Five years ago an importam official spoke to the settlers about agriculture and offered them advice, saying: "Bear in mind that the Finlanders sow grain on mountain slopes." But Sakhalin is not Finland. The climate and especially the condition of the soil pre- clude any agriculture on the mountains. The agricultural inspector advised them to raise sheep, which would "easily make use of the sparse but numerous pastures along the slopes, where the cattle cannot graze." This advice is impracticable, however, since sheep could "make usc of' the pastures only during the short summer and they would starve to death during the long wimer.
The question mark is inserted by Chekhov.—trans.
He told me that when playing faro he "feels electricity in his veins," his hands shake from ncrvousness. One of his most pleasant memories is of the time when in his youth he stole the watch of a chief of police. He speaks with excitement about playing faro. I remember his words: "You can push it, and it doesn't go in the right place," which he said with the despair of a hunter who has missed a shot. For card lovers I recorded some of his expressions: "The transport is devoured! nape! naperipe! corner! smear the eye with a ruble! in the color and in the suit, artillery!"
I met a number of wounded and ulcerated prisoners, but not once did I smell iodoform, although more than twenty pounds of it are dispensed on Sakhalin annually.
s Due has an exaggeratedly bad reputation among people. I was told that when the Baikal dropped anchor near Due, one passen- ger, an older high official, examined the shore for a long time, and finally he said, "Tell me, please, where is the scaffold on which the convicts are hanged, and their corpses thrown into the sea?"
Due is the cradle of Sakhalin penal servitude. The opinion exists that this particular spot was chosen for a penal colony by the convicts themselves. Supposedly a man called Ivan Lapshin, serving time for parricide in Nikolayevsk, petitioned to be sent to Sakhalin, and in September, 1858, was landed here. Settling nor far from Due, he began raising garden products and grains, and according to Vlasov, he served his sentence here. He was probably not sent to the island alone, because in i 858 coal was being mined by convicts near Due. (See "From the Amur and the Shores of the Great Ocean" in Moskovskiye Vedomosti [Mos- cow News], 1874, No. 207.) Vysheslavtsen writes in his book Notes Written with a Pen and Pencil that in April, 1859, he found some forty men in Due, with two officers and an engineer- ing officer in charge of the work. "What beautiful gardens," he writes rapturously, "surround these comfortable, clean cottages! Vegetables ripen twice in the summer."
The period of the rise of Sakhalin penal servitude begins with the '6os, when the disorganization in our deportation system was at its highest. The times were such that the officer in charge of a branch of the Police Executive Department, the councillor Vlasov, scandalized by everything he encountered in penal servi- tude, stated flatly that the regime and the system are actually increasing the number of serious criminal offenses and debasing civic morals. Approximate, on-the-spot investigations of forced labor convinced him that in Russia it is practically nonexistent (see his Short Outline of Disorganization Existing in Penal Servi- tude). The Prison Administrative Headquarters, making a critical survey of penal servitude in its ten-year report, notes that in the period under survey, penal servitude ceased being a higher puni- tive measure. Indeed, it was the gravest possible disorganization ever engendered by ignorance, callousness and brutality.
Here are the main reasons for the disorganization:
a} Neither those who wrote the laws for convicts nor those who enforced them had any clear conception of the meaning of penal servitude, what it should comprise and why it was neces- sary. And practice, irrespective of its long duration, neither de- vised a system nor furnished material for a legal definition of penal servitude.
b] Various economic and financial considerations reacted ad- versely on reformatory and penal aims. A convict was considered a laborer obliged to produce profit for the state treasury. If the work was not gainful or was produced at a loss, they preferred to keep him in prison doing nothing. Unprofitable idleness was given preference over unprofitable labor. It was also necessary to reckon with the aims of colonization.
Lack of knowledge of local conditions and therefore the absence of a definite point of view about the character and nature of types of work can be observed from the recently abolished assignment of work in mines, factories and fortresses. In practice, a convict sentenced to an indefinite term in the mines sat idle in the prison, a convict with a four-year sentence was ordered to work in the factories, but in fact went to work in the mines. In the Tobolsk penal prison the convicts were set to work moving stones from one place ro another, reshoveling sand, etc. This point of view became predominant in society and to some extent in litera- ture: the severest and most humiliating penal punishment can only be administered in the mines. If Nekrasov's hero in To a Russian Woman had caught fish for the prison or was a woodchopper rather than a miner, the reading public would have been left unsatisfied.
The backwardness of our criminal code. It does not answer the numerous questions which arise daily and present a broad field for arbitrary interpretations and illegal actions. It is often a com- pletely worthless book when the need arises to solve the most difficult situations, and this is probably one of the reasons why Vlasov failed to find the code book in some administrative offices in the penal prisons.
The absence of uniformity in administering penal servitude.
/] The remoteness of penal servitude from St. Petersburg and
the complete lack of publicity. Official reports have only been published since the recent establishment of the Prison Adminis- trative Headquarters.
g] The temper of our society was also greatly responsible for hindering the regulation of the practices of exile and penal servi- tude. When society does not possess a specific viewpoint on some- thing, it is necessary to consider its mood. Society was always indignant about prison regulations, but at the same time it pro- tested at every step taken to improve the lot of the prisoners, saying, for example, "It is not right for a peasant to live better in prison than at home." If a peasant often lives worse off at home than in prison, it follows logically that penal servitude should be hell. When prisoners in trains were given kvass• instead of water, this was called "coddling murderers and firebrands," etc. However, as though to counterbalance such a mood, it was noted that the better Russian writers tended to idealize convicts, vagrants and escapees.
In 1863 a committee was organized by royal decree with the aim of investigating and suggesting measures for organizing penal labor on a more sensible basis. The committee declared that it
• A sweet-sour drink made of malt and black bread.—^^NS.
was imperative "to exile serious offenders to a distant colony to be employed in forced labor, with the aim of settling them by preference in the place of exile." Choosing among the distant colonies, the eyes of the committee fell on Sakhalin. A priori it defended its choice of Sakhalin with the following:
1 ) The geographical location safeguards the mainland from escapees;
The sentence is endowed with adequate repressive force, since exile to Sakhalin may be considered irrevocable;
There is a large enough space for the activities of a prisoner who resolves to begin a new working life;