He was sentenced to penal servitude for hacking off his wife's head.
Yadrintsev tells the story of a certain Demidov who wanted to discover all the details of a murder and had the wife of the murderer beaten, although she was a free woman. She had fol- lowed her husband voluntarily to Siberia and was therefore not liable to corporal punishment. He then had the eleven-year-old daughter of the murderer beaten. They held the little girl in the air and she was beaten with birch rods from head to foot. After she had received a number of strokes, she begged for a drink and they gave her a salty salmon. They might have gone on to beat her again and again, but the executioner himself refused to go on. Yadrintsev wrote: "Dcmidov's brutality is the natural result of the training inevitable to a man who has been in charge of large numbers of convicts" ("The Condition of Convicts in Siberia," Vestnik Evropy [News of Europe], 187 5, XI, XII). Vlasov's report contains an account of Lieutenant Yevfonov, whose two weaknesses consisted of "turning the convict prison into a public gambling den and a feeding house for crime, and being so brutal that he bred violence in the convicts. One prisoner who had been ordered to receive an excessive number of birch rods killed the guard before the flogging could begin."
The present island commandant, General Kononovich, has always opposed corporal punishment. When the sentences handed down by the police adminisuarion and the Khabarovsk court are shown to him, he usually writes: "Agreed, except in the maner of corporal punishment." Unfortunately he has rarely enough time ro visit rhe prisons and does nor know how frequently the convias are ^Mten with birch rods. This may be happening 200 or 300 yards from his headquarters, and the number of corporal punish- ments inflicted can be judged only by the reportS on his desk. One day when we were sining in his drawing room, he told me in the presence of some officials and a visiting mining engineer: "Here on Sakhalin corporal punishment is almost never inflicted; it is astonishingly rare."
XXII Escapees on Sakhalin - Reasons for Escapes - Composition of Escapees by Origin,
Class and Others
a famous committee of 1868 pointed out that one of the more important advantages of Sakhalin lay in the fact that it was an island. Therc appeared to be no particu- lar difficulty in establishing a large prison on an island separated from the mainland by a stormy sea on the prin- ciple of "water surrounding a center of adversity." Penal servitude on the Roman model could therefore be instituted in such a way that thoughts of cscapc would be nothing but idle fa ntasies. In reality, from the very beginning of Sakha- lin as a prison center, the island proved to be a peninsula. The strait separating the island from thc mainland freezes over during the winter momhs, and the water which serves as a prison wall during the summer becomes smooth and level like a field in winter. Anyonc can then make his way across on foot or by dog sleigh. And it is not impossible to cross the strait in summer. The width is only six or seven versts in the narrows between Capes Pogobi and Lazarev. On calm bright days it is not difficult to make a journey of one hundred versts in a dilapidated Gilyak boat. The people on Sakhalin arc able to see the mainland shore quite clearly even where the strait is at its widest. Every day the convict is fascinated and tempted by the hazy strip of shore with its lovely mountain peaks, which gives promise of freedom and the homeland. In addition to these physical conditions, the committee either did not foresee or overlooked the pos- sibility of escaping imo the interior of the island rather than to the mainland. The two kinds of escape were equally disturbing to the authorities, and therefore Sakhalin's posi- tion far from justified the comminee's hopes.
But it still retains certain advantages. It is not easy to escapc from Sakhalin. Vagrants, who may be regarded as specialists in this activity, tell you candidly that it is more difficult to escape from Sakhalin than from Kariysky or Ncrchinsky penal scrvitude. In spite of the illimitable de- bauchery and indifference which existed undcr the old administration, the prisons were full and the prisoners did not escapc as oftcn as thc guards might have desired, since thcy had much to gain from escapes. Nowadays the offi- cials admit that in view of the inadequate surveillance and thc widc arca ovcr which convict labor is carried on, if it wcrc not for the fcar of the physical difficultics of escaping, thc only people who would rcmain on the island would be thosc who likcd to live on it, and that means nobody.
Thc sca is not thc most fcarful of thc impediments which prcvcnt peoplc from cscaping. Thc impassable Sa- khalin taiga, thc mountains, thc evcrlasting humidity, fogs, dcsolation, bears, hungcr, gnats, sevcre frosts and snow- storms—all thcsc immcasurably assist official survcillance. Evcn wcll-fed mcn who arc not prisoncrs can make no morc than cight vcrsts a day in thc Sakhalin taiga. At evcry stcp hc confronts hugc windfalls, and thick tangles of marsh roscmary or bamboo must bc surmountcd. He finds himsclf sinking up to the waist in marshcs and strcams, and hc must kcep shiclding himself from the gnats. A man who has grown cmaciated in prison, whose f^^ on thc taiga consists of rottcn wood sprinkled with salt, and who docs not know north from south, can make no morc than thrcc to fivc vcrsts a day. Hc is forced to travcl in a widc circle to avoid the cordon. His escape lasts for a wcck or two, rarely for a month, and then, cxhausted with hunger, dysentery and fcver, bitten by gnats, his feet bruised and swollen, wct, filthy, ragged, he either perishes in the taiga, or elsc he summons up the last vestigcs of his strength and turns around and staggers back, praying that God may gram him the supreme g^^ fortune of meeting a soldier or a Gilyak who will send him back to prison.
The main reason why a criminal finds salvation in escape rather than in repentance and work lies in his un- ending awareness of life. Unless he is a philosopher who can live anywhere and under any conditions, he simply can- not prevent himself from desiring to escape and he is not obliged to do so.
The convict's passionate love for his homeland is the chief impulse which drives him from Sakhalin. To hear the convicts talk, living in one's homeland is an endless joy! They speak with contemptuous derision, aversion and malice about Sakhalin, of the local earth, the people, the trees and the climate, but in Russia everything is wonderful and delightful. The most audacious imagination cannot tolerate the idea that there may be unfortunate people in Russia. To be living in Tulsk or Kursk gubemija, seeing the native huts every day and breathing the Russian air are for them the greatest happiness. May I be visited with pov- erty, sickness, blindness, deafness and slander, buc, 0 God, let me die in my native land! One old convict woman who was my servanc for a while was cnchanted with my luggage, my books and my blanket because they did not come from Sakhalin but from the homeland. When priests were my guests, she never asked them for a blessing but glared at them with a sneer on her lips because in her view there would be no authentic priests on Sakhalin. Their long- ing for the homeland is expressed in the form of continual melancholy and sorrowful reminiscences intermingled with laments and bitter tears, or in the form of unrealizable ex- pectations astonishing in their absurdity and resembling lunacy, or else they are demonstrated in a form of insanity.i