Since Due's inception it appears that paupers and simple people work for themselves as well as for ochers, while cheats and loan sharks drink tea during working hours, play cards, or wander around the port clanking their chains and conversing with the guards they have bribed.
Revolting scenes are everlastingly being played here. A week before my arrival a prisoner, a former Petersburg merchant sentenced for arson, was beaten with birch rods for refusing to work. He is a stupid man who does not know how to conceal his money and he has constantly bribed the guards. Finally he grew tired of giving the guard five rubles and the executioner three rubles, and for some reason, choosing the wrong time, he flatly refused to give them any money. The guard complained to the warden that a certain prisoner refused to work, the inspector ordered thirty strokes with birch rods, and the executioner naturally employed his best efforts. When he was being beaten the merchant kept screaming, "I was never beaten before!" After the beating he changed his mind, paid off the guard and the executioner, and as though nothing had happened, he continues to hire a settler to work in his place.
The exceptionally heavy work in the mines is not due to having to work underground in the dark and damp shafts, always crawling and sliding. Construction and road building in raw and powerful winds require far more phys- ical strength. Whoever is acquainted with conditions in the Donets shafts will not consider the Due mine so terrible. The exceptionally hard labor is not in the work itself, but in the existing conditions and in the stupidity and un- scrupulous behavior of all the minor officials, while at every step the convicts must suffer insolence, injustice and arbi- trariness. The rich drink tea, while the poor work and the guards openly dupe their superiors. The inevitable quarrels between the mine and prison administrations result in con- stam mockery, scandal and all sorts of minor disturbances, the burden of which is borne primarily by the forced laborers. According to the proverb, the masters fight and the boys get rapped over the head.
Moreover, no matter how depraved and contemptible the convict is, he loves fairness above all, and if it does not exist among his superiors, then he becomes more and more malevolent and vicious with every passing year. So many of them become pessimistic, morose old men endlessly dis- cussing people, the officials, and a better life with angry, thoughtful faces! The prison listens and bursts into laugh- ter, because it all sounds very funny.
Work in the Due mines is also difficult because for many long years without interruption the only things the convict sees are the mine, the road to the prison, and the sea. His whole life is confined to this narrow coastline be- tween the marshy shore and the sea.
Near the mine office there is a barracks for settlers who work in the mine. It is a small old barn which has been set up as a dormitory. I was there at five o'clock in the morning when the settlers had just woken up. What a stench, what drabness, what overcrowding! Their heads were disheveled! Brawling had been going on all night and their yellowish-gray sleepy faces looked sick or insane. It was obvious they had slept in their clothes and boots, packed closely together, some on the plank bed, others under it on the filthy sod floor. According to the physician who accompanied me that morning, there is only one cubic sazhen of air for every three or four men. Moreover, it was the time when cholera was expected on Sakhalin and a quarantine had been placed on all vessels.
That same morning I visited the Voyevodsk prison. It was built in the '70S. To acquaint you with the terrain I must explain that it was necessary co level the high banks of the gap over an area of 480 square sazhens. At the present time it is the most infamous of all the Sakhalin prisons. It has completely resisted reforms and can serve as an exact illustration to describe the old order and the old prisons which have so aroused men's loathing and terror.
Voyevodsk prison consists of three main buildings and one small one containing individual cells. Naturally, there is nothing good to say about the cubic content of air or the ventilation. When I entered the prison, they were just finishing washing down the floors, and the humid foul air had not yet dissipated from the night and it hung there heavily. The floors were wet and unpleasant to look at. The first thing I heard was complaints about bugs. You cannot live with them. At one time they were killed with chlorated lime, or they were frozen to death during intensely cold weather, but now nothing helps. The prison guards' quar- ters smell of latrines and sourness; they also complain about the bugs.
In the Voyevodsk prison convicts are fettered with balls and chains. There are eight fettered convicts here. They live in the common ward with the other prisoners and pass their time in absolute idleness. In any event, in the Report on Assigning Various Kinds of Work to the Forced Labor Convicts, those who are kept in balls and chains are num- bered among the unemployed. Each is chained with man- acles and feners. From the middle of the manacles there hangs a long chain about three to four arshins long which is attached to the bottom of a small iron ball. The chains and ball constrain the prisoner and he moves as little as possible, which undoubtedly affects his musculature. Their hands become so accustomed to this that each slightest movement is made with a feeling of heaviness and when the prisoner finally is released from his ball and chain his hands retain their clumsiness and he makes excessively strong, sharp movements. \X'hen he takes a cup, for ex- ample, he spills his tea as though he were suffering from St. Vitus's dance. At night, while sleeping, the prisoners keep the ball under the plank bed. To facilitate this, the prisoner is usually placed at the end of the bed.
All eight men were incorrigible; they had been con- victed a number of times during their lives. One of them, an old man of sixty, was chained for trying to escape, or as he himself says, "for stupidity." He is obviously ill, con- sumptive, and the former prison warden out of compassion ordered him to have a place closer to the stove.
Another, a former railroad conductor, was convicted for sacrilege, and began forging twenty-five-ruble notes on Sakhalin. When someone walking around the ward teased him for robbing a church, he answered, "So what? God doesn't need money!" Noticing that the other prisoners were not laughing and that his words had displeased them, he added, "That's why I didn't murder people."
A third, a former sailor, was sent to Sakhalin for a disciplinary transgression: he attacked an officer with clenched fists. In prison he attacked everyone in the same way. The last time was when he assaulted the prison warden, who ordered him to be beaten with birches. At the court-martial his lawyer explained that he attacked people because he was ill. The court ordered the death sentence, but Baron Korf commuted it to life imprisonment, a flog- ging and chains. The others were all chained for murder.
The morning was raw, gloomy, cold. The sea roared turbulently. I recall that on the road from the old mine to the new we stopped for a minute near an old Cauca- sian who lay on the sand in a dead faint. Two of his coun- trymen held his hands; they kept looking around helplessly and disconcertedly. The old man was pale, his hands icy, his pulse slow. We spoke to them and went our way without giving him any medical aid. When I mentioned to the phy- sician who was with me that it would not harm to give the old man at least some valerian drops, he said that the Voyevodsk prison assistant surgeon had no medicine what- soever.