Gradually, as I extended my hands, I began to feel that I was in a tiny cell, like a kennel, and that someone was slowly dragging himself toward me; I heard the clanging of iron on the stone floor. My husband stood before me and I saw that his legs were bound by heavy chains. No words can ever describe what I felt when I saw the immensity of his suffering. Only then did I fully realize the sacrifices required to fight for liberty in our country. A feeling of exaltation and great pride swept over me. To the bewilderment of the guards, I knelt on the filthy floor and kissed the chains.461
The tsar, however, didn’t want martyrs on his hands, and the lives of the exiles came to include a remarkable number of amenities. Their situation was also eased considerably by the indulgent supervision of their “warden,” General Stanislav Leparsky, an elderly cavalry officer with a humane consideration for their plight. The wives were permitted to visit with their husbands twice a week, and (in Maria’s view) the work the men had to do, five hours daily in two shifts, was “not excessive and was good for them, because it allowed them exercise.”462 At Chita, where many of them were gathered together, and were able to draw upon each other for intellectual companionship, comfort, and strength, the prisoners worked at the local flour mill, cultivated the prison garden, attended to sanitation, repaired the buildings, or dug or filled ditches by the roads. As one jauntily described their routine:
Every day except on Sundays and feast days the sergeant on duty would enter the prison early in the morning and calclass="underline" “Gentlemen, to work.” In general we were eager to get out, and left with songs on our lips and energy in our hearts. No force was ever used on us. Our column would then amble forth toward the Devil’s Grave. Peasants enlisted by the guards carried our picks and shovels and pushed the wheelbarrows, while we ourselves fastened our chains to our belts and jingled our foot fetters to the rhythm of some stirring revolutionary tune.463
These relatively informal work details were transformed into social outings when the women joined them on the march. “The guards,” we are told, “then carried the ladies’ folding chairs, rugs, samovars, hampers with food, newspapers, chessboards, and reading material. A shady spot would be found on the edge of the forest near the Big Ditch. The ladies settled comfortably under the trees, sewing or reading, while the prisoners would dig for a couple of hours, and then everyone would have lunch and relax. Some played chess; [others] sketched; some soldiers played cards, others stacked their muskets and went to sleep.”464
In the annals of the exile system, such a trusting and idyllic convoy must have been unique.
Whenever the work proved more strenuous than some could handle, their hardier comrades were always willing to lend a hand. And by otherwise sharing with one another just about everything they had, no one lacked for food, clothing, books, and so on, despite the fact that each prisoner was granted only 114 rubles 23 kopeks a year from the state.
“Our life in Chita has really become quite tolerable,” Maria wrote to a relative. “We explore the lovely countryside around us; we have even managed to engage local servants, who though raw and untrained, help to shift the burden of domesticity from our shoulders. I lead an active and occupied life.”465
In Chita, the Decembrists organized themselves into a school, or “academy” as they called it, in which each member lectured in the field of his expertise. One taught military science; another, physics, chemistry, and anatomy; a third, Russian history; a fourth, literature; a fifth, foreign languages; and so on. With Leparsky’s permission, books, magazines, and newspapers in French, German, and Italian started to arrive from abroad, and during the prisoners’ three years in Chita and later at Petrovsky Zavod, near Nerchinsk, a substantial library was built up. They also established a carpentry workshop and forge, formed Siberia’s first string quartet, and organized musical soirees, with Maria as occasional “guest” pianist, playing on the clavichord she had brought along. Sometimes their Academy lectures were attended by outsiders, and in other ways too they contributed to the knowledge and welfare of the community. Nikolai Bestuzhev, a gifted painter, compiled a Buryat-Russian dictionary and collected native legends; others made agricultural experiments, taught the natives the art of hothouse cultivation, and introduced barley, asparagus, cucumbers, melons, and cauliflowers to the Transbaikal. Those individual Decembrists unlucky enough to be scattered to outlying settlements also left their mark. One published a local newspaper in Kyakhta, another made an outstanding map of the northeast, a third gathered material on local folklore and native customs, and the Borisov brothers, Pyotr and Andrei, “developed a system of entomological classification that was later adopted by the French Academy of Sciences.”466
Whereas almost all educated officials or aristocrats before them had regarded their time and tenure in Siberia as a temporary circumstance, the Decembrists knew they were in Siberia to stay, and so committed themselves to the life and development of the country. As Siberia’s first true resident intelligentsia, they also represented the best and brightest that tsarist Russia had yet produced. “One can definitely say,” wrote Nikolai Basargin, rather modestly, “that our long stay in various parts of Siberia was of some use.”467
After two years, the prisoners were allowed to remove their leg-irons, and Pauline Annenkova (who had followed her lover to Siberia and married him in prison) kept those belonging to her husband and fashioned them into bracelets so comely that the other wives found in them an emblem of defiance and insisted on copies of their own.
In August 1830, the prisoners were transferred to Petrovsky Zavod near Nerchinsk, but it is obvious they all knew in advance that the hard labor associated with those mines was not to be their fate. Indeed, the march to the new prison (at an unforced rate of about ten miles a day) could almost be compared to a leisurely camping trip. “The convoy would start off,” writes Maria’s biographer, “as a rule, at 3 a.m., so as to avoid the hottest hours of the day. Camp was pitched about 9 a.m. and a short rest followed after lunch. [One exile’s] task was to ride ahead at dawn each day with the servants and some of the guards to pitch camp for the night, preferably in a picturesque location, and have supper ready when the main parties arrived. On warm days, the prisoners were allowed to bathe in the rivers or lakes along the way.”468
At Petrovsky Zavod, the cells were dark but otherwise quite commodious, and handsomely furnished by their inmates with rugs, pictures, couches, and the like. Married couples were allowed to live together in a separate wing of the prison, and others had their own private cells. Nearby, Maria Volkonskaya had a small house built for herself, where she employed a maid and a cook. After Sergey’s prison sentence expired in February 1835, the Volkonskys moved to Urik, a little village near Irkutsk, where they had a two-story country house with glass windows, servants’ quarters, and a veranda built on a scenic bluff overlooking the Angara River. In 1844, they also acquired a small mansion in Irkutsk, retaining their Urik dwelling as a summer retreat.
In Irkutsk, Maria helped finance local schools and hospital facilities, and became a patron of the arts. Through her efforts, the city acquired a new theater and concert hall, and her son Mikhail, born in exile, became a prominent member of Muravyov-Amursky’s staff. Denied her royal rank as a Decembrist’s wife, it was nevertheless reclaimed for her by a grateful public in Irkutsk who christened her “the Princess of Siberia.”