The representatives of the first group call themselves free persons. The overwhelming majority were either born or conceived prior to the trial and therefore retain all their status rights. The children born in penal servitude fit into no category. In time they will be registered into the com- mon class and will call themselves either peasants or in- habitants of the towns. At present their social status is determined as follows: illegal son of a convict woman, daughter of a male settler, illegal daughter of a female settler, etc. They say that when a noblewoman, the wife of a convict, learned that her child was recorded in the parish register as the son of a settler, she burst into bitter tears.
There are almost no babies or children below 4 years of age in the first group; there is a preponderance of school- age children. In the second group, those born on Sakhalin, it is the exact opposite; the very youngest ages predomi- nate. Moreover, the older the children, the fewer there are of the same age. If we were to make a graph of the chil- dren's ages in this group, we would obtain an extremely sharply declining curve. In this group there are 203 chil- dren less than a year old; of those who are 9 or 10 years old therc are 4 5, of those from 1 5 to 16 there are only i i. As I have already mentioned, not one of the children born on Sakhalin who reached 20 years of age remained there. Thus the shortage of adolescents and young people is made up from the newcomers, who are the only ones from whose midst young brides and grooms are drawn.
The low percentage of older children born on Sakhalin is explained by the high child mortality and because there were fewer women on the island in the past years and, therefore, fewer children were born. But the greatest fault lies with the emigration. Those who leave for the mainland do not abandon their children on the island but take them along with them. The parents of a Sakhalin-born child usually begin serving their sentence long before he arrives, or before he is born, grows up and reaches the age of 10 years, and then most of them succeed in achieving peasant rights and depart for the mainland.
The position of a newcomer is completely different. \Vhen his parents are sent to Sakhalin, he is between 5 and io years old. While they are serving their sentence and then passing the years in settler status, he matures. While the parents are later petitioning for peasant rights, he has already become a laborer, and prior to the family's leaving for the mainland, he has already held several jobs in Vladivostok and Nikolayevsk. At any rate, neither the newcomers nor the native-born inhabitants of Sakhalin remain in the colony, and therefore all the Sakhalin posts and settlements should more properly be called temporary settlements rather than a colony.
The birth of a new child in a family is not accepted joyfully. Lullabies arc not sung over the cradle. They com- plain ominously when a child is born. The fathers and mothers say they cannot feed the children, that they will not learn anything good on Sakhalin, and "the best possible fate for them will be if the good Lord takes them away as soon as possible." If a child cries or is naughty, they scream at him maliciously, "Shut up; why don't you croak!"
But no matter how they speak and how they complain, the most useful, the most necessary and the most pleasant people on Sakhalin are the children, and the convicts them- selves understand this well and regard them highly. They bring an element of tenderness, cleanliness, gentleness and joy into the most calloused, morally depraved Sakhalin family. Notwithstanding their own purity, they love their impure mothers and criminal fathers more than anything else in the world, and if a convict who has become unaccus- tomed to tenderness in prison is touched by a dog's affec- tion, how much more must he value the love of a child!
I have already said that the presence of children gives moral support to the convicts. I will now add that often children arc the only tie that binds men and women to life, saving them from despair and a final disintegration.
Once I recorded two free women who voluntarily fol- lowed their husbands and were living together in one house. One of them, who was childless, continuously bemoaned her fate while I was in the hut. She disparaged herself, saying she was damned and foolish to have come to Sakha- lin. She kept squeezing her hands convulsively. All this took place in the presence of her husband, who gazed at me with a guilty expression. The other woman, who had several children, was a "childbearer"—so they are called here— and as she remained silent, it occurred to me that the pre- dicament of a childless woman must indeed be horrible. I remember that in one hut, as I was recording a three- year-old Tatar boy in a skullcap, his eyes wide apart, I said a few kind words to the child. Suddenly the languid face of the boy's father, a Kazan Tatar, brightened and he nodded his head merrily as if he agreed with me that his son was a very nice little fellow, and I had the feeling that this Tatar was a fortunate man.
The influences undcr which the Sakhalin children are rcared and the impressions which determine their spiritual activity must be obvious to the reader from what I have already said. What is terrifying in the cities and villages of Russia is commonplace here. Children look apathetically at groups of prisoners in chains. When children see chained convicts dragging a wheelbarrow full of sand, they hang onto the back of the barrow and laugh uproariously. play at being soldiers and prisoners. A little boy goes out on the street and yells to his playmates, "Fall in! As you were!" Or he will throw his playthings and a piece of bread in a sack and say to his mother, ''I'm going away to be- come a vagrant." "Be careful, or a soldier might shoot you," his mother answers jokingly. He goes out on the street and wanders about. His playmates, disguised as soldiers, capture him. Sakhalin children talk about vagrants, birch rods and lashes; they know the exact meaning of "executioner," "prisoners in chains" and "cohabitant."
While making the rounds of the huts in Verkhny Armudan I did not find any adults in one hut. Only a ten-year-old boy was at home, a towhead, round-shouldered and barefoot. His pale face was covered with large freckles and scemcd mottled.
'What is your father's name?" I asked him.
"I don't know," he answered.
"How so? You are living with your father and don't know his name? That's disgraceful."
"Hc's not my real father."
"What do you mean, he's not your real father?"
"He's my mother's cohabitant."
"Is your mother married or a widow?"
"A widow. She came because of her husband."
"What do you mcan, she came because of her husband?"
"She killed him."
"Do you remember your father?"
"I don't remember him. I'm illcgitimate. My mothcr gave birth to me in Kara."
Sakhalin children arc pale, thin and flabby. They wear rags and arc always hungry. As the reader will observe from what I have writtcn below, they die nearly always from diseases of the alimentary canal. Their half-starved exist- ence; their food, consisting only of turnips for months on end, the more prosperous among them eating salted fish; the low temperature and thc humidity, all thcsc waste away a child's organism slowly through emaciation; his tissues gradually degenerate. If it were not for the immigration, then within two or thrcc generations the colony would probably be beset by all kinds of diseases arising from the extremely unbalanced diet.
At present thc children of thc ^^rest settlers and con- victs receive a so-called f^^ allowance from the govcrn- ment. Children from 1 to 1 5 years of age arc given one and a half rubles per month, while orphans, cripples, twins and the deformed reccive thrce rubles per month. A child's right to this assistance is determined at the personal discretion of the officials, and each of them understands thc word "^wrest" in his own way.i3