No-one quite knows why Chekhov decided to make an extended tour of the penal colonies on Sakhalin Island in 1890 — he was 29 years old, reasonably well established in medical practice and making a name for himself as a short-story writer, and he'd just had a big flop with his first major play, The wood demon. He'd also diagnosed himself as suffering from TB, which would seem a pretty good reason not to make a long and arduous journey to a notoriously cold and damp part of the world. But perhaps there was a feeling of "now or never"?

Whatever the reason, he set off from Moscow on 18 April, 1890 (just over a year before construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway started), travelling by horse-carriage, sleigh and river steamer, to reach Nikolayevsk at the mouth of the Amur on the 5th of July, from where he could embark to cross the straits to the island. He travelled around Sakhalin until mid-October, visiting (almost) every settlement and interviewing everyone he could find, returning to Moscow the "fast" way by sea to the Crimea, with stopovers in Hong Kong and Sri Lanka.

His description of the trip, written up over the next few busy years and published in 1895, is in many ways a glorious, disorganised mess: there's far too much quantitative data for a mainstream travel book, but it's too full of subjective description to be read as a social science dissertation. In the version translated and edited by Brian Reeve, the footnotes make up almost half the book, and at least 90% of them are Chekhov's own: not just references to sources, but often also lengthy anecdotes and bits of description that somehow got left out of the main body of the text. The book starts off as a geographically-organised description of the settlement, but at some undetectable point it veers off into a thematic discussion of different aspects of the working of the penal colonies. (It doesn't help that this 2019 Alma Classics paperback reprint, which looks to have been cut down from an earlier version, has neither maps nor index.)

All the same, if you're reading it out of general interest rather than in search of some specific piece of information, it's a wonderful — if disturbing — book, full of Chekhov's clear, compassionate observation of what is really going on here, out of sight of the judges who routinely sentence people to penal servitude without the least idea of what that means, and also out of sight of the academics who write articles about prison reform in learned journals.

In theory, Chekhov agrees, it's a wonderful idea to make convicts do useful work during their imprisonment rather than sitting around at the state's expense, and it also sounds like a good idea to use this capacity to develop new regions. In real life, however, as the British found in the much more promising setting of New South Wales, it rarely works out like that. There are always going to be conflicts of interest and opportunities for abuse when forced labour is involved, especially when it's happening out of sight on the other side of the world. Convicts are, almost by definition, poorly adapted to become a labour force in tough conditions: people are likely to fall into crime because they can't or won't work. And it's foolish to imagine that you will be able to recruit competent, honest and highly motivated people to run remote penal settlements unsupervised. Incompetence, corruption and sadistic brutality are bound to result.

Moreover, as he found as soon as he got there, Sakhalin turns out to be a really stupid place to set up an agricultural colony. The indigenous people were migrant hunter-gatherers for a reason. It's winter for about nine months of the year, and it rains almost incessantly: the land is either mountainous or boggy taiga. So it's a good place to do small-scale fishing and trapping, but planting anything other than potatoes is pretty much a waste of effort. There was one coal mine in Chekhov's time, but it was badly managed and unproductive. Distance from markets and the lack of a proper harbour obviously also played a part in holding up the development of mining and forestry. Commercial fishing was left to the Japanese.

Most of the convicts sent to Sakhalin were serving long sentences for murder or other serious criminal offences (Chekhov was expressly banned from talking to any political offenders, but there only seems to have been a handful of these on the island anyway). The system was that after serving their sentences, they had to remain on the island as a "settled exile" for a period of from six to ten years. During this time they could farm or follow a trade to earn money. Vodka-smuggling and prostitution were apparently the only trades in which it was possible to make good money. After the expiry of the settled-exile period they were free to move elsewhere in Siberia, but not allowed to return to their home district. Conditions on the island were such that everyone who could leave did so, and there was no real settled population, so the hope that the penal settlement would lead to the development of a proper colony was not realised.

Chekhov also points out that the system made absolutely no allowance for the supposed role of the penal system in helping convicts to reform and build new lives. There was no trade training, many convicts spent their time in illegal activities (smuggling, gambling, prostitution), and only a handful had any hope of getting out of the system while they were still young enough to work.

Moreover, they were badly fed, their work was poorly supervised, and the medical services on the island were in a completely run down state. Whilst corporal punishment and the death sentence had been abolished in Russian criminal law, prisoners fell under a different set of rules, and beatings were regularly used by the prison authorities as punishment for even quite trivial offences (failing to take ones cap off when a free person passes). Chekhov witnessed a whipping, and had recurrent nightmares about it afterwards.

There was a lot here that reminded me of Solzhenitsyn, but of course the 1890s weren't the 1960s: Chekhov encountered some censorship when he published parts of the book in journals, but it was allowed to appear in full in book form. ( )

Tsjechov beschrijft hoe hij naar Sachalin reist, waar dwangarbeiders en tot verbanning veroordeelden heen worden gestuurd in de tweede helft van de 19e eeuw. Hij treft daar een voor mensen onvriendelijk klimaat aan, weinig mogelijkheden tot land- en tuinbouw, een keihard regime met soms willekeurig uitgedeelde strenge straffen, slechte hygiëne, enzovoorts. Hij concludeert dat op Sachalin de ideeën van straf om mensen moreel op te voeden, nauwelijks nog ingang gevonden hebben.
Soms wat saai door de vele opsommingen, maar als je de situatie op Sachalin op je laat inwerken, is het als geheel interessant. Tsjechov is natuurlijk een goede schrijver, naast arts, en in dit boek pakt hij e.e.a zo wetenschappelijk mogelijk aan.

