Part 27

A few days later we were at Merghén, where we traded a little, and soon reached the Chinese town of Aigún, on the right bank of the Amúr, and the Russian town of Blagovéschensk, on the left bank. We had discovered the direct route and many interesting things besides: the border-ridge character of the Great Khinghán, the ease with which it can be crossed, the tertiary volcanoes of the Uyún Kholdontsí region, which had so long been a puzzle in geographical literature, and so on. I cannot say that I was a sharp tradesman, for at Merghén I persisted (in broken Chinese) in asking thirty-five roubles for a watch when the Chinese buyer had already offered me forty-five; but the Cossacks traded all right. They sold very well all their horses, and when my horses, my goods, and the rest were sold by the Cossacks it appeared that the expedition had cost the government the modest sum of twenty-two roubles--a little over two pounds.

All this summer I travelled on the Amúr. I went as far as its mouth, or rather its estuary--Nikoláevsk--to join the Governor-General, whom I accompanied in a steamer up the Usurí; and after that, in the autumn, I made a still more interesting journey up the Sungarí, to the very heart of Manchuria, as far as Ghirín (or Kirín, according to the southern pronunciation).

Many rivers in Asia are formed by the junction of two equally important streams, so that it is difficult for the geographer to say which of the two is the main one and which is a tributary. The Ingodá and the Onón join to make the Shílka; the Shílka and the Argúñ join to make the Amúr; and the Amúr joins the Sungarí to form that mighty stream which flows north-eastwards and enters the Pacific in the inhospitable latitudes of the Tartar Strait.

Up to the year 1864 the great river of Manchuria remained very little known. All information about it dated from the times of the Jesuits, and that was scanty. Now that a revival in the exploration of Mongolia and Manchuria was going to take place, and the fear of China which had hitherto been entertained in Russia appeared to be exaggerated, all of us younger people pressed upon the Governor-General the necessity of exploring the Sungarí. To have next door to the Amúr an immense region almost as little known as an African desert seemed to us provoking. Quite unexpectedly, General Korsákoff decided that same autumn to send a steamer up the Sungarí, under the pretext of carrying some message of friendship to the Governor-General of the Ghirín province. A Russian consul from Urgá had to take the message. A doctor, an astronomer, two topographers, and myself, all placed under the command of a Colonel Chernyáeff, had to take part in the expedition on board a tiny steamer, Usuri, which had in tow a barge with coal. Twenty-five soldiers, whose rifles were carefully concealed in the coal, went with us on the barge.

All was organized very hurriedly, and there was no accommodation on the small steamer to receive such a numerous company; but we were all full of enthusiasm, and huddled as best we could in the tiny cabins. One of us had to sleep on a table, and when we started we found that there were even no knives and forks for all of us--not to speak of other necessaries. One of us resorted to his penknife at dinner time, and my Chinese knife with two ivory sticks was a welcome addition to our equipment.

It was not an easy task to go up the Sungarí. The great river, in its lower parts, where it flows through the same lowlands as the Amúr, is very shallow, and, although our steamer had only three feet draught, we often could not find a channel deep enough to pass through. There were days when we advanced but some forty miles, and scraped many times the sandy bottom of the river with our keel; over and over again a rowing boat was sent out to find the necessary depth. But our young captain had made up his mind that he would reach Ghirín this autumn, and we progressed every day. As we advanced higher and higher up we found the river more and more beautiful, and more and more easy for navigation; and when we had passed the sandy deserts at its junction with its sister-river, the Nónni, navigation became easy and pleasant. In a few weeks we reached the capital of this province of Manchuria. An excellent map of the river was made by the topographers.

There was no time, unfortunately, to spare, and so we very seldom landed in any village or town. The villages are few and rare along the banks of the river, and in its lower parts we found only lowlands, which are inundated every year. Higher up we sailed for a hundred miles amidst sand dunes. It was only when we reached the upper Sungarí and began to approach Ghirín that we found a dense population.

