George Kennan

“ An American joker does not need hands to point out the merits of his jokes, and this mutilated New England clock, with its empty key-hole eyes and its battered but still humorous visage, seemed to leer at me out of the darkness of that queer, old, second-hand shop as if to say, "You may come to Siberia, you may explore Mongolia, but you can't get away from the American joker." ”

“ As we sat, without coats or waistcoats, under the sizzling leather roof of our tárantás, fanning ourselves with our hats, panting for breath, fighting huge green-eyed horseflies, and looking out over an illimitable waste of dead grass which wavered and trembled in the fierce glare of the tropical sunshine, we found it almost impossible to believe that we were in Siberia.
Many of the Cossack villages along this part of our route were situated down under the high, steep bank of the Írtish at the very water's edge, where the soil was moist enough to support a luxuriant vegetation. ”

“ A few hours later the steamer was at sea, and the escaping political exile, as he stood on the upper deck and watched the slow fading of the Siberian coast in the west, drew a long deep breath of relief, and turned his face, with reviving hope, towards the land where a personal opinion concerning human affairs is not regarded as "prejudicial to public tranquillity," and where a man who tries to make the world better and happier is not punished for it with seven years of solitary confinement, eleven years of exile, and the loss of more than half his family. ”

“ Nothing of interest happened to us until late in the evening, when, just as we were turning up from the river into a small peasant village, the name of which I have now forgotten, both we and our horses were startled by the sudden appearance of a wild-looking man in a long, tattered sheepskin coat, who, from the shelter of a projecting cliff, sprang into the road ahead of us, shouting a hoarse but unintelligible warning, and brandishing in the air an armful of blazing birch-bark and straw. ”

“ For many weeks her hope, courage, and love sustained her, and enabled her to endure without complaint the jolting, the suffocating dust, the scorching heat, and the cold autumnal rains on the road, the bad food, the plank sleeping-benches, the vermin, and the pestilential air of the étapes; but human endurance has its limits. Three or four months of this unrelieved misery, with constant anxiety about her husband and the baby that, for her husband's sake, she had abandoned in Russia, broke down her health and her spirit. ”

“ The day was warm and sunshiny, but clouds were drifting occasionally across the snow-clad peaks south of the village, diversifying their sides with moving areas of purple shadow and increasing the impression of great height that they made upon one. The road, which was dry, hard, and in good condition, crossed the little valley just above the village and then ran along the slopes of the southern mountains through an open, park-like forest of larch, poplar, and silver birch. Flowers were blossoming everywhere in almost incredible luxuriance and profusion. ”

“ As day after day passed, the stillness of death gradually settled down upon the prison. The starving convicts, too weak and apathetic even to talk to one another, lay in rows, like dead men, upon the plank sleeping-platforms, and the only sounds to be heard in the building were the footsteps of the sentries, and now and then the incoherent mutterings of the insane. On the fifth day of the golodófka Major Khaltúrin, convinced that the hunger-strike was serious, came to the prison and asked the convicts to state definitely upon what terms they would discontinue their protest. ”

“ After we passed the party of convicts our monotonous life of night-and-day travel was not diversified by a single noteworthy incident. Now and then we met a rich merchant or an army officer posting furiously towards Irkútsk, or passed a long caravan of rude one-horse sledges laden with hide-bound chests of tea for the Nízhni Nóvgorod fair, but we saw no more exiles; the country through which we passed was thinly settled and uninteresting, and the wretched little villages where we stopped to change horses, or to refresh ourselves with tea, were literally buried in drifts of snow. ”

“ Imagine my surprise to see a rather handsome officer of middle age, with good features, blue eyes, closely cut hair, and a full brown beard, who advanced to meet me with outstretched hand, and whose face fairly beamed with smiling cordiality as he said: "I am Makófski, the chief of police. I have the pleasure of knowing you by reputation,—I have read your book,—and when an eminent foreign traveler comes to Siberia to study the country, I regard it as only my duty to call upon him and offer my services." ”

“ Nesterófski, as well as we could in Russian, our grateful appreciation of their cordiality and kindness, thanked them for the great pleasure they had given us, bade them good-night and good-by, and drove back to Ekaterínburg. The streets of the city, when we entered it, were still filled with the soft glow of the long northern twilight; but there was not a sign nor a sound of life in them save the slow, measured "ting!—ting!—ting!" of the triangles carried by the night watchmen, and struck, now and then, as a warning to "vagrom" men. ”

