The house of the dead, p.31
The House of the Dead, page 31
Sakhalin lies in the North Pacific Ocean, off the eastern coast of Siberia, separated from the mainland by only a few kilometres of open water at the narrowest point of the Nevelskoi Strait. The island is 948 kilometres in length and between 25 and 170 kilometres in width, and it covers a total of almost 77,000 square kilometres, slightly larger than Ireland. Its northern part is covered in taiga and tundra; the southern by dense forests and mountain ranges. The climate varies significantly across the various regions of the island; temperatures are more hospitable than in inland cities on the same latitude such as Irkutsk, but range between a clammy 20°C in the summer and a perishing −20°C in the winter.24
The Siberian authorities had identified Sakhalin as a source of valuable coal deposits back in the 1850s, but its appeal as the site for a penal colony increased dramatically in the 1860s as the mines of Nerchinsk began to run dry. In the 1860s, the first few hundred convicts were shipped to the island. In the middle of the nineteenth century, sovereignty over Sakhalin was divided between the Russian and the Japanese empires; the Russians controlled the north of the island and the Japanese the south. After much negotiation, the two powers signed a treaty in 1875, granting Russia sovereignty over the whole of Sakhalin.25
Sakhalin was perfect as a place of containment: an island separated from the mainland by several kilometres of treacherous waters. In 1867, the Ministry of the Interior commissioned a major investigation into the state of the empire’s penal system and tasked it with drawing up a raft of reforms. Highlighting the parlous state of the exile system in Eastern Siberia, the investigation gave a cautious welcome to the prospect of a penal colony on Sakhalin, provided that hard labour could be properly organized there. While the central government weighed its decision, a further 450 penal labourers were sent to Sakhalin in 1869.26
All the same, from the time the island was first proposed as a site of convict labour, there were real reservations about its suitability. First, the mines that had initially caught the attention of Siberia’s administrators proved too limited to employ any more than a few hundred of the thousands of exiles who were eventually banished there. Secondly, the island’s climate and soil fertility gave rise to serious doubts about the prospects for agriculture. But the Ministry of the Interior and the exile administration disregarded available meteorological data and warnings from officials on the island that there was no prospect of developing an agricultural economy. Buoyed by some wildly optimistic reports about the potential for farming on the island – reports that echoed the fantastical visions penned by convicts eager to lure their wives into following them into exile – the government finally decided in 1875 to push ahead with the establishment of a major penal colony on Sakhalin.27
Convicts destined for Sakhalin either marched there in convoys that wended their way through the Nerchinsk Mining Region to the port city of Vladivostok before making the crossing to the island or, more usually, made the voyage to Sakhalin in the holds of steam ships that navigated around the coast of Asia from the Black Sea port of Odessa. The ships would sail out of the Black Sea, setting anchor in Constantinople before passing through the Suez Canal, Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Nagasaki and Vladivostok on a voyage that lasted between two and three months. The two ships that the government used for this purpose, the Petersburg and the Nizhny-Novgorod, could each carry up to 600 prisoners and sailed twice a year. It was a punishing journey for the fettered prisoners confined in the stifling humidity of the ships’ holds.28
The penal colony began to take shape as the numbers of convicts arriving on the island each year increased rapidly from an initial trickle to several hundred per annum in the mid-1880s and to more than 1,000 every year by the end of the decade. There were about 6,000 penal labourers and 4,000 settled exiles on the island in 1890 and, by the time of the empire-wide census of 1897, the total exile population had swelled to 22,000. Of the roughly 4,000 women on the island, about two thirds were female convicts and the rest were free-status women (wives who had followed their husbands or the peasant offspring of exiles). Over the following two years, a further 5,000 men and 300 women were exiled to Sakhalin.29
Sakhalin offered the government something of a tabula rasa: an opportunity to bring to bear the fruits of a century of experience in administering large-scale penal colonies in Siberia. It was also the government’s last chance to show that punishment could lead to the rehabilitation of exiles and their transformation into small-holding agricultural colonists. Key to this vaunted transition were the women of Sakhalin. They would also come, tragically, to symbolize its failures.
