File:Siberia and the exile system (1891) (14763635954).jpg

Identifier: siberiaexilesyst02kennuoft (find matches)
Title: Siberia and the exile system
Year: 1891 (1890s)
Authors: Kennan, George, 1845-1924
Subjects: Siberia (Russia) -- Description and travel
Publisher: new York : Century
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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m by theexplosives used are doubtless injurious; but there are nodeadly fumes or exhalations from poisonous ores like cin-nabar to affect the health of the laborers, and experienceseems to show that the death-rate is no higher among theconvicts who go regularly every day into the mines thanamong those who lie idle day after day in the vitiated airof the prison Mm eras. If I were permitted to make choicebetween complete idleness in such a prison as that of Algachior Ust Kara and regular daily labor in the mines, I should,without hesitation, choose the latter. So far as I couldascertain by careful inquiry among the convicts themselves,no one has ever been compelled to live and sleep in thesemines day and night, and I believe that all the stories tothat effect published from time to time are wholly imagi-nary and fictitious. The working force may occasionallyhave been divided into day and night gangs, or shifts, sentinto the mines alternately, but the same men have neverII 20 306 SIBERIA
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TUE VILLAGE WELL AT ALGACHI. been required to remain there continuously for twenty-fourhours. At the present time there is no night work and allof the eonvicts return to their prisons before dark, or, in the THE SILVER MINES OF NERCHINSK 307 short days of mid-winter, very soon after dark. I do notwish to be understood as saying that the life of Russianconvicts at the Nerchinsk silver mines is an easy one, orthat they do not suffer. I can hardly imagine a more ter-rible and hopeless existence than that of a man who worksall day in one of the damp, muddy galleries of the Pokrof-ski mine, and goes back at night to a close, foul, vermin-infested prison like that of Algachi. It is worse than the lifeof any pariah dog, but at the same time it is not the sensa-tionally terrible life of the fictitious convict described byMr. Grenville Murray—the convict who lives night and dayunderground, sleeps in a rocky niche, toils in hopelessmisery under the lash of a pitiless overseer, and is slowlypo

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