The house of the dead, p.24
The House of the Dead, page 24
Tsarist retribution in the Kingdom of Poland and the Western Borderlands was swift and heavy. Military tribunals sentenced hundreds to death. Not only armed insurgents, but also politicians, journalists, Catholic priests and student activists were caught up in the government’s dragnet. Some 35,000 were banished to various locations throughout the empire. The repression was designed to dissuade the Poles from all and any outward manifestations of support for independence: one fifteen-year-old girl was arrested by the authorities for singing patriotic Polish songs and for wearing black mourning clothes in the rebellion’s aftermath.3
As in the 1830s, most accused of armed involvement in the insurrection were exiled administratively or extra-judicially by field courts martial. Between 18,000 and 24,000 people were deported beyond the Urals. About 3,500 rebels, charged with the most serious ‘state crimes’, were sentenced to lifelong penal labour in the mines or to shorter terms in the forts and factories of Nerchinsk. Those convicted of lesser crimes, and the beneficiaries of imperial clemency, were stripped of their civil rights and exiled to settlement in either Western or Eastern Siberia, depending on the alleged seriousness of the offence. The constitutional privileges and relative autonomy of the Western Borderlands were withdrawn and the Kingdom of Poland was dissolved, both replaced by direct rule from St Petersburg. A Polish uprising against the Russian Empire had, once again, failed.4
Like their predecessors, this second generation of Polish rebels to be exiled endeavoured to remain faithful in Siberia to their patriotic and republican principles. Exile crushed many both in body and in spirit, but many more continued to battle the Russian state using all the means at their disposal. Some struggled to free themselves from captivity by disputing the justice of their sentences in petitions and letters; others staged daring escapes; some turned to armed revolt.
For the Polish rebels and their allies, these acts of resistance to the Siberian authorities were political acts, a continuation of their struggle against the Russian state. But they were also an extension of the nationalists’ and republicans’ wider battle with the monarchies and empires of Europe. The Poles pitted their patriotic, fraternal values against the patriarchal authority of the autocracy. In appeals, in suicide notes and in testimony to military tribunals in Siberia, the Poles spoke the language of rights, justice, liberty and tyranny. Carried forth by those who escaped and those who were released, their tales of defiance, heroism and suffering reverberated across the Russian Empire and beyond. For many sympathetic contemporaries in Europe, the rebels’ struggles against their jailers in Siberia were the struggles of the Polish nation itself.
Today, the Tenth Pavilion inside the Warsaw Citadel is part of Poland’s National Museum of Independence. In one of its galleries hangs an enormous oil painting by the Romantic artist Aleksander Sochaczewski. It depicts a marching convoy of dozens of exiled rebels, both men and women, at a rest stop, surrounded by desolate expanses of snow. Dressed in convict smocks, many of the shackled figures, their heads shaved, have collapsed to the ground from exhaustion and despair. Some offer up anguished prayers; others weep disconsolately. In the centre of the painting, the boundary post that separates the provinces of Perm and Tobolsk looms over the huddled groups of Poles. Beyond the post, Siberia beckons. Sochaczewski was one of the rebels of 1863 who were exiled to Siberia in the wake of the January Insurrection. He painted Farewell to Europe after returning from twenty years of penal labour in Nerchinsk. It is one of the ironies of history that this stark portrait of the torments of Polish exiles hangs today in what used to be a bastion of Russian imperial might.5
