The woman was leading the little boy, Aleshka, three or four years old, by the hand, and he st^^ there, gazing down at the grave. He wore a woman's blouse with long sleeves many sizes too large for him, and faded blue trousers. His knees were covered with bright-blue patches.
"Aleshka, where is your mather?" asked my companion.
"They b-b-buried her!" said Aleshka as he laughed and then he waved his hand toward the grave.lS
There are five schools on Sakhalin, not counting Der- binskoye, where there were no classes for lack of a teacher.
295
From 1889 to 1890 they had 222 students: 144 boys and 78 girls, with an average of 44 pupils at ea^ school. I visited the island during the school vacations. No classes were being held during my stay and therefore the conduct and behavior in the schools, no doubt very original and interesting, remain unknown to me. They say that Sakhalin schools are ^ror, miserably furnished, not compulsory, living out a haphazard existence, and their status completely indefinite because nobody knows whether they will continue to exist or not. They are supervised by one of the function- aries in the office of the island commandant. He is an edu- cated young man; nevertheless he is a king who reigns but does not rule, for in fact the schools are supervised by the district commandants and the prison wardens who select and assign the teachers. The schoolteachers are convicts who were not teachers in the homeland. They have little knowledge of teaching and have not been trained for it. They receive ten rubles a month. The administration finds it impossible to pay more and does not invite free persons to act as teachers because it would have to pay them at least 25 rubles. Teaching school is considered a very mean occu- pation, for the guards hired among the exiles, whose duties are vague and who act as errand boys for the officials, re- ceive 40 and sometimes 50 rubles a month.10
The literate male population, counting both adults and children, comprises 29 percent; the literate female popula- tion is 9 percent. And even this 9 percent refers exclusively to those of school age, and so it can be said of the adult Sakhalin woman that she can neither read nor write; en- lightenment has not touched her; she embarrasses you with her crude illiteracy, and it seems to me that nowhere else have I seen such stupid and dull women as I found among the criminal and oppressed population of Sakhalin. Among the children who came from Russia 25 percent are literate, but only 9 percent of those born on Sakhalin are literate.20
1 A Russian pound is about o/J.o of the American pound; a zolot- nik is ^ of a pound.—^^NS.
2 A large, low, half-covered, four-wheeled carriage without springs.—TRANS.
"A Table of Food Rations for Convict Men and Women" was composed on the basis of Regulationi on Provisions and Addi- tional Food Rations for the Armies, as approved by His Imperial Majesty on July 3 i, i 87 1.
The weight differential between flour and bread is a seductive demon whose wiles, it appears, are very difficult to resist, and as a result many people have lost their scruples and even their lives. The guard Selivanov, whom I have already mentioned, became a victim of the weight differential when he was killed by a convict baker, while giving a tongue-lashing to the convict for having ob- tained a low weight differential. This is really worth being dis- turbed about. Let us suppose that bread is baked for 2,870 persons in the Alexandrovsk prison. If they hold back only i o zolotniks from each ration, that amounts to 300 pounds a day. These tricks with bread are generally very profitable. Thus, in order to em- bezzle 1 o,ooo poods of flour, it would take only 2 to 3 years to conceal this amount with flour taken in small amounts from pris- oners' rations.
Polyakov wrote: "The bread was so bad in the Malo-Tymov- skoye settlement that not even the dogs could bring themselves to eat it. It contained a great deal of unground whole grain, chaff and straw. One of my associates, who accompanied me during my bread inspection, said rightly: With this bread it is just as easy to tie up all your teeth with straw as to finJ a toothpick to clean them." •■
5 Soup is occasionally cookeJ v.'ith fresh meat in the prison. This only happens when a bear has killed a cow, or some accident has happened to an ox or cow belonging to the government. But the prisoners often consiJer this butchered meat to be carrion and refuse to cat it. Here are some lines from Polyakov: "The lotal corned beef was always very bad. It was prepared from the meat of government oxen which had grown exhausted by work on poor and difficult roads. They were butchered the day before they would have expired, unless it happened that their throats were cut when they were already half dead." During the run of migratory fish the prisoners are fed fresh fish at the rate of one pound per person.
0 The administration knows all about this. At any rate, here is the opinion of the island commandant himself: "In the local operations of distributing food rations to convicts, circumstances exist which unwittingly cast a suspicious shadow" (Order No. 3 i 4, i 888). If an official says he has been eating prison food for a week or a month and still feels well, this means that his food has been especially cooked for him in the prison.
From the quantities which are placed in the caldron one can see how easily the cooks can make mistakes and prepare a volume of soup which is greater or lesser than the required number of por- tions. On May 3, 1890, 1,279 prisoners were fed from the caldron, which contained i 3 poods of meat, 5 poods of rice, i poods of flour for thickening, i pood of salt, 24 poods of potatoes, pound of bay leaf and pounds of pepper. On September 29, for 67 5 persons in the same prison the caldron contained i 7 poods of fish, 3 poods of groats, i pood of flour, pood of salt, i 2Y2 poods of potatoes, V11 pound of bay leaf and pound of pepper.
On May 3, of the 2,870 persons in the Alexandrovsk prison, 1,279 were fed from the common caldron; on September 29, of the 2,4 32 prisoners, only 67 5 were fed from it.
The administration and the local doctors have found the prison rations to be quantitatively inadequate. According to data which I obtained from a medical report, the rations measured in grams are as follows: albumen-i42.9;fats-3 7 .4; carbohydrates-659.9 on meat days and 164.3, 40.0 and 67 1.4 on fast days. According to Erisman, the diet of our factory workers on meat days contains 79.3 grams of fat, and on fast days, 67.4. Hygienic rules demand that the morc a man works, the greater and more prolonged the physical strain he undergoes, the more fat and carbohydrates must be taken in. The reader can judge by the foregoing how little trust can bc placed in the nourishment obtained from the bread and the soup. Prisoners working in mines receive increased rations during the four summer months—i.e., 4 pounds of bread and i pound of meat and 24 zoloitiiki of groats. Through the interces- sion of the local administration the same rations were ordered for the laborcrs working on roads.
In 1887, at the suggestion of the Director of the Prison Ad- ministrative Headquarters, questions were raised about ''the possi- bility of changing the existing regulations in Sakhalin in order to decrease the cost of provisioning convicts without impairing nutri- tion," and experiments were conducted in a manner recommended by Dobroslavin. As can be seen from his report, the late professor found it inconvenient "to limit the amount of food which has been issued for so many years to the convicts without entering into a more detailcd srudy of the working and prison conditions into which the prisoners have been placed, since it is very difficult to form an exact opinion here on the quality of the meat and bread which are issued locally." Nevertheless, he still found it possible to limit the use of expensive meat rations during the year and proposed three sets of regulations: two for meat days and one for fast days.