New route taken by exiles since opening of the Trans-Siberian railway—Increased numbers produced overcrowding in all prisons both in Europe and Asia—The “forwarding prisons” the cause of much distress—The Tiumen prison; cells, kitchen, hospital—Infectious diseases—Death-rate—Tomsk forwarding prison—Conditions worse than at Tiumen—The balagan or family “kamera”—Futile attempts to dispute incontrovertible evidence—“Étapes” or road prisons and “polu Étapes” or half-way houses—Distance covered daily by the marching parties—The “telyegas” or country carts which carried the sick—Method of buying provisions from villagers en route—The “Étape” of Achinsk—Infectious diseases in these prisons—The reports of Governor-General Anuchin—Sympathy of the Czar Alexander III.

The old order changeth slowly, and the hideous memories of the black and baleful past will long survive. The pages which record the disgraceful facts may be torn out of Russian prison history but they can never be eradicated or forgotten. Let it be granted that reforms and improvements have been introduced, and that some of the most glaring evils have been removed, we may doubt whether in the present condition of the empire, still shaken to its very base by disaster and disaffection, the betterment goes below the surface or will be lasting. The governing authorities in these troublous times have but little leisure to discuss penology, and although long since aroused to a lively sense of the shortcomings of their prison system, they are slow to mend their ways. Changes and ameliorations promised still tarry by the way, and there is but little hope that the frightful conditions so long prevailing have even in part disappeared.

The chief blot upon the method of transportation no longer exists, it is true. The wearisome, almost interminable march has been replaced by the long railway journey over the Trans-Siberian line, completed in 1897 and opened the following year for the conveyance of exiles. The convicts no longer spend a couple of years or more on a journey now performed in eight or ten days. Their sufferings are no longer protracted indefinitely, but for a brief space they are still locked up like cattle in dirty, ill-ventilated vans, and are still collected in the foul “forwarding prisons,” whence they pass on for distribution to Eastern Siberia, the convict colony of Saghalien, or the outer darkness near the North Pole. A few well-planned and commodious new prisons have been erected in recent years, for which credit must be given to the prison administration, but they have applied only a partial remedy to existing conditions.

The exile route to-day naturally follows the new line of railway. From Moscow the road strikes south to Samara on the Volga, to which point a large passenger traffic is brought by the great water-way to board the trains. From Samara to Ufa on the west slope the Ural Mountains, and after scaling them the line descends to Chelyabinsk on the Siberian frontier. Here the convict travellers are divided into parties according to their destination. Some go north toward Tiumen and Tobolsk, others travel due east in the direction of Lake Baikal, and others start south for Semipalatinsk and the Altai.

The route before the railway was built was from Moscow, the centre of the home prison system, thence by train to Nizhni-Novgorod, and on by boat down the Volga through Kazan to Perm, and thence by train across the Ural Mountains to Ekaterinburg and Tiumen. All exiles of whatever class, without distinction or separation, travelled this way, and all halted at Tiumen, where they were made up into parties and forwarded to their several destinations.

Overcrowding was the curse of all Russian prisons; the cause of discomforts innumerable, inflicting untold suffering, producing deadly endemic and epidemic diseases. That it was the same everywhere, we are told on incontestable authority, and the futile attempts made by superficial inquirers to vindicate the government which is responsible are contemptible. To begin with St. Petersburg, the official report of the society for prisons stated that in 1880 the show prison, the Litovski Zamok, although built for seven hundred inmates, uniformly contained from nine hundred to a thousand; and the depot prison, supposed to hold two hundred, was always filled with double the number. The first named had 103 rooms nominally for eight hundred persons. These rooms, as described by an eye-witness, were exceedingly dirty, and he further says: “The ‘black holes’ are dreadful; they are absolutely deprived of light; a dark labyrinth leads to them and within all is wet, with rotten floors and dripping walls. A man coming from the outer air staggers away half asphyxiated. Specialists say that the healthiest man will surely die if he is kept there for three or four weeks. After a short stay prisoners went out exhausted; several could hardly stand on their feet.”