The scale of the state’s retribution in the wake of the rebellion had grave consequences for the Siberian exile system. The authorities could not cope with the sudden influx of Polish penal labourers sentenced to Siberia’s towns, villages, mines, forts and factories. Even though, by the 1860s, the deportation of exiles to Siberia was becoming semi-industrialized, the journey the Poles made remained a gruelling one. The government had turned first to waterways and later to railways to ensure a faster, smoother and more orderly transfer of convicts eastwards. From 1862, trains transferred convicts from Moscow and other collection points to Nizhny Novgorod, via Vladimir. The converted trains into which the convicts were crammed comprised third-class carriages with bars on the windows, as depicted by Nikolai Yaroshenko in his 1888 canvas Life is Everywhere. The overcrowding forced convicts to sit not simply on the benches but also beneath them and in the aisles. The sealed doors and the absence of ventilation took their toll. The 440-kilometre journey to Nizhny Novgorod lasted a day and a night. Elsewhere, the physical infrastructure of the deportation system was in a woeful state: waystations were so old and dilapidated, one official reported, that ‘no amount of repairs and alterations would render them in a state fit for the winter’. In one such waystation on the road to Tyumen, even the ceilings had collapsed.6
Beyond the limitations of the infrastructure for deporting the prisoners eastwards, the Siberian authorities simply lacked the spare capacity to deal with the numbers of new exiles. The governor of Tomsk, German Lerkhe, wrote to his superiors in St Petersburg in July 1864 that the prison fort was capable of accommodating only 400 prisoners but ‘it rarely has fewer than 600 and the average is between 700 and 750 convicts’. The prison was mismanaged by a corrupt and incompetent administration that was in ‘need of a complete overhaul’.7
Unable to accommodate the Poles, Siberian officials scrambled in time-honoured fashion to have them transferred to more remote regions further east. In April 1864, the governor-general of Western Siberia, Aleksandr Dyugamel, wrote to St Petersburg to request that, ‘due to the lack of necessary facilities’, all political prisoners sentenced to penal labour in forts under his command be sent to work in the industrial enterprises of Eastern Siberia. But further east, the authorities were themselves struggling to cope with the influx of exiles. Mikhail Korsakov, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, ordered the transfer of a full company of riflemen ‘with officers who were reliable and not of Polish background’ from the Amur River Basin to Nerchinsk. In October 1864, he instructed the head of the Nerchinsk Mining Region, Shilov, to disperse the new exiles across the mines. Four hundred had already arrived in Nerchinsk over the summer, with another 800 to 1,000 expected in the coming months, and the authorities there responded that it was ‘quite impossible’ to find productive work for them. Shilov insisted that, ‘despite the best efforts of the administration, [prison buildings] could not be constructed at such short notice’. New building work could only begin in the spring and, until that time, the exiles would need to be quartered in the towns along the route to Nerchinsk: in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Chita. Overcrowding became endemic. The retributive instincts of the Russian state had outstripped the government’s punitive capacities.8
As early as August 1864, the exile authorities were registering serious alarm about the mutinous potential of tens of thousands of ‘state criminals’ entering Siberia. Between 1863 and 1867, some 4,000 Poles were exiled to settlement in Tobolsk province, while 4,400 were sent to Yenisei province. It was proving extremely difficult to maintain even the most rudimentary forms of surveillance and control over such large numbers of exiles. Eager to bring the numbers of Poles down to more manageable levels, Minister of the Interior Pyotr Valuyev wrote to all Siberia’s governors asking them to draw up lists of individuals who might be released early from exile and returned to complete their sentences in their native lands. In May 1866, the tsar ordered a series of measures to commute the sentences of those convicted of involvement in the January Insurrection. Poles condemned to lifelong penal labour had their sentences reduced to periods of ten years; those sentenced to periods of fewer than six years in the mines, forts and factories were released to settlement, and some were freed to return home. A further amnesty followed two years later, which released to settlement all penal labourers ‘not charged with murders and armed robbery, and not having been convicted of any further political crimes’, and made provision for the return of some to European Russia and Poland.9 Such demonstrations of clemency had less to do with the sovereign’s magnanimity and more to do with the practical problems of accommodating the huge numbers of political exiles.