“ It has brought Russia to such a pass that, at the present time, the masses of the people are in a state of pauperism and ruin; are subjected to the most humiliating surveillance, even at their own domestic hearths; and are powerless even to regulate their own communal and social affairs. The protection of the law and of the Government is enjoyed only by the extortionist and the exploiter, and the most exasperating robbery goes unpunished. But, on the other hand, what a terrible fate awaits the man who sincerely considers the general good! ”

“ Petersburg can gag its newspapers for months at a time, keep its university closed, choose the teachers and prescribe the courses of study for its schools, prohibit the reading of the best books in its libraries, bind its population hand and foot by a rigid passport system, govern it through corrupt and wretchedly paid chinóvniks, and pour into it every year a flood of common criminals from European Russia, just so long will it remain what it now is—a naturally enterprising and promising colony strangled by oppressive and unnecessary guardianship. ”

“ It is with a feeling of intense pleasure and relief that one leaves such a village and rides out upon the wide, clean, breezy steppe where the air is filled with the fragrance of clover and the singing of birds, and where the eye is constantly delighted with great sweeps of smooth, velvety turf, or vast undulating expanses of high steppe grass sprinkled in the foreground with millions of wild roses, white marguerites, delicate five-angled harebells, and dark-red tiger-lilies. ”

“ White-walled churches with silver domes appear here and there on the hills, surrounded by little villages of unpainted wooden houses, with elaborately carved and decorated gables; deep valleys, shaggy with hazel bushes, break through the wall of bluffs on the right at intervals, and afford glimpses of a rich farming country in the interior; and now and then, in sheltered nooks half up the mountain-side overlooking the river, appear the cream-white walls and gilded domes of secluded monasteries, rising out of masses of dark-green foliage. ”

“ It arises, your Majesty, from the lack in Russia of a real government in the true sense of that word. A government, in the very nature of things, should only give outward form to the aspirations of the people and effect to the people's will. But with us — excuse the expression — the Government has degenerated into a mere camarilla, and deserves the name of a usurping "gang" much more than does the Executive Committee.
Whatever may be the intentions of the Tsar, the actions of the Government have nothing in common with the popular welfare, or popular aspirations. ”

“ The well-built and architecturally effective railway station, with its circumjacent lawn and glowing flower-beds, the polished private carriages and droshkies with coachmen in livery that stand behind it, the well-dressed, prosperous looking gentlemen that alight from the train and enter the waiting vehicles, and the white globes of electric lights hanging here and there over the broad streets, are all significant evidences of enterprise, success, and prosperity. And it is not without reason that Ekaterínburg shows signs of wealth. ”

“ Gentlemen — Senators, you are well acquainted with the fundamental laws of the Russian Empire. You are aware that no one has a right to advocate any change in the existing imperial form of Government, or even to think of such a thing. Merely to present to the Crown a collective petition is forbidden — and yet the country is growing and developing, the conditions of social life are becoming day by day more and more complicated, and the moment approaches when the Russian people will burst through the barriers from which there is no exit. ”

“ No night-watchman ever happened to come near us until we approached Pávlodár, a little town midway between Omsk and Semipalátinsk. About two o'clock that morning, while it was still very dark, we stopped to change horses at the post station of Chernoyárskaya. While a sleepy Kírghis hostler was harnessing fresh horses under the supervision of a large-bodied, sharp-tongued woman with a lantern in her hand and a lighted cigarette in her mouth, we were suddenly startled by the hollow staccato beat of a night-watchman's drum coming out of the darkness behind us and only a few feet away. ”

“ If I am neither a freeman, representing the highest grade of Russian citizenship, nor a criminal, representing the lowest grade, I am debarred from Russian citizenship altogether, or, in other words, I am a foreigner. Indeed I must be a foreigner — unquestionably a foreigner! The Russian State does not recognize me as a free citizen, nor does it put me on the level of a criminal whose rights as a citizen have been taken away. ”