As to the specific charge of overcrowding, a few details must carry conviction. The prison at Nizhni-Novgorod was built for three hundred, and generally held seven or eight hundred persons. In Poland there were four prisons occupying the space required for one. The prison at Perm was built in 1872 for 120 inmates, but in the same year it held just double that number and the cubical air space allotted to each individual was from 202 to 260 cubic feet, or, as Kropotkin puts it, it was just as if a man was living in a coffin eight feet by six feet. Another authority, the Journal of Legal Medicine, issued by the medical department of the Ministry of the Interior, gives the cubical contents as no more than 124 cubic feet per head. At Tomsk the prison was disgracefully overcrowded. It was built for nine hundred but contained over two thousand souls. At Samara the average prison population was 1,147, but the aggregate cubic capacity of all the prisons in the town was for 552 inmates. At Verkhni Udinsk an ostrog built for 140 prisoners was often packed with five hundred and even eight hundred inmates. On the whole, summing up the dreadful facts, an apologist of the Russian government admits that the prisons contain half as many more than the number originally intended.

Let us pass to the direct evidence of a perfectly veracious witness, speaking out of his own experience. George Kennan approached his self-imposed task with a judicial, well-balanced mind, quite unprejudiced against the Russian system, predisposed, if anything, to view it with favour. He paid a lengthy visit to the Tiumen forwarding prison, with the full permission of the authorities, who withheld nothing from his observation, premising only that it was greatly overcrowded and in a bad sanitary condition.

As to the first point, the figures were conclusive. It was a well-known fact that the prison was built originally for 550 inmates but was subsequently enlarged by the addition of detached barracks so as to hold nominally 850 prisoners. On the day Kennan visited it, the number was 1,741, as witnessed by a blackboard hanging up at the office door. In the first room entered, a kamera or cell, 35 feet long, 25 feet wide and 12 feet high, the accommodation and air space at the outside was for forty persons. On the night before, 160 had slept or, more exactly, passed the night in the room. The same dreadful superfluity of human beings existed throughout the entire prison.

“I looked around the cell,” says Kennan. “There was practically no ventilation whatever, and the air was so poisoned and foul that I could hardly force myself to breathe it. We visited successively in the yard six kameras or cells, essentially like the first, and found in every one of them three or four times the number of prisoners for which it was intended, and five or six times the number for which it had adequate air space. In most of the cells there was not room enough on the sleeping platforms for all of the convicts, and scores of men slept every night on the foul, muddy floors, under the nary, ‘sleeping platforms,’ and in the gangways between them and the walls.”

The main building, containing the kitchen, the workshops, the hospital and a large number of kameras, was in a worse sanitary condition than the barracks. The air in the corridors and cells, particularly on the second story, was indescribably foul. The oxygen had been breathed again and again; it was laden with fever germs from the unventilated hospital wards, fetid odours from diseased human lungs and unclean human bodies, and the stench of unmentionable receptacles. “It was like trying to breathe in an underground hospital drain,” says Kennan. The kitchen was a dark, dirty room in the basement where three or four half naked cooks were baking large loaves and preparing soup. The bread was sour and heavy, but as good as that usually eaten by Russian peasants; the soup was found to be good and nutritious.

The hospital was on the third floor and the wards were larger and lighter than the kameras, but wholly unventilated; no disinfectants were in use, and the air was polluted to the last degree. The prospect of regaining health in such unwholesome dens was small. A man in robust condition must certainly become infected in a few weeks, and there was little hope for the recovery of the sick. All the worst disorders were to be found among the patients; scurvy, typhus fever, typhoid fever, acute bronchitis, rheumatism and syphilis. Only the patients affected by malignant typhus were isolated in a single ward. The women were separated from the men, but that was all. “The patients, both men and women, seemed to be not only desperately sick, but hopeless and heart broken.” The mortality was excessive. Typhus was epidemic every year. The prison was uniformly overcrowded; it had been built for eight hundred and generally contained eighteen hundred. Some scanty ventilation was possible when the windows could be opened, but in the stormy autumn or bitter winter no fresh air could be admitted.

