In Russian and French Prisons | Page 3

next day after the long expected and often delayed emancipation of Serfs had been promulgated, several copies of the bulky and incoherently-worded Polozhenie (Emancipation Act) were busily studied and briskly commented upon in our small sunny library. The Italian Opera was forgotten for guesses as to the probable results and meaning of the emancipation. Our teachers, too, fell under the influences of the epoch. History, and especially the history of foreign literature, became, in the lectures of our professors, a history of the philosophical, political, and social growth of humanity. The dry principles of J. B. Say's "Political Economy," and the commentaries upon Russian civil and military law, which formerly were considered as a useless burden in the education of future officers, became endowed with new life in our classes, when applied to the present needs of Russia.
Serfdom, had been abolished, and a series of reforms which were to culminate in constitutional guarantees, preoccupied the minds. All had to be reformed at once. All had to be revised in our institutions, which are a strange mixture of legacies from the old Moscow period, with Peter I.'s attempts at creating a military State by orders from St. Petersburg, with the depravity bequeathed by the Courtiers of the Empresses, and Nicholas I.'s military despotism. Reviews and newspapers were fully devoted to these subjects, and we eagerly read them.
It is true that Reaction had already made its appearance on the horizon. On the very eve of the liberation of the Serfs, Alexander II. grew frightened at his own work, and the Reactionary Party gained some ground in the Winter Palace. Nicholas Milutine--the soul of the emancipation of the Serfs in bureaucratic circles--had been suddenly dismissed, a few months before the promulgation of the law, and the work of the Liberal Emancipation Committees - had been given over, for revision in a sense more favourable to the nobility, to new committees chiefly composed of Serf-proprietors of the old school,--the so-called kryepostniki. The Press began to be muzzled; free discussion of the Emancipation Act was prohibited; the paper of Aksakoff--he was Radical then and advocated the summons of a Zemskoye Sobranie, and was not opposed to the recall of Russian troops from Poland--was suppressed number after number. The small outbreak of peasants at Kazan, and the great conflagration at St. Petersburg in May, 1862 (it was attributed to Poles), still reinforced the reaction. The series of political trials which were hereafter to characterize the reign of Alexander II. was opened by sentencing our poet and publicist, Mikhailoff, to hard-labour.
The wave of reaction, however, bad not in 1862 yet reached Siberia. Mikhailoff, on his way to the Nertcbinsk mines, was fêted at a dinner by the Governor of Tobolsk. Herzen's Kolokol ("The Bell") was smuggled and read everywhere in Siberia; and at Irkutsk I found, in September, 1862, a society animated by the great expectations which were already beginning to fade at St. Petersburg. "Reforms" were on all lips, and among those which were most often alluded to, was that of a thorough reorganization of the system of exile.
I was nominated aide-de-camp to the Governor of Transbaikalia, General Kukel, a Lithuanian, strongly inspired with the Liberal ideas of the epoch; and next month we were at Tchita, a big village recently made capital of Transbaikalia.
Transbaikalia is the province where the well known Nertchinsk mines are situated. All hard-labour convicts are sent there from all parts of Russia; and therefore exile and hardlabour were frequently the subject of our conversations. Everybody there knew the abominable conditions under which the long footjourney from the Urals to Transbaikalia used to be made by the exiles. Everybody knew the abominable state of the prisons in Nertchinsk, as well as throughout Russia,. It was no sort of secret. Therefore, the Ministry of the Interior undertook a thorough reform of prisons in Russia and Siberia, together with a thorough revision of the penal law and the conditions of exile.
"Here is a circular from the Ministry," the Governor once said to me. "They ask us to collect all possible information about the state of prisons and to express our opinions as to the reforms to be made. There is no one here to undertake the work: you know how fully we are all occupied. We have asked for information in the usual way, but receive nothing in reply. Will you take up the work?"I objected, of course, that I was too young and knew nothing about it. But the answer was: "Study! In the Journal of the Ministry of Justice you will find, to guide you, elaborate reports on all possible systems of prisons. As to the practical part of the work, let us gather, first, reliable information as to where we stand. Then we all, Colonel P., Mr. A., and Ya., and