asked what it meant.

162“Make haste, and be off, or I shall order the start to be made at four o’clock to-morrow morning,” said the officer.

“But you have just agreed that we shall start at six,” said we.

“Well, and now I say that we shall start at four.”

“We shall stick to the original arrangement, and won’t stir before six,” we returned.

“We shall see about that!” was the rejoinder; and off he went.

Evidently we should have a tussle, but we were unanimous in our resolve not to give in to any such arbitrary proceeding.

Next morning the watch awakened us while it was still dark, and said the officer had given orders that we must be moving. We paid no attention to this. The ordinary convicts had been already called out, and were in the yard ready for the start, when at four o’clock the sergeant came and repeated the order. Some of us then dressed, but the others remained lying on the plank beds. Meanwhile the convicts began to grumble at being kept freezing in the cold; they cursed and threatened, and made a great to-do outside our windows. The officer himself now appeared, accompanied by one of the soldiers, and again repeated his order to start. We did not stir, and he called to his people—

“Drive them out with the butt-ends of your rifles!”

This would now most certainly have become a serious affair if the soldiers had obeyed at once, for we were prepared to defend ourselves. Fortunately they hesitated a moment, and that saved us.

“What are you doing?” cried some of us. “Do you want to have bloodshed? That would not be pleasant for you. You have broken your promise, and in no case are we obliged to begin the march so early; the instructions only say that a party must reach its destination before sunset.”

At this moment the sergeant came up in haste.

163“Captain,” said he, “the convicts are in rebellion; they want to break in here.”

“Let us get at them!” we heard them shouting outside; “we’ll soon make them show their legs!”

“There you are!” we cried to the officer. “You have brought this on yourself. It is your fault for having inflamed those men against us.”

The man lost his presence of mind in face of this danger; and, scared out of his wits, instead of giving orders, appealed to us for counsel.

“In God’s name, what’s to be done?”

We advised him to let the fellows start off at once, under command of the sergeant, so as to get them out of the way.

“At six o’clock we will be ready, and will go after them; but we won’t start a minute sooner.”

He went off somewhat humbled, and gave the order as we had suggested. We drank our tea very peacefully, and got ready at our leisure. From time to time the orderly appeared, and asked if we would start; but we always looked at the time and said it was only so many minutes to six. Punctually on the stroke of the hour we got up and set off after the rest of the convoy.

This occurrence had the effect of winning us the respect and sympathy of most of the convicts. Our firmness and decision pleased them and impressed them. They were surprised that such a handful of us—fourteen men and women—should have successfully resisted the domineering of an officer, who had at his command a hundred soldiers and their own contingent into the bargain.

Friendly relations were established between our two divisions, and throughout our journey we never came into collision. One only of the convicts had a grudge against us, and took every opportunity of evincing his dislike. He was an old hand, had repeatedly escaped from prison, and was now being transported as a criminal of “unknown antecedents.” He was evidently from the working-classes, 164but was distinguished by keen reasoning powers, and had read an astonishing amount. Reading seemed to be his master passion, but the works of reactionary authors exclusively had fallen into his hands—Katkov, Meshtchèrsky, etc.—and his views were according. He had formed really remarkable opinions on politics in general, and Socialism in particular. He was genuinely convinced that the revolutionists had killed Alexander II. solely because he had emancipated the serfs! He accused us before all the other convicts of being either discontented aristocrats or their paid agents. After this, several of us entered into discussion with him, and tried to convert him. By degrees our arguments began to take effect; he begged us to lend him books, and sought our society whenever possible. I had many talks with him, and tried to get him to tell me about his past and his wandering life; but I never succeeded in learning who and what he really was. He remained to the end the “Ivan of unknown antecedents,” as he was called in his record-book. Yet he would readily tell us tales of his vagabondage. I asked him on one occasion how he managed to get through to European Russia when he escaped from Siberia.

“Oh, where’s the difficulty?” he replied. “The chief thing is to have the Urals behind your back; then you get a train or a steamboat, and stop wherever you like. I would go in that way to Kharkov, or Ki?v, or Odessa, or Rostov, hire a room, and live quite comfortably. I was always respectably dressed; my passport was all right (that we see to ourselves), and so nobody bothered about me. The one thing I cared about was to subscribe to a library and get books. I’ve read all sorts of good things—Gaboriau, Paul de Kock, Ponson du Terrail, and lots more beside. At midday I would dine at a restaurant, and go to the theatre in the evening sometimes.”

“That sounds very nice. But where did you get the money for all that?” I inquired, with interest.

Of earning a living in the ordinary sense there was 165evidently no question here. One would suppose the gentleman to have been living on private means.

ESCAPED CONVICT-TRAMP (BRODYAGA)

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“Money? Oh, I took whatever there was to take!”

“Well, tell me just what that means,” I asked him. And he thereupon explained his theory of life.

“Above everything, it’s my motto that ‘Self’s the man.’ I don’t hold with joint-stock business in our way of life. Thieves make bad partners, you know. You run the chance of being murdered or split on at every turn; so I always work on my own hook.”

