General Kukúshka

George Kennan gives a lot of information in his two-volume travel book. Towards the end of 1840's the traditional lead and silver mines in Nerchinsk area exhausted. Also, due to the lack of proper metal tools, the apathy of the convicts and the indifference of the camp management the productivity was extremely low. Because of the long transportation to the marketplace lead was virtually worthless. In Kutomárski zavód Kennan noticed nearly 2000 tons of lead lying around. It had been dug out of the mines during years but the ore was not valuable enough to be transported anywhere. This all led to even deeper misery in the prison camps. The convicts had not anymore any reason to be let out  from the prison cells but were kept day and night idle, lying closely packed, side-to-side on rotten wooden platforms. The only activity was to smash bedbugs on the walls. This made the dungeon walls to look rusty red. Kennan's guide to Nerchinsk mines, the Finnish-born lieutnant-colonel Saltstein had the reason to grin cynically: look, they are trying to paint their walls red!

Luckily, between 1832 and 1850´s, gold was found in nearby Kará delta, Ust-Karsk in Russian. A shallow river Kara flows into Shilka river which runs later into Amur. Kará carries gold nuggets somewhere from the mountains that can be washed from the gravel of the river base. A set of washing stations were set up and log prisons erected. The fields belonged to the crown, the Tsar and were very rich yeilding a ton of gold annually. This is why more and more convicts were sent to Kara and, accordingly, the conditions in the Kara prison grew catastrophical.



                                                                                                                                       Ust-Karsk in 52.42'47.02'' 118.49'47.93''

Kennan visited one of the cameras, i.e. cells:

We ascended two or three steps on filthy steps and entered a dark corridor whose broken and decaying floor felt slippery. The atmosphere was very damp saturated with the strong and peculiar odor characteristic of Siberian prisons. A person who has once inhaled it can never forget it, and yet it is so unlikely any other bad smell in the world that I hardly know with what to compare it. I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine  that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp decaying wood and more that a suggestion of human excrement - and still you will have no adequate idea f it. To unaccustomed senses it seems so saturated with foulness and disease as to be almost insupportable.

Even Major Pótulof, the commandant of the prison who escorted Kennan to the cells exclaimed in disgust: atvratítelni tiurmá! What a repulsive prison!

No wonder that almost everyone who only had the chance to escape, disappeared into deep forests towards Lake Baikal. The following  Russian folk song from the 1800´s tells about an escaped convict longing to the West:

The signal of this annual mass movement was the cuckoo, kukúshka in Russian. The cry of cuckoo in the valley announced the beginning of the warm season. Hundreds of convicts left the Kara barracks every year to join the army of General Kukúshka. At that time the number of the runaway exiles was estimated to exceed 30 000. Some of them did return to the camps for winter only to repeat the try the following Spring. Below three captured fugitives.