THE CONVICT MINES OF SIBERIA.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1938, 3 September 1889, Page 4

THE CONVICT MINES OF SIBERIA.

Now and again a telegram froin St. Petersburg announces that certain Nihilists have been condemned to death, but the Czar has been pleased to commute their sentence to penal servitude in the mines of Siberia. The misery the Imperial clemency condemns the unhappy wretches to is told in the Century Magazine by Mr George Kennah. The mines are those at Kara, and they are the private property of the Czar, for whose benefit they are worked. No more abominable places of human habitation could be imagined than the cells in which the convicts are lodged. Mr Kennan, who was accompanied en his visit by the governor, thus describes them •• We entered, through a heavy plank door, a long, low, and very dark corridor, the broken and decaying floor of which felt wet and slippery to the feet, and where the atmosphere, although warm, was very damp, and saturated with the strong peculiar odor that is characteristic in Siberian prisons. A person who has once inhaled that odor can never forget it; and yet it is so unlike any other bad smell in the world that I hardly know with what to compare it. To unaccustomed senses it seems so saturated with foulness and disease as to be almost insupportable. We stepped across the threshold into a room about ‘gift long, 22ft wide, and Bft high, which contained 29 convicts. The air here was so much worse than the air in the corridor that it made me faint and sick. The room was lighted by two nearly square heavily grated windows with double sashes, that could liot be raised or opened, and there was not the least apparent provision anywhere for ventilation. The floor was made of heavy planks, and, although it had recently been swept, it was encrusted with*dry, hard-trodden filth. Out from the walls on three sides of the room projected a low sloping wooden platform about 6 ft wide, upon which the convicts slept, side by side, in closely packed rows, with their heads to the walls and their feet extended towards the middle of the cell. They had neither pillows nor blankets, and were compelled to lie down upon these sleeping benches without removing their clothing, and without other covering than their coarse grey over- . coats,” The women are rather better off than the men as regards accommodation, hut their cells were in the same horribly insanitary condition. “The floor was uneven and decayed, and in places the rotten planks had either .settled or given away entirely, leaving cdark holes into a vacant space between the floor and the swampy ground. Into these holes the women were evidently in the habit of throwing slops and garbage. I went and stood for a moment.oyer one of them, but I could see nothing in the darkness beneath, and the damp air, laden with the effluvium of* decaying organic matter that was arising from it, seemed to me bo suggestive of typhoid fever and dinhtheria that I did not venture to take a second breath in that vicinity. The kamera’s in the women's prison had no furniture of any kind except the plank sleeping-platforms, which, of course, were entirely destitute of bedding. I did not see in either room U Single pillow or blanket. In these two cejls were imprisoned 48 girls and woman, six or seven of whom were carrying in their arms palhd-sickiy-looking babies.” The escape of convicts is often winked at by the prison officials, who continue to draw for weeks or months the clothing and the rations to which the runaways would have been entitled. The flight commences when the worm weather sets io, and for two or three- months an almost continuous

stream of escaping convicts run from the Earapena settlement in the direction of Lake Baikol. “ The signal for this annual movement is given by the cuckoo, whose notes, when first heard in the valley of the Eara, announce the beginning of the warm season. The cry of the bird is taken as an evidence that an escaped convict can once more liye in the forests; and to run away, in convict slang, is to ‘ go to General Eukushka for orders.* (Kookooshka is the Russia name for cuckoo.) More than 800 . men leave the Eara free command every year to join the army of ‘ General Eukushka ; ’ and in Siberia, as a whole, the number of runaway exiles and convicts who take the field in response to the summons of this popular officer exceeds 30,000. Most of the Eara convicts who ‘ go to General Eukushka for orders * in the early summer come back to the mines under new names in leg-fetters the next winter; but they have had their outing, and have breathed for three months the fresh free air of the woods, the mountains, and the steppes.” Mr Eennan adds that he made a careful examination of 10 prisons in the province of the Trans-Baidal, and that in none of them did he find a bed, a pillow, or a blanket. “ Everywhere the prisoners lay down at night in their grey overcoats on bare planks, and almost everywhere they were tortured by vermin, and were compelled to breathe the same air over and over again until it seemed to me that there could not be oxygen enough left in it to support combustion in the flame of a farthing rushlight. Civilised human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs; but the Russian Government forces men to work for 10 or 12 hours a day in its East Siberian mines; compels them after this exhausting toil to lie down on a bare plank; and then, to console them in their misery, tacks up on the grimy wall over their heads the command and promise of Christ, ‘ Come unto Me, all ye that labor and aro heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ ”

It is stated that the Czar receives from all his gold mines in Eastern Siberia about 36001 b of pure gold every year.