According to the official reports of the inspectors of exile transportation, in the eleven years between 1876 and 1886 the greatest number of deaths in the Tiumen prison hospital was 354, the lowest 175, the average 270. This is an unparalleled death-rate. In various European prisons the rate is on the average as follows:—England, 1.4 per cent.; France, 3.8 per cent.; Austria, 3.5 per cent.; Belgium, 1.8 per cent.; United States, 1.7 per cent. “In the Tiumen forwarding prison it was 29.5 per cent., or almost 300 per thousand.... This would entirely annihilate a fixed population in from two and a half to four years,”—a death-rate such as this, in the words of Mr. Cable, “exceeds that of any pestilence that ever fell on Europe in the Middle Ages.”

The female prison was in a separate yard within a high stockade of sharpened logs. The kameras were clean and well-lighted; floors and sleeping platforms had been scrubbed; the rooms were not so densely overcrowded, and the air was purer than on the men’s side. But the condition of the third detached prison, that for exiled families, in which men, women and children were herded together to the number of three hundred, was horrible. It was overcrowded; the air was heavy and foul; “dozens of children were crying from hunger and wretchedness; and the men and women looked tired, sleepless and dejected.” All the women were voluntarily accompanying their husbands or fathers into banishment.

The disgraceful state of the Tiumen forwarding prison was perfectly well known to the authorities, and has been strongly commented upon in official reports. How far amendment has proceeded I have no definite information, although we may hope that the diversion of the outward stream of exiles since the opening of the Trans-Siberian railway has greatly reduced the excessive demands upon the imperfect accommodation. But there is another forwarding prison further eastward and at one time on the direct line of exile traffic. This is at the city of Tomsk, which is actually fifty miles distant from the railway, because the local authorities refused to pay the blackmail demanded by the projectors of the line to bring it through, or within easy reach of the city. Before railway days, the convicts travelled in barges on the river Tobol from Tiumen to Tomsk. These barges were planned to accommodate six hundred on each voyage; they were towed by steamers and made the journey in from seven to ten days, completing eighteen trips during the season of open navigation, and thus they transported annually between ten thousand and eleven thousand souls.

If the Tiumen prison was in horrible condition, that of Tomsk was infinitely worse. Its deplorable state was frankly admitted to George Kennan by the authorities when they granted him permission to visit it. “I think you will find it the worst prison in Siberia,” said the acting governor of the province of Tomsk. What else was to be expected when the buildings were filled with more than twice the number of inmates which they could properly accommodate? The Tomsk forwarding prison was designed to hold fourteen hundred, but three thousand or even four thousand were habitually crammed into it. The numbers arriving exceeded the power of distribution, and week by week a residuum remained to increase the permanent population. The Étapes, or halting stations along the road, could accommodate only a limited number and there were not enough troops to provide for more than one marching party each week.

The Tomsk forwarding prison is described by Mr. Kennan, who saw it in 1885, as, “a stockaded camp or enclosure three acres in extent, lying on open ground outside the city.” Within were some fifteen to twenty log buildings grouped about a pyramidal church tower. Each wooden building in the enclosure was a one-storied barrack prison of square logs with board roofs, heavily grated windows and massive iron doors secured with padlocks. There were eight of these, each constituting a prison ward and each divided into two kameras, one on each side of a central corridor running through the building. Each ward or building was calculated to hold 190 inmates, but was crowded with at least three hundred. Each cell was about forty feet square and the air space was seven-eighths of a cubic fathom per head. The cells were fairly well lighted, but the atmosphere was pestilential and the temperature from the natural heat of the prisoners’ bodies was fifteen or twenty degrees higher than the external air. The usual sleeping platforms ran across the cells, but there was not room on them for half of the number confined there, and the other half was forced to sleep beneath the platforms, or on the floor in the adjoining gangways. These lay there on the mud-stained and filthy floor, without pillows, blankets or bedclothing. They were in such a grievous state that they complained feelingly of the heat, foulness and oppressiveness of the air and declared that it was impossible to move about in the day time or to get rest at night.

