Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

ANDREW A. GENTES

THE INSTITUTION OF RUSSIA’S SAKHALIN POLICY, FROM 1868 TO 18751

Introduction Cossack explorers discovered the sturgeon-shaped island just beyond the mouth of the Amur River during the seventeenth century. By the beginning of the eighteenth, Russia like the rest of Europe had come to call this island in the North Pacific “Sakhalin”, a name descended from the Manchu word for “black”. Prior to 1875, again in 1904, and ever since World War II the Japanese have considered Sakhalin to be theirs. They call it “Karafuto”. Almost 600 miles long and covering nearly 30000 square miles, Sakhalin is one of the largest islands in the world with temperatures and geologic conditions varying greatly according to region. Its northern half is characterized by taiga and tundra; its southern by rugged mountains and thick forests. The climate is bone-chillingly cold in winter, foggy and damp in summer. In January temperatures average –11° (Fahrenheit) in the north and 21° in the south; in August, 50° in the north and 66° in the south. Natural vegetation in the wind-swept and icy north is limited to grasses and scrub brush; in the slightly more temperate south, where the soil is clayey, there are deciduous, coniferous, and even bamboo forests, with peat bogs near the coast. Throughout the island all types of biting insects “make the warm humid months an ordeal ...”2 In the summer of 1875, after years of jockeying for position in the North Pacific, Russia and Japan signed the Treaty of St. Petersburg which gave Russia sovereignty over all of Sakhalin. Later that year an article in the influential Russian newspaper Golos (The Voice) identified three essential roles for this latest imperial acquisition.3 The first was military: Sakhalin would serve as an enormous fortress to guard the entrance to the Amur River and hence the region of that same name, which Russia had acquired just fifteen years earlier thanks to the efforts of N. N. Murav’ev- Amurskii.4 The second role was economic: the island possessed “a rich mine of coal” which it was hoped would provide fuel for the nascent Pacific Fleet. The third role envisioned for Sakhalin was a penal one: Golos argued that the island should be turned into a huge colony to which Russia might commit its worst offenders. Like Australia had been for Great Britain and Devil’s Island still was for France, Sakhalin – some 4000 miles from St. Petersburg – could serve the Russian Empire as a realm of banishment seemingly as far away from the heart of society as the moon. However, unbeknownst to Golos, the decision to transform Sakhalin into a penal colony had already been made. Indeed internal documents of the Eastern Siberian Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Vostochnoi Sibiri – GUVS), which had jurisdiction over the island, reveal that a de facto decision high in the Russian government was reached as early as 1868, seven years before the Treaty of St. Petersburg. These and other sources show that the autocracy made a fateful and tragic decision and that it felt compelled to establish a penal colony on Sakhalin because, by the 1860s, its exile penal labor system, known as katorga, was in a state of turmoil. So powerful was this compulsion that even when evidence indicated Sakhalin’s soil and climatic conditions prohibited the development of a productive agricultural economy – upon which it was believed the colony could be based – authorities willfully ignored or covered up this evidence and went ahead with their plans. In order to better demonstrate this process I will describe it thematically rather than chronologically. I discuss first the nature of the penal colony itself; second, the evidence which clearly showed that a penal colony based upon an agricultural economy would not work on Sakhalin; third, the driving motivation behind the autocracy’s decision to establish, regardless of this evidence, a penal colony there; fourth, the manner in which this decision was arrived at; and finally, the way in which this decision was transformed into policy.

Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

Sakhalin as penal colony Many Russians and foreigners visited Sakhalin in the years before the Russo-Japanese War, of whom the most renowned was Anton Chekhov. Sakhalin Island (Ostrov Sakhalin), a journalistic account of his 1891 visit provides some of the most vivid depictions of life in the penal colony. “The vices and perversions which may be observed among the exiles”, he concluded, are those which are peculiar to enslaved, subjected, hungry and frightened people. Lying, cunning, cowardice, meanness, informing, robbery, every kind of secret vice – such is the arsenal which these slavelike people, or at least the majority of them, employ against the officials and guards they despise, fear and regard as their enemies.5 Despite the abolition of corporal punishment in the 1860s and of the death penalty a century earlier, convicts on Sakhalin were regularly beaten and sometimes hanged by the military administration. Wardens starved and tortured their prisoners, and chained them to wheelbarrows for years at a time as punishment for attempted escapes. During his visit Chekhov was vouchsafed the dubious honor of attending a flogging. “After the first five or ten strokes [the victim’s] body, covered by scars from previous beatings, turns blue and purple, and his skin bursts at each stroke”, recorded the playwright with feigned dispassion. “Through the shrieks and cries there can be heard the words: ‘Your worship! Your worship! Mercy your worship!’ 6 Charles Hawes, an Englishman who visited Sakhalin a decade after Chekhov, described among other things the butchering of native families by gangs of runaway criminals and the deaths by exposure of convicts forced to pull timber through coastline surfs. He referred to prostitution as the real “hard labor” for Sakhalin’s female population and was particularly incensed by the sex trade which operated unhindered (indeed was abetted) by the administration. Exiled couples regularly prostituted their prepubescent daughters in an attempt to derive an income. As a result, wrote Hawes, “There is not a girl over nine years of age on the island who is a virgin”.7 Responding to this, and similar exposes, a British publication in 1905 declared Sakhalin “the most notorious penal settlement in the world”.8 As of 1897 Sakhalin had a total population of 28113 people. Indigenous natives (Giliaks, Oroks, Ainu) represented 15 percent; peasants and Cossacks, virtually all of whom were former convicts, comprised a third; and exiles made up 47 percent. In addition to these groups there was a small number of administrators, soldiers, townspeople, clergy, and foreigners. Almost half the population was between the ages of 20 and 40; three-quarters was male. More than twenty-five languages and language groups were represented on the island, including Ukrainian, Armenian, Finnish, and Tatar. Great Russian was the principal language for 56 percent of the island’s inhabitants.9 Therefore, by the end of the nineteenth century this was the penal colony which had been created by mandate decades earlier: almost no productive farm plots existed anywhere on the island; what did exist was a subhuman realm comprising murderers, rapists, and thieves; exiles who mutilated and maimed themselves to avoid labor assignments; families whose only source of income was the prostitution of their children; and Giliak bounty hunters who earned three rubles for each severed head of a runaway convict they turned in to officials. This realm was made all the worse by the syphilis, cholera, and scurvy which regularly afflicted the “unfortunates,” as they were commonly and appropriately referred to in popular parlance. In short, Sakhalin possessed one of the most wretched collections of humanity ever assembled.

Early indicators Years before it decided to officially transform Sakhalin into a penal colony the state sent small numbers of penal laborers, called katorzhnye, to the island for the purpose of mining coal. Military expeditions had discovered coal there as early as 1851, and Petersburg hoped that its extraction would become a major enterprise. By early 1868 there were 400 katorzhnye assigned to the shafts at Dué Post, a dilapidated prison poised on an outcropping of rock halfway up the west coast. The early mining operations as led by the local military command were beset by poor Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

organization and terrible living conditions, and consequently yielded little. In August 1869 the mainland administration sent another 450 katorzhnye to Sakhalin, 350 of whom it assigned to the Dué mines. However, many of the katorzhnye nominally assigned to mining actually engaged in a desperate effort to grow the cabbages and potatoes they and their jailers needed to keep from starving. This was because ice prevented the shipping of supplies to the island for several months out of the year; and even when the Tatar Straits were clear, there was still an insufficient amount of food due to poor organization and the absence of ships to deliver it.10 In 1870 Dué’s mines yielded just 4660 tons of coal. In May 1872 there were 643 exiles on Sakhalin, yet no more than 400 were actually assigned to coal-mining.11 Given the local military’s inability to properly manage operations, the government in 1875 entered into a lease agreement with a joint-stock venture calling itself the “Sakhalin Company”. By 1890 Sakhalin’s annual coal production had increased to 18000 tons; yet as John Stephan has noted “This output never became a significant factor in Russia’s total coal production (6609000 tons in 1890)”.12 There was never a time when more than a few hundred of the thousands of convicts eventually exiled to Sakhalin worked in the mines. The government’s initial plan that Sakhalin’s katorga regimen would center around mining, as those at Nerchinsk and Kara did, soon disappeared when it realized that even in the most optimistic scenario Dué’s operations could utilize no more than 1200 laborers.13 Instead planners began to envision that exiles sent to the island would labor as agriculturalists instead. This desire by the state to transform convicts into peasants continued a tradition dating back to 1593, when Boris Godunov sent the first group of exiles across the Urals. However, despite its singular grandiosity, the Sakhalin plan also marked the continuity of the autocracy’s stubborn refusal over the course of three centuries to recognize the futility of this coercive task. This refusal of recognition is highlighted by the fact that between 1868 and 1875 it unequivocally committed itself to a project despite a mountain of evidence showing it could not work.

