SOME SIBERIAN PRISONS.* MR. HARRY DE WINDT, having 'spent a
few weeks of an autumn vacation in Russia and Siberia, has produced a
• Saeria as It Is. By Harry de Windt. London : Chapman and Hall. volume of five hundred pages, with an introduction in Madame Olga Novikoff's best "0. K." style, for the purpose of white- washing the Great White Czar and his Siberian system. A good many pages might have been saved if Mr. Harry de Windt had contented himself with stating the facts as they appeared to him, without indulging in acrimonious sneers at every one who had been in Siberia before him and did not see things through the same rosy spectacles as himself. One can pardon, however, an ingenious gentleman who wishes to startle the world with a new view, for feeling superior to the poor creatures who are sunk in the darkness of the com- mon and accepted view of things. But it is rather passing the bounds, both of advocacy and book-making, to reproduce in a book in miens°, a newspaper controversy in which the superior person, having first insinuated that one of his predecessors in the same field has—not to put too fine a point on it—deliberately falsified the facts, has afterwards been annihilated and dropped the subject ; and then, pro- fessing to be "very much averse to entering into a paper war" with his adversary, repeats the same insinuation as to another subject-matter. Yet if Mr. Harry de Windt means anything by pp. 34.9 to 361 of his book, which is devoted, not to a general sneer—that occurs on almost every page—but to a specific attack on a specific statement, he means to impute to Mr. Kennan, first that he had described a certain prison at Tomsk which he had never seen, and secondly, when he had to drop that insinuation, that Mr. Kennan had purposely miedescribed the prison which he had seen. This sort of thing rather defeats its purpose, for the critic who finds Mr. Harry de Windt admitting that he founded his insinuation on the mere fact that he asked a single subordinate gaoler in the prison in question, when Mr. Kenn= visited it, and was told "he never visited it at all," becomes rather sceptical as to the value of Mr. Harry de Windt's own judgment, and the weight of his own evidence. This scepticism is not diminished when we find "0. K." stating in her introduction that "capital punishment is repellent to public feeling in Russia," while Mr. Harry de Windt gives an account of the execution of, amongst others, a young girl who was implicated in the conspiracy, as an accomplice before the fact, to murder the late Czar, and incidentally says: "Although the drop is not used in Russia, the executions were rapidly and painlessly carried out, save in the case," &c. Even this contradiction is nothing to some contradictions of Mr. Harry de Windt by Mr. Harry de Windt. He pours scorn on the "English playwrights and novelists" who depict travelling in Siberia as " traversing dark, impenetrable forest "—though, by-the-way, we should doubt whether any one ever depicted a traveller traversing an impenetrable forest—" and dreary wastes of steppe land, with an occasional prison or pack of wolves to break the monotony of the scene." True, he locates the English novelist and play- wright's scenes at Ekaterinburg, which is now, it seems, a railway-station and "a little less civilised than the German watering-place." Yet only a very few pages, and miles, further on, Mr. Harry de Windt himself, driving to catch a steamer, wakes up to find himself "in the middle of a vast plain, broken only by a black belt of pine-forest," while "in a typical Siberian village," which, from the ruinous state of the miserable wooden houses, looks like "a fleet of dismasted ships riding at anchor in a gale of wind," the only spot of colour is "the post-house, with its yellow walls, imperial coat-of-arms, and black-and-white verst posts," "if we except the red roof of the etape prison." In other words, the English novelist's Siberian picture is perfectly correct, even to the prison. Even the wolves are there, and that, too, in the height of summer. Mr. Harry de Windt's carriage breaks down :—" At this moment a weird wailing cry to our left broke the dead stillness,—a strange, unearthly cry, followed the next instant by a chorus of deafening howls, alternating with short, sharp barks and the sound of snarling and fighting vollos ' (wolves), said my companion."
Mr. Harry de Windt penetrated only as far as railways and steamers could carry him, except when he made a cut in a carriage overland to avoid delay from a river drought, and only got as far as Tomsk, the present place of starting for the tramp of thousands of miles, taking over two years, across Siberia to the mines; and it is this awful march, formerly twice as long as it is now, and the mines at the end, which constitute the real Siberian horror. And of this Mr. Harry de Windt can only speak from that hearsay which he
derides in others. The net result of the book, so far as the writer himself is concerned, seems to be that the " sensational " tales of travellers and the " romances " of foreign critics have so far penetrated the Russia official mind, that reforms have been, and. are being, introduced into Russian prisons to bring them into some conformity with the demands of civilised humanity. At Tiumen, far short of Tomsk, even Mr. Harry de Windt is obliged to admit that the prison is a disgrace. But even in the prisons of which he speaks in the nnst rose-coloured terms, the arrangements are still such as have been condemned in civilised countries. The wretched prisoners are huddled together in gangs :—
" A shrill-voiced, wicked-looking Armenian was re-
lating questionable anecdotes in a loud tone of voice to a group of loud-voiced, brazen-faced women, whose behaviour and gestures proclaimed them as loose and abandoned as herself, and who by their laughter appeared (or wished to appear) as though they looked upon Siberian exile rather as a joke than otherwise. Standing by was a young girl about seventeen years old, with a baby at her breast, who was looking longingly at the noisy harri- dans as if even their society would have been better than none."
Mr. Harry de Windt appears to think it is nice for the
prisoners thus to have cheerful society. Yet the very first prison reform insisted on by Howard, and all reformers since, has been the isolation of prisoners, separating the sheep from the goats, and preventing as far as possible the corruption of the mere c)mmitter of a crime by the thoroughly criminal and vicious ;
to say nothing of the prevention of the hideous tyranny of criminal over criminal. This last even our couleur-de-rose
writer recognises, though alleging that it is a thing of the past, as if, while the gang system remains, its inevitable results can fail to follow.
It appears, however, to be the case that the political prisoners are separated from the criminals, and, at all events so far as Tomsk, better treated. But the tramp to Siberia must be even worse for them than for the common peasant-criminal. And it never seems to occur to Mr. Harry de Windt that there is any hardship in a journalist being sent to Siberia for five years for a political article, or a " seditious " pamphlet, or for life for participating in a political movement. His verdict appears to be, " Serve him right." Indeed, he actually says of an American fellow-traveller who had dared to air some demo- cratic opinions in a railway-carriage : "The reflection that my talkative friend's conduct will, if it is persisted in, probably (and justly) land him in the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, is but poor consolation." One wonders what Mr. Harry de
Windt's feelings would be if he found himself in gaol for airing monarchical views in New York ; or how he would like to live in a country where "there is (for those who do not meddle with politics) so much liberty," but where you cannot buy an English
newspaper, and where, when you light a cigarette in a public garden, not knowing it is prohibited, it is dashed out of your mouth by a policeman.
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