He then related how he “worked” at burglary, pocket-picking, or petty thefts, each as occasion served.

“Of course,” he observed, “sometimes you have a bit of bad luck and get caught. Then off you go to Siberia, and have to begin all over again. I expect I shall go on all my life ringing the changes on Europe and Asia,” he concluded, with perfect composure.

I realised from the narrations of this man and other criminals the astonishing numbers belonging to this vagabond class. It is generally recruited from the ranks of those condemned to transportation for the less serious offences; but some among its members have been sentenced to penal servitude, and have then “swopped.” As soon as the sun of spring shines out, not one of them remains at his place of exile; they all manage to get away and make for European Russia. They usually choose byways and tracks known only to themselves through the taigà or primeval forest, but occasionally they wander quite calmly along the great Moscow high road—until the completion of the railway the only regular way of transit between Eastern Siberia and Europe. We ourselves often met these tramps on the road, travelling in couples or in quite considerable bands. They came along in their prison clothes, a bundle and a small kettle on their backs; always skirting the edge of the forest, so as to vanish within its recesses if need be. At sight of our party they would stop for a chat with the convicts, among whom they 166often found old acquaintances. The officers and soldiers seemed not to trouble their heads about them in the slightest degree.

“Where are you off to?” the officer of our convoy once asked, when some tramps saluted him, cap in hand.

“Your Excellency knows; we’re going to the Government’s lodgings,” the rogues replied, grinning.

“Oh, get along with you, then, in God’s name!” the officer laughed; and then told us that he had escorted this very lot into exile a few months back.

“Government lodgings” was the recognised euphemism for prison, and it was perfectly true that most of these vagabonds would find their way back there soon enough; by autumn hardly a man of them would be still at large. Meanwhile they begged their way along. The Siberian natives were liberal in almsgiving; partly from obedience to their religion, which enjoins charitable deeds, but not a little from fear, as, if refused, these tramps are not slow in revenging themselves. In many places there was a regular custom of putting out food on the window-sill at night—a bowl of thickened milk, a piece of bread, or some curd-cheese. The peasants would even leave open the door of the bath-house (generally placed at a little distance from the other houses), that the wanderers might find shelter. They were admitted very unwillingly to the dwelling-houses, from a not unjustifiable mistrust of their conduct; and that reminds me of the following episode.

One day as we were on the march a criminal told me that he had known Tchernishevsky.[61] This naturally excited my interest, and I asked him how and where he had met that great martyr to our cause. He told me that he had once before been exiled, and sent to Viluisk, in Yakutsk. Tchernishevsky was there at the same time; 167they were let out of prison together, and interned in the same town. The man could tell me nothing except some details of the way in which Tchernishevsky had passed his time in exile; but that was enough to make my heart warm towards him. It seemed to me that a criminal who had known personally one of the noblest men in Russia must have something in him a little different from the rest. When he had told me all he could of Tchernishevsky, I asked him how he himself came to be going back into exile.

“I got sick of that cursed hole, Viluisk,” he said, “and got away with some other tramps. We’d been a few days on the road when one stormy night we came to a village. It was pouring in torrents, and we could find nobody who would let us in, till at last an old man opened the door of his hut. We begged him in God’s name to give us shelter.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘will you promise to leave us old folks in peace?’

“‘What do you take us for, grandfather?’ said we. ‘Have pity on us!’

“So he let us in, and the old woman gave us something to eat, and they allowed us to lie on the stove by turns. Well, they went to sleep, and we just did for them, and went off with everything that could be of any use to us. We didn’t get far: the peasants came after us and caught us; and then there was the usual game—trial and sentence to penal servitude. But on the way here I made a ‘swop,’ and now I’m going into exile as ‘of unknown antecedents.’”

On their side, however, the people of Siberia are often guilty of great brutality towards the convict-tramps, sometimes shooting them down like beasts of the chase simply in order to steal their clothes, boots, and the products of their begging. I have been told, for instance, by people whose evidence is to be trusted, that the following is a typical instance.

A tramp had hired himself out to a peasant for the 168winter. When spring laid the road open, he received the whole sum due to him, and took his departure. His wages amounted to the veriest trifle, for the peasants drive hard bargains with the poor rascals; but his master grudged parting with even this miserable pittance, and after his departure took his gun and went on the chase. Siberians are keen huntsmen and dead shots; they are as much at home in the forest as the wild animals. This man soon got on the convict’s trail, caught him up, shot him down ruthlessly, and left the body to the beasts of prey, while he went home with the spoils.

Throughout our journey we constantly heard tales of unrecognised corpses found, and shocking crimes never unravelled. Siberia was then a wild, forsaken land, untraversed by roads save for the one great Moscow highway. The government of the country districts, entirely in the hands of the police, was corrupt from top to bottom. What wonder if events that chill one’s blood with horror take place there without exciting more than a passing comment? The life of a human being is not valued highly in itself anywhere throughout the Tsar’s dominions; but in Siberia it counts for absolutely nothing, as my own eyes often testified. Even now, when distinct progress has been made in many respects, and the administration of justice greatly reformed (since 1897), this state of things is little changed.