The evidence Let us consider such evidence. Since the late seventeenth century Russian, European, and Asian naval explorers had been mapping and writing about Sakhalin, all the while gathering information about its weather and climate. In the three decades before 1870 Russia sent several expeditions to the island.14 N. V. Busse, who would die from syphilis in 1866 while serving as Amur District’s first governor, commanded one of these expeditions which scoured the island from August 1853 to May 1854. While there, he meticulously recorded temperatures and other important agricultural indicators in a diary which was published serially in Vestnik Evropy (European Herald) in 1871 – the very year Petersburg committed itself unequivocally to establishing a penal colony on Sakhalin.15 In addition to this convergence of dates it should be pointed out that all of Russia’s explorers to the island served in either the military or civil services. Thus top decision-makers must have had access to their reports, which explicitly stated among other things that the indigenous Ainu, Giliaks, and Oroks depended for their food upon, not agriculture but rather hunting, fishing, and trading. Knowledge of these peoples’ millennium-old feeding traditions might have given Petersburg officials pause for thought as they contemplated the construction of an agriculturally- based economy. Yet even though it is admittedly dubious that imperial Russians would ever have taken a cue from the very people they were supposedly introducing to civilization, such an idea is possible only on the presumption that they bothered to read expedition accounts in the first place. I find it nearly inconceivable that if any top official knew about this information and was seriously concerned with establishing a functioning penal colony on Sakhalin, that he then could have believed agriculture was the way to go about it. For as Chekhov, whom we know did read many of these early reports, was later to write, “meteorological tables and the brief reports of other writers present a general picture of exceptionally bad weather.” More specifically he noted that Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

In the Cherepovetsky district, where the summer is warmer and longer [than elsewhere on the island] ..., buckwheat, cucumbers and wheat cannot ripen properly, while in the Aleksandrovsk region the local agricultural inspector insists that there has never been a year when the temperature was sufficiently high for oats and wheat to ripen.16

But if officials did indeed read such reports, the point still remains the same: gross malfeasance in Petersburg led to the horrors which rendered the Sakhalin penal colony justifiably infamous. Whether politicians read these reports then simply ignored them, or neglected to read them but nevertheless made their decisions in ignorance, they clearly demonstrated neither leadership nor planning for Russia’s penological future, but rather only a contemptible retreat into cynicism and despair.17 But first, there were opportunities for them to learn from their mistakes. In 1862 the government launched its first express attempt to settle “exile-settlers” (ssyl’nye poselentsy18) on Sakhalin. Fortunately this self-described “experiment” (opyt’) involved only eight male exiles, but they were treated extremely cruelly, like guinea pigs, in an effort that was doomed to fail. It took two years before the men could establish their own homesteads near the mouth of the Aleksandrovka River. But their harvests were too meager to live on and beginning in 1865 the administration issued each a certain annual amount of foodstuffs which, among other things, included two pods (c. 70 lbs.) of rye. Despite, or perhaps because of this aid, the homesteaders’ output declined further and their dependence on government rations increased. In 1870 all were transferred back to the mainland.19 In 1869 the government launched another no less poorly conceived and executed plan to settle twenty-five families of nominally voluntary settlers (pereselentsy) on the island. After bungling their transport from the Siberian interior administrators finally delivered these families to Sakhalin just as winter hit. In mid-November soldiers marched the new arrivals into the middle of the wilderness, where they left them to fend for themselves. By building earthen shelters the settlers who remained somehow managed to survive; but many others wandered back to the coastline to beg for succor from the island command. As late as 1876 thirteen of these families still depended on government rations for their survival. 20 Although officials had hoped both the 1862 and 1869 experiments would prove agriculture viable on Sakhalin, they proved just the opposite. Nevertheless officials ignored the results, placed blame on the “guinea pigs,” excused their own roles in the debacles, and forged ahead. As the government moved seemingly inexorably toward a conclusive decision to make Sakhalin a penal colony, there however still remained opportunities for reappraisal. Yet officials chose to ignore even contemporary reports from the island administration which detailed the katorzhnye’s inability to grow enough vegetables. For example in March 1871 Dué’s commander wrote to I. V. Furugeim, Primofe District’s military governor, explicitly stating there was “no possiblity for the development of an agricultural economy ...”21 The soil was too infertile, the climate too harsh. Cabbages and potatoes could be grown, but even these hardy stables were few. Despite much similar information detailing the failure to establish productive farming on Sakhalin, officials in Petersburg continued to believe that agriculture would provide exiles with the substance of life as well as the labor tasks their sentences required. Why? One reason was that there soon emerged “scientific evidence” to back up this belief, in the work of M. S. Mitsul’. Just as T. D. Lysenko bears the onus for the disasters of Soviet agriculture so too should Mitsul’ for tsarist Sakhalin’s agricultural travails. It is uncertain whether Mitsul’, an agronomist, was deluding himself or simply reporting what higher authorities wanted to hear when, following his 1870 inspection of the island, he described agricultural opportunities there as “ideal”. But it helps to know he made this observation within the context of his larger argument that Sakhalin should serve as a penal colony, in part because it was supposedly escape-proof.22 Such a fortuitous marriage of science and convenience appears to have been just what V. I. Vlasov23 was looking for. Vlasov, who sat on Eastern Siberia’s Governing Council, also served as chief of that region’s Department of Executive Police (Departament politsii ispolnitel’noi). Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

Theoretically he answered to Governor-General N. P. Sinel’nikov (1871-1873) and his successor P. A. Frederiks (1873-1879). 24 Yet with DPI a subsection of the Ministry of the Interior (Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del – MVD), Vlasov’s primary allegiance was to then interior minister A. E. Timashev.25 Such an overlapping of authority characterized both the administrative structure which M. M. Speranskii designed for Siberia in 1822 and the ministerial apparatus he had created for the government twenty years earlier.26 Vlasov’s primary allegiance is important to bear in mind when considering his motives. In a lengthy report written in July 1873 and addressed to both Timashev and Sinel’nikov, Vlasov summarized the findings of an inspection tour which had brought him to Sakhalin two years earlier. Relying exclusively on Mitsul’s work he extolled the possibilities for a penal colony, proclaiming “On the basis of Sakhalin’s vegetation, especially in the southern part, there is every possibility for the successful cultivation of grains”. He went so far as to assert that a “minimum of 25-30 thousand people” could be settled there, albeit mostly in the south. Although both Vlasov and Mitsul’ mention in their writings the possibility for other “industries” on Sakhalin besides agriculture, such as timbering and fishing (both of which eventually employed very small numbers of exiles), neither place a great deal of emphasis on them, heralding instead the supposed opportunities for agriculture.27 As should already be clear Mitsul’s and Vlasov’s forecasts bore no relationship to reality. Whether this was the result of cynicism, disingenuousness, or just plain naïveté is impossible to know for sure; but the fact that Mitsul’ favored the establishment of a penal colony and that Vlasov worked for the MVD strongly suggests that if cynicism itself was not their motivating factor then they were at least beholden to those for whom it was. Looking ahead for a moment, the following examples show the long-term effect of their forecasts. As of 1876 produce from the Dué model farm (ferm), which utilized exile labor, consisted almost entirely of cabbages and potatoes and even these were few in number. For this reason the mainland administration continued to provide most of the food Russian inhabitants required. Exiles and soldiers subsisted on a diet centered around bread (made largely from imported grain), cabbages, potatoes, and salted fish and beef.28 In April 1881 the tsar ordered zoologist I. S. Poliakov to Sakhalin for the purpose of “zoological and anthropological research”. A well-heeled member of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, Poliakov was a perspicacious scientist whose interests ranged far beyond the boundaries of his immediate discipline.29 Having seen little other than cabbages and potatoes being grown during his visit Poliakov concluded: If a modest agricultural economy is [to be] established on the island, then it will be through enormous labor and strength; [but] at the present time, considering the general number of people on the island, it [agriculture] may be considered worthless.”30 A full decade later Chekhov found only a very small percentage of the population in and around Aleksandrovsk, Sakhalin’s largest settlement, working in agriculture. Along the nearby Duika River, where soil was marginally better than near the shoreline or toward the piedmont, a total of only thirty-six homesteaders grew produce while nine worked hayfields. The size of their plots ranged from 300 sazhens (one-third of an acre) to one desiatina (2.7 acres). Nearly everyone planted potatoes. Only sixteen homesteaders owned horses; thirty-eight, cows; but most of the livestock was in the hands of those who worked as traders rather than as food producers. No one in Aleksandrovsk had been there a decade or more: six had established homesteads in 1882; four in 1883; thirteen in 1884; and sixty-eight in 1885. The remaining 207 had arrived later. Of the nearly three hundred people assigned to Aleksandrovsk only nineteen exiles had managed to attain peasant status.31 Finally, the failure of both Sakhalin’s agricultural economy and the state’s general effort to transform convicts into cultivators is best summarized in a report by D. A. Driĺ, a criminologist from the Ministry of Justice who inspected the island in 1896.32 By that time Sakhalin had long been home to large numbers of exiles, and it was Driĺ’s task to assess the conditions in which they lived. Although on paper thousands of exiles and former exiles were assigned to individual Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

