The doors of all the buildings [of the Aleksandrovsk prison] are left wide open. I walk through one set into a short corridor. Doors to the right and left open into the prison wards. Above the doors hang black signs with white lettering: Cell number: XYZ. Cubic volume of air: X. Number of prisoners: X. At the very end of the corridor, a door opens into a tiny cell. Two political prisoners in unbuttoned waistcoats, their feet bare in their shoes, rush to plump up their straw-filled mattress. A pamphlet and a piece of black bread lie on the windowsill. My guide, the district commander, explains that these two prisoners were given permission to live outside the prison, but did not wish to distinguish themselves from the rest of the convicts and choose not to take advantage of this permission.
Do Practical Things
Do something to pass the time or, if the occasion presents itself, do some useful work. This may help you with your observations.
The Baikal having to unload seventy-two tons of government cargo, we stayed the night in De Castries. The machinist and I passed the time fishing off the deck and caught some huge fat-headed gobies, the likes of which I had never caught in the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov. We caught some plaice as well.
Unloading cargo is an excruciatingly long proposition here, accomplished with much ill will and bad blood. . From the deck of the Baikal, I watch a tugboat towing a large barge with two hundred soldiers on board and see it lose the towline. The barge slips away on the outgoing tide and heads straight for the anchor chain of a steamship moored near our ship. With sinking hearts, we wait for the moment when the barge will break in half against the chain, but fortunately, some good men catch the line just in time and the soldiers get off with nothing more than a bad fright.
A little later, I see to the ambulatory patients. The receiving room is next to the pharmacy and smells of fresh wood and varnish. The physician's desk stands in the kind of wooden cage that one sees in banks. This ensures that during the medical exam the patient never comes too close to the physician. A medic sits next to the physician silently fiddling with a pencil stub, as if he were the one being examined.
At the entrance to the room, an armed guard stands by the door keeping watch over the men and women who are milling about. This bizarre arrangement is upsetting to the patients: I doubt the syphilitics or the women would wish to discuss their symptoms in the presence of the gun-toting guard and the other men. Their ailments are either febris sachaliensis,12 or eczema, or their "heart hurts," or they are malingerers. Convict patients obstinately clamor to be released from labor.
A young boy comes in with an abscess on his neck that requires lancing. I ask for a scalpel. The medic and two men leap up and run off; after a while they come back and hand me a scalpel. The instrument is dull, but they insist that this is not possible because the blacksmith has just sharpened it. Again, the medic and the men run off and after some two or three minutes they are back with a fresh scalpel. I start to make an incision, but the blade on this one too is dull. I ask for some carbolic acid in solution. They bring it, but only after making me wait for a long time. It is obvious that the disinfectant is rarely used. There is no basin, no cotton swabs, no probes, and no decent scissors; there is not even enough water.
Join Celebrations
Observe the preparations, rites, and participants; note the atmosphere.
Sakhalin was getting ready for the upcoming visit of the Governor-General, and everyone was busy.... When I awoke in the morning, a very particular blend of sounds reminded me of where I was. Outside my open windows, convicts walked along with the measured clanging of chains; across the street from our quarters, in the military barracks, musician-soldiers were running through the marches selected to welcome the Governor-General. The flautist was practicing one passage, the trombonist another, the bassoon a third, and the result was a chaos beyond imagining. . Workers were rushing to construct a bridge over the Duyka. Everyone was cleaning, painting, sweeping, and marching. The streets bustled with troikas and teams of horses with bells on their harness; other horses were being curried and brushed for the Governor-General. Time was short, so the work had to continue right through the holidays.
.Baron A. N. Korf, the Governor-General of the Amur region, arrived on Sakhalin on July 19 on the warship Bobr. The official welcome was given by an honor guard, officials, and an assembly of exiles and convicts, and was held on the square between the commandant's residence and the church. The music described above was performed. The bread and salt were displayed on a silver platter of local workmanship and were presented by a striking old man, Potemkin by name, who had once been a convict but was now a wealthy resident of Sakhalin.13 My host, the physician, was also in the square, dressed in a black frock coat and a cap and holding a petition.
This was the first time I had seen a crowd on Sakhalin and I was struck by its uniquely sad character: it was composed of men and women of working age, of old men and children, but there were absolutely no adolescents. It seemed as if the years from thirteen through twenty simply did not exist on Sakhalin. I could not resist asking myself, "Does this mean that as soon as they're old enough, youngsters escape from the island the first chance they get?"
The day after his arrival, the Governor-General undertook to inspect the prisons and the exile settlements. Everywhere he went, exiles who had waited impatiently for his visit pressed their written petitions on him or made their verbal appeals. Some spoke on their own behalf, others in the name of an entire village, and since oratory is a flourishing art form on Sakhalin, there was quite a great number of these speeches. In Derbinsk, the settler Maslov several times referred to the authorities as "our very most clement governors." Unfortunately, only a fraction of the appeals to Baron A. N. Korf were sensible. As happened on similar occasions in other parts of Russia, here too our peasantry's disappointing ignorance came to the fore: they did not ask for schools, justice, or fair wages. Instead, they wanted the most incidental of concessions: bigger rations, the right to adopt a particular child, etc. In other words, they submitted petitions that the local authorities could have granted locally. Nevertheless, A. N. Korf was attentive and sympathetic to their requests. Evidently deeply moved by their wretched circumstances, he made promises and raised hopes for improvement.14 After the assistant supervisor of the Arkovo prison reported that "all is well in the Arkovo settlement," the Baron drew his attention to the winter and spring grain yields and said, "All is well, except that there is no grain in Arkovo." The inmates of Aleksandrovsk prison received fresh meat and even venison in honor of his visit. He made the rounds of all the cells, listened to the petitions, and ordered the chains removed from many of the prisoners.
. In the evening, there were fireworks and illuminations. Late into the night groups of soldiers, exiles, and convicts milled about the streets illuminated with oil lamps and Bengal lights. The prison gates stood wide open. The Duyka River, whose bare banks ordinarily made it look miserable and filthy, now appeared beautiful and even majestic in the glow of colorful lanterns and Bengal lights whose reflections flickered on the surface of the water. There was, however, something ludicrous about the entire effect, as if a cook's daughter had been made to wear her mistress's gown. There was music and singing in the general's garden. There was even an attempt to fire the cannon, but it ended in an explosion. Yet, despite all these amusements, the streets were dreary. No singing, no accordion playing, not even a drunk: people moved like ghosts in a ghostly silence. Penal servitude by the light of fancy illuminations is still penal servitude, and the distant music heard by a man forever exiled from his native land can do no more than bring on deadly melancholy.