This inability to differentiate between preliminary detention (in the dungeon of the penal prison, no less) and incarceration, or to distinguish between free citizens and convicts astonished me all the more since the local district commander was a law school graduate, while the prison warden was a former member of the St. Petersburg police force.
Another time, early in the morning, the district commander and I were visiting the prison cells when the four exiles who had been suspected of murder were released from their cells. They were shaking from cold. Garanina was in her stocking feet, without shoes, and was shivering and squinting in the light. The district commander had ordered that she be moved to a cell with light. Quite by chance, I then happened to notice a man, a Georgian, hovering outside the cell doors like a shadow. He had been sitting there, in the dark passageway, for the past five months, detained on suspicion of having poisoned someone and waiting for the completion of an investigation that had not even been undertaken yet.
In order to meet its obligations and safeguard the interests of the company, the treasury maintains two prisons not far from its mines, one at Duй and another at Voyevodsk, and supports a military presence of 340 men, at an annual
cost of about 150,000 rubles For its part, the company
has to meet three serious obligations: it must develop the Duй mines and support a mining engineer to oversee their proper exploitation; it must make semiannual payments for the coal and the lease of convict labor; it must make exclusive use of convict labor in all aspects of mining operations. These three obligations exist only on paper and have apparently been long since forgotten.
Voice Your Opinion
If you do not like something, say so.
It is just about impossible to say anything in favor of communal jail cells. The inmates of a communal jail cell do not make up a commune or a cooperative of members with individual obligations, but a mob in which no one person bears any responsibility for the space, its occupants, or their belongings. It is utterly impossible to forbid inmates from tracking in mud and filth on their boots, from spitting on the floor, from spreading lice. If there is a stench in the cell, or rampant thieving, or lewd singing, everyone is at fault, which is to say: no one is at fault. I asked a convict who had once been a respectable citizen, "Why are you so slovenly?" "Because," he replied, "here my being neat would be pointless." And indeed, what would be the point of his being clean if on the morrow a new group of convicts is moved into the cell and his new bunkmate is crawling with bugs and stinks to high heaven?
The communal cell deprives inmates of the privacy to pray, think, or be introspective that, according to advocates of the penal system, is essential to meeting the goal of reforming criminals. Instead, the exhausted worker is kept awake all night long by violent games of cards which are tolerated by corrupt guards; his nerves are frayed by the constant cursing, the coarse laughter, the gossiping, the din of slamming doors and the clanging of chains that go on through the night so that his digestion and his psyche cannot but suffer. It is a well-established fact that this brutish, herdlike existence—with its crude diversions and the inevitably pernicious effect of the depraved on the good—has the most debilitating impact on the morale of the inmate. Bit by bit it erodes his capacity for domestic life, that single most important trait he must preserve if, after his release, the inmate is to become a self-sufficient member of the colony in which he is required, by law and under threat of punishment, to take his place as a good householder and a kind family man from the very first day of his residence.
From these barbaric premises and practical arrangements, where fifteen-and sixteen-year-old girls are forced to sleep next to convicts, the reader can draw his own conclusions about the disrespect and contempt that are heaped upon the women and children who voluntarily follow their husbands and fathers into penal servitude, about the low value placed on them, and the negligible amount of thought given to the welfare of the agricultural colony!
being truthful
Portraits
Describe what people look like.
Of the women kept in solitary confinement, one in particular draws attention to herself. This is the notorious Sophia Bluvshtein, the "Little Gold Hand" who was sentenced to three years of penal servitude for attempting to escape from Siberia. Small, slim, and graying, she has the creased face of an old woman. Her hands are chained together. On her plank bed, a meager, gray sheepskin serves her as coat and bedding in one. She paces her cell from end to end and seems to be constantly sniffing the air, like a mouse in a trap. Even her expression has something of the mouse about it. Looking at her one finds it hard to believe that until just recently she was such a beauty that she could charm her jailers, as happened in Smolensk, for example, where her guard not only helped her escape but even ran off with her.
In Mitsul'ka lives the sixteen-year-old Tanya, the Gretchen7 of Sakhalin, daughter of the settler Nikolayev from Pskov province. She is blond and trim, with refined, soft, and gentle features. She is already engaged to marry one of the guards. Whenever I happened to pass through Mit- sul'ka, I would always see her sitting at her window, thinking. What could this young, lovely girl who ended up in Sakhalin possibly be thinking, what could she possibly be dreaming—that is something only God can tell.
The son of the Archpriest K. was sentenced for murder, escaped to Russia, committed another murder, and was sent back to Sakhalin. One morning I happened to catch a glimpse of him in the crowd of convicts that was milling around the mine entrance. Dreadfully emaciated, stooped, with dull eyes, in an old summer jacket and ragged trousers worn inside out, shivering in the morning frost, he walked up to the guard who was standing next to me, took off his cap from his balding head, and began to ask for something or other.
Settings
Evoke the situation, complete with characters, ambience, and background.
When I was in Debrinskoye, the convicts were out catching fish for the prison. General Kononovich, the commandant of the island, ordered the settlers to assemble and berated them for selling the prison fish that was not fit to eat. "The convict is your brother and my son," he said to them. "When you cheat the treasury, you cheat your own brother and my own son." The settlers made a semblance of agreeing with him, but their faces suggested that next year both brother and son would be back to eating rotten fish.
In another hut, I witnessed the following scene. A young, dark-haired convict in an elegant shirt and with an unusually sad expression on his face was sitting at the table holding his head in his hands. Meanwhile, the housekeeper, a convict, was picking up the samovar and cups. To my question about his marital status, the young man replied that his wife and daughter had voluntarily come after him to Sakhalin, but that two months ago both had left for Nikolayevsk and were refusing to come back, even though he had written them several telegrams. To this the housekeeper added, "She won't ever come back. She is young. She is free. What is there for her here? She took off, like a bird, and she is gone, lock, stock, and barreclass="underline" not like you or me. If I had not killed my husband and if you had not set fires, we would also be free, you and me. But instead, here we are; and you can just go on sitting here and waiting for the wind to bring your little wife back, and you can drown your heart in sorrow.. " The young man is suffering. There seems to be a big weight on his soul, but the housekeeper just keeps at him, needling and nagging. I leave the hut, but I can still hear her needling him.