The house of the dead or, Prison life in Siberia
prisoner’s countenance when he re-entered the barracks. There, indeed,
one learns to support everything.
When darkness set in we had to re-enter the barrack, where we were shut
up for all the night. It was always painful for me to leave the
court-yard for the barrack. Think of a long, low, stifling room,
scarcely lighted by tallow candles, and full of heavy and disgusting
odours. I cannot now understand how I lived there for ten entire years.
My camp bedstead was made of three boards. This was the only place in
the room that belonged to me. In one single room we herded together,
more than thirty men. It was, above all, no wonder that we were shut up
early. Four hours at least passed before every one was asleep, and,
until then, there was a tumult and uproar of laughter, oaths, rattling
of chains, a poisonous vapour of thick smoke; a confusion of shaved
heads, stigmatised foreheads, and ragged clothes disgustingly filthy.
Yes, man is a pliable animal--he must be so defined--a being who gets
accustomed to everything! That would be, perhaps, the best definition
that could be given of him. There were altogether two hundred and fifty
of us in the same prison. This number was almost invariably the same.
Whenever some of them had undergone their punishment, other criminals
arrived, and a few of them died. Among them there were all sorts of
people. I believe that each region of Russia had furnished its
representatives. There were foreigners there, and even mountaineers from
the Caucasus.
All these people were divided into different classes, according to the
importance of the crime; and consequently the duration of the punishment
for the crime, whatever it might be, was there represented. The
population of the prison was composed for the most part of men condemned
to hard labour of the civil class--“strongly condemned,” as the
prisoners used to say. They were criminals deprived of all civil rights,
men rejected by society, vomited forth by it, and whose faces were
marked by the iron to testify eternally to their disgrace. They were
incarcerated for different periods of time, varying from eight to ten
years. At the expiration of their punishment they were sent to the
Siberian districts in the character of colonists.
As to the criminals of the military section, they were not deprived of
their civil rights--as is generally the case in Russian disciplinary
companies--but were punished for a relatively short period. As soon as
they had undergone their punishment they had to return to the place
whence they had come, and became soldiers in the battalions of the
Siberian Line.[1]
Many of them came back to us afterwards, for serious crimes, this time
not for a small number of years, but for twenty at least. They then
formed part of the section called “for perpetuity.” Nevertheless, the
perpetuals were not deprived of their right. There was another section
sufficiently numerous, composed of the worst malefactors, nearly all
veterans in crime, and which was called the special section. There were
sent convicts from all the Russias. They looked upon one another with
reason as imprisoned for ever, for the term of their confinement had not
been indicated. The law required them to receive double and treble
tasks. They remained in prison until work of the most painful character
had to be undertaken in Siberia.
“You are only here for a fixed time,” they said to the other convicts;
“we, on the contrary, are here for all our life.”
I have heard that this section has since been abolished. At the same
time, civil convicts are kept apart, in order that the military convicts
may be organised by themselves into a homogeneous “disciplinary
company.” The administration, too, has naturally been changed;
consequently what I describe are the customs and practices of another
time, and of things which have since been abolished. Yes, it was a long
time ago; it seems to me that it is all a dream. I remember entering the
convict prison one December evening, as night was falling. The convicts
were returning from work. The roll-call was about to be made. An under
officer with large moustaches opened to me the gate of this strange
house, where I was to remain so many years, to endure so many emotions,
and of which I could not form even an approximate idea, if I had not
gone through them. Thus, for example, could I ever have imagined the
poignant and terrible suffering of never being alone even for one minute
during ten years? Working under escort in the barracks together with two
hundred “companions;” never alone, never!
However, I was obliged to get accustomed to it. Among them there were
murderers by imprudence, and murderers by profession, simple thieves,
masters in the art of finding money in the pockets of the passers-by, or
of wiping off no matter what from the table. It would have been
difficult, however, to say why and how certain prisoners found
themselves among the convicts. Each of them had his history, confused
and heavy, painful as the morning after a debauch.
The convicts, as a rule, spoke very little of their past life, which
they did not like to think of. They endeavoured, even, to dismiss it
from their memory.
Amongst my companions of the chain I have known murderers who were so
gay and so free from care, that one might have made a bet that their
conscience never made them the least reproach. But there were also men
of sombre countenance who remained almost always silent. It was very
rarely any one told his history. This sort of thing was not the fashion.
Let us say at once that it was not received. Sometimes, however, from
time to time, for the sake of change, a prisoner used to tell his life
to another prisoner, who would listen coldly to the narrative. No one,
to tell the truth, could have said anything to astonish his neighbour.
“We are not ignoramuses,” they would sometimes say with singular pride.