If our aim had been to establish friendly relations with Manchuria--and not simply to learn what the Sungarí is--our expedition ought to have been considered a dead failure. The Manchurian authorities had it fresh in their memories how, eight years before, the ‘visit’ of Muravióff ended in the annexation of the Amúr and the Usurí, and they could not but look with suspicion on these new and uncalled-for visitors. The twenty-five rifles concealed in the coal, which had been duly reported to the Chinese authorities before we left, still more provoked their suspicions; and when our steamer cast her anchor in front of the populous city of Ghirín we found all its merchants armed with rusty swords, unearthed from some old arsenal. We were not prevented, however, from walking in the streets, but all shops were closed as soon as we landed and the merchants were not allowed to sell anything. Some provisions were sent on board the steamer--as a gift, but no money was taken in return.

The autumn was rapidly coming to its end, the frosts began already, and we had to hurry back, as we could not winter on the Sungarí. In short, we saw Ghirín, but spoke to none but the couple of interpreters who came every morning on board our steamer. Our aim, however, was fulfilled. We had ascertained that the river is navigable, and a detailed map of it was made, from its mouth to Ghirín, with the aid of which we were able to steam on our return journey at full speed without any accident. Our steamer only once touched the ground. But the Ghirín authorities, desirous above all that we should not be compelled to winter on the river, sent us two hundred Chinese, who aided us in getting off the sands. When I jumped into the water and, also taking a stick, began to sing our river song, ‘Dubínushka,’ which helps all present to give a sudden push at the same moment, the Chinese enjoyed immensely the fun of it, and after several such pushes the steamer was soon afloat. The most cordial relations were established after this little adventure between ourselves and the Chinese--I mean, of course, the people, who seemed to dislike very much their arrogant Manchurian officials.

We called at several Chinese villages peopled with exiles from the celestial empire, and we were received in the most cordial way. One evening especially impressed itself on my memory. We came to a small, picturesque village as night was already falling. Some of us landed, and I went alone through the village. A thick crowd of a hundred Chinese soon surrounded me, and although I knew not a word of their tongue, and they knew no more of mine, we chatted in the most amicable way by mimicry and we understood each other. To pat one on the shoulders in sign of friendship is decidedly international language. To offer each other tobacco and to be offered a light is again an international expression of friendship. One thing interested them--why had I, though young, a beard? They wear none before they are sixty. And when I told them by signs that in case I should have nothing to eat I might eat it--the joke was transmitted from one to the other through the whole crowd. They roared with laughter, and began to pat me even more caressingly on the shoulders; they took me about, showing me their houses, everyone offered me his pipe, and the whole crowd accompanied me as a friend to the steamer. I must say that there was not one single boshkó (policeman) in that village. In other villages our soldiers and the young officers always made friends with the Chinese, but as soon as a boshkó appeared all was spoiled. In return, one must have seen what ‘faces’ they used to make at the boshkó behind his back! They evidently hated these representatives of authority.

Our expedition has since been forgotten. The astronomer, Th. Usóltzeff, and I published reports about it in the ‘Memoirs’ of the Siberian Geographical Society; but a few years later a great conflagration at Irkútsk destroyed all the copies left of the Memoirs as well as the original map of the Sungarí, and it was only last year, when the Trans-Manchurian railway began to be built, that Russian geographers unearthed our reports, and found that the great river had been explored five-and-thirty years ago.

VII

As there was nothing more to be done in the direction of reform, I tried to do what seemed to be possible under the existing circumstances--only to become convinced of the absolute uselessness of such efforts. In my new capacity of attaché to the Governor-General for Cossack affairs, I made, for instance, a most thorough investigation of the economical condition of the Usurí Cossacks, whose crops used to be lost every year, so that the government had every winter to feed them in order to save them from famine. When I returned from the Usurí with my report, I received congratulations on all sides, I was promoted, I got special rewards. All the measures I recommended were accepted, and special grants of money were given for aiding the emigration of some and for supplying cattle to others, as I had suggested. But the practical realization of the measures went into the hands of some old drunkard, who would squander the money and pitilessly flog the unfortunate Cossacks for the purpose of converting them into good agriculturists. And thus it went on in all directions, beginning with the winter palace at St. Petersburg and ending with the Usurí and Kamchátka.