The same evils were present in every cell. But the horrors culminated in the “family” room or balagan, the long, low shed of rough pine boards,—a frame work hastily put together and with sides of thin white cotton sheeting. There were three of these crammed full of family parties, men, women and children. The shed was surrounded by a foul ditch half full of filth which soaked through and from under the cotton-sheeting wall. The only light that penetrated within the windowless balagan was through this wall of cotton. The place was packed with hundreds of occupants,—“weary-eyed men, haggard women and ailing children,” sitting and lounging about the sleeping platforms and on the broken boards of the floor through which exuded all kinds of abominations. The air was insufferably fetid from the great numbers of infants unwashed and wholly uncared for. Wet underclothing, washed in the camp kettles, was hanging from the beams to dry; an indistinguishable chaos of bags, bundles and domestic utensils encumbered the floor, and the crowd was so closely packed that people could not move without touching each other. No remedy, no alleviation was possible. The cold at night in these cotton enclosed walls, or the damp heat and imperfect ventilation in the bath-house—which many would have preferred—were equally fatal to infant life. Detention in these wretched apologies for shelters was greatly prolonged. No change of clothing was provided; a man wore the same shirt for months, until it almost dropped off, in dirty ragged scraps, full of vermin. Not strangely was it thought a welcome relief when the orders came to take the road. The toilsome march with its incessant hardships and exhausting fatigue was preferable to the fixed residence in a forwarding prison.

The hospital at Tomsk was in some respects better than that at Tiumen; it occupied a separate building, and was kept in better order. There were always more patients than beds to receive them, and the surplus in various stages of acute disease lay about on benches or on the floor. Despite the overcrowding, the place was kept fairly clean, the bed clothing was fresh and plentiful and the air was less polluted than at Tiumen. The percentage of the sick varied according to the season. It rose in November, when the population was at its highest, to twenty-five per cent., and among the diseases malignant typhus, the true type of the ancient, but now happily rare, “gaol fever,” was always largely present. There were twenty-four hundred cases of illness in the year and at the most crowded time there have been 450 cases in the hospital with beds for only 150 patients.

The prison surgeon, one of the most humane and devoted of his class, Dr. Orzheshko, has described his experience covering fifteen years. In November, he says, “three hundred men and women dangerously sick lay on the floor in rows, most of them without pillows or bed clothing; and in order to find even floor space for them we had to put them so close together that I could not walk between them, and a patient could not cough or vomit without coughing or vomiting into his own face or into the face of the man lying beside him. The atmosphere in the wards became so terribly polluted that I fainted repeatedly upon coming into the hospital in the morning, and my assistants had to revive me by dashing water into my face. In order to change or purify the air, we were forced to keep the windows open; and as winter set in, this so chilled the rooms, that we could not maintain ... a temperature higher than five or six degrees RÉamur above the freezing point.”

This hospital was so saturated with contagious disease that it stood condemned, and deserved to be burned down. Official procrastination delayed its destruction, but in 1887 a sum of 30,000 rubles was granted for the erection of a new hospital, which is, presumably, now occupied. It was high time to make a change. The city of Tomsk, the capital of Siberia, the great centre of Siberian trade, flourishing, prosperous and increasing, naturally became alarmed. The free inhabitants were threatened with the spread of dire epidemic diseases. The local press, defying the censorship, eloquently denounced the horrible condition due to the vast accumulation of excessive numbers in the forwarding prison, and the resultant evils in sickness and mortality. The newspapers stated incontrovertible facts. The death-rate in the city of Tomsk was fifty per thousand per annum, sufficiently large, but in the prison it was three hundred per thousand. Typhus was the predominating disease, accompanied by smallpox, diphtheria, measles and scarlatina. This typhus constituted 56.4 per cent. of all the sickness in the forwarding prison in 1886, 62.6 per cent. in 1887 and 23 per cent. in 1888. The corresponding death-rate in these years was 23.2, 21 and 13.1 per cent.

