For information on Western European and Russian penal servirude, and for some partial observations on the female prob- lem, see the well-known book by Professor I. L. Foynitsky, A Study o/ Punishment in Relation to the Priion System.
In one of his articles Dr. A. V. Shcherbak writes: ''The de- barkation was only completed during the morning. All that re- mained was to embark the convicts who had been designated for the Korsakov Post and to receive the various delivery receipts. The first batch, 50 men and 20 women, were sent without delay. The itemized list of men did not indicate any trades, while the women were very old. They were sending out the worst" ("With Penal Prisoners," New Times, No. 5 38 i ).
For example, there is this order: "In accordance with the petition made to the commander of the Alexandrovsk district, presented in the report of January 5, No. 75, the convict Akulina Kuznetsova of the Alexandrovsk prison is moving to the Tymovsky district for joint housekeeping with settler Alexey Sharapov" (No.
25, 1889).
It is difficult to understand where women would live if they refused to become cohabitants. There are no separate quarters for them in penal servirude. In his report of I 889, the chief of the Medical Department writes: "Upon arrival in Sakhalin, they themselves must worry about living quarters . . . some of them cannot neglect any means whatsoever for obtaining funds to pay for them."
8 I personally was doubtful about these rumors. Nevertheless, I verified them on the spot and collected all instances which could serve as a basis for them. They say that three or four years ago, when General Gintse was the island commandant, a foreign con- vict woman was forcibly married to a former police officer. The convict Yagelskaya of the Korsakov district received thirty lashes because she wanted to leave her cohabitant, the settler Kotlyarov. It was in this place, too, that the settler Yarovaty complained that his woman refused to live with him. The following disposition was made: "NN. beat her." "How many?" "Seventy." The woman was beaten, but she still insisted on her own way and she moved in with settler Malovechkin who could not praise her enough. The settler Rezvetsov, an old man, caught his cohabitant with a certain Rodin and went to make a complaint. The follow- ing order was issued: "She is to be brought to the prison." The woman came. "You so-and-so, so you don't want to live with
Rezvetsov? Birch rods!" And Rezvetsov was ordered to beat his cohabitant himself, which he did with gusto. In the end she won out, and I have recorded her not as Rezvetsov's cohabitant, bur as Rodin's. And this is the sum of all the cases remembered by the people here. If due to her quarrelsome nature or debauchery a woman often changes cohabitants, she is beaten; but even such cases are rare and crop up only when settlers complain.
7 In Verkhny Armudan I recorded cohabitant Ekaterina Petrova living with the Tatar Tukhvatuli. He has children by her. This family's hired hand is a Muhammadan, as are the boarders. In Rykovskoye, settler Mahomet Uste-Nor lives with Avdorya Med- vedeva. In Nizhny Armudan the cohabitant of the Lutheran set- tler Peretsky is rhe Jewess Leya Permut Prokha, while in Bolshoye Takoe the peasant-formerly-convict Kalevsky cohabits with an Ainu woman.
H In the first ten years of transportation by ships, from 1879 to 1889, the ships of the Voluntary Fleet carried 8,430 convict men and women and 1,146 members of their families following them into exile.
0 One prisoner even bragged in a letter that he had a foreign silver coin. The tone of these letters is cheerful and jocular.
Sometimes husbands voluntarily follow their wives into exile. There are three on Sakhalin: the retired soldiers Andrey Naydush and Andrey Ganin in Alexandrovsk, and the peasant Zhigulin in Derbinskoye. Zhigulin, who followed his wife and children, is an old man and behaves very oddly; he appears to be perpetually drunk and is the laughingstock of the whole street. One old Ger- man came with his wife to be with his son Gotdieb. He does not speak a word of Russian. Among other things, I asked him how old he is.
"I was born in 1832," he answered in German. Later he wrote 1890 with a piece of chalk and subtracted 1832.
A convict, a former merchant, was accompanied by his steward, who, incidentally, remained only one monrh in Alexandrovsk and then returned to Russia. According co Article 264 of the Code on Convitls, Jewish husbands cannot follow their convicted wives into exile and the lauer are only permitted to bring the babies they are suckling, and chen only with the husband's consent.
Here one is struck by the difference the circumstances of this free woman, a legal wife, and her convict woman neigh- bor, a cohabitant, who daily receives three pounds of bread from the prison. In Vladimirovka one free woman is suspected of kill-
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ing her husband. If she is convicted and sentenced to penal servi- tude, she will begin receiving rations; this means that she will be in better circumstances than before the trial.
!2 The Code on Convicts also covers free women. In Article 85 we read: "Women who go voluntarily should not be separated from their husbands during the entire journey and are not subject to strict supervision." In European Russia or on a ship of the Voluntary Fleet they are free of all supervision. However, when the prison party is walking across Siberia or is being conveyed in cans, the convoy guards do not have time to distinguish in the crowd who is a convict and who is free. In Zabaikal I happened to see men, women and children bathing together in the river. The guards, standing in a semicircle, did not permit anyone to pass their cordon, not even children. According to Articles 17 3 and 153, women who voluntarily accompany their husbands "re- ceive clothing, shoes and food money during the trip until the designated place is reached""; they receive what amounts to a pris- oner's fation. But the Code does not state how the free women are supposed to cross Siberia—by foot or by cart. According to Article 407 they arc permitted temporary leaves of absence from their place of exile and may travel into the interior provinces if they receive their husbands' permission. If the husband dies in exile or if thc marriage is dissolved as a result of a new crime, according to Article 408, the wife may return to her homeland at government expense.
Describing the circumstances of criminals' wives and their children, who are only guilty because fate has decreed that they should be related to criminals, Vlasov states in his report that this "is probably the darkest page in our entire deportation system." I have already spoken of the disproportionate number of free women distributed in the districts and settlements, and how little they are respected by the local administration. Let the reader re- call the Due barracks for families. The fact that free women and their children are kept in common wards, as in prison, under dis- gusting circumstances, together with prison cardsharps, with their mistresses and their pigs, that they are kept in Due, in the most horrible and hopeless place on the island, paints a sufficient pic- ture of the colonizing and farming policies of the local authorities.