The higher administration of Siberia was influenced by excellent intentions, and I can only repeat that, everything considered, it was far better, far more enlightened, and far more interested in the welfare of the people than the administration of any other province of Russia. But it was an administration--a branch of the tree which had its roots at St. Petersburg--and that was enough to paralyze all its excellent intentions, enough to make it interfere with and kill all the beginnings of local life and progress. Whatever was started for the good of the country by local men was looked at with distrust, and was immediately paralyzed by hosts of difficulties which came, not so much from the bad intentions of the administrators, but simply from the fact that these officials belonged to a pyramidal, centralized administration. The very fact of their belonging to a government which radiated from a distant capital caused them to look upon everything from the point of view of functionaries of the government, who think first of all about what their superiors will say, and how this or that will appear in the administrative machinery. The interests of the country are a secondary matter.

Gradually I turned my energy more and more toward scientific exploration. In 1865 I explored the western Sayáns, where I caught a new glimpse of the structure of the Siberian highlands and came upon another important volcanic region on the Chinese frontier; and finally, the year following, I undertook a long journey to discover a direct communication between the gold mines of the Yakútsk province (on the Vitím and the Olókma) and Transbaikália. For many years the members of the Siberian expedition (1860-1864) had tried to find such a passage, and had endeavoured to cross the series of very wild, stony parallel ridges which separate these mines from the plains of Transbaikália; but when, coming from the south, they reached that gloomy mountain region, and saw before them the dreary mountains spreading for hundreds of miles northward, all of these explorers, save one who was killed by natives, returned southward. It was evident that in order to be successful the expedition had to move from the north to the south--from the dreary unknown wilderness to the warmer and populated regions. It so happened, also, that while I was preparing for the expedition I was shown a map which a Tungus had traced with his knife on a piece of bark. This little map--a splendid specimen, by the way, of the usefulness of the geometrical sense in the lowest stages of civilization, and one which would consequently interest A. R. Wallace--so struck me by its seeming truth to nature that I fully trusted to it, and began my journey from the north, following the indications of the map.

In company with a young and promising naturalist, Polakóff, and a topographer, we went first down the Léna to the northern gold mines. There we equipped the expedition, taking provisions for three months, and started southward. An old Yakút hunter, who twenty years before had once followed the passage indicated in the Tungus map, undertook to act for us as a guide and to cross the mountain region--250 miles wide--following the river-valleys and gorges indicated by the Tungus with his knife on the birch-bark map. He really accomplished that astounding feat, although there was no track of any sort to follow, and all the valleys that one saw from the top of a mountain pass, all equally covered with wood, seemed to be absolutely alike to the unpractised eye. This time the passage was found. For three months we wandered in the almost totally uninhabited mountain deserts and over the marshy plateau, till at last we reached our destination, Chitá. I am told that this passage is now of value for bringing cattle from the south to the gold mines; as for me, the journey helped me immensely afterwards in finding the key to the structure of the mountains and plateaus of Siberia--but I am not writing a book of travel, and must stop.

* * * * *

The years that I spent in Siberia taught me many lessons which I could hardly have learned elsewhere. I soon realized the absolute impossibility of doing anything really useful for the masses of the people by means of the administrative machinery. With this illusion I parted for ever. Then I began to understand not only men and human character, but also the inner springs of the life of human society. The constructive work of the unknown masses, which so seldom finds any mention in books, and the importance of that constructive work in the growth of forms of society, appeared before my eyes in a clear light. To witness, for instance, the ways in which the communities of Dukhobórtsy (brothers of those who are now settling in Canada, and who found such a hearty support in England and the United States) migrated to the Amúr region; to see the immense advantages which they got from their semi-communistic brotherly organization; and to realize what a success their colonization was, amidst all the failures of State colonization, was learning something which cannot be learned from books. Again, to live with natives, to see at work the complex forms of social organization which they have elaborated far away from the influence of any civilization, was, as it were, to store up floods of light which illuminated my subsequent reading. The part which the unknown masses play in the accomplishment of all important historical events, and even in war, became evident to me from direct observation, and I came to hold ideas similar to those which Tolstóy expresses concerning the leaders and the masses in his monumental work, ‘War and Peace.’

