Conditions in the women’s prison for politicals at Ust-Kara were somewhat more humane; each prisoner had a cell to herself, and doors were left unlocked during the day so that the inmates could socialize whenever they wished.
As with the Decembrists, the government was in a quandary as to how best to contain the spread, in exile, of subversive ideas. In prison, politicals were isolated from common criminals (whom it was feared they would corrupt). To make it more difficult for them to escape, they were generally distributed in small groups among remote towns and villages, in forced colonization, or assigned residences under police surveillance. This arrangement, however (according to the governor-general of Eastern Siberia), had also spread “anarchistic ideas” where they had never been known before.
However dispersed, it was exile by “administrative process” which allowed the government to do with them what it wished. In brief, this most egregious aspect of the penal code allowed the arrest, detention (for up to two years), and eventual banishment without hearing or trial for up to ten years (after 1888) of any individual judged by the local authorities to be “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquillity.” Under this authority, people could be picked up suddenly, without warning on the street, for reasons as impalpable as the air – as in the case of a man who was “suspected of an intention to put himself into an illegal situation.”481 Although primarily aimed at suppressing political dissent, in fact anyone known to wish a change of regime was liable to exile for life. So was anyone aware of anyone contemplating such a wish who did not report it to the police.
Although the use of administrative exile as a state weapon had preceded by several years the first attempt on the life of a government official, its application was redoubled as Russia’s pre-revolutionary struggle intensified. Hundreds of people, wrote Kennan, “representing all classes and all social grades,” were “swept into the prisons by the dragnet of the police,” and before the end of 1889 “there was hardly a town or large village in Western Siberia that did not contain administrative exiles.”482 Their individual treatment varied according to the luck of their locale, but in the wave of repression that followed the assassination of Alexander II, a newly promulgated statute of police surveillance and its companion “standard” code of exile regulations (both set forth in March 1882) more strictly circumscribed an exile’s life.
Among other things, they effectively deprived him of any independent means of support. In Kennan’s inventory, he was
forbidden, under pain of imprisonment, to act in the capacity of teacher, doctor, chemist, photographer, lithographer, librarian, copyist, editor, compositor, reporter, lecturer, actor, lawyer, bookseller, or clerk. He cannot hold any position in the service of the state or of society; he cannot be an officer or a partner in any commercial company; he cannot be a member of any scientific body; he cannot have anything to do with drugs, medicines, photographic or lithographic materials, books, weapons, or newspapers; and, finally, he cannot “exercise any public activity.”483
“What,” expostulated Kennan, “is there left for an educated man to do?” – especially since most administratives were professional men or intellectuals, and generally unfit for farming or other manual trades.
Beyond this, the administrative was a captive of his place of banishment; had to report at intervals to the police; and his residence was subject to search and seizure at any hour. His correspondence was so strictly censored that all letters were tested with a solution of chlorate of iron, to see whether any entries had been made with invisible ink.
Of course, the rules were not always strictly enforced, despite the tsar’s bureaucratic effort to make them uniform. But apart from the humiliating restrictions, some exiles were also subjected to the harshest conditions of Siberian life. At Surgut, a small town on the Ob just south of the Arctic Circle, and Berezov at the river’s mouth, Turukhansk, Verkhoyansk, and Srednekolymsk (the usual destination “for all Jewish suspects” after 1888484), and other miserable little native settlements so small or remote as not to be on the map, exiles languished among the aborigines and sometimes found that for hundreds of miles around there was not a single person with whom they could converse. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the radical social theorist and writer exiled to Vilyuysk, wrote to his wife: “People here are so used to travelling endless distances that Yakutsk, which is 700 versts [464 miles] away, seems to them a town you could reach out and touch.” For lack of anything else to do, he spent his time “collecting mushrooms and drying them by a method developed by my experiments and deep cogitation.”485
Another exile complained to a friend that he was followed by a suspicious Yakut everywhere he went – “for fear that if I escape they will have to answer for it to the Russian authorities.” Inside the communal tent (where he was forced to dwell) there was invariably some Yakut
who has stripped himself naked, and is hunting for lice in his clothing... The excrement of the cattle and of the children; the inconceivable disorder and filth; the rotting straw and rags; the myriads of vermin in the bedding; the foul, oppressive air, and the impossibility of speaking a word of Russian – all these things taken together are positively enough to drive one insane. The food of the Yakuts can hardly be eaten. It is carelessly prepared, without salt, often of tainted materials, and the unaccustomed stomach rejects it with nausea. I have no separate dishes or clothing of my own; there are no facilities for bathing, and during the whole winter – eight months – I am as dirty as they. I cannot go anywhere... I have nothing to read – neither books nor newspapers – and I know nothing of what is going on in the world.486
The Decembrist Muravyov-Apostol spent a year of his exile (1828) at Vilyuysk, which at the time consisted of a little shacklike church with a dome, four houses, and a few dozen yurts. The church had been built during the reign of Catherine the Great, but the priests had spent most of their time engaged in the fur trade, and few Yakuts had been evangelized. The surrounding landscape was barren, relieved by only a few coniferous trees, and Apostol’s attempt to plant potatoes completely failed. He had more luck at first with millet, which grew quickly, but before it could ripen it was nipped by frost. After a long and bitterly cold winter, summer came in a brief blaze of heat and with a swarm of giant midges that bred out of the swamps. These midges, he wrote, were
to be compared with the Egyptians’ boils in the time of the Pharoah... I could not even poke my nose outside my yurt. Whole clouds of midges of great size stick to you cruelly. The Yakut wear masks against them, woven from hairs from horses’ manes. In the yurt they protect themselves by means of smoke from a dung fire. There is a large pot containing coal, and they put into it pieces of dried dung paste, and this they also use in autumn to smear on the outside of the yurt. This fumigation, far from fragrant, continues day and night.487
Under such circumstances, the return of the frightfully cold winter, with temperatures that dropped to as far as 50 below, seemed to him a “saving frost.”
One of the most famous of the women revolutionaries sent into exile was Katerina Breshkovskaya, who had first “gone among the people” in 1874, and in punishment for this (after nearly four years in preliminary detention before her trial) was sent first to Ust-Kara, then to a prison camp near the eastern shores of Lake Baikal. “I was like a wild falcon in a narrow cage,” she recalled. “I grew almost frantic with loneliness and to keep my sanity I would rush out in the snow shouting passionate orations, or, playing the prima donna, sing grand opera arias to the bleak landscape – which never applauded.”488 She managed one spectacular, if short-lived escape, making her way across the rugged mountains with two companions for 600 miles toward the Pacific Coast before being caught. After several years near the Arctic Circle, she was transferred as a forced colonist to Selenginsk, a half-Buryat village of wooden huts in the desolate valley of the Selenga River. Seven years later, she became a “free exile,” and in 1896 was finally released.