Octave Mirbeau’s searing 1895 essay on Georges Kennan’s exposé of Tsarist Russia’s brutal exile system. A masterpiece of political commentary revealing the horrors of Siberian prisons and the arbitrary cruelty of ‘administrative relocation’ under the Russian Empire.
That excellent and fascinating Franco-Belgian journal, La Société nouvelle, has begun serialising in its latest issue a book by Georges Kennan: Siberia. And here is the story behind it.
About ten years ago, The Century Magazine dispatched Mr Georges Kennan to Russia and Siberia to study the prison system, the lives of political detainees and exiles—those whom a governmental euphemism charmingly calls “administratively relocated persons”. The journey, identical to that of the prison convoys, was long and arduous. It would have defeated a man of lesser courage and ingenuity. But Kennan returned with devastatingly instructive documents, which appeared in the celebrated magazine, where their publication was met with more than mere shock—with sheer horror.
Despite the extraordinary gravity of the facts he exposed to the world’s indignation, not a single one of Kennan’s assertions was denied or even challenged. All those atrocities, all that barbarous violence against human beings committed in the bleak, inaccessible wastelands of the Northern Empire—one might perhaps have suspected the account, so far did they exceed the bounds of repressive cruelty and authoritarian madness, had anyone other than Kennan, less known for his scrupulous integrity and unimpeachable veracity, taken on the staggering task of revealing them. To those who, despite everything, might be tempted to doubt them or cry exaggeration, it’s worth noting that Kennan could not have brought the slightest revolutionary passion to his inquiry and accounts, his ideas not exceeding the bounds of the most moderate liberalism. It’s precisely this evident impartiality that gives the American writer’s work its moral weight and force of protest.
Kennan’s observations in those dark lands of grief and suffering—at whose borders one might nail Dante’s inscription to black posts—date from about ten years ago. Perhaps, you will object, since then political customs in Russia have grown gentler and finally show notable progress over those of Dahomey. Not a bit of it. In the last days of his life, the late Emperor made his despotism even more restrictive and savage, his autocracy more absolute. Living in perpetual terror of nihilist attacks, he believed he could shield himself and discourage death by armoring his sacred person in a thick mattress, an impenetrable mattress of corpses. Death came all the same, led by that implacable terrorist: disease, against which bloody laws, proscriptions, mines and gallows can do nothing. As for the young man who succeeds him, not only does he appear disinclined to modify his father’s ways in the slightest, he seems, on the contrary, to affirm his will to continue them and, if need be, to add to them imperially. It is therefore a duty of humanity and sympathy towards an unfortunate country “where for so long all that is noble, intelligent and generous has been in its death throes” to give Kennan’s book the widest, most resounding publicity.
⁂
“Administrative relocation” works like this: They arrest someone without any of the judicial formalities and “guarantees” that, in civilised countries, precede and follow such harsh measures; they arrest him, most often, upon receipt of an anonymous denunciation, and send him to Siberia for five or ten years, depending on the case. Most of the time, he doesn’t know why he is being arrested, and has no means of finding out, nor any possibility of defending himself against what very often rests only on false accusation or simple mistaken identity. From the instant the gendarme lays a hand on his shoulder, that gesture irrevocably separates him from the world. All communication, even moral, with his family, friends, supporters, those who might constitute his defence, is pitilessly cut off. The Minister of the Interior, charged with carrying out these “administrative measures”, generally has no idea of their motive either, and doesn’t care. He hasn’t time to know, being occupied with multiple similar tasks, and prefers to rely on the vagueness of denunciation and the mindless zeal of some subordinate agent.
In the language of Russian justice, “administrative relocation” isn’t considered a punishment. True, they don’t go so far as to grace it with the title of national reward. No. They soberly call it an “administrative measure”, or sometimes a “measure of social preservation”. We shall see later, from the terrifying tortures of a punishment that isn’t a punishment, what those of a punishment that truly is a punishment might be like.
Convoys of detainees and exiles depart four or five times a year. They are sent by rail or boat as far as Tomsk. From there, they fan out towards their assigned residences, ordinary detainees on foot, political exiles in telegas, along barely marked or rutted roads, under scorching sun and deadly cold by turns, and so slowly they can advance no more than ninety-five kilometres a week. Some journeys last sixteen months, for some residences lie ten thousand kilometres from the capital. One struggles to imagine the agonies of this long calvary. It’s not rare for detainees to die en route from heat, cold, privation, exhaustion, contagious diseases caught in the way-station prisons—unspeakable hovels where the germs of every Asiatic infection breed and multiply. Some arrive mad who departed sound of mind. Others, at the end of their courage, kill themselves.