A violent controversy was aroused between the enterprising and outspoken American investigator, Mr. George Kennan, and a well-known English explorer, Mr. H. de Windt, who undertook to contest the statements, and, indeed, to deny the facts set forth by Mr. Kennan, plainly condemning them as the phantasy of a disordered imagination and boldly affirming that such a place as the Tomsk forwarding prison “does not exist.” Mr. de Windt’s arguments are based upon the negative evidence of his own experience. He declares that he saw nothing of the horrors described, but then he never saw or closely inspected the prisons incriminated. He was, no doubt, admitted to certain prisons, which he visited under the auspices of the authorities, and he reported upon them hastily and on imperfect knowledge. Mr. Kennan’s painful story is so completely sustained by Russian official reports and the open condemnation of the Siberian press, that it is entitled to full credence and may be relied upon as absolutely trustworthy and conclusive. His account of Tiumen and Tomsk must take a prominent place in the history of penal institutions.

The exile system called the Étapes or “road prisons” into being. They were very numerous and were planted at intervals of every twenty-five or forty miles, and as this distance was beyond the limit of a single day’s march, half-way houses, or polu Étapes, were to be met with regularly along the road. Each Étape was the headquarters of a detachment of soldiers who formed the convoy or escort of the convicts moving eastward. At the polu Étapes there were no troops. The head of each convoy was a commissioned officer styled the nachalnik.

The marching parties covered 330 miles every month, doing from fifteen to twenty miles on two succeeding days and resting on the third. Thus a party leaving Tomsk on Monday morning reached a polu Étape that night, slept there and passed on to another regular Étape on Wednesday, where they halted for twenty-four hours. On Thursday the journey was resumed with a fresh escort, a polu Étape was reached that night, and a regular Étape the next, and so on, day after day and week after week for many months. Until 1883, there was no separation of the sexes on the march, but after that date single men were excluded from the family parties in which women and children were included. Terrible demoralisation was previously the rule in the constantly overcrowded Étapes, and the grossest offences were commonly committed.

The departure of a marching party from the forwarding prison was generally fixed at eight o’clock in the morning, when the telyegas, or country carts, for the conveyance of the sick and infirm, began to collect in front of the prison gate. Next appeared the prison blacksmith with his anvil and portable forge, to test the fetters as the convicts came forth, and after he had satisfied himself that the rivets were fast and the basils had not been bent, an under officer doled out ten kopecks to each individual, and the convicts were formed in line, by classes, for convenience of inspection and calling the roll. The hard-labour convicts removed their gray visorless caps to show that their crowns were half shaved according to regulation. From the other sides of their heads hung a mat of long, coarse and dishevelled hair. At length the whole party, numbering from three to four hundred, assembled in the street; each convict carried a gray linen two-bushel bag for the storage of his personal effects. Many possessed tea-kettles, dangling from the waist belts that supported the leg irons, and one or two might be seen with a favourite dog in their arms. All the men were dressed alike in long gray overcoats over coarse linen shirts and loose gray trousers. The women wore no distinctive uniform, but were dressed mostly in peasant costume with gaily coloured handkerchiefs on their heads. Square foot-wrappers of gray linen were used in lieu of stockings and all wore the koty, or low shoes, while they lasted, but they were of such rotten, worthless material that they fell to pieces in a couple of days and the wretched wayfarers went barefooted.

The telyegas were carts of the rudest description, one-horsed and without springs or seats, and the occupants, sick and suffering, old, infirm and emaciated, lay at the bottom on a scanty layer of grass. A doctor’s certificate was essential to secure a place in the carts, and a sharp lookout was kept to weed out the malingerers. In one year more than twenty-five hundred broken-down persons were conveyed to their destination in as many as 658 carts.

