CITY OF CRIME

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 106, 31 October 1931, Page 22

CITY OF CRIME

A p!a>;e notorious throughout the four centuries since it was founded, the Siberian, city of Irkutsk, which stands at the eastern gateway to the country, and which has a population of 300,000, has a reputation no better today (writes Henry Wales in the "Chicago Tribuno"). Even the G. P. U. (the Soviet secret police), has thus far failed to clean up the place properly, and it is infested with irresponsibles, thieves, and escaped convicts, who scrawl chalk marks on walls such as: "Your overcoat belongs to us if you venture out after 9 p.m." The Moscow Government has repeatedly changed its administration heads in Irkutsk, and recently installed a. new section of the dread secret police to establish order, as rumours had filtered back along the 3600 miles to the capital that the police were working hand in hand with the crooks. Proof ivas forthcoming when robbery victims identified thoir property, clothing, and toots which were being worn by police and militiamen.

Irkutsk is proverbially a -bad town, and in the old days of the Tsarist regime it wis the headquarters of escaped felons Who had been exiled to Siberia. To-day it is the headquarters of desperate men who are beating their way east to China to escape across the boundary, 500 miles farther east, into Manchuria. Bagged, penniless, famished, many of them do not hesitate to knife passers-by at night to steal clothes, wallets, and papers. All night long the militia and the police make their rounds, tramping up and down the principal streets, questioning everyone not known to them, and arresting those who cannot show good reason why they aro prowling about. Ono hundred miles on either side of Irkutsk tho railway police bogin searching trains, inside, outside, and underneath, to capture undesirables. ■■ .

Outside Irkutsk is a huge prison, the concentration camp constructed under the Imperial regime to lodge tho long convoys of exiles on their way ,to the gold mines, then the personal property of the Tsar, in the region north-west of Irkutsk. To-day tho Soviet authori-

IRKUTSK THE NOTORIOUS

tics use the place as a penitentiary. Outside the walls are barbed wire entanglements and lied Guards with lixed bayonets peer over the top of tall poles. Inside the prisoners are labouring, trimming logs, preparing railway ties, and fashioning huge joists and timber for construction under way along the railroad and in the city. There are huge railway shops at Irkutsk! built in IS9B. The two-headed Imperial eaglo of the Tsar, facing east and west, typifying the Bussian Empire with its realms in Europe and Asia, is covered by the Bolshevik insignia of the sieklo and the hammer, and a-lithograph of Lenin replaces the photograph of Nicholas in the station waiting-room. The town is situated on the banks of the Angara Eivcr, 35 miles wert of Lake Baikal, the largest lake in the world, and "bottomless" in many places, and frozen for many months of the year, and is a rambling, straggling place of low, one-story mud huts except for some two-story buildings on a few principal streets, and the former palaces and offices of the Tsar's Governors, and the big bulbous domed churches.

The former Governor's palace is a big white and green three-story building right down on the Angara, opposite the railway station. It is now used as headquarters of the local Soviet. Tho former office buildings have become museums and workers' clubs. The Grand Hotel on Litvinov street is now tho best hostelry. But extensive building operations are going on, and already several new factories are being erected, with big blocks of brick apartments for the workers. There are also large frame houses, three-story log dwellings, composed of one room lodgings, to house the proletariat. A bitter wind prevails continuously, blowing viciously with keen penetrating blasts from tho uorth-west to the south-east and wafting the bitter icy ozone from tho Arctic over the vast plain surrounding the city. Even in May, tlie sentries have to wear their great bearskin heavy coat 3, which reach to their heels and surround them like miniature tents to protect them from tho wind.