The Last Wildernis

The vastness of Siberia is difficult to understand. At least if you live in Europe where the only "greenfield" suburb (a new neighborhood built up on a virgin forested area) so far in the 21st Century was put up in Finland, i.e. the Vuores small town close to Tampere.

In 1978 a team of geologists found a family of six in the Siberian taiga. These forests are the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. They stretch from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

Being firm believers, the Lykov family had fled the Stalin purge of th 1930's and lived in gloomy forests around river Abakan since then. The life of the family was not far from the cavemens'. The rotten shoes were finally replaced by bark and the male members of the family developed the skill to hunt barefeet even in the Siberian winter. As the metal kettles finally were worn out and became obsolete, the settlers ate potatoes with wild rye. Famine was a constant guest in the rotten hut made of pieces of wood.

All family members understood spoken language, however, many of the modern concepts were alien. They had never head about the WW II, man on the moon sounded completely weird and  the biggest novelty seemed to be the polyethylen film to wrap the food rests: it looked like glass but was flexible!

The two daughters had developed a private language of their own: it sounded like a blurred cooing.

In the picture Agafia and Natalia with their father. The father died 27 years after his wife in pneumonia, obviuously got from the visitors. The rest of the family died on kidney failure due to the poor diet in the Siberian forests. Agafia, now in her 80's  - in the middle - still live in the taiga.

The destiny of the Lykov family gives an idea of the life the runaways had to endure in the vast deserts of Siberia. During the last quarter of the 19th century it was believed almost 50.000 past prisoners were at large on the tundra.

In the National Archive

The Finnish National Archive is in Helsinki, in Eläintarhankatu near the amusement park Linnanmäki, Castle Rock. Obviously, it serves mainly family researchers because there was plenty of research space, micro film devices for visitors to use and staff assistance.

Micro films are a practical way to browse large amounts of statistics, registers or, say,  newspaper articles. However, they are sometimes quite unclear and zooming makes them sometimes even more difficult to read. This is why - and because there was hands available, I asked to see the original court records. The clerk told these to be in the undergrond cellar but picking them up would take not more than a few minutes.

In no time the old books were brought onto my desk and I could start to look for the right documents. The Juntunen records included the dates of the court, thus, the task was not too difficult. In half an hour I had the three original handwritten documents of 1852 there and I could make use of my camera. Two of the documents confirmed that the robbery victim was not killed, because the text begun with: " the verdict was given in attendance of ...(the defendants) and Mr. Benjamin von Pfaler..."

In sum, the documents give a picture of a hasty hearing with no lawyers, only judges. On the other side were three unfortunate men of common folks, unfortunately already fined for drunkness sometimes in the past. On the other side is a nobleman, university clerk, Benjamin von Pfaler who was cheated to an empty property in Erikinkatu Street in downtown Helsinki at 8:00 p.m. on April 8, 1852. He was beaten and robbed his fur coat and watch. Some minor sum of money was also taken. The injuries of the incidence were not too severe, only an few scratces and a blue eye. The damages were inspected by a collegue at Helsinki University, Mr. Joachim Pipping. The later famous professor of gynecology wrote a medical certificate to Mr. von Pfaler for the trial.

Although there were no permanent damages and all robbed property was returned, the three unfortunate guys were condemned to death. For a warning for the rest, closed the judges the case. The final sentence is shown below.

 The judges were legal counsellors (Ferdinand) Bacmansson, Decker, Hedström ja Strömberg.

Family Researcher plays Sherlock Holmes

This blog is based on my family research made in 2008-2010. I put the results on Web and - in spite of being in Finnish language - the site has got more than 52 000 visitors since!

In Finland the applied research method is almost unknown in genealogy. However, it has been hundreds of years in use in courtrooms. The idea is to collect enough proof and evidence to draw a plausible picture of the circumstancies during the period investigated. If new proof emerges later, the narrative will be changed accordingly. Thus, if the deceased left, say, four smoking pipes and a tobacco-pouch we may suppose the man was a smoker. But if we later find out he was a peddler the goods may as well his merchandise. And so on.

One who has widely applied this method in family research is Alice Munro (below), the Canadian writer, who has already for some time been a Nobel Prize candidate.

Dead man walks

The old student register of Helsinki University includes information about Josef Benjamin von Pfaler who was mugged and robbed by Anton, Gabriel and Gustaf on Eriksgatan street Spring 1852. All were punished by death enforced by loss of the right hand. The sentence sounds exeptional harsh because Mr. Pfaler seemed to survive the robbery. According to the Helsinki University register he left his office at the university in 1854 and died March 12, 1863, in age of fourty-one.