When the column started, the marching party led the van at a brisk pace, followed by the military escort, the carts bearing the sick, and those conveying the gray linen bags. The commanding officer brought up the rear. “This strange procession,” says Deutsch, who knew from personal experience, “extends itself along the road for about three-quarters of a mile, and raises clouds of dust.” A terrible scourge was the Siberian midge, a pest attacking not only the exposed hands and face but getting into the mouth, nose, ears and eyes, and under the clothing, and inflicting unendurable irritation. The pace maintained was at the rate of two miles an hour. After traversing ten miles, a halt was called for rest and the noon-day meal. The effort was little for the able-bodied, but for the weaker, laden with chains and bundles, the long march was most exhausting, and all gladly flung themselves on the ground, wet or dry. A spot was chosen at the entrance of some village, and its residents came forth to haggle and huckster over the sale of coarse food, such as black rye bread, fish pies, hard boiled eggs, milk and kvas, or sour country beer. Prices varied, and no attempt was made to control them officially; they were liable to be extortionate at seasons of scarcity, after bad harvests, and the government allowance was at times ludicrously inadequate, barely enough to satisfy hunger. Besides, the average convict is an inveterate gambler, and many became penniless risking and losing the whole of their allowance. Then they would beg by the roadside, as already described. After a short hour’s pause, the march was resumed, a second ten miles was painfully covered, and it was almost dark when the halt for the night was reached, whether at an Étape or polu Étape.

There was little to choose between the Étapes and the polu Étapes, but the latter were smaller and the accommodation was consequently worse. Both were stockaded enclosures, containing three or more long, low, one-story buildings. One of these was the commanding officer’s quarters, a second was for the soldiers of the escort, and the remaining hut or huts formed the prison. Each was divided into two or three cells; each was furnished with the usual plank sleeping platforms in a double row, and a brick stove. The available space was much too small for the prisoners passing through as these halting prisons were built for about half the number. “All of these,” says an official report, “are not only too small, but old and decayed and demand capital repairs.” The governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Anuchin, reported confidentially in 1880, to the Czar, Alexander III, that all prisons he had visited, including the Étapes, were tumbled-down buildings in a lamentable sanitary condition; that they were cold in winter and saturated with miasma; that the prisons of the empire generally, with the exception of the principal ones recently erected, were not remarkable for their good qualities, but the Siberian prisons were particularly bad because they were built quickly, with insufficient means, and almost wholly without supervision of any kind. Only one architect had been employed and his sphere of action was so wide that he paid only a rare visit to new works in progress. The contractors departed from the original plans and evaded conditions, so that the work was continually neglected. In the first place the money was insufficient, after a portion of the government appropriation had been stolen by fraudulent contractors and corrupt officials, and the new Étapes were run up without stone foundations, so that the walls soon “settled” and the buildings rapidly deteriorated under climatic agencies and the injurious wear and tear of the constant overcrowding. In temperate weather half the prisoners slept on the ground in the outer courtyard, but when it was too inclement they filled the kameras, lay about the corridors and packed themselves into the garrets. Not the smallest care was taken to make places habitable. Dirt accumulated everywhere; no provision had been made for ventilation, and the windows would not even open. Occupation of quarters was a matter of force, when the weakest went to the wall.

On arrival at an Étape, generally in the afternoon, a halt was called outside the palisade for roll-call, and then the great gates were thrown open for the indiscriminate admission of the crowd. “With a wild, mad rush and a furious clashing of chains, more than three hundred men made a sudden break for the narrow gateway, struggled, fought and crowded through it, and then burst into the kameras, in order to secure, by preoccupation, places on the sleeping platforms,” says Kennan. Leo Deutsch graphically describes this “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 and kicks and curses did not result in anything serious.” The losers in the game took the worst places, or bartered for a better bed with the more fortunate at the price of a few kopecks.

When the scramble for a night’s lodging ended, the tired wayfarers fell to preparing their own suppers. Hot water for making tea was retailed by the soldiers of the escort, and cooked food with coarse bread was bought from the market women who came in to sell their wares. Sometimes they did not appear and the convicts would almost starve, or the times were hard and impossible prices were charged. The daily allowance issued by the authorities was sometimes insufficient, and again the convicts went short. Often enough the buyers cheated the sellers, or stole their goods, and the poor women could get no redress. After supper, roll was again called, the watch was set, sentries were posted, and the prisoners were locked up and left for the night.