farmsteads, he found only 10 percent of these farmsteads had “any substance”. Of those remaining, half were “only pro forma, for [the benefit of the appearance of] the [Sakhalin] command ...”, while the rest were defunct, having been abandoned by those assigned to them. As a result government rations were still needed to keep alive the vast majority of exiles.33 Thus agriculture on Sakhalin was an unmitigated failure. In 1884, by which year it cost the government as much as 375 rubles per convict to ship exiles from Odessa to Sakhalin, it cost another 150000 r. just to feed most of the island’s exiles and all of its administrators, guards, and soldiers.34 Moreover the later history of Sakhalin shows that at no time under the imperial regime was the penal colony ever able to feed itself. But in fully addressing the question of agriculture we have gotten ahead of ourselves, and so it is necessary to turn back in order to ask why the government felt so compelled to establish a penal colony on Sakhalin in the first place.

Compulsion Although Petersburg could not have entirely foreseen the situation later so well described by Chekhov, Driĺ, and others it should have had forebodings based on well-known mistakes in the past, mistakes that involved many times more victims than the failed agricultural experiments of the 1860s but which had yielded similar results. From the 1730s through the 1850s the autocracy launched several large-scale attempts to establish penal colonies in various regions of Siberia, all of which failed and collectively caused death and misery for thousands of exiles.35 With such a track record why did top officials believe Sakhalin would be any different? The answer is they believed they had little choice. Although katorga (and to a great extent the rest of the exile system) virtually ceased to function during the 1860s, the autocracy refused to abolish Siberian exile and replace it with a nationwide prison system. This refusal was persistent despite successive ministers’ and commissions’ attempts ever since Peter the Great’s reign to persuade the Romanovs otherwise.36 Prisons administered at the regional level did exist in Russia and held rotating numbers of criminals for brief terms, as well as exiles awaiting transfer east; but these were too few to accommodate all those the courts convicted each year.37 As a result the state dealt with society’s worst offenders by exiling them to Siberia. This practice began in the late sixteenth century and by the mid-nineteenth had expanded enormously. Courts sentenced the most violent and dangerous exiles to special katorga prisons in Eastern Siberia, but the vast majority entered Siberia as “exile-settlers” (ssyl’no-poselentsy), whom officials simply distributed without money or other means amongst the local peasantry. However not all those exiled to Siberia were criminals sentenced by the judicial system. Fully half of the one million subjects exiled to Siberia during the nineteenth century went there as a result of “administrative procedures” instigated, for the most part, by commune assemblies and elders against their own neighbors.38 Due to the combination of a lack of funding, administrative chaos, disregard for existing laws, and institutionalized cruelty the Siberian exile system was a hulking failure, as evidenced in part by the fact that escape rates for all categories of exiles ranged between 25 and 50 percent.39 On the eve of the decision to turn Sakhalin into a penal colony there were many signs that the collapse of katorga in particular had reached critical mass. One major reason for this was the huge upsurge beginning in the 1860s in the number of people sent to Siberia. That decade alone nearly 120000 exiles and accompanying family members crossed the Urals.40 At certain times specific ethnic and religious groups comprised a disproportionate number of exiles. For example the autocracy exiled as many as 24 000 Poles in reprisal for the 1863 insurrection. Although most of these Poles were not sentenced to katorga, some 4000 were.41 These and other katorzhnye imposed a serious strain on a system already saturated with convicts. In 1868 M. S. Korsakov, then governor-general of Eastern Siberia, wrote a harried letter to the Interior Ministry explaining that the Nerchinsk and Kara mining regions east of Lake Baikal – locations Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

at that time of the only two major katorga regimes – were filling up. As a consequence he warned “there is not enough work for all the exile-laborers [ssyl’no-rabochikh]”.42 Korsakov requested that at least the Poles be relocated to the Altai Mining District in Western Siberia or to the Urals. At this stage the MVD and the Ministries of War and Justice were indeed struggling to find alternative locations for all katorzhnye,43 but were restricted by a law enacted in 1859 which prohibited their assignment to Western Siberia. Therefore the Poles remained where they were. 44 While it is true that penal facilities were taxed by the massive numbers of exiles, many of the problems related to them were the result of negligence and malfeasance on the part of Siberian officialdom, which had a long and colorful history of corruption dating back to the early 1600s. In 1868, senior officials inspecting conditions in Kirensk District in Irkutsk Province determined that commands at certain local prisons and holding prisons [used during the transfer of exiles] are not observing proper procedure in the maintenance of arrestees held in those same places. For example: the cleanliness of clothes and linen is not being supervised, nor is the cleanliness of the arrestees themselves; the arrestees’ food is very meager and poorly-prepared; the arrestees’ only place for strolling and for fresh air – the courtyard – is untidy and filled with garbage: in all respects the latrines are in a poor state; in certain locations arrestees are never allowed into the courtyard for fresh air, regardless of good weather; in certain prison buildings the windows are knocked out, the cells are full of mud, the stoves are broken, [etc.] ...45

Beginning (at the latest) during the 1860s, the organization responsible for assigning and distributing exiles within Siberia, the Tobol’sk Exile Office, encountered difficulty maintaining its records.46 This problem rippled through the Office’s subordinate, provincial Exile Bureaux and worsened over the course of the next decade. A circa 1877 report47 concerning the Irkutsk Bureau revealed that “from 1870 through 1875 ... when and where 429 katorzhnye were assigned is unknown”. Statistical logs which should have shown exiles’ arrival and departure dates to and from Irkutsk and other cities were typically bereft of information. In 1873 Irkutsk officials had distributed up to 340 katorzhnye without any reference to their court-mandated sentences: thus, for example, katorzhnye sentenced to fortress and mining labor in the Kara gold industries were removed to factories in Irkutsk Province ... and in some cases those who had received brief [i.e., temporary] sentences in the factories were removed to the Kara gold industries.48 Because of the bureaucratic morass within Irkutsk’s holding prison, convicts scheduled for transfer were sometimes held “for several months and sometimes more than a year” longer than they should have been, languishing in their disease-ridden cells until some official finally got around to processing their cases. The report also showed that the Irkutsk Bureau regularly failed to provide clothes for katorzhnye located throughout Eastern Siberia, so that over a four-year period exiles in Balagnask Prison went for months at a time completely naked. As officials noted time and again in their correspondence, the Irkutsk Bureau clearly was “in disorder”. Largely in response to wretched living and working conditions a number of disturbances occurred among katorzhnye in the Kara and Nerchinsk mines during the late 1860s. Regional military administrators’ beliefs that such disturbances signaled a direct threat seem more than anything else to have focused Petersburg’s attention on the profound problems surrounding katorga. Most of the disturbances were minor and involved only political exiles, who represented just a small percentage of the katorzhnye; but there was a growing fear that these politicals would spark a general revolt among the entire exile population.49 One example in particular highlights the paranoia which underlay these administrators’ fears. After having dealt with what was essentially a sit-down strike by political exiles at a couple mines in the Nerchinsk Mining District the district commander, Adol’f Knoblokh, described his actions to the governor of Irkutsk Province in a personal letter full enough of grammatical errors and odd word choices to suggest he did not know Russian well. First, Knoblokh had removed all books and writing materials from the prison cells, then, “having fettered the legs and arms of all the convicts without exception, I ordered them held [in] a narrow, locked cell, and [put] these same criminals on bread and Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

water. I promised them that they themselves would beg me to return them to the shafts”. The politicals did relent and agreed to reenter the shafts, though it is unclear how long it took for them to capitulate. But their protest had had an effect on their mine’s overseer Kuznetsov, who soon acknowledged the exiles’ earlier claims that some of the shafts were lacking in oxygen. Kuznetsov subsequently gave them permission to avoid these particular shafts. When he learned of this Knoblokh became outraged, as he wrote the governor, secure in his belief that Kuznetsov was a weakling and conditions in the shafts fine. “Regarding this [Kuznetsov’s decision] regrettably I am unable”, he laboriously scribbled. To not charge [with insubordination (?)] Overseer Lieutenant Kuznetsov, who has demonstrated throughout this affair incomprehensible weakness and unresourcefulness. A little bit of energy on his part at the very beginning, and the matter would not have reached such [proportions].50

Although like Knoblokh many officials believed a firm hand was all that was needed to keep katorzhnye in line, reports such as his also proved unsettling to those with somewhat broader perspectives. This eventually led to a fateful decision.