I remember one day a ruffian who had got drunk--it was sometimes
possible for the convicts to get drink--relating how he had killed and
cut up a child of five. He had first tempted the child with a plaything,
and then taking it to a loft, had cut it up to pieces. The entire
barrack, which, generally speaking, laughed at his jokes, uttered one
unanimous cry. The ruffian was obliged to be silent. But if the convicts
had interrupted him, it was not by any means because his recital had
caused their indignation, but because it was not allowed to speak of
such things.
I must here observe that the convicts possessed a certain degree of
instruction. Half of them, if not more, knew how to read and write.
Where in Russia, in no matter what population, could two hundred and
fifty men be found able to read and write? Later on I have heard people
say, and conclude on the strength of these abuses, that education
demoralises the people. This is a mistake. Education has nothing
whatever to do with moral deterioration. It must be admitted,
nevertheless, that it develops a resolute spirit among the people. But
this is far from being a defect.
Each section had a different costume. The uniform of one was a cloth
vest, half brown and half gray, and trousers with one leg brown, the
other gray. One day while we were at work, a little girl who sold scones
of white bread came towards the convicts. She looked at them for a time
and then burst into a laugh. “Oh, how ugly they are!” she cried; “they
have not even enough gray cloth or brown cloth to make their clothes.”
Every convict wore a vest made of gray cloth, except the sleeves, which
were brown. Their heads, too, were shaved in different styles. The
crown was bared sometimes longitudinally, sometimes latitudinally, from
the nape of the neck to the forehead, or from one ear to another.
This strange family had a general likeness so pronounced that it could
be recognised at a glance.
Even the most striking personalities, those who dominated involuntarily
the other convicts, could not help taking the general tone of the house.
Of the convicts--with the exception of a few who enjoyed childish
gaiety, and who by that alone drew upon themselves general contempt--all
the convicts were morose, envious, frightfully vain, presumptuous,
susceptible, and excessively ceremonious. To be astonished at nothing
was in their eyes the first and indispensable quality. Accordingly,
their first aim was to bear themselves with dignity. But often the most
composed demeanour gave way with the rapidity of lightning. With the
basest humility some, however, possessed genuine strength; these were
naturally all sincere. But strangely enough, they were for the most part
excessively and morbidly vain. Vanity was always their salient quality.
The majority of the prisoners were depraved and perverted, so that
calumnies and scandal rained amongst them like hail. Our life was a
constant hell, a perpetual damnation; but no one would have dared to
raise a voice against the internal regulations of the prison, or against
established usages. Accordingly, willingly or unwillingly, they had to
be submitted to. Certain indomitable characters yielded with difficulty,
but they yielded all the same. Prisoners who when at liberty had gone
beyond all measure, who, urged by their over-excited vanity, had
committed frightful crimes unconsciously, as if in a delirium, and had
been the terror of entire towns, were put down in a very short time by
the system of our prison. The “new man,” when he began to reconnoitre,
soon found that he could astonish no one, and insensibly he submitted,
took the general tone, and assumed a sort of personal dignity which
almost every convict maintained, just as if the denomination of convict
had been a title of honour. Not the least sign of shame or of
repentance, but a kind of external submission which seemed to have been
reasoned out as the line of conduct to be pursued. “We are lost men,”
they said to themselves. “We were unable to live in liberty; we must now
go to Green Street.”[2]
“You would not obey your father and mother; you will now obey thongs of
leather.” “The man who would not sow must now break stones.”
These things were said, and repeated in the way of morality, as
sentences and proverbs, but without any one taking them seriously. They
were but words in the air. There was not one man among them who admitted
his iniquity. Let a stranger not a convict endeavour to reproach him
with his crime, and the insults directed against him would be endless.
And how refined are convicts in the matter of insults! They insult
delicately, like artists; insult with the most delicate science. They
endeavour not so much to offend by the expression as by the meaning, the
spirit of an envenomed phrase. Their incessant quarrels developed
greatly this special art.
As they only worked under the threat of an immense stick, they were idle
and depraved. Those who were not already corrupt when they arrived at
the convict establishment, became perverted very soon. Brought together
in spite of themselves, they were perfect strangers to one another. “The
devil has worn out three pairs of sandals before he got us together,”
they would say. Intrigues, calumnies, scandal of all kinds, envy, and
hatred reigned above everything else. In this life of sloth, no ordinary
spiteful tongue could make head against these murderers, with insults
constantly in their mouths.
As I said before, there were found among them men of open character,
resolute, intrepid, accustomed to self-command. These were held
involuntarily in esteem. Although they were very jealous of their
reputation, they endeavoured to annoy no one, and never insulted one
another without a motive. Their conduct was on all points full of
dignity. They were rational, and almost always obedient, not by