The Étape at Achinsk, for instance, between Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk, is described by a newspaper of Irkutsk as “a cloaca where human beings perish like flies. Typhus fever, diphtheria and other epidemic diseases prevail there constantly, and infect all who have the misfortune to get into that awful place,” and a St. Petersburg newspaper says, “There one doctor has on his hands more than three hundred sick.” A correspondent wrote to a Tomsk journal, “As soon as you enter the court-yard of the prison you notice the contaminated, miasmatic air.... Dante himself would have thrown down his pen if he had been required to describe the damp, cold, dilapidated cells of this prison. At night myriads of bed-bugs torture every prisoner into a condition not far removed from frenzy. The prison sometimes has six hundred inmates and to its filth and disorder are attributable the typhus fever, diphtheria and other diseases that spread from it, as from a pit of contagion, to the population of the city.” In the Isham Étape, the cold was intense and the exiles arriving had no warm clothing. One man was frozen to death on the road. At Cheremkhovsky the air space which was barely enough for two persons had to serve for thirty. It was described by a prisoner as “a grave and not a prison.” At Kirinsk, the building of decayed logs would have fallen down had it not been shored up by other logs equally rotten. A prisoner, to show the state of the wood, thrust his fingers out of sight into the wall.

We have seen how the marching parties were accompanied by a large contingent of sick who were unfit to travel and yet could not be left behind, sometimes even at the point of death. They were compelled to sit all day in a cramped position in the rude carts, intensifying the already acute pains of their often mortal ailments, and were exposed to all conditions of the weather. When dry and warm, they were enveloped in clouds of dust, causing intolerable discomfort, especially in the case of disease of the respiratory organs; when cold and inclement, still worse dangers attended the exposure to snow and wintry winds. No change into dry clothing on arrival was feasible, for with inconceivable carelessness the baggage was allowed to become soaked through on the road. The baggage carts were unprovided with cover even by tarpaulins. Thus the sickly, in the worst stages of illness, were forced to lie down upon the same platforms, side by side with the more robust, to whom they quickly passed the contagion of their diseases. In the rare cases when the Étape was provided with a lazaret, newcomers who were ill might fare better, but the average Étape hospital was infamously bad.

The indictment against the Czar and his government for their brutal defiance of the commonest rules of humanity has been more than substantiated by the deplorable facts set forth in the previous pages. It is agreeable to note some disposition to mend matters on the part of the supreme authorities. Certain reforms in prison administration have been introduced in recent years, showing that the autocrat of all the Russias has not continued utterly indifferent to the sufferings of Siberian exiles and convicts. Widespread radical changes have been impossible; the evils were too deep seated and too extensive for general removal; but one or two new prisons have been erected, more in accord with the dictates of penitentiary science and aiming at partial improvement. A brief account of one or two of these may serve to relieve somewhat the gloomy picture which has been by no means over-coloured.

The Czars Alexander II and III could not plead ignorance of the horrible conditions prevailing in Eastern Siberia which were brought unmistakably to their notice by the reports of Anuchin in 1880 and 1882. Some of his condemnatory remarks have already been quoted and may be repeated here as summing up his final verdict. After minute inquiry and much investigation, he characterises the Siberian prisons as follows: “The exile system and penal servitude in Eastern Siberia are in the most unsatisfactory state ... while the exile bureaus in the provinces are not organised in a manner commensurate with the importance of the work that they have to do and are prejudicial rather than useful to the service.” The Czar Alexander III was so deeply impressed with the necessity for reform that he endorsed on this report in his own handwriting, “I should greatly like to do this and it seems to me indispensable.” Events proved too strong however even for the autocrat ruler of all the Russias. He says: “I have read this report with great interest, and I am more than troubled by this melancholy but just description of the government’s forgetfulness of a country so rich and so necessary to Russia.” On the part dealing with prisons the Czar endorsed the words, “A melancholy but not a new picture.” On a later page I shall go further into the ameliorations and improvements attempted since 1886.