"You are a politician?" asked the feminine-looking Gil- yak in bad Russian.
"No."
"That means you are a pishi-pishi?" [pisar means clerk] he said, seeing some paper in my hands.
"Yes, I write."
"How much salary do you get?"
I was earning about 300 rubles a month. I told them the figure. You should have seen the disagreeable and even painful expressions which my answer produced. Both Gilyaks suddenly grabbed their stomachs, and throwing themselves on the ground, they began rolling around exactly as though they had severe stomach cramps. Their faces expressed despair.
"How can you talk that way?" they said. "Why did you say such an awful thing? That's terrible! You shouldn't do that!"
"What did I say that was bad?" I asked.
"Butakov, the regional superintendent, well, he's a big man, gets 200, while you are not even an official—a clerk —amounts to nothing, and you get 300! You spoke un- truth! You shouldn't do that!"
I tried to explain that a regional superintendent re- mains in one place and therefore only gets 200 rubles. Although I am just a "pishi-pishi," I have come a long way—io,ooo versts away. My expenses are greater than Butakov's and therefore I need more money. This calmed the Gilyaks. They exchanged glances, spoke together in Gilyak, and stopped suffering. Their faces showed that they finally believed me.
"It's true, it's true!" said the bearded Gilyak briskly. "That's fine. You may leave now!"
"It's true," nodded the other. "You may go!"
When a Gilyak accepts an obligation, he fulfills it properly. There has never been a single case of a Gilyak dumping mail along the road or embezzling the property of others. Polyakov, who had dealings with Gilyak boatmen, wrote that they were most punctilious in fulfilling an obligation, and this is characteristic of them today when we find them unloading government freight for the prisons.
They are clever, intelligent, cheerful, brash, and arc never shy in the society of strong and rich men. They do not accept authority, and they do not even understand the meaning of "older" and "younger." In The History of Siberia, by I. Fisher, we read that the renowned Polyakov visited the Gilyaks, who were then "under no foreign domination." They have a word, dzhanchin, which denotes "your excellency," and they use it equally to a general or to a rich trader who has a great deal of nankeen and to- bacco. Seeing Nevelskoy's picture of the Tsar, they said he must be a strong man who distributes much nankeen and tobacco.
The commandant of the island possesses vast and ter- rifying powers. Nevertheless, when I was riding with him from Verkhny Armudan to Arkovo, a Gilyak had no com- punction about shouting at us imperiously: "Stop!" Then he asked if we had seen his white dog along the road.
As it is often said and written, Gilyaks have no respect for family seniority. A father does not believe he is senior to his son, and a son does not respect his father, but lives as he pleases. An old mother has no more authority in the yurt than a teen-age daughter. Boshnyak wrote that he often saw a son beat his mother and chase her out of the house and no one dared say a word against him. The male members of a family are equal to one another. If you treat Gilyaks to vodka, it must also be served to the very young- est males.
The females are equally without rights, whether it is a grandmother, mother or breast-fed baby girl. They are treated as domestic animals, as chattels, which can be thrown out, sold or kicked like a dog. The Gilyaks pet their dogs, but women—never. Marriage is considered nonsense— much less important, for example, than a drinking bout. It is not accompanied by any religious or superstitious rites. A Gilyak exchanges a spear, a boat or a dog for a young girl, drives her to his yurt and lies down with her on a bearskin—and that is all there is to it. Polygamy is per- mitted but is not widespread, although there are obviously more women than men. Contempt for women as for a lower creature or possession has come to such a pass that the Gilyak does not consider slavery, in the exact and coarse meaning of the word, as reprehensible. As Shrenk witnessed, the Gilyaks often bring Ainu women home with them as slaves. Plainly a woman is an object of barter, like tobacco or daba cloth. Strindberg, that famous misogy- nist, who thought women should be slaves of men's desires, follows the Gilyak pattern. If he happened to visit North- ern Sakhalin, they would embrace him warmly.