The vast majority of Poles deported to Siberia in the wake of the January Insurrection – around 80 per cent – were exiled to settlement. Another, much smaller category, exclusively reserved for noblemen, was ‘exiled to residence’ and permitted to live in towns and cities.10 Fearful of the influence of these Polish exiles in wider Siberian society, the government issued an edict in January 1866 preventing them from engaging in teaching, pharmacy, printing, photography, medicine and the sale of wine, from residing in buildings in which postal or telegraph services were stationed and from serving in all government offices. In short, they were forbidden from engaging in almost any form of productive labour to which their training and professional experience might have suited them. Many circumvented, or simply ignored, these restrictions, but all that remained for others was farming. Like their predecessors in the 1830s and 1840s, Polish rebels in the 1860s struggled to establish themselves as agriculturalists. They lacked the knowledge, stamina and ambition to make a success of farming in sub-Arctic conditions. Even if they had possessed the requisite characteristics, there was also a desperate shortage of arable land. Many tried to eke out a living by hiring themselves out as farmhands, thus putting themselves at the mercy of the Siberian peasantry. By the end of the 1860s, only around 150 of the nearly 960 Poles settled in Kansk district worked as traders and artisans; the rest were dependent on the charity of the local population and the meagre government handouts intended to keep them from starvation.11 The ethnographer Sergei Maksimov witnessed their despair:
The political exile bears the conviction that his life has been wasted irrevocably and, for that reason, he is utterly indifferent to his surroundings, or is irritable, unsettled and tense. If he does still cherish the hope of returning home, then this hope itself, which so sustains him, impedes him from working, from properly settling down: Siberia is for him like a postal station, a brief stopover in life . . . But as the years pass, weakening their hope and strength, these men become gloomier; their irritability becomes reinforced by idleness. Dissatisfaction burrows deeper and turns into hatred.12
After his original sentence of penal labour was commuted to ‘exile to settlement’ in the amnesty of May 1866, Maurycy Sulistrowski wrote to his brother from Balagansk district in Irkutsk province:
There are around one and a half thousand exiled settlers in Irkutsk province. It is difficult for numbers like that to find work. Things are all right for those who receive funds from their relatives, but those who receive nothing and do not know any trade very often work for some [peasant] farmer or other, but what sort of work is it? He is given strong tea in the morning, some cabbage soup and a piece of bread for supper. You can satisfy your belly with the food but to clothe your body and meet the needs of your soul, what remains? Only tears, disappointment, misery and rags! Such is the picture of settlement! In my view, it is worse than penal labour.13
Desperate to avoid such a fate, Polish exiles and their families bombarded the tsarist authorities with petitions and pleas for clemency. The mass of illiterate peasants and tradespeople languished silently in Siberian exile without families able to lobby the government intensively on their behalf. By contrast, most of the Poles were literate and many came from families versed in the arts of petition and patronage. Their pleas, bolstered by appeals from their relatives, underlined the injustice of the sentences handed down. Exiles claimed either that their punishments were excessive or that no crime had been committed. They further drew attention to their terrible plight in Siberia and also to the penury and suffering of wives and children whom they had been forced to abandon when they set out in the marching convoys.14 One exiled insurgent, a nobleman from Kiev named Iwan Dąbrowski, appealed to the authorities from the village of Irbei in Yenisei province in July 1865. Dąbrowski claimed to have been ‘seized by a gang of rebels and forced under duress to remain in their party’, but had fled the group at the earliest available opportunity and had made a full and frank declaration to the authorities of his involuntary participation in the revolt. He had hoped to be pardoned in 1863, ‘but the new law did not take my sincere regret into consideration’. Dąbrowski had been exiled to settlement in Eastern Siberia ‘with the loss of all rights and properties’. He made so bold as ‘to fall at your Imper-ial Majesty’s feet to pray for mitigation of my fate, which is accompanied by the misery of my four suffering children and of my wife who has been left without the means to support herself’.
Two years later, in October 1867, Dąbrowski’s four children themselves petitioned Korsakov, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, detailing their father’s record of service to the Russian crown. Dąbrowski had fought in the Imperial Army in 1847 and 1848, participating in the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, and had sustained head injuries that explained the ‘attacks of madness that were the cause of his misfortune’. He was in poor health, they wrote, unable to engage in farming and dependent for food on the meagre financial support of his family. Destitute, he had been unable to pay the bribes demanded by the local authorities in exchange for permission to remain in Irkutsk province and had found himself transferred in February 1867 to Yakutsk province, several hundred kilometres further north-east, ‘to a land where any man from our climate will die a slow death. What penal labour can compare with such a cruel fate?’ Their father should have benefited, they claimed, from the amnesty of May 1866, but instead had been doomed by ‘unfounded slander and denunciation’. They ended their petition:
Your Excellency, please graciously forgive our bold petition! But we are children, distressed by the injustices done to our poor and ailing father who has been stripped of everything, severed from his own blood, pronounced guilty because he is unable to work to support himself . . . We can only conclude that there is no justice in the courts. Your Excellency’s will is the law for our father and for us; your word is a sentence of life and death . . . Be merciful! Consider his former service, his pitiful condition as a man afflicted with attacks of weak-mindedness, and consider our young years, for the oldest of us is only seven! Heed the voice of us poor orphans, save our father from an inevitable hungry and cold death! . . . Return our father from Yakutsk province to Irkutsk to live with his cousin, the political exile Karol Drogomirecki, who would be able to look after him.