‘Siberia is a big, cold country,’ Anton Chekhov wrote to his brother Aleksandr from Irkutsk in June 1890:
There seems to be no end to the journey. There is little of novelty or interest to be seen, but I am experiencing and feeling a lot. I’ve battled with rivers in flood, with cold, unbelievable quagmires, hunger and lack of sleep . . . Experiences you couldn’t buy in Moscow for a million roubles. You should come to Siberia! Get the courts to exile you here.30
At the age of thirty, and knowing that he had already contracted tuberculosis, Chekhov had set out on a gruelling eleven-week journey across Siberia to visit the penal colony on Sakhalin. He was no supporter of the exile system and had left with the determination to document conditions on the island and then to bring them to the attention of the Russian reading public. En route to Sakhalin, he fulminated to his editor, Aleksei Suvorin:
It is quite clear from the books I have been reading and am still reading that we have let millions of people rot in gaol, and let them rot to no purpose, treating them with an indifference that is little short of barbaric. We have forced them to drag themselves in chains across tens of thousands of kilometres in freezing conditions, infected them with syphilis, debauched them, hugely increased the criminal population, and heaped the blame for the whole thing on red-nosed prison supervisors. All Europe now knows that the blame lies not with the supervisors, but with all of us, but we still regard it as none of our business, we’re not interested.31
Chekhov spent just over three months on the island working intensively. He rose early and spent each day interviewing Sakhalin’s penal labourers and settled exiles. The extensive notes he made on the island formed the basis of the part-travelogue, part-sociological study serialized to great acclaim in 1893–4 in the liberal monthly Russian Thought. Sakhalin Island would prove instrumental in turning the tide of public opinion against the Siberian exile system.32
Chekhov discovered that only around 5 per cent of Sakhalin’s women could read, let alone write. As a consequence, their stories were most commonly told, if they were told at all, by men. Official reports acknowledged that the women were the victims of sexual exploitation and sexual violence, but they rarely recorded the women’s own voices in the form of petitions and appeals. The most graphic accounts of the lives of women and children on Sakhalin came from the men who observed and sometimes interviewed them. Chekhov’s own account was followed by a slew of publications by journalists, government inspectors, physicians and foreign travellers, all of which dwelt in harrowing detail on the fate of the island’s women and children. Some, like journalist Vlas Doroshevich, employed the sensationalist style of the feuilletonist, but even he prided himself on the factual basis of his writing.33 Most authors – the government officials, the physicians and Chekhov himself – strove for dispassionate reportage. The majority of these men were, or at least became, avowed opponents of the exile system. They understood that the corruption of women and children and the destruction of families were things that the autocracy could not possibly defend. The plight of Siberia’s convicted criminals might have left many consciences back in Moscow and St Petersburg untroubled; the brutalization of innocent women and children did not.