“Sakhalin is a place of unbearable sufferings, which only a human being, whether free or subjugated, is capable of causing and undergoing.”

In April 1890, the thirty-year old Chekhov left on a challenging trip across Siberia to the Island of Sakhalin, site of a penal colony established under Tsarist authority. Sakhalin Island is located east of Siberia and north of Japan. As Russia’s largest island, it is twice the size of Greece. From Siberia chronicles his two and a half months of travel by sledge, carriage and boat, followed by three months of documenting the island’s census, lifestyle, and penal system in Sakhalin Island.

Chekhov had early-stage tuberculosis and his motivation for making this trip has been the subject of much unresolved speculation. His stated goal was to visit all of the inhabited places on the island and in order to learn as much as possible about life in these communities, to conduct a census of all occupants associated with the prison population. The island is divided into three administrative districts, each with its own settlements, prisons and character. He began his survey of the island in what he refers to as the northern section, which is geographically the central third of the island, the top third being uninhabitable, and ended in the southern region.

The penal system Chekhov observed was a perplexing combination of harshness and leniency, governed by the Statutes of Exile. Prisoners were divided into three general categories: convict, settled exile and peasant- in- exile. A life sentence was considered equal to twenty (20) years, the death penalty was nonexistent, and the majority (62.5%) of convicts served short-term sentences of up to 12 years. Forced labor was considered to be the primary instrument of punishment, with concurrent exile considered as an effective means of permanently removing an individual from mainstream society. After having served their sentence, convicts transitioned to settled exile status. Following six to ten years, they became peasants-in-exile.

Local authorities exercised considerable discretion in implementation of the system’s governing statutes. An interesting example is found in the issue of living arrangements. Convicts were often allowed to live in free-persons’ lodgings, especially if they had been accompanied to the island by their families, or worked as artisans and providers of service (ex. cooks, nannies) to settlement inhabitants. In the Alexandrovsk District, home to the Governor of the Island, even convicts who spent the night in the prison were allowed to leave freely during the day. In January 1890, a total of 5,908 convicts lived in the three administrative districts of Sakhalin. Of these, 1332 (23%) lived outside of prison in their own cabins or other free-persons’ lodging. 424 were householders living on their own plot of land and 908 were wives, cohabitants, workmen or tenants. Further, under the statutes, settled exiles were required to establish or become a member of a household in the district, thus fulfilling a secondary purpose of populating the island. If a settled exile did not already have a household, they were assigned a plot to build on, ordered to become a member of another established household, or sent to start a new settlement site. Peasants- in- exile were allowed to leave Sakhalin Island and settle in Siberia, but remained in permanent exile, banned from returning to their original home area.

While some practices appear unusually humane, the system mostly presented a harsher side. The majority of prisons provided only the most primitive of living conditions. There was no bedding, food was scarce, and communal cells were overcrowded and filthy. Chekhov even comments on the inadequate volume of air that he calculates to be available to each prisoner. Forced labor was often harsh, although payment was expected to be provided to the convict, with a portion held back until settled exile status was achieved. Corporal punishment for infractions was the rule. Harshly and often arbitrarily applied by corrupt overseers, this included flogging with birch rods or lashes, and even such inventive approaches as being chained to a wheelbarrow.

Living conditions found in the settlements were often not much different than in the prisons. Most cabins were crowded and poorly furnished. Food was scarce, as weather and growing conditions on the island were poor, household land allotments were inadequate, crops suitable for productive farming were extremely limited, and livestock rarely owned. Health care and education are minimally available and of poor quality. Aside from the impoverished physical conditions, life in most of the settlements was marked by severe cultural deprivation, resulting in excessive drinking and card-playing, "flagrant depravity" and a suffocating boredom.

The plight of women on the island, whether prisoner or free, was appalling. Overall, there was a scarcity of women, who were looked upon as less than human. Within the exile community residing in cabins, there was a ratio of 53 women to every 100 men. With those men who spent the night in prison and unmarried soldiers added, the ratio fell to 25 women for every 100 men. Prostitution was a common means of resolving this problem, as well as a primary means of support for female residents. Female convicts, representing 11.5% of the total, were often lodged in brothels. When new unattached women arrived within settlements, men who were determined worthy were allowed to meet with them and negotiate domestic relationships, although permission to marry was generally withheld, resulting in nearly half of families lacking the permanency of being legalized.

Chekhov documented his journey and investigations in great detail, sometimes overwhelmingly so. He describes each settlement and prison visited and provides extensive demographic, geographical and historical background, while supplementing his observations with the stories of those he meets, both prisoner and free. The information to be absorbed is also not confined to Chekhov’s primary narrative. The edition I read, published by Alma Classics, includes extensive notes (often several per page), a biography, bibliography, excerpts from Chekhov’s letters, and even the first chapter in Russian.

Prior to stumbling upon this book, my familiarity with Anton Chekhov had been confined to his short stories and plays. Despite sections where I felt bogged down in detail, I found this book fascinating and revealing of the Russian perspective on the punishment and rights of criminals and their family members. It also provides an historical context that I expect will be useful in understanding the development of the Soviet gulag system.

Highly recommended.

http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/recent-reads-a-brick-and... ( )

De reis eind 19e eeuw van Tsjechow door ht Siberische Rusland naar het langgerekte eiland Sachalin, dat voora diende om verbannenen en gevangenen weg te zetten wordt nauwgezet door de grote schrijver verteld.Hijzelf ging er als arts naar toe. ( )