It is of course possible that the incident had some impact on his health but he still lived more than ten years after the robbery. Thus, the information given by the Transbaikal Archive of Chita is not correct. The answer may be found in the explanation part of the trial documents of Summer 1852. They are kept in the Finnish National Archive, Helsinki. The next step will be to browse the papers there. 

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)

Verhne Sujetuk

The Finnish Lutheran Curch has been active in Siberia since 1840's. At the moment rev. Juha Saari is the priest in the area, working from Irkutsk. He has provided us with information about the history of Transbaikalia, priests who have been active there and where the archives or correspondence may be stored.

The first clergyman sent from Finland in 1849 was the German Konstantin Butzke. He visited twice a year e.g. Nerchinsk. If his letters and reposrts are somewhere in the church archive, they are in German. In February 1864 the Lutheran Church sent another priest to Siberia. He was rev. Herman Wilhelm Roschier and would operate from a village actually outside of the Nercinsk forced labor fields, in Verhne Sujetuk, on the Western side of lake Baikal. At the time of his arrival, October 1864 there were 300 dwellers in half-collapsed shanties. Forty of them were women. Theft, fighting, drunkenness and vice were common. Only three women could be considered not to be a drunkard. The village exists still today with a population of 145 of Estonian origin.

Roschier made long inspection tours all over the area that is larger than Europe. In 1871 he visited Kara gold washing fields und met there a larger group of Finnish convicts than anywhere else, forty-one in total.
From the 1850's released convicts were concentrated mainly to Verhne Sujetuk, although they were not always welcomed. The dwellers of the village stated:

We don't consider ourselves to have any duty to take care and feed creeps from Finland. They have wandered the whole life around in Siberia and as they finally are no-goods for anything, they are sent to our burden here.

This was probably the reason for many of the released convicts chose a life as a vagobond and earning the living as a beggar because since 1849 a good-behaving convict could be released to probation. As a rule one could get rid of the irons and a lighter job after a service of four to eight years. Still three more years and he could move out from the camp and settle down, build a house or marry. This is why it is well possible that if Anton Henrik was lucky enough to avoid epidemic diseases and accidents, he could have begun a career as a roaming worker or beggar - or settle in Verhne Sujetuk around 1863 to 1865.

A student at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Kseniya Tarasova took the challenge to find tracks of Anton Henrik in Siberia, if possible. She had the idea to contact the National Archive in Chita because the city seemed to be the follower to Nerchinsk as the centre of the region. To our positive surprise they soon replied us telling there may be some information we're looking for.

Source: Rev. Juha Saari and Juntunen, Alpo, Suomalaisten karkottaminen Siperiaan autonomian aikana ja karkotetut Siperiassa, Siirtolaisinstituutti, Turku, 1983

An Estonian short film, Puhkus Siberis (Siberian vacation), 2011 shows how Verhne Sujetuk looks like today. The movie is directed by Liivo Niglas and it's about Estonian relatives coming to see the grandfather living in the village.

 

Hell on Earth

After walking almost 7000 km in chains through about 300 etápes and transition prisons, Anton Henrik Eklöf arrived to Nerchinsk zavod in 1855 under unlucky stars. The mining activity had been plagued by inefficiency, theft, corruption, hopeless sanitary conditions, and exhaustion of minerals. Scurvy and typhus killed prisoners by hundreds. In 1850 alone one thousand died in typhoid fever. Tuberculosis was common, as well as syphilis, typhoid fever or diphtheria. This all led to mass escapes and to constant complaints of local peasants who had to fear the runaway criminals, murderers and burglars. Catherine II the Great (1729-1796) had tried to improve the conditions e.g. by banning the ripping of nostrils of the convicts and letting them to be branded, instead. Branding, too, was forbidden some twenty years later by Alexander I. Catherine II also forbid grand knout when punishing women. This was a positive improvement, indeed, because only 25 lashes usually killed a man. An article in New York Times in April 14, 1872 highlights the effect of grand knout.

                                              

The authorities tried to stem escapes in many ways. They gave few carrots but more stick. A few days off work annually were introduced and more cossacks were called to duty. Finally, a mining engineer, Ivan Razgildejev was appointed as commandant of Nerchinsk in 1849. He held the office thirteen years and succeeded to transform the camps into a Hell on Earth. First, he returned branding. The cheeks and the forehead got the letters C, O and K, ssyl-o-katorzhnye, convict to katorga. He also took the practice of flogging with birch rods. 300 lashes were frequently applied as 200 were known to cause death. Even Razgildejev's superiors shook heads and stated him to be "very severe". Below branding irons.

Severity helped only little. Towards the end of the century some 50 000 convicts were estimated to roam around the tundra.

Source: Eva-Maria Stolberg (Ed), The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia's Wild East, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2005, pp. 73-85.