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.