Decision made, decision confirmed In 1868 Alexander II responded to what was officially termed “the collapse of katorga” by appointing representatives from the Ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Finance to form a so- called Special Committee to investigate the issue. As of that year there were some 12000 katorzhnye in Siberia, and the first major task before the committee was to ascertain how conditions might be created to allow these convicts to fulfil the hard labor portions of their sentences. The committee’s second major task was to find a solution to the problem of escape, which loosed upon Siberian society thousands of desperate fugitives each year.51 The two documents which describe the activities of this committee contain slightly conflicting evidence as to when the government finally decided to establish a new katorga regime and penal colony on Sakhalin. One of these documents is a copy of a report by Vlasov to Korsakov just before the governor-general died in November 1871, which lays out the former’s recommendations on this issue. The copy is undated; yet because VIasov’s inspection did not end until September 1871 we know both the original and its copy were produced sometime shortly thereafter, while Korsakov remained among the living. The second document is a copy of a report read into the minutes (zhurnal) of the GUNS Governing Council on 13 October 1872.52 Interior Minister Timashev would later claim the Special Committee chose Sakhalin only after a careful review of Vlasov’s and other evidence.53 Yet due to the timing of events which follow, it strongly appears this was not the case. Instead the Special Committee’s decision was made for it sometime earlier by a higher authority, and therefore its role was that of a mere rubber-stamp. Part of the evidence for this comes from Vlasov himself, who relates that in August 1869 the regime dispatched 800 katorzhnye to Sakhalin so that the just-convened Special Committee could conduct yet another, albeit much larger “experiment”, this time to determine the feasibility of not just agricultural settlement in general but a large-scale agriculturally-based penal colony per se. Lack of logistical coordination and the inabilities of local officials account for why only half the convicts actually reached Sakhalin. Moreover their behavior once there was so violent it actually caused the emperor to seriously consider reinstituting capital punishment across the board. Who actually ordered the 800 katorzhnye to the island in the first place is unclear, but it would seem to have been a figure high in government, for despite the operation’s utter failure, the Special Committee amazingly concluded Sakhalin would be a fine location for a penal colony.54 Nonetheless, the GUVS Council report asserts that not until April 1871 did the Special Committee “persuade” Korsakov that a new katorga regime should be established on Sakhalin, and therefore it requested his cooperation in developing a plan to make this possible.55 Vlasov writes that the committee did not reach this decision until mid-May, prior to which, he claims, Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

the committee could agree only that “a distant colony” had to be established in order to salvage katorga. Although he infers that it seemed likely to choose Sakhalin, he also asserts that other locations were supposedly being considered. What these were he does not say, however.56 In either case the above series of events means, that when Timashev dispatched Vlasov to inspect katorga sites in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East and “to research and report on [Sakhalin’s] topgraphy ...”, the decision was a foregone conclusion.57 Even Vlasov himself later paradoxically admitted the committee reached its decision about Sakhalin “without any data on the island”.58 Needless to say, this begs the question of how the committee knew it would be a suitable place for the penal colony. Well, of course, it did not. But for the regime this was not the point. The point was simply to get rid of the exiles and the problems they were causing on the Siberian mainland. As alluded to earlier, Timashev in 1876 claimed that not until late 1872 did the committee complete its analysis of the research from Vlasov’s and other reports. Only then, according to the interior minister’s scenario, did it decide “conditions [on Sakhalin] were favorable”.59 But Timashev’s was a lie designed to cover his own rear and possibly those of others, for as we have seen, not later than 1868-1869 were certain powers intent on placing a colony on Sakhalin and nowhere else. Vlasov left Irkutsk in June 1871 and traveled through Transbaikalia and Amur Districts to the Pacific coast, whence he crossed over to Sakhalin in September. Given what had earlier transpired within the Special Committee it is clear, despite Vlasov’s, Timashev’s, and the Governing Council’s later assertions to the contrary, that the findings of the MVD lackey were predicated on his knowledge the choice would (and could only be) Sakhalin. Therefore it should come as no surprise that, despite some remarkably candid statements about purely administrative conditions on Sakhalin,60 Vlasov told his superiors what they wanted to hear. As noted, he relied entirely on Mitsuĺ’s work and mentioned no conflicting evidence. The nature of the procedure between 1868 and 1871 which resulted in a plan to transform Sakhalin into a penal colony shows this resolution was preordained from above. The candidate most likely to have sought this resolution was Timashev, likely with strong backing from Eastern Siberia’s Governor-general Korsakov and possibly the emperor as well. If so, this means both the Special Committee’s and Vlasov’s efforts to ascertain Sakhalin’s suitability as a location were merely shadow plays designed to create the illusion of informed decision-making. Why would such deception have been necessary? If it was Timashev who ordered this resolution, then he needed to protect himself against possible future political attacks by making it appear he had consulted the appropriate ministries and experts for their advice. But regardless of who actually ordered the decision, the deceptive process just outlined added legitimacy to a government then struggling with self-reform.61 Apropos of this Alexander II could therefore appear less the autocrat and more the mediator within a new-style political apparatus.

The policy on Sakhalin The 1871 decision on Sakhalin was followed by several years of inaction. It is not entirely clear what accounts for this, though it may have been due to Timashev’s lack of administrative skills. 62 Whatever the case, when the Commission for the Organization of Katorga Labor (Kommisiia po organizatsii katorzhnykh rabot – KOKR) finally convened in Petersburg on 1 March 1875, one of its two major tasks was to design both a policy and institutions necessary to facilitating Sakhalin’s transformation into a penal colony. Its other task was to approve or disapprove the leasing of Dué’s coalmining operations to Court Councilor I. N. Butkovskii, major shareholder in the Sakhalin Company.63 Only the first of these tasks concerns us here; but the importance the government attached to both is suggested by those it named to KOKR. M. R. Shidlovskii, chairman, was a senator and member of the General Staff, and was until six months earlier Timashev’s second-in-command at the MVD.64 Other members included Engineer and Lieutenant-General L. A. Sokolovskii, Senator and Privy Councilor E. V. Frish,65 Privy Councilors A. I. Despot-Zenovich,66 A. P. Beklemishev, P. T. Kititsyn, Count V. A. Sollogub,67 and O. I. Kvist,68 and Major-General A. I. Belenchenko.69 Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

