Answers and a New Mystery

The documents Kseniya had asked for from the Transbaikal District National Archive, arrived. The information we already possessed proved to be accurate: the Nerchinsk records are today stored in Chita, the administrative center of the Transbaikalsky krai. There were two records of Anton Henrik Eklöf. One from year 1862 and another from the next year. At that time, eleven years had passed  since the original sentence of Anton Henrik and he had spent in Siberia already eight years. Both short records are quite identical and contain a lot of interesting, even crucial information.

According to the documents Anton Henrik was 38 years old in 1862. This is correct because he was born in 1824. He was two arshin and four and half vershok tall, that is 163 cm that is not so much today but quite normal at that time. For instance, the average height of the Swedish soldiers that year was exactly the same. Our man was white, with grey eyes, light brown hair and with quite ordinary nose mouth and chin. He was sentenced to receive 40 pairs of lashes of a rod and to be exiled to Siberia for robbing of  "von Faler". Arrived to Kara.  Behavior has been good.

The man of the Chita archives corresponds well with the impression we have had in form of an old image of a Siberian hard labor convict. In the first part of the Chita document the destination of the exile is Kara and in the other Kara industrial site (Karijskih promslah). This is logical, too, because according to the Juntunen records of the Finns sentenced to Siberia Anton Henrik set off form Viborg in 1853 to the destination on Kaltnisk gold washing fields. "Kaltnisk" is a very un-Russian name and we have wondered it all the time. Because gold was washed only at Kara delta at that time, Karijskih may have been translittered into Kaltnisk in the later correspondence. 

The 4500 mile march from Viborg to Nerchinsk may sound inhuman and unbearable to modern people. However, Anton Chekhov who familiarized himself with the Siberian and Sakhalin exile communities in 1890 writes:

The slow wandering through Siberia, the changing of the forwarding prisons and hundreds of the etapés, new comarades, guarding cossacks as well as the adventures during the long march has its own romanticism and-  after all - is more like freedom than prison or construction works in tundra. Anyway, you skip to hear the clinching of the irons, chatting of the prisoners, seeing the repulsive walls and human beings... (Chekhov 1893-1895, p. 325).

If we still try find anything comforting in the tough destiny of Anton Henrik, this may be the impressive landscape of the Kara mountains and the familiar, almost Finnish landscape of the Kara valleys.

 

So far almost all information received from Chita Central Archive matches with the data we have collected during the years. Only the first part of the record makes a problem. It explains Anton Henrik's sentence with a notion of  grabez i smertoubijstvo. This means robbery leading to death. This is something else we have believed so far. We have all the time understood that Anton, his brother Gabriel and the third creep Gustaf Eklund were drunk and robbed Mr. Joseph Benjamin von Pfaler his silver watch and fur coat in an early evening late Winter 1852. But the victim survived. This is why the true mystery has been the severity of the sentence. According to Alpo Juntunen records only about one per cent of the convicts to be exiled to Siberia had committed some other crime than killing or murder. And these were child murder, church robbery and counterfeiting (Juntunen Alpo, Suomalaisten karkottaminen...p. 51)