PRISON LIFE IN SIBERIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 6996, 19 April 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

PRISON LIFE IN SIBERIA.

Banishment to Siberia, as at pressnt carried out, is a punishment quite serious enough without the imaginary terrors that have been added to it by romantic travellers. The criminal sentenced to the indefinite, form is practically an exile, for life, remission of a sentence taking place only under the most exceptional circumstances, and this solely through the intervention of persons in high places, sometimes of the Emperor himself. The exile is dressed in the regulation suit, the principal feature of which is a long gray overcoat. His property is confiscated and, his marriage dissolved; the law even denies him the right to his offspring, but, on the other hand, waere the choice is made, allow 3 his family to accompany him into exile. There are about five different of banishment. Xhe mildest of them consists of exile to a town. The criminal in this case loses none of his rights aa a citizen; he may live in his own house, and follow any occupation he chooses, but must keep within the. limit 3 assigned to him, and submit to the surveillance of lii 3 correspondence by the local authorities. It is in this form that banishment i 3 meted out to most of the political exiles, and to most of them its punishment is merely the irksoraenes3 of being compelled to remain all their lives in one spot. The3o criminals of the first degree usually adapt themselves to the changed circumstances of their lot with surprising— sometimes amusing—readiness. A fGrmer army caotain, for example, is now the proprietor of an hotel in Stretinsk, a Cossack settlement on the Shilka. In the same establishment a Polish Count presides over the cuij'tne, and a whilom officer of the Russian marine acts as heid waiter. In Nikolaevsk a certain Prince Volkonsky, belonging to one of the richest and mo3t aristocratic houses in all tha Russias, earns his living by copying documents in a public office; on the Amur a Tcherkeßs prince walks the bridge as the captain of a dirty little river steamer. To the second class belong those exiles who are enrolled in the Siberian batallion. The3.e consist mainly of soldiers and young men under obligation of military service who have committed offences of the lighter kind. They have to submit to severe discipline, and to live in barracks, but are permitted, under supervision, to correspond with their relatives and friends. The largest number, that is to say at least three-fourths of the exiles, belong to the third clas3—that of the "colonists." These are criminals who, after having undergone a short or long term of imprisonment in one ot the central gaols of Siberia, are transferred to different villages in gangs of from ten to twenty: On arriving at their destination, each receives a strip of plougliod lind, a quantity oi seed, the necessary implements for cultivating his patch, and a sits for his dwelling a3 near as possible to the village. Timber and firewood the colonist must got for himself in the nearest wood. Until his crop is oat and his house erected the colonist is entitled to look for both food and shelter to the village commune. Some of tho exiles belonging to this class prefer tho alternative open to them of hiring themselves out as domestic servants or farm labourers. In the fourth class are racked the workers in the mines. These live in immense barrack-like blockhouses. Their hours of labour are twelve. Their lives are cut short at a very early period, owing, eyewitnesses declare, to the poorness of the food supplied to them, and to the exhausting character of their work, aa well a3 to thfeir treatment by those placed in authority. The fifth degree of punishment in exile is that of the arrestniskayarota, a class in which are included criminals ot the deepest dye, highway robbers mur&c., the punishment being hard labour of the severest kind, and in chains. Until the year ISSS it was customary to mark criminals of the fifth class—not, bowever, in the French fashion oi branding, but by the tatoo. The process, well known to sailors, consisted of first pricking letters in the skin with needles, and then rubbing in gunpowder. Herr Putttnau, a. German traveller, frequently saw old men with marks of this kind on forehead and cheek. The letter 3 stood for bradyag (vagabond) ; the letters Iv Y for katorzhny (coademned to bard labour); and SKI! lor silui Icalordiny rabotail: (exile and hard labour), tho letter K. being marked oa the forehead, and the letters S and Ron the cheeks. In the year ISoStatooing waa abolished, its aim—that of rendering the flight of the criminal difficult —being accomplished by a process scarcely less cruel and repulsive. One side of the crown to tho nape of his neck. This criminal's head i 3 now shaved from the operation gives tha exile a most grotesque appearance, and, while it leaves him easily recognisable as an is said to exercise a most prejudical effect upon bis health. Criminals are usually trausportedfrom Europe to Siberia in wagons or on sledges; sometimes, however, they go in marching order on foot. Three or- four Cossacks, liolster pistols, in baud, ride in front ; then follow some exiles, men and women, guarded on either side by foot soldiers placed at short intervals from each other. The rear is brought up by wagons containing the sick, and such families as have elected to follow their relatives into banishment. The march goes on thus from station to station : it begins at dawn, and ends for the night at dusk—that is to say, when the station house i 3 reached. This i 3 usually little more than a large log-house with a courtyard, surrounded by palisading. These stations are required by law to havo two rooms, but most of them have only one, and thus men, women, children, and soldiers have to pass the night together in the single apartment. Polished exiles regard the real punishment of deportation as consisting not so much in residence in Siberia, as in the suffering which has to be endured to get there. When hundreds of persons come to be thrust into them, some of these stations be come, for the tiuie, abominations of foul air and filth of all kinds ; and there are r.o many repetitions of tho Siberia black hole along the line of march that a surprisingly large number of exiles die annually of prison typhus before they reach their destination. The vessels employed to transport criminals to Siberia during the summer months are usually overcrowded, aud frequently become hotbebs of some of the most frightful diseases. A traveller who saw one of theso boats describes it as "a floating meuagerie waggon divided into cages above-deck with iron bars." Siberia has its moral as well as its physical evils. Even in the dreaded mines corruption and bribery have found out the weak point in Russian administration. Supplied with resources from home, the convict even of the fifth class may enjoy an immunity from hardships and a general state of social comfort to which, with tbe same means ho would aspire in vain in England. When tho Katorzhuy pays the piper, wild drinking banquets sometimes take place in these Siberian prisons, and nobody feasts with greater zest than ,the invited overseer (smotrited) himself, Base coining is an art that once had its home, for the Russian empire, in Siberia ; not very long ago the Government seriously contemplated abolishing the prisons, leaving only for deported criminals the punishments of mine-labour aud enforced colonisation. The. evil has been abated of late years, but bad money of Siberian workmanship still finds its way into the market, and its detection, though never impossible, is all the more difficult because, in the majority of cases, the flash paper has been produced with the connivance of Government officials themselves.