Thc one-and-a-half- and thrce-rublc food allowances are spent at the discretion of the mothcrs and fathers. TIiis monetary aid, which depcnds on so many considerations and which rarely achieves its purpose because of the pov- erty and unscrupulousness of the parents, should have been abolished a long time ago. It docs not dccrease the poverty; it merely masks it. It gives uninformed people the impres- sion that provision has been made for the children on Sakhalin.
1 Herewith is a table of age groups compiled by me: Years
From
To
Males
Females
0
5
493
473
5
IO
3I9
3I4
IO
15
2I5
234
I5
20
89
96
20
25
I34
136
25
35
I ,4 I9
68o
35
45
I ,405
578
45
55
724
236
55
65
3I8
56
65
75
90
12
75
85
I7
1
85
95
—
1
Of unknown age: males 142; females 35.
In the Cherepovets district, people of working age constitute 44.9 percent of the population; in the Moscow distrin, 45.4 per- cent; in the Tambov, 42.7 percent. See the by V. I. Nikolsky, The Tambov District. Statistics on Population and Morbidity
(1885).
In the Cherepovets distrin this figure is 37 .3 percent;in Tambov, about 39 percent.
* The table shows that in the children's ages the sexes are di- vided almost equally, while in the i 5-t0-20-year age group and from 20 to 25 there is even a slight surplus of women. In the 25-C0-35 age group there are almost twice as many men, while in the older age groups this preponderance may be called overwhelm- ing. The small number of aged men and the almost complete ab- sence of aged women indicate a lack of family experience and tradition on Sakhalin. Every time I visited the prisons I had the feeling that they harbored more old men than the colony.
Stable conditions in a colony do not depend principally on the development of families. Virginia's prospericy was established be- fore women settled in the colony.
Judging by the figures, we may conclude that marriage in church is most unsuitable for Russian convicts. We know from the governmem statistics of I 887 that there were 2 I i convict women in the Alexandrovsk district. Of these only 24 were legally mar-
260
ried, while I 36 were cohabitants with convicts and settlers. In the same year, out of 194 convict women in the Tymovsk district, I I had legal husbands and I 6 I were cohabitants. In the Korsakov district not one convict woman was living with a husband; 115 were living in illegitimate unions. Of the 2 I fe^le senlers, only four were married.
In !tis The Problem o/ Organizing Sakhalin Island, Prince Shakhovskoy wrote: ''A g^^ deal of the difficulty in arranging marriages without let or hindrance lies with the family records, which often do not give the religion or the family status, and no one knows whether a divorce was obtained from the marriage partner who remained in Russia. h is almost impossible to find out, and it is even more difficult to petition for a divorce through the consistory from the island of Sakhalin."
Noncommissioned officers, especially guards, are considered ex- cellent catches on Sakhalin. They arc well aware of their value and conduct themselves with unbridled hauteur toward their brides and the brides' parents; N. S. Leskov despised such men and de- scribed them as "insatiable bishop-like ^^sts." [Nikolay Scmcno- vich Leskov ( 1831-95), the novelist, was an enemy of ecclesiasti- cal bureaucracy; the phrase was used in his book Spiritual Reguia- tions o/ Peter 1.] During the past ten years there were a number of mesalliances. A college regisuar married a convict s daughter, a court councillor married a scttlcrs daughter, a captain married a settler's daughter, a merchant married a pcasanr-formcrly-a-convict, and a noblewoman marricd a settler. The rare cases when a mem- ber of che intelligentsia marries the daughter of a convict are extraordinarily apjpealing and probably have a good influence on the colony. In January, i88o, a convict married a Gilyak woman in the Duĉ church. In Rykovskoye I recorded Grigory Sivokobylka, eleven years old, whose mother was a Gilyak. Marriages betwecn Russians and foreigners arc rare. I was cold of a guard who was living with a Gilyak woman who had given him a son, and now wants to become a Christian so that they can get married. Father lrakly knew a Yakut convict who married a Georgian woman. They knew very litdc Russian. As for Muhammadans, they do not renouncc poly&;amy even in exile, and some of them have two wivcs. Thus, in Alexandrovsk, Dzhaksanbecov has two wives —Batyma and Sascna—and in Korsakov, Abubakirov also has two wivcs—Ganosta and Vcrkhonisa. In Andrcyc-Ivanovskoye I saw an extraordinarily beautiful fifteen-year-old Tatar girl whose husband bought her from her father for a hundred rubles. When her husband is not at home she sits on the bed. The settlers gaze at her through the open door and ogle her.
The Code on Convicts permits conviCtS of both sexes to marry
one to three years after they have achieved a reformed status. Ob- viously a woman who enters the colony but is still on probation can only become a cohabitant, not a wife. Convict men are per- mitted to marry felons, but until they have achieved ^^&nt status females who have been deprived of all rights can only marry convicts. A free woman receives 50 rubles from the gov- ernment when she marries a convict in Siberia, if it is his first marriage. A settler in Siberia who is getting married for the first time with a convict woman is given 15 rubles outright and a loan of a similar sum.
The Code contains no provisions for marriages between va- grants. I do not know which d^^ments determine their family status and their age at marriage. I first learned they were being married on Sakhalin from the following note written in the form of a petition. '"To his Excellency the commander of Sakhalin Is- land. The certification of a settler of the Tymovsk district, settle- ment of Rykovskoye, Not-Remembering-His-Family Ivan 35 Years. I, Not-Remembering, was legally married to the settler Berezni- kova Maria last year on November 12." Two settlers were respon- sible for this illiterate statement.
0 These figures which I extracted from church baptismal records apply only to the Orthodox population.
According to Yanson, 49.8 or almost 50 births per thousand.
Such severe and impermanent catastrophes as crop failures, war, etc., decrease the birth rate; chronic afflictions like high infant mortaliry and perhaps also imprisonment, bondage, penal servi- tude, etc., increase it. In some families a higher birth rate g^ hand in hand with mental degeneration.
The illegitimate children in the first group are the offspring of convict women, the majority born in prison after the trial. There are no illegitimate children in the families which volun- tarily followed their mates and parents into exile.
The amount of assistance also depends on whether the official interprets "crippled and deformed children" to mean only the lame, the hunchbacks and those without arms, or whether it includes children suffering from tuberculosis, imbecility and blindness.
How can the Sakhalin children be helped? First of all, it seems to me that the right to assistance should not depend on suA conditions as "^^rest," "cripple," etc. Assistance should be given to all who request it and there should be no fear of fraud. It is better to be deceived than to deceive oneself. The kind of assitt-