Long March

Anton Henrik Eklöf was sentenced, flogged and ready to begin the his journey to Transbaikal Summer 1853. The destination was Nerchinsk near the border of Mongolia. The small town was a hub for trade with China and later the administrative centre for Nerchinsk katorga, the Tsarist forced labor camp system. The long march from Viborg to Nerchinsk started Summer 1853 and according to Finnish documents (Turku Province records) Anton Henrik arrived to his exile in 1855. The last lines of the short document tell two crucial pieces of information. Anton Henrik worked in "Kaltnisk gold washing station" from 1855 and this information was recorded in 1860. Thus, he had endured the march to Nerchinsk and secondly, he was probably alive still in 1860.

The way from Viborg to Nerchinsk was about 6800 km (4200 miles). The convicts walked all the way but stopping and overnighting at étapes, stages, scattered along the road at distances of about 20 km or 12 miles. The convicts were chained and often barefooted. The shoes lasted usually only weeks instead of the three months guaranteed by the businessmen who delivered the shoes. The march took about two years.

  Image: Kennan, George, Siberia and the Exile System, New York, 1891, p. 109

The American journalist George Kennan visited Siberia to inspect the exile system late 1880's. He recalls in his two-volume book:

The network of étapes was badly overcrowded with criminal convicts and their volunteerly exiled spouses and children. The guarding Cossacks could only shout stupái, stupái, move on, move on and use their whips to drive crowds of hundreds further. Because of the limited number of guards the marching groups could not be more than 400 individuals. As the courts at the same time pushed much more into the katorga camp system, the stages and forwarding prisons were badly overloaded. The American journalist George Kennan visited e.g. a Tomsk prison that was made for 1400 prisoners but had to house more than 3000:

The situation worsenes as summer advances. The prison kámeras (cells) are terribly overcrowded; it is impossible to keep them clean; the polluted air in them causes a great amount f disease, and the prison hospital is already full to overflowing with the dangerously sick. The floors were covered with mud and filth where scores of men had to lie down and try to sleep at night (ibid, p. 300-314).