It is remarkable that KOKR’s first meeting began with several members openly questioning the suitability of Sakhalin as a location for the penal colony. Sokolovskii curtly reminded them that this question had already been decided “between 1869 and 1871”. (Note this further undermines the claims of Timashev et al.) But the dissenters were not immediately deterred. As a result the session ended with a decision to form a “Special Conference” consisting of Despot- Zenovich, Beklemishev, and State Councilors O. A. Deikhman and Vlasov70 to yet again confirm Sakhalin’s suitability.7l As with Vlasov’s 1871 “findings” the decision reached by the Special Conference appears to have been preordained. Minutes of a series of eight meetings between 3 and 22 March 1875 show the four members confirmed the island possessed a wealth of natural resources and conditions virtually requiring its transformation into a penal colony. Indeed, so promising were the possibilities that Vlasov et al. recommended Sakhalin’s future katorga administration consist not only of a prison division but a farm division as well.72 There is no evidence that KOKR or any of its members convened between the end of March and 22 September 1875. The hiatus was probably due to the necessity to await the outcome of high-level negotiations with Japan which culminated in the St. Petersburg Treaty (signed in May and August and formally effected in September).73 Another factor may have been a desire to await clarification of the future for coal-mining operations on the island: just prior to KOKR’s 22 September session the government finalized a lease agreement with the Sakhalin Company.74 Whatever the case, on this date KOKR turned its full attention to determining the manner in which the Sakhalin penal colony would function. In this and another session a week later it unanimously decided the colony would be “permanent” as opposed to “temporary” (i.e., experimental). This was important because it represented the government’s absolute commitment to a plan it believed would initiate a new era of penal labor, as in fact it did, though not in the manner forecast. Also during these two sessions the notion of establishing a farm division within the new administration was abandoned. Vlasov seems to have been the architect behind this idea, having proposed as early as 1873 the creation of two labor farms, one for 600 men and another for 400 women. However KOKR decided to establish additional prisons in place of these proposed farms.75 Although this penological retreat did not mark the end of efforts to turn exiles into peasants, it was a tacit admission that the penal colony’s primary purpose was not the transformation (much less the rehabilitation) of criminals, but rather their banishment and punishment. KOKR’s final session appears to have taken place on 6 October 1875. This session was important because the commission decided to give the military commander of the island’s new administration extensive judicial authority over the exile population. For crimes committed on the island he alone would possess the awesome power to both determine guilt and dispense punishment.76 Recognizing the abusive opportunities immanent in this disturbing marriage of powers, members O. I. Kvist and M. N. Bazhenov submitted a formal protest in which they cited not only its violation of the Exile Code (Ustav o ssyl’nykh) but presciently added it may in practice lead not only to serious difficulties in terms of implementation, but [also] provoke among katurzhnye a dangerous conviction of the injustice of the punishments, which in turn may not bring about desired results.77 Chairman Shidlovskii duly noted Kvist’s and Bazhenov’s protest, then promptly dismissed it from the agenda. The establishment of the penal colony began slowly, Although the delay was in part due to the dilatoriness still characterizing Russia’s bureaucrats, it was also caused by the problems detailed above concerning agriculture and supply. Yet there were other factors as well, which originated in the capital. One was the numerous changes in the leadership of the MVD during this period. Between 1878 and 1882 four different men were appointed to head the ministry. It was not until the comparatively stable (and especially harsh) rule of D. A. Tolstoi (1882-1889) that the government was finally able to get the penal colony up and running in a semi-functional manner. Another factor which stymied MVD efforts to draw attention and resources for the colony was the assassination of Alexander II that plunged all ministries into turmoil. Finally, it was not until 1884 that the Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

government restructured Eastern Siberia, removing from GUVS’s control the Russian Far East and Sakhalin and giving these territories to the newly-created Governor-generalship of Priamur krai.78 On the island itself a single commander took charge over three new districts – Aleksandrovsk, Tymovsk, and Korsakovsk – and Aleksandrovsk Post replaced Dué as administrative center.79 For all these reasons it was not until the mid-1880s that katorga operations on Sakhalin began to follow a version (albeit bastardized) of the policy KOKR had laid out years before. “[F]rom 1879 through 1883, inclusive”, reads an MVD report dated October 1885, “525 katorzhnye arrestees were shipped to Sakhalin every year, and 1050 in the years 1884 and 1885”.80 By the time the island’s new administration was installed in 1884 the katorzhnye population stood at 4000. When Chekhov visited in 1891 there were around 6000 katorzhnye and 4000 exile- settlers.81 The latest available figure comes from the 1897 census, which shows a total exile population of some 22000.82 This edged close to the figure of 25-30 thousand Vlasov had projected in 1873; but he had also envisioned these masses would be economically self- sufficient, which they were not. The penal colony disintegrated as a result of the Japanese invasion of the island during the 1904-1905 war. Although the Portsmouth Treaty allowed Russia to keep the northern half of the island, the government decided to abolish officially the penal colony in April 1906.83

Conclusion This paper has demonstrated in non-linear fashion the chronological development by which Sakhalin became “the most notorious penal settlement in the world”. During the 1860s the total collapse of the system of katorga in Eastern Siberia compelled Petersburg to believe it needed a penal colony on Sakhalin in order to keep the system viable. Yet due to the factors discussed – ramifications of the “collapse of katorga”; pressure from top officials; ignoring or ignorance of mitigating evidence; and the way in which the decision to establish a penal colony was made, then transformed into policy – the eventual colony became a man-made hell exhibiting the worst tendencies of Imperial Russia’s criminal justice system. On the one hand, Sakhalin served to funnel into a crucible many of the internal tensions then wracking society; on the other, the decisions which eventually created so much suffering show that when it came to such fundamental issues as political leadership and management of the country’s penal system, the autocracy during its final half-century no longer possessed an ability to reform itself, if indeed it ever really did.

Notes: 1 The author would like to thank Abbott Gleason, Patricia Herlihy, Andrew Bell, Susanne Bolle, and Michael Bowen for their helpful comments on various drafts of this article. 2 A. P Gorkin, ed., Geograflia Rossii: entsiklopediia (Moskva: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia, 1998), 515-516; Stephan, Sakhalin, 7-9, 32-34. 3 Golos: 1-2. 4 Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav’ev (1809-1881) served as governor-general of Eastern Siberia from 1847 to 1861. “Amurskii” (“of the Amur”) was affixed to his name in recognition of his role in the annexation of the Amur region. See AtdPk, 9; Patrick March, Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific (Westport, CT: Prager, 1996), ch. 13. For treatments of Russia’s imaginative and administrative relationship to Siberia and the Amur region see Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1999); idem, “The Russian Geographical Society, the Amur Epoch’, and the Great Siberian Expedition 1855-1863”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, no. 2 (1983): 240-256; idem, “Expansion and Colonialism on the Eastern Frontier: Views of Siberia and the Far East in Pre-Petrine Russia”, Journal of Historical Geography 14, no. 1 (1988): 3-21; idem, “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century”, American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (June 1991): 763-794. 5 Chekhov, Island, 32:1. 6 Ibid., 331. 7 Hawes, Uttermost, 144-145. 8 W. C. Chisholm, “Saghalien, the Isle of the Russian Banished”, Chamber’s Journal VIII (April 1905): 301. “Saghalien” is a transliteration of the Manchu name for the island. Note that some visitors to Sakhalin and other locations within the Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