The petition was signed by the unpractised hand of each young child: Kamila, Yumen, Iwan and Honorata. Two months later, in what appears to have been a coordinated campaign of appeals from Dąbrowski’s family, his sister Wincentyna also wrote to the governor-general, protesting her brother’s innocence. She begged that he not be left in the ‘exceptionally harsh climate’ of Yakutsk province, where ‘virtually nothing grows and where moving from one yurt to another, without any comfort at all and in poor health, he would die a slow death’. Wincentyna was counting on, she declared, the governor-general’s ‘humanity’ and on the ‘magnanimity of our most merciful monarch’.15
What Dąbrowski’s relatives really thought of the Russian government they expressed in private letters sent to Dąbrowski that were unfortunately intercepted by the authorities in Irkutsk: ‘You won’t believe how distressed and angry we are by the behaviour of the authorities,’ one stated. ‘They are not people but heartless beasts! Sending you without any explanation or justification to live among savages!’16
In part influenced by the contents of these letters, the authorities in Eastern Siberia were unmoved by Dąbrowski’s pleas and those of his relatives. Dąbrowski had been removed to Yakutsk province, not because of his poverty and inability to farm, but because he was ‘unreliable’. His alleged poor health had not been officially certified, and his correspondence with members of his family ‘was a precise measure of his moral sentiments’ and proof of his ‘hostile attitude to the government’. Letters from his brother in Kiev were full of ‘indecent and abusive expressions about the field courts in Kiev province’; they boasted that the law did not exist for the Poles and they gave advice on how to bribe the authorities. But eventually, in June 1870, the petitioning did pay off, and Dąbrowski was allowed to relocate to Penza province in central Russia seven years after his original petition.17
The sudden expulsion of so many insurgents brought administrative chaos to the exile system. Minister of the Interior Pyotr Valuyev complained to provincial governors that many Poles were being exiled without the correct paperwork, something which was generating confusion about their identities and their sentences. Perhaps tellingly, Valuyev’s concern lay not with the possible injustice of convicts serving out the wrong sentences. Rather, he was agitated by the fact that many exiles from the lower orders of Polish society were availing themselves of the administrative confusion in record-keeping. They were claiming that they in fact hailed from the privileged classes and so were entitled to better rations and seats on the wagons that accompanied the marching convoys, all at greater expense to the treasury. The Tobolsk Exile Office bombarded St Petersburg with a string of requests for clarification of the identities and sentences of the exiles now passing through its forwarding prisons.
At the beginning of 1865, an exile claiming to be an Italian, Ludovico Perevosti, arrived in Tobolsk. He testified that he had been exiled for political crimes by the authorities in Warsaw but had no idea of his intended destination. The Exile Office contacted Warsaw for further information, but after two months it received only a confirmation that Perevosti was indeed an Italian, from Palermo, and that he had been exiled on 14 August 1864. His destination, however, was a mystery. One nobleman from Vitebsk, Michał Blażewicz, was discovered en route to Siberia to be carrying another insurgent’s papers. Blażewicz’s intended destination was not Siberia but rather a small village in Perm province. In April, the governor of Tobolsk, Aleksandr Despot-Zenovich, wrote to the governor of Warsaw to complain about the consequences of the chaos: exiles arriving without the necessary documentation had to be detained in the city’s prison while enquiries were conducted, a state of affairs that ‘significantly increases the number of prisoners held in transit, causing serious difficulties in accommodating them and making excessive demands on the state’s finances’. Some political exiles had been detained ‘often for more than a year, which inflicts an undeserved punishment on them and is harmful to their morality and health’. By the spring of 1865, there were 280 Poles in Tomsk province about whom the authorities had no information concerning their class or their sentences.18