Having been brought up in a serf-owner’s family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing, and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline, and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills. Although I did not then formulate my observations in terms borrowed from party struggles, I may say now that I lost in Siberia whatever faith in State discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist.

From the age of nineteen to twenty-five I had to work out important schemes of reform, to deal with hundreds of men on the Amúr, to prepare and to make risky expeditions with ridiculously small means, and so on; and if all these things ended more or less successfully, I account for it only by the fact that I soon understood that in serious work commanding and discipline are of little avail. Men of initiative are required everywhere; but once the impulse has been given, the enterprise must be conducted, especially in Russia, not in military fashion, but in a sort of communal way, by means of common understanding. I wish that all framers of plans of State discipline could pass through the school of real life before they begin to frame their State Utopias: we should then hear far less than at present of schemes of military and pyramidal organization of society.

With all that, life in Siberia became less and less attractive for me, although my brother Alexander had joined me in 1864 at Irkútsk, where he commanded a squadron of Cossacks. We were happy to be together; we read a great deal and discussed all the philosophical, scientific, and sociological questions of the day; but we both longed after intellectual life, and there was none in Siberia. The occasional passage through Irkútsk of Raphael Pumpelly or of Adolph Bastian--the only two men of science who visited our capital during my stay there--was quite an event for both of us. The scientific and especially the political life of Western Europe, of which we heard through the papers, attracted us, and the return to Russia was the subject to which we continually came back in our conversations. Finally, the insurrection of the Polish exiles in 1866 opened our eyes to the false position we both occupied as officers of the Russian army.

VIII

I was far away in the Vitím mountains when some Polish exiles, who were employed in piercing a new road in the cliffs round Lake Baikál, made a desperate attempt to break their chains and to force their way to China across Mongolia. Troops were sent out against them, and a Russian officer was killed by the insurgents. I heard of it on my return to Irkútsk, where some fifty Poles were to be tried by a court-martial. The sittings of courts-martial being open in Russia, I followed this, taking detailed notes of the proceedings, which I sent to a St. Petersburg paper, and which were published in full, to the great dissatisfaction of the Governor-General.

Eleven thousand Poles, men and women, had been transported to East Siberia in consequence of the insurrection of 1863. They were chiefly students, artists, ex-officers, nobles, and especially skilled artisans from the intelligent and highly developed working-men’s population of Warsaw and other towns. A great number of them were kept in hard labour, while the remainder were settled all over the country in villages where they could find no work whatever and lived in a state of semi-starvation. Those who were condemned to hard labour worked either at Chitá, building the barges for the Amúr--these were the happiest--or in iron works of the Crown, or in salt works. I saw some of the latter, on the Léna, standing half-naked in a shanty, round an immense cauldron filled with salt-brine, and mixing the thick, boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the gates of the shanty were wide open to make a strong current of glacial air. After two years of such work these martyrs were sure to die from consumption.

Lately, a considerable number of Polish exiles were employed as navvies building a road along the southern coast of Lake Baikál. This narrow Alpine lake, four hundred miles long, surrounded by beautiful mountains rising three to five thousand feet above its level, cuts off Transbaikália and the Amúr from Irkútsk. In winter it may be crossed over the ice and in summer there are steamers, but for six weeks in the spring and another six weeks in the autumn the only means to reach Chitá and Kyákhta (for Pekin) from Irkútsk was to travel on horseback a long circuitous route, across mountains 7,000 to 8,000 feet in altitude. I once travelled along this track, greatly enjoying the scenery of the mountains, which were snow-clad in May, but otherwise the journey was really awful. To climb eight miles only, to the top of the main pass, Khamár-dabán, it took me the whole day from three in the morning till eight at night. Our horses continually fell through the thawing snow, plunging with the rider many times a day into icy water which flowed underneath the snow-crust. It was decided accordingly to build a permanent road along the southern coast of the lake, blowing up a passage in the steep, almost vertical cliffs which rise along the shore, and spanning with bridges a hundred wild torrents which furiously rush from the mountains into the lake. Polish exiles were employed at this hard work.