exile system regarded the regime’s treatment of exiles as appropriate, or at least believed the convicts deserved the punishments and conditions they received. Some of these works were underwritten by the Russian government and intended to refute directly George Kennan’s magnum opus and expose, Siberia and the Exile System., 2 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1891). Cf. Thomas W. Knox, Overland Through Asia. Pictures of Siberian, Chinese and Tartar Life (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1871); Julian Ralph, “Awakened Russia”, Harper’s Monthly Magazine XCV1 (May 1893): 817-836; idem, “The Czar’s People”, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine XCVII (June 1898): 3-21; Benjamin Howard, Prisoners of Russia: A Personal Study of Convict Life in Sakhalin and Siberia (New York: D. Appelton and Co., 1902); J. W. Buel, Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia (Denver, Philadelphia: World Publishing Co., 1893): De Windt, Siberia; idem, The Island of Sakhalin”, Fortnightly Review LXI (January-June 1897): 711-71.5. 9 1897 census, tables, pp. v. vi, vii. Note that this source refers to exiles rather obliquely as “those not assigned to a class [soslovie]”. Nonetheless, it is clear this category signifies exiles. By comparison, at the beginning of 1898 Hawes reported 7080 penal laborers (i. e., katorzhnye) on the island. However this figure did not include convicts graduated to exile-settler (poselentsy) and peasant status. Thus Hawes gave the total number of convicts and ex-convicts at 22167. This figure equals almost exactly the totals of those the 1897 census categorizes as “not assigned to a class” and “peasants and Cossacks”. Cf. Hawes, Uttermost, 85. 10 Vlasov, “Kratkii”, 22; idem, “Otchet”, 8,22; RGIA DV, f. 1, op. 4, d. 142, 11. 64, 69, 78; d. 320, 11. 36-38, 39-40. [See abbreviation key in Bibliography.] The problem of poor supplies dogged the island for many years. For example in 1876 Dué’s commander reported that supply transport from the mainland port of Nikolaevsk-na-Amure were always insufficient. “Not one of the deliveries of these transports ... was without a significant absence of supplies”, he wrote, “and the present delivery by the Transport Iapontsev is distinguished by complete disorder ...”. Whether the absence of supplies was indeed the result of disorder or instead outright thievery is unclear, though it was probably a combination of both. See RGIA DV, f. 701, op. I, d. 142, it. 5-6. 11 RGIA DV, f. 1, op. 1, d. 320, II. 194-196; Vlasov, “Kratkii”, 41-43; idem, “Kopiia”, 1, 38. 12 Stephan, Sakhalin, 74, Additional figures on Sakhalin’s coal production between 1884 and 1886 are located in RGIA DV, f. 702, op. 2, d. 28, 11. 9-10, 11-12, 19-20. 13 This was made clear in a schedule drawn up as part of the 1875 lease agreement between the state and Sakhalin Company. BIGU, “Poiasnitel’-naia”, table, p. 2. 14 Stephan, Sakhalin, 33-40. 15 After returning from Sakhalin Nikolai Vasil’evich Busse (1.828-1866) led expeditions to the Arnur before becoming the district’s governor in 1858. (Russkii hiograficheskii, 508-509. On cause of death see Stephan, Russian, 53.) Busse’s diary appeared in book form as Ostrov Sakhalin: Ekspeditsiia 1853-1854 gg. (S.-Peterburg: V. tipografii F. S. Sushinskago, 1.872). 16 Chekhov, Island, 81, 82. 17 Such despair and cynicism may have been by products of what Abbott Gleason has perceptively suggested was a kind of “imperial exhaustion” which gripped the Russian state at this time, analogous to the malaise later affecting Great Britain. (Gleason’s comments were made during a round-table discussion held sometime in autumn of 1999 . a t the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Affairs at Brown University.) 18 “Exile to settlement” (ssylka na poselenie) followed katorga on the ladder of punishments. In fact, most convicted exiles (note the distinction from those exiled administratively) went to Siberia as exile-settlers (poselentsy). Katorzhrayn, upon successful completion of the hard labor portions of their sentences and the satisfaction of other requirements, transferred to the exile-settler category as part of an incremental process by which they might eventually regain their civil rights and be enrolled in the peasant class. However, few of those exiled or transferred to the exile-settler category remained in their assigned locations. On the topic of vagabondage and criminal culture in Siberia see N. M. Iadrintsev, Russkaia obshchina v tiur’me i ssylke (S. Peterburg: Tipografiia A. Morigerovskago, 1872); idem, Sibir’ kak koloniia v geograftcheskum, etnograficheskom i istoricheskorn otnoshenii, 2d ed. (S.-Peterburg: Izdanie I. M. Sibiriakova, 1892); Maksimov, Sibir’ (1900). 19 Vlasov, “Otchet”, 6-8. 20 Ibid., 15-16; RGIA DV, f. 1154, op. 1, d. 5; d. 16. 21 RGIA DV, f. I, op. 1, d. 320, 1.36. 22 Stephan, Sakhalin, 67-68. In fact, exiles often escaped from Sakhalin by crossing the narrow Tatar Straits either on the ice-bridge in winter or by homemade or stolen craft in summer. On a few occasions desperate fugitives would launch a raft from the island’s eastern shore in the hopes of being rescued by American whalers, which regularly combed the North Pacific during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (See Chekhov, Island, 350-352; Golos: 1-2; De Windt, Siberia, 76-79; Alan Wood, “Sex and Violence in Siberia: Aspects of the Tsarist Exile System”, in Siberia: Two Historical Perspectives, John Massey Stewart and Alan Wood (London: The Great Britain-USSR Association and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1984, 36.) Mitsul’s study of Sakhalin was published as Ocherk ostrova Sakhal ina v se! skokhoziaistvennorn otnoshenii (S. -Peterburg: [pub. info. unavailable], 1873). Vlasov and other officials knew of Mitsui’s findings not later that 1871. 23 At present I have no further biographical information on Vlasov other than what is presented here. This lack of information includes his full first name and patronymic. Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

24 Nikolai Petrovich Sinel’nikov (1805-1892), before his assumption of the governor-generalship, attained the rank of lieutenant-general and served in the Senate. Baron Platon Aleksandrovich Frederiks (1828-1888) served as head of GUVS from 1873 until 1879. Prior to this assignment he was in charge of the Department of Gendarmes in Warsaw. He later served on the State Council. Shobodoev, “Ot gubernii”: passim. 25 Aleksandr Egorovich Timashev (1818-1893) ran the MVD from 1868 until the end of 1877. Prior to this, he served as chief of staff of the Corps of Gendarmes and as head of the Third Section. He sat on the State Council from 1867 until his death. Joseph L. Wieczynski, ed., The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, v. 39 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International, 1985), 46-47; Orlovsky, Limits, 84-93. 26 Speranskii’s so-called Siberian Reforms were first published as Uchrezhdenie cilia upravleniia Sibirskikh gubernii (Sanktpeterburg: Pechatno v Senatskoi Tipografii, 1822). For a summary see “ 0 novykh”, Sibirskii vestnik; for an analysis see Raeff, Siberia; on the general organization structure of the government see idem, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772--1839 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957); Eroshkin, Ocherki; S. A. Chibiriaev, Velikii russkii reforrnator: Zhizn’, deiatel’nost’, politicheskie vzgliadv M. M. Speranskogo (Moskva: Nauka, 1989). 27 Vlasov, “Otchet”, 2-3, 33. Vlasov cites Mitsui’s work in this regard. 28 RGIA DV, f. 701, op. 1, d. 142, ll. 3-4, 64-68, 76-78. 29 Ivan Semenovich Poliakov (1845-1887) was a prolific author who traveled extensively throughout the empire on behalf of the Geographic Society, by which activity he came to the attention of the tsar and entered government service in 1881. His trip to Sakhalin was part of a tour which included Japan. He did not return from this tour until February 1885, though it is unclear how long he actually spent on Sakhalin. Russkii biograficheskii, v. XIV, 481-484. 30 I. S. Poliakov, Puteshestvie na ostrov Sakhalin v 1881-1882 gg. (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia A. S. Suvorina. 1883), 110- 111. 3l Anton Chekhov, Ostrov Sakhalin, M. L. Semenova. intro. and ed. (Moskva: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1984), 66-67. 32 Dmitrii Andreevich Dril’ (1846-1910) was a polymath with advanced degrees in medicine and law, training in psychoncurology and finance, and an active interest in children’s welfare. I Ic drew upon this varied background in his criminological pursuits. Dril’ represented Russia at several international congresses on penology; and in addition to his travels to Siberia and Sakhalin, visited French prisons in New Caledonia. which led to his 1899 work comparing exile systems in France and Russia. Entsiklope ticheskii slovar’,v. 4, 812-814. 33 [D. A. Dril’], Katorga i ssylka na ostrov Sakhalin, v Priamurskii krai i v Sibir’: Izvlechenie iz otcheta Chinovnika osobykh poruchenii pri Ministerstve Iustitsii, Magistra ugolovnago prava D. A. Drilia po komandirovke v 1896 godu (S.- Peterburg: rep., 1898), 4ff. 34 By comparison the state’s transportation costs for exiles who entered Siberia through a combination of foot, railroad, and barge travel averaged 125r. per person; though when “taking into account the obligation of the local population to forward the exiles, the cost reaches 300r.” Fel’dstein, Ssylka, 180. See also Foinitskii, Uchenie,’ 298-299. 35 A possible exception was the settlement during the 1760s of the Baraba Steppe by Denis 1. Chicherin, governor-general of a then administratively-united Siberia. Yet to regard this project as a success one would have to conform to the autocratic values of the time because, like the other projects, it involved the sacrifice of many lives. Concerning exile colonies see Maksimov, Sibir’ (1900), passim; Fel’dstein, Ssylka, passim; Ssylka v Sibir, passim; G. Peizen, “Istoricheskii ocherk kolonizatsii Sibiri”, Sovremennik 9 (1859): 9-46; Sergei Dizhur, “Russkaia ssylka. Eia istoriia i ozhidaemaia reforma”, Ilusskoe bogatstvo 4 (April, 1900): 45-64; A. P. Okladnikov, et al., eds., Istoriia Sibiri s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, 5 vol. (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka”, 1968), passim. 36 See Ssylka v Sibir’, 31ff. et passim; Foinitskii, Uchenie, 267 et passim; Adams, Politics, passim. 37 Cf. Adams, Politics; M. N. Gernet, Istoriia tsarskoi tiur’my, 5 vols., 3” I ed. (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1960). 38 S. Maksimov, Sibir’ i katorga, pt. 2 (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia A. Transhelia, 1871), tables et passim; E. N. Anuchi.n, Izsledovaniia o protesente soslannykh c Sihir’ v period 1827-1846 godov: rnatertaly dlia ugolovnoi statistiki Rossil (S.- Peterburg: Tipografiia Maikova, 1873). tables, pp. 23-24; Ssylka v SibiU, appendices, table, pp. 14-18. It should be added here that, with the notable and temporal exception of those exiled as a result of the 1863 Polish Insurrection, during the nineteenth century political exiles (designated as both politicheskie and gosudarstvenny ssylnye) accounted for only around one to two percent of the total exile population. 39 Ssylka v Sibir’, appendices, table, pp. 39-40. 40 Ibid., appendices, table, pp. 1-2. 41 Over half of the Poles exiled as a result of the uprising were residents of the Western Provinces. Because both Congress Poland and the provinces were multi-ethnic regions. the term “Polish exiles” should be interpreted somewhat loosely. Figures on the number of Polish exiles may be found in Maksimov, Sibir’ (1872), table, pp. 336-337; idem, Sibir’ (1900), 358: Mitina, V gluhine,14; Roshchevskaia, Istoriia, 79 and table, p. 43; idem, Revoliutsionery-raznochintsy v zapadnosibirskom izgnanii (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1983), 37. Concerning Poland’s and the Western Provinces’ demo-graphics see R. F. Leslie, Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland, 1856-1865 (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1963), 50; Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois, 1996), tables 1 through 8, Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

