Thus did a quite limited idea of Siberia become fixed in the public mind. One Victorian writer called the colony “the cesspool of the Tsars,”446 and if the judgment seems harsh, the prevailing view was perhaps fairly epitomized by Count Nesselrode’s emphatic pronouncement that Siberia was “the bottom of the sack.”447 In 1882, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia lamented this notion of the territory in a report to Alexander III. Describing the exile system (not Siberia) as “an ulcer upon the Empire,” he wrote in conclusion:
Siberia is truly a beautiful country. Its people are gifted with high intellectual capacity, and are honest, industrious, and energetic. Both the country and its inhabitants deserve the most gracious consideration... It is time for the Government to give this country particular attention, and extricate it from the position into which it has been put by its remoteness from the center of the Empire, by its designation as a place of exile and penal servitude, and by the long-continued failure to satisfy its needs and demands.448
The tsar himself, reacting to this appeal, scrawled in the margins: “I am more than troubled.... It is inexcusable, and even criminal, to allow such a state of affairs in Siberia to continue.”
As a result of new attention paid to Sakhalin Island, a kind of preliminary solution to Siberia’s woes emerged. After Russia acquired undisputed sovereignty over the island in 1875, the government decided to turn it into a penal colony to relieve mainland Siberia of its convict element. Sakhalin’s economic potential, moreover, promised to make it “the pearl of Russia’s eastern possessions... as rich in coal as Wales, in fish as Newfoundland, and in oil as Baku.”449 And in 1881 the government went forward in earnest with its prison island scheme. After 1884, when a prison administration headed by a military governor was established, the convicts and exiles flowed in at the rate of about one thousand a year; some came via the Amur to Nikolayevsk, from which they were ferried across to the island, but most arrived by sea from Odessa after a two-month voyage via the Suez Canal, the Indian Ocean, and the East China Sea. Because the island’s isolation made it an even more natural prison than Siberia’s expanse, there was little chance of escape, and most hard-labor convicts, repeat offenders, and brodyags who refused to divulge their identities were subsequently confined there. By 1888, Sakhalin had become the most important and the biggest of Siberia’s prisons.
If Siberia was Russia’s Australia, Sakhalin was its Norfolk Island. One writer has eloquently summarized the dread conditions which prevailed:
On Sakhalin, the guards were more criminal than the convicts and the free settlers suffered more than the imprisoned. On Sakhalin, free women sold their children to preserve a mockery of a family, while convict women, rationed like precious commodities, were known to murder their designated spouses in hope of a better match. On Sakhalin the aborigines enjoyed an open season on escapees with a bounty for each corpse. On Sakhalin, men and women went to the woods not in search of grapes nor to gratify their lust, but for deadly toxic wolfsbane which would bring a quick end to their tormented lives. On Sakhalin, peasants talked wistfully of that same Siberia that Muscovites dreaded.
On Sakhalin, the coal-miners ate tallow candles and rotten wood while the rivers were clogged with salmon. Sakhalin infused its unfortunate residents with a special malady. Chekhov called it “febris sachalinensis” and described it as sensations of dampness, shivering fits, severe headaches, rheumatic pains, and a sinking feeling that one would never be able to leave the island. He added that “if only those who liked Sakhalin lived there, the island would be uninhabited.”450
At the turn of the century, Sakhalin was also the only place throughout the Russian Empire where the death penalty existed, where convicts were still chained to wheelbarrows, and floggings remained routine. In a candid admission in 1890 by the island’s military governor, “Everyone wants to escape from here – the convicts, the settlers, and the officials.”451 And Chekhov exclaimed: “I have seen Ceylon, which is paradise, and Sakhalin, which is hell.”452
The story of Sakhalin’s women is especially lamentable. As they made up less than 10 percent of the exile population, they were processed to meet the universal demand. Upon arrival, some became the concubines of officials and were immediately enrolled in the prison administration as maids or domestic servants; others were “set aside as prostitutes for the guards and minor clerks”; the majority were distributed among the convict settlers as common-law wives.453 But wherever the new arrivals went, wrote Chekhov, they were followed by crowds of hungry men, the way whales, seals, and dolphins – “hoping to feast on the fat egg-filled herring” – followed schools of fish.454 That feast was not always one the men savored for long. Most of the women had been exiled for murdering their husbands or lovers, and an abusive mate easily tempted them to repeat their crime.
There were some mitigating factors. Convict settlers were supplied with a small homestead, seed, tools, clothing, and a modest allowance for each child under eighteen. After six years they were eligible to become free peasants, and could return to Russia if they wished. Nearly everyone who could afford to did. To supplement the exile population, develop the island’s natural resources, and give it an agricultural base, the government also made some attempt to lure free immigrants with tax exemptions and other incentives. But the degraded atmosphere, physically inhospitable environment, and lack of planning frustrated most efforts to turn their labor to account. Only the large coal deposits located around Due on the west coast were profitably mined, after Chinese coolies were imported from Hong Kong.
Of all the notorieties of the exile system, perhaps none aroused so much feeling in the West as its use in suppressing political dissent. Before the revolutionary movement developed in earnest – with a proliferation of terrorist organizations and communist cells – easily the most celebrated of the dissidents were the so-called “Decembrists,” who in December 1825 attempted a sort of libertarian coup d’etat in St. Petersburg.
The Decembrists on the whole were gentleman-aristocrats of liberal views who had been embittered by the failed promise of Alexander I’s regime. Upon ascending the throne in 1801, Alexander had surrounded himself with a coterie of brilliant and energetic young reformers who proposed a number of plans for democratic change. The tsar himself corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, who sent him pamphlets explaining the character of American political institutions, and with Alexander’s evident approval a constitution granting free speech and other civil rights was drafted as a new foundation for the rule of law. It is not clear how far the tsar was prepared to go in his reforms (except that they were to be imposed from above), but the Napoleonic Wars and the burning of Moscow expunged his enthusiasm and strengthened the forces of reaction. The government grew ever more determined to resist the “Jacobin spirit” of the West, and detected sedition in the least dissent. After 1817, dissidents were forced to whisper and secret societies began to form. Some evolved from Masonic lodges, where restless intellectuals of like mind made contact; others brought together those who through study and travel had become familiar with the French Encyclopedists, and with the revolutionary movements in France and the United States. Army officers returning from the Napoleonic Wars naturally compared what they had seen abroad “with what,” wrote one of them, “confronted them at every step at home: slavery of the majority of Russians, cruel treatment of subordinates by superiors, all sorts of government abuses, and general tyranny. The masses who had been told that they were fighting ‘Napoleonic despotism’ came back to find at home a regime more despotic than Napoleon’s had been.”455