Kennan witnessed the arrival of a convoy of prisoners at a residence. An officer called the roll. Some names were missing.
“Dead!” said their unfortunate companions.
At the call of Victor Sidorski’s name, no one answered.
“Why don’t you answer?” said the officer, addressing one of the prisoners. “Aren’t you Victor Sidorski?”
“No!” said the wretch, “I’m not Victor Sidorski… My name is Vladimir Sidorski… There’s been a mistake… It’s not me… I’ve done nothing…”
“No matter!” said the officer calmly.
And on the sheet, he immediately substituted Vladimir for Victor.
Another was lamenting: a delicate, beardless young man.
“Why was I taken?… No one would tell me.”
His neighbour asked him:
“Don’t you have a spotted cow?”
“My father has many cows,” replied the young man. “Perhaps there are spotted ones among them.”
“That’s enough!” concluded the neighbour. “And get it into your head that there are over a thousand criminals among us whose crime is that their father or someone of theirs owns spotted cows… or unspotted ones, for one never knows.”
Most of the exiles were, according to Kennan, men of superior education and high intellectual culture. He was struck that their political opinions contained nothing subversive: they were animated by a liberalism that was hardly dangerous; some even sincerely protested against violent theories. In countries other than that one, they would certainly have filled important state functions with honour.
Kennan tells us their names, origins, work, hopes, the cast of their minds; he makes us know and love them.
After a few months in that harsh and barren nature, on that desolate and dead soil, deprived of everything that might make exile less bitter, they soon begin to waste away. Some prefer to tear themselves at once from the slow, painful agony of this existence that is already death; others fade from consumption and languor. When their term of liberation arrives, they have long been sleeping in the village’s little cemetery, two thousand leagues from all they loved.
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I wish I could reproduce all these tragic accounts that make Kennan’s book bleed and weep. I will limit myself to extracting just one from this sinister sequence. I don’t choose it specially, I take it at random, for all have this character of unspeakable, horrifying terror.
“In 1879, a very capable young doctor, Dr Belloj, lived in Iwangoroff, in the province of Chernigov. Though liberal, he didn’t belong to the party of agitators and revolutionaries, and wasn’t involved in politics at all. One day, two ladies visited him with letters of recommendation. From St Petersburg, where they were studying medicine, they had been sent to central Russia on political suspicion. Wanting to continue their studies, they asked the young doctor to teach them his art and allow them access to his library, which he granted, having found them intelligent and charming.
“The ladies’ frequent visits to the doctor’s house aroused police suspicions, who investigated and discovered that one of them lacked a passport. On 10 May 1879, the two ladies and the young doctor were arrested and sent to Siberia ‘by administrative means’.
“Belloj was relegated to the Arctic regions, to the village of Verkhoyansk in Yakutsk province, where survivors of the Jeannette expedition saw him in 1882.
“The young and beautiful wife was expecting a child, making it impossible to accompany her husband into exile. But after the birth, relatives took charge of the baby, and she began a journey of ten thousand kilometres to find her husband. She didn’t possess the money necessary for this costly expedition; she was therefore obliged to petition the Minister of the Interior for permission to accompany the exile transport, which was granted.
“For weeks, months, hope and love gave her superhuman courage to endure without complaint the jolting of the telegas, the dust, heat and rain, the bad food, the hard camp beds, the poisoned air of the way-stations, but finally her strength gave out. Under the weight of grief and privation, constantly preoccupied with her husband and the child she’d left to find him, her body and mind broke. But she still stood, though showing signs of mental disorder. Near Irkutsk, she recovered, spoke constantly of her dear husband, whom she hoped soon to see again. For, deceived, she believed he was in the village of Verkholensk, not far from Irkutsk, while he was at Verkhoyansk, 4,500 kilometres further still. It was the final blow. When she learned that a long, interminable road through steppes and forests still stretched before her, and that she had to travel quite alone for several months in sledges drawn by dogs and reindeer, madness erupted, irreparable, and some weeks later she died in Irkutsk hospital, without seeing again the husband for whom, out of love, she had suffered so much!”
And I cannot help thinking of that other journey, interrupted by Borski’s bomb, where Emperor Alexander, followed by seven hundred cooks, refrigerated wagons and merry ovens, loved to dine in the evening on the steppes where nothing grows, by the riversides, eating from golden vessels under tents embroidered with the imperial eagle, peaches and grapes from France brought by special couriers.
1895.
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Léon Hennique Novel 