General Kononovich told me he wants to Russify the Sakhalin Gilyaks. I don't know why this is necessary. Fur- thermore, Russification had already begun long before the general's arrival. It began when some prison wardens, re- ceiving very small salaries, began acquiring expensive fox and sable cloaks at the same time that Russian water jars appeared in Gilyak yurts.9
As time passed, the Gilyaks were hired to help in track- ing down prisoners who escaped from the prison. There was a reward for capturing them, dead or alive. General
Kononovich ordered Gilyaks to be hired as jailers. One of his orders says this is being done because of the dire need for people who are well acquainted with the countryside, and to ease relations between the local authorities and the non-Russians. He told me personally that his new ruling is also aimed at their Russification.
The fim ones approved as jailers were the Gilyaks Vaska, Ibalka, Orkun and Pavlinka (Order No. 308, 1889). Later, Ibalka and Orkun were discharged "for continuous failure to appear at the administrative office to receive their orders," and they then approved Sofronka (Order No. 426, 1889). I saw these jailers; they wore tin badges and re- volvers. The most popular and the one who is seen most often is the Gilyak Vaska, a shrewd, sly drunkard. One day I went to the shop supported by the colonization fund and met a large group of the intelligentsia. Someone, pointing at a shelf full of bottles, said that if you drank them all down you would really get drunk, and Vaska smirked fawn- ingly, glowing with the wild joy of a tippler. Just before my arrival a Gilyak jailer on duty killed a convict and the local sages were concerned with only one question: whether he was shot in the chest or in the back—that is, whether to arrest the Gilyak or not.
That their proximity to the prison will not Russify but eventually alienate the Gilyaks does not have to be proved. They arc far from understanding our requirements, and there is scarcely any opportunity to explain to them that convicts are caught, deprived of their freedom, wounded and killed not because of caprice, but in the interests of justice. They regard this as coercion, a display of bestiality, and probably consider themselves as hired killers.10
If it is absolutely necessary to Russify them and if it cannot be avoided, I believe that when we choose our methods, our primary concern should not be our own needs, but theirs. The order permitting them to become patients in our hospitals, the distribution of aid in the form of flour and groats, as was done in 1886 when the Gilyaks were starving, and the order not to confiscate their property for debt, and the remission of their debts (Order No. 204, 1890), and all similar measures will probably achieve this aim more quickly than tin badges and revolvers.
In addition to the Gilyaks, there are a small number of Oroki, or Orochi, of the Tungus tribe living in Northern Sakhalin. Since they are barely heard of in the colony and since no Russian settlements exist in this area, I merely mention them here.
Among the orders issued by General Kononovich there is one which refers to the long-desired abolition of the Due and Voye- vodsk prisons:
"After inspecting the Voyevodsk prison I became personally convinced that neither the location nor the significance to be artached to the prisoners who are held in it—most of them are long-term convicts or else they are recidivists—can justify the conditions at thc prison, or, more accurately, the complete lack of supervision which has been characteristic of the prison from the beginning. The present situation is as follows: the prison stands in a narrow valley one and a half versts north of the Due Post. Communication with the post exists only along a shore road which is drowned by the tide twice every twenty-four hours, while com- munication over the mountains is difficult in the summer, and impossible in the winter. The prison warden lives in Due;so docs his assistant. The local garrison supplies the sentries and a number of convoy guards, and they are sent out on various jobs by arrangement with the "Sakhalin Company," which is stationed at the post. Meanwhile there are only a few jailers in the prison, and there is one guard, who is changed daily; the military authori- ties do not supervise him closely or over a long period of time. Without entering into a discussion of the circumstances which brought about the construction of a prison in such an unlikely locality, where there is no possibility of direct supervision, and before raising the question of whether the Due and Voyevodsk prisons should be abolished and moving them elsewhere, I must at least partially correct the existing deficiencies," etc. (Order No. 348, 1888).