Yet the Tomsk exile-forwarding prison, which processed all exiles and convicts destined for Central and Eastern Siberia, resembled to the end of the century “a small prairie village on the frontier, surrounded by a high stockade of sharpened logs to protect it from hostile Indians.”535 And in some small riverside settlements not far distant, the mail was delivered in a corked glass bottle dropped by a passing steamer into the water near the quay.
There were other curiosities. One traveler encountered a Mississippi River pilot on the Ussuri River; another, a Negro minstrel from South Carolina in Irkutsk. In the southern Transbaikal, Kennan encountered all sorts of luxury American items that had been shipped from California, and a well-thumbed copy of Bret Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp. Minusinsk, a town of just five thousand, 150 miles from the Mongolian frontier, contained the largest and most important museum of archeology and natural history in Siberia. Its display of two hundred prehistoric skulls, and plaster death masks of great antiquity, in fact, were world-famous, along with the knives, helmets, and other artifacts unearthed from burial mounds. The museum also had life-sized models of men and women from various tribes in native dress.
The even smaller town of Nerchinsk (which had a population of just four thousand in 1885) was incongruously dominated by the palatial residence of a wealthy mining proprietor, who had adorned its forty-odd rooms with hardwood marquetry floors, silk curtains, stained-glass windows, crystal chandeliers, soft Oriental rugs, and white-and-gold furniture upholstered with satin. The hallways were lined with marble statues; old Flemish masters hung on the walls. A large greenhouse attached to the mansion was “filled with palms, lemon-trees, and rare orchids from the tropics”; and in another museumlike chamber could be seen the principal minerals and ores of Siberia handsomely displayed.536 That was not all. In a huge semicircular gallery above the ballroom stood an orchestrion, as big as a church organ, which furnished music for the host’s extravagant entertainments, and the ballroom itself boasted the largest mirror in the world. Bought at the Paris Exposition of 1878, the mirror had been transported halfway around the world by sea, before being towed up the Amur River on a special barge.
Elsewhere, Krasnoyarsk (in the same longitude as Calcutta) had the best public gardens in Siberia, but after the local opera house burned down, performances were held in a cowshed – “Tchaikovsky and Pushkin,” as one critic wrote, “to the smell of manure.”537 Real pistols with bullets were used on stage in the duels, but the players carefully shot at the ceiling. The town’s most famous feature was a unique belltower, built over the main street, under which everybody entering the city passed.
The exile and prison culture of Siberia added its own peculiar spice to the variety of life. In more accessible places, the solidarity among criminal exiles was such that not to have a criminal record was considered a liability, even a barrier to respectability. One Siberian-born merchant at Krasnoyarsk, whose business was faring poorly, journeyed all the way to St. Petersburg to commit a felony, returned to Siberia in chains, served time in the Alexandrovsk prison outside Irkutsk, and reopened his business at Krasnoyarsk, where his now thoroughly blemished reputation at last enabled him to thrive.
Along the Great Siberian Post Road or Highway, many villages became known as “thieves’ towns”: Tara on the Irtysh specialized in moonshine and most of the inhabitants had their own illegal stills; Mysovaya was virtually an outlaw haven; and between Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk, there were numerous little villages inhabited entirely by convict settlers who had established enclaves in the swamps and in the middle of the deepest woods. Everywhere one turned there were people “whose past could not bear inspection,”538 even among the elite. One queen of society in Irkutsk in the late 1870s had done five years at the mines for poisoning her niece, a rich heiress, and was living quite nicely on the proceeds; others, though grown prosperous in legitimate circumstances, were still unable to give up their compulsion to crime. Once, in the middle of a banquet given by the military governor of Chita, the mayor (an ex-con) politely excused himself on important business “and went straight from table to waylay the passing night-mail.” With his friends, he galloped after the coach, murdered the driver, seriously wounded the guard, and seized the bag containing the registered letters and cash.539
Ex-cons were also pervasive among the hired help. At Akatui, the warden was waited upon by a chambermaid who had split her husband’s skull in two, and when a guest expressed unease, he explained: “But I always employ assassins. They make far better servants than thieves. My ‘Yamshchik’ [driver] is also a murderer.”540
The domestic arrangements of a warden at a maximum security prison might be viewed as exceptional, but in the world of Siberia in fact they were not. Probably no group was so heavily infiltrated with ex-convicts as the special confraternity of yamshchiki, or drivers, upon which all Siberia depended for the long-distance transport of people and goods. In summer or winter, their sleighs and carts formed great caravans drawn by reindeer, horses, or camels, carrying furs, silks, spices, and tea from the heart of Siberia or the Mongolian frontier to the great Russian trade fairs in the west. They also operated out of post stations, of course, for the transport of individual travelers, and in addition to their official duties, often engaged in illicit trade. The line between a yamshchik and a bandit or black marketeer was razor-thin and, not surprisingly, escaped felons favored the occupation as a way to begin a new life. One company of Americans, for example, who crossed Siberia in 1876, engaged six drivers for their journey, only to discover on the way that every one of them had been convicted of murder. Subsequently, it was revealed that their interpreter (on whom they most relied) had been convicted for murder twice, and that his wife, engaged as the cook, had butchered her former husband with an ax.
Into the late nineteenth century, Siberia had few schools and nothing even remotely resembling an educational system. Missionary and trade schools were scattered here and there, but by and large there was no stepped curriculum of primary, secondary, and higher education. In 1724, Peter the Great had established a school of Oriental languages in Irkutsk, and the great naval expeditions along the Arctic coast and in the North Pacific had led to the founding of a navigational school for future seamen. Here and there seminaries sprang up, but in 1826, there were still only 31 schools with 1,588 pupils throughout the whole territory. A few English missionaries had set up tutorial classes in their own homes for native children, and had founded an institute at Selenginsk “for the Instruction of a Select Number of the Youth of the Heathen Tribes of Siberia,”541 but neither had any lasting effect. Indeed, not long after the mission’s dissolution in 1840, popular superstition among the Buryats had transformed the missionaries into “spooks.”
Siberia’s first university finally opened in Tomsk in 1888. Largely financed at the outset by money donated by the Demidovs (the Urals’ industrial magnates) and Alexander Sibiryakov, the university rather pretentiously aspired to be “the intellectual center of Asia.”542 But it did become the intellectual center of Siberia, with a vast library of some 97,000 volumes assembled in an effort spearheaded by Pyotr Makushin, a merchant and devoted bibliophile, who had previously opened the first Siberian bookstore in 1873. The rare book division of the library housed a number of treasures, including a unique, complete set of the Moniteur Universale, a newspaper published during the French Revolution; a sixteenth-century book of psalms; and an album with views of Egypt that had once belonged to Napoleon. The “House of Science” in Tomsk today is appropriately named after Makushin, though a predictably tasteless and secular monument to him nearby features a rail (symbolizing the way to knowledge) and an electric valve above it (symbolizing constant study) that shines both day and night.