pp. 82-89; Territory and Population of Poland [Polish Encyclopaedia, v. 2], (1924; rpt. New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1972). 42 GARF, f. 122, op. 5, d. 1, 11. 127-132. Mikhail Semenovich Korsakov (1826-1871) was a cousin of N. N. Murav’ev, whom he replaced as governor-general from 1861 until his death in 1871. He began service in Siberia in 1851, there-after occupying a variety of military-administrative positions. Shobodoev, “Ot gubernii”, passim; Stephan, Russian, 46, 53, 322. 43 GARF, f. 122, op. 5. d. 1. 44 Nonetheless, as early as 1867 many of those Poles who were deemed less guilty began to be released, largely due to the exile system’s incapacity to deal with them. [GA1O, f.24, op.3, k. 1768, d.90; k.1769, d.1.22, d.107; k. 1770, d. 128, 128a, 128e [= Cyrillic “v”]; k. 1771, d. 128b. 45 GA10, f. 455, op. 1, d. 4, II. 4--5. 46 Roshchevskaia, Istoriia, 38-39. 47 That which follows is from GAIO, f. 32, op. 1, d. 5327, 11. 121-150. The report was the result of an initial investigation into embezzlement by clerks at the Bureau. It is undated, though an MVD letter indicates that it was prepared prior to 23 September 1877. Cf. ibid., 1. 120. 48 There existed three categories of katorga: mining, factory, and fortress. Theoretically, the first was supposed to be the most severe and convicts who received the longest sentences were supposed to end up there. But in practice, various categories’ severity depended largely upon the local katorga regimes. This three-tier division was codified in the Dopolnitel’nyia postanovleniia o praspredelenii i upotreblenii osuzhdennykh v katorzhnyia raboty. Polozhenie o ispravitelnykh arestantskikh rotakh grazhdanskago vedomstva. Dopolnitel’-nyia pravila k ustavu o soderzhashchikhsia pod strazheiu ([n. p.: n. p], 1845); and confirmed in Nachal’nik Glavnago tiuremnago upravleniia [M. Galkin-Vraskoi], 0 .s.sylke, 28 December 1886 [This is an MVD internal memorandum, catalogued under W 15163 in the Russian State Library, Moscow]. 49 GAIO, f. 24, op. 3, k. 1780, d. 236, 11. 1-2; k. 1766, d. 65; k. 1773, d. 141. It should he pointed out that such concerns were not completely unwarranted. During the 1830s authorities uncovered a plot by Polish exiles in Omsk and Tobolsk to launch a mass uprising amongst all the disaffected elements in Siberia. Moreover, a futile revolt by Polish exiles did occur in 1866 near Lake Baikal. Maksimov, Sihir’ (1900), 350ff.; A. S. Nagaev, Ornskoe delo, I833-1834 gg. (Krasnoiarsk: Izdatel’stvo Krasnoiarskogo universiteta, 1991); M. D. Filin, “Pol’skie revoliutsionery v zabaikal’skoi politicheskoi ssylke v 30-40-e gg. XIX v. (po materialam Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Chitinskoi oblasti)”, in L. M. Goriushkin, ed., Politicheskie ssyl’nye v Sibiri (XVIII-nac:halo XX v.) (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1983), 167-177; L. M. Goriushkin, ed., Politicheskaia ssylka v Sibiri: Nerchinskaia katorga [v. 1, issue 2 of Istoriia Sibiri. Pervoistochnikil (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1993), various documents; Mitina, Vo gluhine; S. F. Koval’. “Polskie ssyl’nye posle Krugobaikal’-skogo vosstaniia 1866 g.”, in L. M. Goriushkin, ed., Ssylka i katorga v Sibiri (ATM-mahalo XX Li.) (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1975), 153-160.

50 GAIO, f. 24, op. 3, k. 1766, d. 65, Il. 95-97. 51 These developments are described in Vlasov, “Kopiia”, 11. 1-2. It is possible that what Vlasov refers to as simply the “Special Committee” is what Adams has described as the “Main Prison Committee”. However the committee about which Adams writes appears to have had a much broader mandate than the one Vlasov describes. Whatever the case, it should he noted that beginning in 1867 the MVD had launched a major effort to address general prison reform, embracing a number of issues necessarily beyond the scope of this paper. Cf. Adams. Politics of Punishment, 54-55 et passim. 52 The council was composed of six high-ranking councilors (sovetniki) from within GUVS. In theory, the governor- general was supposed to defer to the advice of this body, but in practice the council rubber-stamped his decisions. See “ 0 novykh”, Sibirskii vestnik; Raeff, Siberia, 73 ff.; Eroshkin, Ocherki, 240ff. As of October 1872 the council consisted of E. Simonov, A. Savinskii, B. Miliutin, D. Bol’shakov, A. Paderin, and V. Vlasov. 53 ‘Timashev, MVD DPI, p. 5. 54 Vlasov, “Kopiia”, 11.3-8, 12, 14-15. See also RGIA DV, f. 1, op. 1, d. 32, [l. 194-196. 55 “Kopiia s zhurnala”, 11.81-82. 56 Vlasov, “Kopiia”, 11. 2-3. 57 Quote is from Timashev, MVD DPI, 5. See also “Kopiia s zhurnala”, Il. 82-83. 58 Vlasov, “Kopiia”, 1. 12. 59 Timashev, MVD DPI, 5. 60 For example he cited the complete absence there of any sort of penal code. Vlasov, “Kratkii”, 50. 61 There is a large literature on Russia’s so-called Great Reforms. For more recent treatments see those in Ben Eklof, et al., eds., Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1881 (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana. 1994). 62 Orlovsky, Limits, 87. 63 KOKR, 1 March 1875. KOKR should not be confused with the Korniteta oh ustroistve katorzhnykh rabot, established as early as 1869, but which had a much broader mandate. However it is entirely possible that KOKR was an extension or subcommittee of KUKR. Cf. GARF, f. 122, op. 6, d. 648, ll. 8-29; Timashev, MVD DPI, 9-10. 64 Mikhail Romanovich Shidlovskii (1826-1880), in addition to the positions listed above, served as governor of Tula Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