“ I have not a word to say in defense of their crimes. I do not believe in such methods of warfare as assassination, the wrecking of railway trains on which one's enemies are riding, the robbing of Government sub-treasuries, and the blowing up of palaces; but I can fully understand, nevertheless, how an essentially good and noble-natured man may become a terrorist when, as in Russia, he is subjected to absolutely intolerable outrages and indignities and has no peaceful or legal means of redress. ”

“ I personally know police officers in Siberia — and I now particularly remember two, one of them the chief of police in Minusínsk — whom I should hesitate to meet anywhere at night unless I had a revolver. Even in a comparatively well-governed city like Tomsk, the history of the police has been a history stained with acts of violence, outrage, and crime, including the arrest and imprisonment of innocent citizens by the hundred, the taking of bribes from notorious criminals, the subornation of perjury, the use of torture, and the beating nearly to death of pregnant women. ”

“ Deportation by étape in Siberia is attended by miseries and humiliations of which a European or an American reader can form only a faint conception. I had many opportunities, during our journey from Tomsk to Irkútsk, to see convicts on the march in sunshine and in rain; to inspect the wretched étapes in which they were herded like cattle at night; to visit the lazarets where they sometimes lie sick for weeks without skilled medical attention or proper care; and to talk with intelligent officers of the prison department who had been familiar for years with every feature of the exile system. ”

“ Throughout the length and breadth of the Tsar's dominions there is not another group of men who, for genuine, wise patriotism, thorough grasp of the burning questions of the day, cordial sympathy with all that is noblest in the character of their countrymen, and exemplary political discipline, can compare with these liberals. The select band of thinkers and writers who rally round the Russian Gazette of Moscow and the review called Russian Thought, is not only an ornament to a nation still emerging from barbarism, but would do credit to an old constitutional country like our own. ”

“ The well-known but now suppressed Russian newspaper, Gólos, in a review of the "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance," said, with force and justice, that "administrative exile is a double-edged weapon. It removes from a certain place a man who is thought to exert an injurious influence, but by depriving him of his civil rights and putting him into the position of an outlaw, it frequently rouses in him such anti-human feelings as to transform a possible criminal not only into an actual one, but into a wild beast, capable of anything. ”

“ Harvesting was in progress all along the road between Tomsk and Áchinsk, and in many places the whole population, with the exception of the post-station-master and three or four drivers, had gone to the fields. In one village the only inhabitant whom we saw was a flaxen-haired child about five years of age, dressed in a dirty homespun shirt, wearing on a string about its neck a huge cow-bell, and gnawing contentedly at a big raw turnip, as it paddled along the deserted street half-way up to its knees in mud. ”

“ In more than one place in the Trans-Baikál we were startled, as we entered a crowded prison kámera, by some uncared-for lunatic, who sprang suddenly towards us with a wild cry or with a burst of hysterical laughter. The reasons for this state of affairs are given, in part, by the governor-general. There is not an insane asylum in the whole country, and it is easier and cheaper to make the prison comrades of a lunatic take care of him than to keep him in seclusion and provide him with an attendant. ”

“ The left bank, it is true, is generally low and uninteresting; but on the other side the land rises abruptly from the water's edge to a height of 400 or 500 feet, and its boldly projecting promontories, at intervals of two or three miles, break up the majestic river into long, still reaches, like a series of placid lakes opening into one another and reflecting in their tranquil depths the dense foliage of the virgin forest on one side and the bold outlines of the half-mountainous shore on the other. ”

“ In the early spring this disease-nursery is not a nursery at all, it is a prison of the most common kind, and empty at that ; but no sooner does spring wave her perfumed wings — no sooner is the whistle of the steamer heard on the river — than the nursery begins to re- ceive the necessary material — the prison becomes reanimated. Week after week its population increases, and week after week its hospital, built to hold 150 patients, fills up. ”

“ Such, with trifling variations in detail, was the regular routine of arrival and departure in all of the steppe villages where we changed horses between Tiumén and Omsk. The greater number of these villages were dreary, forlorn-looking places, containing neither yards, walks, trees, grass-plots, nor shrubbery, and presenting to the eye nothing but two parallel lines of gray, dilapidated log-houses and tumble-down court-yard walls rising directly out of the long pool of jet-black mud that formed the solitary street. ”