When Kennan met her at Selenginsk in 1885, he was much impressed with her character and fortitude, but predicted she would die in captivity, leaving only an unpainted wooden cross in a bare graveyard in the Transbaikal. In fact, after her release, she returned to Russia, and (“an embittered revolutionist”) helped plan the assassinations of Count Vyacheslav von Plehve, Minister of the Interior in 1904, and of Grand Duke Sergey in 1905.
Although most administratives were exiled as neblagonadyeshny – literally “those of whom nothing good can be expected” – when given the least opportunity to manifest their industry and gifts, quite the opposite was often true. From the beginning, in fact, Siberian exiles had made significant contributions to the life and culture of the empire. The exiled seventeenth-century Croatian priest Yuri Krizanich was usefully consulted by early trade envoys to China; Johann Tabbert von Strahlenberg, a Swedish prisoner of war, drew some of the best contemporary maps of Siberia and “compiled polyglot tables of aboriginal languages”489; and a number of Poles pursued studies that earned them lasting renown. Two mountain ranges in Northern Siberia are named after Polish geologists; other exiles (such as Waldemar Bogaras, Waldemar Jochelson, and Dmitry Klementz) added enormously to the knowledge of native cultures and folklore. Their compatriot, Alexander Tschekanovsky, devised a magnifying glass for himself from a broken decanter, and developed into an acclaimed entomologist. He also made geological studies along the Angara River, and (again with instruments of his own making) meteorological observations at Irkutsk. The Siberian-born Grigory Potanin, a founding father of the movement for Siberian autonomy, was actually exiled from Siberia to the European Russian north, but returned in 1876 to lead naturalist expeditions to Mongolia, Tibet, and the Central Asia Plateau. Bronislaw Pilsudski did pioneering work among the Ainu, Gilyak (Nivkh), and Oroks on Sakhalin Island.
Among the exiles Kennan met at Tomsk was Prince Alexander Kropotkin (brother of the famous Socialist), who had first been arrested as a student for possessing a copy of Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance.” Arrested again in 1877, he was banished to Minusinsk, north of Mongolia on the Yenisey, where in conjunction with a dedicated local naturalist he founded an outstanding museum devoted to the geology, botany, and archeology of the region.
Yet the repression that created the exile system ultimately negated even some of these gains. In 1822, for example, the Polish scholar, Jozef Kowalewski had joined a secret patriotic society organized by the poet Adam Mickiewicz. He was arrested, after the society was broken up by the police, banished to Kazan, where he studied Oriental languages for six years, and in 1828 was transferred to Eastern Siberia. From there he was allowed to travel to Peking. He returned with many books in Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chinese, and did such brilliant work in his field as to become the preeminent Orientalist of his day. Ultimately allowed to return to Warsaw, he happened to be living in a house from which a bomb was thrown at the Russian governor on September 19, 1863. In reprisal, the authorities burned everything the house contained, including a piano that had once belonged to Chopin, and all of Kowalewski’s priceless manuscripts and books.
Three centuries after the town bell of Uglich had been exiled, it received an imperial pardon, on May 20, 1892. Reconsecrated and repaired, it was duly restored to its original abode, where, we are told, “the people lined the piers and river embankment to give a rousing welcome to the steamer that was bringing the alarm bell home. The bell was placed on special stretchers and borne into the city to the loud cheers of the crowd. The city’s dignitaries stood as a guard of honor over the bell till the following morning, when in the presence of five thousand fellow townsmen, the sexton rang it.”490 Seven years later, on May 6, 1899, the system itself was declared abolished, and the announcement (according to an official publication) “removed from Siberia that shameful stain attached to it as a place of exile, by putting it on the same footing with other countries of the Empire.” A few months after that, with great fanfare, the Russian delegate to the International Prison Congress in Brussels declared: “The Middle Ages left to Russia three legacies: torture, the knout, and exile. The eighteenth century abolished torture, the nineteenth the knout, and the first day of the twentieth century will be the last of a penal system based upon exile.”491
The imperial edict of June 12, 1900, however, failed to sweep it away. Imprisonment replaced exile as the punishment in a number of cases, and Siberian exile (as distinguished from banishment to Sakhalin) was more or less limited to political or sacrilegious crimes. But the penal colonization of Sakhalin continued, and communes could still turn undesirables over to the authorities for deportation, even if they now had to readmit those who had served their term. In 1900, 287,000 exiles remained in Siberia, not counting convicts at hard labor; and over the next several years the vagrants and vagabonds of old would be supplanted by new revolutionary intellectuals deported in continuing waves.
Endnotes
¶¶¶¶ In official figures: 1823-1832 (98,725 exiles), 1833-42 (86,550), 1843-52 (69,764), 1853-62 (101,238), 1863- 72 (146,380), 1873-82 (1 75,918), 1883-88 (106,326).
***** Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, p. 241. The title Dostoyevsky gave to this faintly fictionalized account of his own Siberian internment was meant to be literally understood. After the abolition of capital punishment, the condemned were still often obliged to undergo “civil execution,” a procedure that stripped them of all their rights and rendered them legally “dead men.”
††††† Avvakum’s ordeal was far from over. In 1666, he and other Old Believers were excommunicated by a Church Council, and for the next fifteen years he was confined in a dungeon at Pustozersk. On April 14, 1682, he was pronounced a heretic and burned at the stake.
13
THE NEW FRONTIER
No matter how many exiles were poured into its flatlands, valleys, or Asiatic alps, or were forcibly lodged in the most recessed nooks of its terrain, in the settlement of Siberia it was the potential of the region that was most conspicuous, and among its many growing communities, the vast empty spaces that remained.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were approximately 300,000 Russians in Siberia, and by the beginning of the nineteenth, 1 million or more. The colony produced millions of bushels of grain and potatoes, and sent annually to European Russia enormous quantities of raw products, such as hides, tallow, bristles, furs, birds’ skins, flax, and hemp. Cottage industries also turned out rugs and carpets, fish netting, linen cloth, barrels, telegas and sleighs, leather goods, stockings, mittens, belts, and scarves. Beekeeping was started in the eighteenth century by Old Believers around Ustkamenogorsk. The breeding of marals (a species of red deer) began at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the southern Altai and subsequently spread to the Transbaikal. Their horns, ground to a powder, were coveted by Chinese apothecaries for all sorts of remedies, their fat as a medicine for ulcers, and their bone marrow as a lubricant for guns.