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.

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).