Of the female convicts sentenced to penal labour on Sakhalin, most had been condemned by the courts for crimes of passion: ‘I’ve come ’cos of my ’usband’ or ‘I’ve come ’cos of my mother-in-law’, Chekhov heard them say. Peasant women were no strangers to misogyny. Wives who had endured years of violent beatings from their husbands would sometimes snap and reach for a knife or for poison. Some had murdered newborns they could not afford to support. Others had been exiled as thieves, forgers and arsonists. For some economically marginal women, prostitution proved a gateway to a wider criminal underworld and was a source of stigma that rendered them, like the female heroine of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), Katyusha, vulnerable to all manner of accusations. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the number of women prosecuted for ‘fornication’ was in steep decline.34
Chekhov observed that, by the time a woman reached Sakhalin, her ‘human dignity, . . . femininity and modesty . . . are not taken into account in any circumstances; the implication seems to be that all this has been wrung out of her by her shame, or that she has lost it trudging around prisons and the waystations on the way to Siberia’. Even innocent women following their husbands were not spared this fate. In a continuing violation of the regulations that stipulated that women should travel separately from the men, they often found themselves locked up overnight together with hardened criminals. Exiles’ wives were also sometimes forced into sex by criminals in the marching convoys or passed around by their spouses in exchange for money, vodka or physical protection. The criminologist and Ministry of the Interior official Dmitry Dril, who visited Sakhalin in 1896, was blunt: the women, both convicts and those voluntarily following their husbands, ‘are often corrupted to the core in deportation parties, and arrive as prostitutes at the penal camps’.35
Women were especially vulnerable when they were pregnant or carrying newborns. In 1837, the State Senate had ruled that women should not be sent into exile if they were pregnant or breast-feeding, but, as with many directives from the centre, the Siberian authorities routinely ignored this instruction. Indeed, given the length of the journey into exile and the pressures on the women to have sex with the men in the marching convoys, many became pregnant en route. Nikolayevna, a female convict in a group of penal labourers being transported by steam ship down the Amur River in 1870, was in the final days of pregnancy and begged to be permitted to remain in Blagoveshchensk until her child was born. The authorities ignored her request, however, and she went into labour four hours after the ship had set sail. Allowed on deck, she gave birth, shielded from the eyes of onlookers and from the bad weather by only a few convict smocks. The child died within an hour.36
Women often followed their husbands with several young children in tow. One group of families accompanying penal labourers in 1885 was awaiting departure from Kiev for Sakhalin via Odessa. It included the wife of Lavrenty Shvoren, who had a son of nine and three daughters aged seven, five and one, and the wife of Osip Chumak, who had four daughters aged thirteen, eleven, nine and five. Their names were not even recorded.37
The American explorer George Kennan observed girls as young as ten being made to walk 30 kilometres a day because there was no room for them on the wagons. In 1875 alone, 1,030 children died en route to Siberia in the forwarding prisons of Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Perm and in the étapes beyond. Two years later, a further 400 did not survive the journey. Indeed, ethnographer and journalist Nikolai Yadrintsev estimated that, as a result of woefully inadequate medical facilities, half of all children died on the way to their parents’ place of exile.38
In addition to hunger, cold and lack of adequate medical care, the children faced the predatory appetites of the convicts with whom they shared the crowded waystations, train carriages and ships’ holds. A senior Ministry of the Interior official, Vasily Vlasov, reported in 1873 that the authorities’ failure to ensure that children were kept separated from the convicts in the marching convoys resulted in their exposure to ‘orgies and illegal acts’. Exile women would complain that male convicts in the deportation convoys were ‘corrupting their children’. Vlasov discovered that ‘some of the male criminals are so immoral and cynical that they have amorous relations in broad daylight in front of children’, something which ‘not only corrupted the children’s morality but also served to prematurely awaken their own sexual desires’. Travelling with Chekhov on a steamer down the Amur to Sakhalin ‘was a convict in leg irons who had murdered his wife. His daughter, a motherless little girl aged six, was with him . . . hanging on to his fetters. At night the little girl slept hugger-mugger with the convicts and soldiers.’ There were reports of the rape of young girls onboard the transport steamers on the Amur.39