Several batches of Russian political exiles had been sent during the last century to Siberia, but, with the submissiveness to fate which is characteristic of the Russians, they never revolted; they allowed themselves to be killed inch by inch, without ever attempting to free themselves. The Poles, on the contrary--this must be said to their honour--were never so submissive as that, and this time they broke into open revolt. They evidently had no chance of success--they revolted nevertheless. They had before them the great lake, and behind them a girdle of absolutely impracticable mountains, beyond which begin the wildernesses of North Mongolia; but they nevertheless conceived the idea of disarming the soldiers who guarded them, forging those terrible weapons of the Polish insurrections--scythes planted as pikes on long poles--and making their way across the mountains and across Mongolia, towards China, where they would find English ships to take them. One day the news came to Irkútsk that part of those Poles who were at work on the Baikál road had disarmed a dozen soldiers and broken out into revolt. Eighty soldiers were all that could be despatched against them from Irkútsk. Crossing the lake in a steamer, they went to meet the insurgents on the other side of the lake.

The winter of 1866 had been unusually dull at Irkútsk. In the Siberian capital there is no such distinction between the different classes as one sees in Russian provincial towns; and the Irkútsk ‘society,’ composed of numerous officers and officials, together with the wives and daughters of local traders and even clergymen, met during the winter, every Thursday, at the Assembly Rooms. This winter, however, there was no ‘go’ in the evening parties. Amateur theatricals, too, were not successful; and gambling, which was usually pursued on a grand scale at Irkútsk, only dragged just along: a want of money was felt this winter among the officials, and even the arrival of several mining officers did not bring with it the heaps of bank-notes with which these privileged gentlemen usually enlivened the knights of the green tables. The season was decidedly dull--just the season for starting spiritualistic experiences with talking tables and talkative spirits. A gentleman who had been during the previous winter the pet of Irkútsk society on account of the tales which he recited with great talent, seeing that interest in himself and his tales was failing, now took to spiritualism as a new amusement. He was clever, and in a week’s time the Irkútsk ladies were mad over talking spirits. A new life was infused amongst those who did not know how to kill time. Talking tables appeared in every drawing-room, and love-making went hand in hand with spirit rapping. An officer, whom I will call Pótaloff, took it all in deadly earnest--talking tables and love. Perhaps he was less fortunate with the latter than with the tables; at any rate, when the news of the Polish insurrection came he asked to be sent to the spot with the eighty soldiers. He hoped to return with a halo of military glory. ‘I go against the Poles,’ he wrote in his diary; ‘it would be so interesting to be slightly wounded!’

He was killed. He rode on horseback by the side of the Colonel who commanded the soldiers, when ‘the battle with the insurgents’--the glowing description of which may be found in the annals of the General Staff--began. The soldiers slowly advanced along the road, when they met some fifty Poles, five or six of whom were armed with rifles and the remainder with sticks and scythes; they occupied the forest, and from time to time fired their guns. The chain of soldiers did the same. Lieutenant Pótaloff twice asked permission of the Colonel to dismount and to dash into the forest. The Colonel very angrily ordered him to stay where he was. Notwithstanding this, the next moment the Lieutenant had disappeared. Several shots resounded in the wood, followed by wild cries; the soldiers rushed that way, and found the Lieutenant bleeding on the grass. The Poles fired their last shots and surrendered; the battle was over, Pótaloff was dead. He had rushed, revolver in hand, into the thicket, where he found several Poles armed with pikes. He fired all his shots at them in a haphazard way, wounding one of them, whereupon the others rushed upon him with their pikes.