He is now dead. He died soon after his tour of Sakhalin. Judging from his hastily written and sketchy notes, he was a talented and erudite person. His articles include: "Journey on Sakhalin Island i 881-1882" (Letters to the Secretary of the Sociery) included in Vol. XIX of Reports of the Imperial Ruuian Geographical Society (1883); "Report on Explorations on Sa- khalin Island and in the Yuzhno-Ussuruysky Kray," Supplement
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No. 6, Vol. XLVIII of Notes o/ the Imperial Academy of Science ( 1884); and "On Sakhalin," News ( 1885), No. 1.
With regard to this station, the guard acts somewhat like a former king toward his obligations, having nothing whatsoever to do with them.
A two-sazhen pole could not reach bottom at the river's mouth. A large boat could anchor in the bay. If shipping developed on the Okhotsk Sea near Sakhalin, ships would find calm and com- pletely safe anchorage in this bay.
Mining Engineer Lopatin saw the sea covered with ice here in the middle of June. The ice remained until July. The water in the teakettle froze on St. Peter's Day [June 29].
A novel written by the French novelist Victor Henri Ducange ( 1783-1853) .—TRANS.
The people of Sakhalin believe the insects and cockroaches come from the moss, which is brought from the forest and used here to caulk the dwellings. This belief arises from the fact that the insects and cockroaches appear in the chinks when they have barely finished caulking the walls. Obviously it is not due to the moss. The carpenters who sleep in the prison or in the settlers' huts bring the insects with them.
A writer who was on Sakhalin two years after me found an entire drove of horses near Uskovo.
It took us three hours to walk the six versts from Uskovo to Voskresenskoye. If the reader can imagine a hiker loaded down with flour, bacon and other government stores, or a sick person who must walk from Uskovo to Rykovskoye to the hospital there, he will understand the meaning of the common Sakhalin phrase, "There is simply no road." It is impossible to go by wagon or horseback. There have been occasions when those who attempted to go on horseback failed, because the horses broke their legs.
Rykovskoye - The Local Prison - The Meteorological Station of M. N. Galkin-Vrasky - Palevo - Mikryukov - Valzy and Longari - Malo-Tymovo - Andreye-lvanovskoye
in the upper reaches of the Tym River, especially in its southernmost watershed, we encountered a more developed life. Here, whatever else there is, the climate is warmer, nature's tints are softer, and starving, freezing man finds more favorable natural conditions than in the middle or lower reaches of the river. Here the scenery is remi- niscent of Russia. This resemblance, so enchanting and moving to the convict, is especially noticeable in the plain surrounding the Rykovskoye settlement. This is the admin- istrative center of the Tymovsk region, and the plain is about six versts wide. A low mountain range shelters it somewhat from the easternwinds, while in the west the spurs of a tremendous watershed show blue in the distance. There are no hills or elevations. It is a completely flat and familiar Russian plain with plowlands, meadows, pastures and green groves. Polyakov first saw it when the entire valley was covered with hillocks, pits and water-filled hol- lows, and with little lakes and rivulets flowing into the river Tym. He rode horseback, and his horse floundered through knee-high and breast-high swamps. Now the area has been completcly cleared and drained, and from Derbin- skoye to Rykovskoye there stretches an exemplary road, 14 versts long, amazing in its smoothness and straightness.
Rykovskoye, or Rykovo, was setded in 1878; it was hap- pily chosen and designated as the site of a setdement by the prison warden, a noncommissioned officer called Rykov. It is distinguished by its rapid growth, unusual even for a Sakhalin setdement. The area and population have quad- rupled in the past five years. At present it covers 3 square versts and contains 1,368 inhabitants: 831 male and 537 female. Including the prison and the military detach- ment, there are over 2,000 people. It does not resemble the Alexandrovsk Post. It is a small town, a small Babylon, containing gambling houses and even family bath houses maintained by a Jew. It is a real, raw Russian village with no pretensions to culmre.
As you ride or walk down the street, which stretches for three versts, you soon become bored with its monotonous length. Roads are not called slobodkas, Siberian fashion, as in Alexandrovsk, but streets, and the majority retain names given them by the settlers themselves. There is a Sizovskaya Street, so called from the hut of the woman settler Sizo- vaya which stands on the corner; there is a Khrebtovaya [Backbone] Street, and a Malorossyskaya [Little Russian] Street.
There are many Ukrainians living in Rykovskoye and therefore in no other settlement will you probably come across such exquisite surnames as: Zheltonog [Yellow Foot] and Zheludok [Stomach]. There are nine people called Bezbozhny [Godless]. Also Zaryvay [Buried], Reka [River], Bublyk [Doughnut], Sivokobylka [Gray Filly], Koloda [Fetter], Zamozdrya [Behind Mortared Walls], etc.
In the middle of the settlement there stands a wooden church, surrounded not with shops as in our villages but with prison buildings, offices and the officials' living quar- ters. As you walk across the square you seem to be on a noisy, happy fairground; you hear the loud voice of the Uskovo gypsies trading horses, you smell tar, manure and smoked fish, you hear lowing cows, and the shrieking of accordions mixed with drunken songs. But the peaceful scene comes to an end when you suddenly hear the clang of chains and the shuffling feet of the prisoners and guards making their way back to prison across the square.
Rykovskoye has 335 householders and 189 half-owners jointly working the homesteads. The half-owners consider themselves householders. There are 195 legally married families, and 91 cohabitants. The majority of the legal wives are free women who followed their husbands. There are i 55 of them. These figures are high, but they are no cause for joy or enthusiasm, for they promise little good. The large number of half-owners, those supernumerary householders, indicates the large proportion of deprived people who have no means or possibility to work their own homesteads. It shows how crowded and famished the place is.
The Sakhalin administration sets the people down on small plots of land without any order, giving no considera- tion to existing conditions and without looking to the future. Their methods of creating new setdements and homesteads are so inefficient that those which are in the comparatively favorable situation of Rykovskoye eventually come to present an appearance of vast poverty, as bad as Upper Armudan. With the existing amount of arable land in Rykovskoye, and under local conditions of productivity, assuming some possible profit, two hundred homesteads would be a magnificent accomplishment. In fact, there are over 500, including the supernumeraries, and yearly the administration continues to add to the number.
The prison in Rykovskoye is new. It is built like all Sakhalin prisons: wooden barracks, cell blocks, filth, dire poverty and discomfort, all those things which arc in their very nature inevitable in the gregarious existence within a Sakhalin prison. Recently, for reasons which are quite ob- vious, the Rykovskoye prison was beginning to be regarded as the best prison in Northern Sakhalin. For my own pur- poses, coo, it was better. I was obtaining information from prison records and employing the services of literate people in all the prisons of the region, and I could noc help notic- ing from the beginning that throughout the entire Tym area, especially in Rykovskoye, there were local clerks who were well trained and disciplined. They worked as though they had all attended a specialized school. The homestead lists and the alphabetical lists of settlers were in exemplary order. Later, when I visited the prison, I found the cooks and bakers and all the rest equally disciplined, and even the older jailers did not seem so satiated, so grossly stupid and so callous as those in Alexandrovsk or Due.