Province from 1857 to 1870. He was released from his duties at the MVD due to poor health. Russkii biograficheskii, v. XXIII, 274. 65 Frish, an official in the Ministry of Justice, chaired a commission from 187] to 1873 whose purpose was to revise punishments and laws listed in the 1845 criminal code. Adams, Politics, 77-78 et passim. 66 Between 1862 and 1867 Despot-Zenovich was governor of Tobolsk Province in Siberia. An ethnic Pole, he had been exiled from Moscow to Perth for political reasons around 1850. Judged on the basis of later relations with Polish exiles, Despot-Zenovich was considered too liberal a governor by the regional gendarmerie and too inconsistent by Alexander Herzen, who wrote in Kolokol that he “was exiled as a liberal-but reformed”. Roshchevskaia, Istoriia, 12-13, 86-87; Mitina, Vo gluhine, 21-22. 67 Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sollogub (aka Sologub) (1814-1882) was of Polish lineage, though his family settled in Russia under Catherine II. Trained in law, he first worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an attache at the embassy in Austria before joining the MVD. Renowned largely for his numerous literary works, in 1870 he toured prisons in Europe and the next year, in Siberia. In 1872 he chaired a commission involved in prison reform. Adams, Politics, 65-77; Russkii biografacheskii, v. XIX, 96-98. 68 Oskar Ilich Kvist (1827-1890) was a jurist who worked for the Senate as both procuror for Volhynia Province and as oher-secretary in the Fourth Department of the Imperial Chancellery. He took an active role in the Judicial Reforms of 1864 and was Russia’s representative at international juridical congresses. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, v. 5, 742. 69 Biographical information could not be found on Belenchenko, Kititsyn, Beklemishev, or Sokolovskii. 70 Both Deikhman and Vlasov sat on KOKR as well. Sometime between 1873 and 1875 Vlasov was promoted from collegiate to state councilor, presumably on the strength of his work vis-a-vis Sakhalin. Oskar Aleskandrovich Deikhman (1818-1891), a mining engineer, was put in charge of the mines and industries of the Nerchinsk Mining District by N.N. Murav’ev in 1856. In that capacity Deikhman demonstrated such “humane views” and became so friendly with katorzhnye that he was booted from government service a decade later and ordered to remain in Petersburg. However his fall from grace lasted less than a year and he was soon working again for the Ministries of Finance, the Navy, and internal Affairs. As part of his work for the MVD Deikhman was charged with improving conditions at an imperial prison in Finland. In the early seventies he went to Sakhalin to investigate geologic conditions there, and from this produced several scientific articles. Russkii hiogruficheskii, v. VI, 173-175. 71 KOKR, 1 March 1875. 72 KOKR, 3, 5, 8, f 1, 15, 17, 21, 22 March 1875. Minutes do not distinguish between individual sessions. 73 On the treaty see Stephan, Sakhalin, 62-64. 74 KOKR, 22 September 1875. The agreement with the Sakhalin Company, while interesting in itself, appears to have had little bearing on the decision to establish a penal colony on Sakhalin, largely owing to the state’s recognition (by 1875) that it could assign only relatively few katorzhnye to mining. For this reason I have chosen not to focus on this topic here. 75 KOKR, 22 and 29 September 1875. Concerning plans for the farm division, see Vlasov, “Otchet”, 33ff. Officials did however establish on Sakhalin, both before and after the KOKR sessions, at least a couple of so-called model farms utilizing exile-laborers. One of these was the Dué Farm mentioned above, which had a population of almost 350 katorzhnye in 1876. However this and the other farms were failures. See ibid., 24; RGIA DV; f. 701, op. 1, d. 142, 11. 21- 22, 23-25, 28, 54-61, 64--68, 74, 76-78. 76 KOKR, 6 October 1875. Military administrations were common throughout the empire during its last century and a half, governing, for instance, the Nerchinsk and Altai mining districts in Siberia. Moreover the entire administrative apparatus of Siberia was organized in a martial fashion with governors-general possessing both military and civilian authority. But the presence of a military administration on Sakhalin should not suggest the island’s military-strategic role superseded its penal one. Indeed quite the opposite was true. The fact that there were only 1351 soldiers on the island at the end of the century demonstrates this. 1897 census, table, pp. 52-53. 77 “Mnenie dvukh chlenov”. p. I. Dated 14 November 1875, appended to KOKR minutes. 78 RGIADV,f.1.op_I,d1010,1.1.40. 79 Fel’dstein, Ssylka, 176; 1897 census, iv. 80 GARF, f. 122, op. 6. d. 648, 118-29. This is an internal memo of the Main Prison Administration (Glavnoe tiuremnoe upravlenie), dated 17 October 1885. The GTU was established in 1879 as a subsection of the MVD with general authority over all Russian prisons and exiled convicts. In 1896 control over it transferred to the Ministry of Justice (Ministersivo Justitsii-MIu). 81 RGIA DV, f. 1, op. 1, d. 1010, 1. 140; d. 1383, 11. 29, 30. 82 1897 census, table, p. vi. This figure combines exiles in all categories including those since transferred to peasant and Cossack status. Despite such a large penal population on Sakhalin the earlier-established katorga regimes at Nerchinsk and elsewhere were not dismantled, though their convict populations were drastically reduced. 83 Stephan, Sakhalin, 78-81, 90-91.

Bibliography of frequently cited sources Journal of Asian History (2002) 36(1):1-31.

Archival sources: Abbreviations: f.=fond (collection); op.=opis’ (listing); k.=karton (carton); d, = delo (sheaf); l,=list (sheet) BIGU - Irkutsk State University Library (Biblioteka Irkutskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta) [Irkutsk], Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, “Sakhalin” collection, cat. no. RUK. 345. This is a sheaf of internal GUVS memoranda containing the following seven documents: 1) “Kopiia s zhurnala Soveta Glavnago Upravleniia Vostochnoi Sibiri, sostoiavshagosia 13-go Oktiahria 1872 goda No. 21- i.” Listy numbers are internal to the document, but are sequential following Vlasov, “Kopiia” (see below). 2) “Poiasnitel’naja zapiska k procktu uslovii na s dachu g. Butkovskago v arendu Duiskikh kamennougol’nykh kopei”. This is an addendum to KOKR, 3, 5, 8, 11, 15, 17, 21, 22 March 1875 (see below). Pagination is internal to document. 3) [Timashev. A. E.] Untitled MVD DPI report dated March 1876, signed by Timashev. concerning the establishment of the Dué katorga administration. Pagination is internal to document. 4) Vlasov, V. [I.] “Otchet po izsledovaniiu ostrova Sakhalina i predpolozheniia ob ustroistve na nem penitentsiarnykh kolonii”, 28 July 1873. Pagination is internal to document. 5) Idem. “Kopiia s soobrazhenii predstavlennykh Kollezhskim Sovetnikom V1asovym General-Gubernatory Vostochnoi Sibiri, ob ustroistv katorzhnykh rabot na o. Sakhaline”. undated (c. autumn 1871). Listy numbers internal to document. 6) Idem. “Kratkii ocherk neustroisty, sushchestvuiushchikh na katorge”, 31 January 1873. In addition to I3IGIJ’s copy I found and utilized another copy of this document in the Society for Study of the Amur Region (Obshchestvo izuchenii Amurskogo kraia) [Vladivostok], Sbornik ofitsial’nykh svedenii ob Arnurskom krae, Tom I, cat. no. 1598. Pagination is internal to document. Note also that the catalog of the Russian State Library (Rossiskaia Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka) in Moscow lists a copy of this document. 7) Zhurnal Kommisii po organizatsii katorzhnykh rabot. KOKR minutes, cited as “KOKR, [date]”. GAIO - Irkutsk Province State Archive (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Irkutstkoi oblasti), Irkutsk: Fond 24: Main Administration of Eastern Siberia (Glavnoe upravlenie Vostochnoi Sibiri) 1822-1887 Fond 32: Irkutsk Provincial Administration (Irkutskoe guhernskoe upravlenie) 1834-1917 Fond 455: Kirensk District Police Administration (Politicheskoe Kirenskoe uezdnoe upravlenie) 1866-1917 GARF - Russian Federation State Archive (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii), Moscow. Fond 122: Ministry of Justice’s Main Prison Administration (GTU pri Mlu) 1879-1917 RGIA DV - Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East (Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia istoricheskaia arkhiv Dal’nego Vostoka), Vladivostok. Fond 1: Primor’c District Administration (Primorskoe ohlastnoe pravlenie) 1862-1917. Fond 701: Main Administration of Eastern Siberia (Glavnoe upravlenie Vostochnoi Sibiri) 1858-1903. Fond 702: Chancellery of the Priamur Governor-generalship (Kantseliariia Priamurskogo general-gubernatova), 1861- 1920. Fond 1154: Southern Sakhalin Police Administration. Korsakovsk Post (Iuzhnosakhalinskoe okruzhnoe polirseiskoe upravlenie. Post Korsakov) 1867-1893.

Published sources Adams, Bruce F. The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863-1917. Dekalb: Northern Illinois, 1996. Administrativno-territorial’noe delenie Primorskogo kraia, 1865-1980 gg. Vladivostok: DVNTs AN SSSR, 1984. (Cited as AtdPk.) Anon, “Nashi zadachi na Sakhaline”, Golos, 11 November 1875: 1-2. Anon, “ 0 novykh postanovleniiakh dlia upravleniia Sibiri”. Sibirskii vestnik 9 (September 1822): 1-28. Chekhov, Anton. The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin. Trans. Luba and Michael Terpak. 1967; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. De Windt, Harry, The New Siberia. London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1896. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauz i Efron biografii. Moskva: “Bolshaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia”, 1993. Eroshkin, N. P. Ocherki istorii gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Uchebno-Pedagogicheskoe Izdatel’stvo Ministerstva Prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1960.