Exile officials found the plight of the children in the marching convoys especially troubling. One hardened waystation officer ‘who had already grown indifferent to a great deal’ exclaimed to the ethnographer Sergei Maksimov, ‘“The poor children! . . . In winter it’s terrible to look at them: Numb with cold, drained, sick, coughing, many have broken out in sores and they are covered in rashes . . .”’ Women who sold themselves could be condemned as depraved prostitutes, but young children forced to witness or participate in sex could not be so easily dismissed. Mirroring the ambivalence of educated society to the child prostitutes in Russia’s cities, however, officials viewed the sexually exploited children of the exiles with a mixture of sympathy and disgust.40 Vlasov had at least the decency to observe of the children that ‘it is impossible to reproach these victims of circumstance’. But he was still shocked by their ‘impudent behaviour towards the soldiers and sailors, which outstripped the street walkers of large cities’. In one convoy, two twelve- and fourteen-year-old daughters of penal labourers were already infected with syphilis. Ethnographer Vasily Semyovsky accompanied a party of 500 exiles and family members to the Lena gold fields in 1878; among them were eleven-year-old boys who drank, played cards and were interested in women; there was also a twelve-year-old girl ‘considered common property by the convict party’.41
When women exiles finally did reach Sakhalin, they were treated as habitual prostitutes; the camp administration even organized the sale of their bodies. After a visit to Sakhalin in 1871, Vlasov reported that the authorities had turned the female section of the prison into a brothel. His report, although girded by the bureaucratic language of officialdom, nonetheless simmered with outrage. Only those guilty of an offence on the island or ‘not worthy of men’s favour’ ended up working in the kitchen; the rest ‘served needs’ and drank themselves silly.42
The prostitution of the island’s exile women set a pattern that would endure in the years that followed. Sakhalin’s chief physician, Dr Leonid Poddubsky, observed how, upon arrival on the island, female penal labourers were ‘lusted after and molested’ by warders and soldiers who demanded sex from them. If the women offered any resistance to the ‘base instincts of the local authorities’, they paid a heavy price. They were dragged to the hospital every week for medical examinations as prostitutes, or the guards accused them of having committed some ‘imaginary crimes’. They then sent them to live with a settler in some isolated village, which amounted to ‘a sentence to the most unbridled prostitution, as such villages have between two and five women for some 50–60 bachelors’. Poddubsky was indignant at this ‘mockery of the goals appointed in the laws’. He even encountered cases where a husband and wife, sentenced together to penal labour on Sakhalin for the same crime, would arrive at different times of the year, only for the woman to be given to another settler.43
After the clerks and warders had helped themselves to the female convicts they desired, the rest were taken to the settlement at Korsakovsk Post, where Chekhov observed scenes that resembled the proceedings of a cattle market. The district governor and officials from the local administration decided which of the settled exiles and peasants ‘deserved to obtain a woman’. Those selected were instructed to attend the prison on the appointed day, when they were given the opportunity of inspecting the new arrivals: ‘Each man chooses . . . perfectly seriously, treating ‘‘with humanity’’ plainness, old age and their prisoner-like appearance; he gazes attentively, wishing to surmise from their faces – which of them is a good housewife?’ The settlers regarded the women as ‘not exactly a human being, a housewife, and not exactly a creature even lower than a domestic animal, but somewhere between the two’.44
The authorities deliberately circumvented laws designed to maintain sexual propriety and traditional morality among the exile population. Chekhov understood that convict women were parcelled out to the settled exiles across Sakhalin in the guise of agricultural labourers, ‘but this [is] only a screen against the law forbidding immorality and adultery’, since they were in reality unlegalized wives.45 ‘A woman on Sakhalin becomes,’ one of the physicians on the island, Dr Nikolai Lobas, commented, ‘an object in the full sense of word, an object that can be handed over, dispatched, received, borrowed.’ Women were indeed passed around from one exile to the next in a series of squalid transactions arranged by the authorities, sometimes for personal profit. One of the few literate convict women, Natalya Linevaya, wrote a petition protesting against her treatment:
When I arrived on the island of Sakhalin, I was sent to the Porechenskoye settlement, where I moved in with the settler Pavel Fomin, together with whom I lived for just over two months. I became pregnant by him and wanted to get married . . . but the settlement overseer arrived and for some reason did not like the look of our home. He took me away from Pavel Fomin and wanted to hand me over to another settler.
Lobas witnessed dreadful scenes: a woman with two young children on her knees, begging an official not to send her to live with an exile, the two frightened children clinging to her, crying and shaking. Her prayers and tears did not help, and the woman was forced to comply. Sakhalin’s women became, in effect, the prisoners of prisoners.46
