Siberia and the Exile System (Volume Two)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1891. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... is not beautiful within. You enter the long vaulted gateway, and notice at once a heavy odor; but it is not very bad, as there is plenty of air. From this gateway there are two entrances; one, on the right, leading to the corps-de-garde, and the other, on the left, to the chapel and the hospital. From the latter comes the stench. Beyond these entrances there are more iron gates, and on the other side of them is the court. The courtyard is clean, but the odor in the cells is murderous. ... On the left extends a low building with twelve or thirteen windows. In it are the secret kdmeras where they keep particularly important criminals. Here it is comparatively clean and neat--better than in any other part of the prison, not excepting the so-called "office of the warden." The bathhouse is too small for such a prison, where the number of prisoners sometimes reaches 2000, and the common cells and the hospital are incredibly dirty and stinking. --" Afar," by M. I. Orfanof, p. 216. In the Irkutsk city prison, typhus fever constituted 11.8 per cent. of all the sickness in 1888. --Rep. of Chf. Pris. Adm. for 1888, p. 292. THE ISHfM PRISON. The Ishim correspondent of the newspaper Sibir, after referring to the murder of a prison inspector there by a prisoner, says: "It has long ceased to be news that the prisons in Siberia are hot-beds not only of moral but of physical contagion. And it is not surprising that they should be such. Not long ago I happened to meet, in a temperature of forty degrees below zero [Reaum.], a whole party of exiles clothed merely in khatdts, without warm overcoats or felt boots. Among them were many young children -- also thus unprotected. In the rooms of the police station, to which the prisoners were taken, the coughing of the emaciated ...