MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“There still exists in Europe a Bastille—that is to say, a hundred times worse than the Bastille—among a people whom men call the Frenchmen of the North.”The Prisons of Europe · Volume VII
Five thousand versts from Saint Petersburg, shackled princes descend alive into the lead pits where Russia entombs her unbowed rebels.
The Petersburg night seemed to die unendingly against the ramparts of the Peter and Paul Fortress. In the miry courtyard, lashed by a cutting gale off the Baltic, six springless kibitkas stood in waiting, each harnessed to three gaunt, raw-boned horses. No priest was summoned to bless their departure, nor any kin to wipe away a parting tear. Beneath the granite portico, irons struck with a dull, heavy, unrelenting ring. These were the iron collars and the kandaly—those twenty-pound chains riveted to the ankles by the smiths of the Crown—which sealed for ever the doom of the insurgents of December 1825.
Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, once the darling of the imperial drawing rooms and the scion of one of Russia’s most illustrious houses, was the first to mount the rough wooden box, flanked by two impassive gendarmes. Upon the prison register, a single stroke of violet ink had struck out his civil name, leaving only the ledger number of a state exile. Before them yawned the white abyss: five thousand versts of ruts, of petrified taiga, and of boundless steppes where the mercury fell so low that human breath crystallized upon the air with the faint, brittle crackle of shattering glass.
“There still exists in Europe a Bastille—that is to say, a hundred times worse than the Bastille—among a people whom men call the Frenchmen of the North. The name of this fortress is not built of stone: it is a realm of solitude and torment named Siberia.”
The whip cracked. Relays were run without respite, day and night, throughout forty days of a hallucinatory flight wherein the prisoners, sustained only by frozen black bread thawed beneath their armpits, lost all reckoning of time and season, until the jagged ridges of the Urals gave way to the silent void of Transbaikalia.
At the bottom of a ravine of slate and foul slush, hard by the Chinese frontier, rose the noxious chimneys and palisades of Nerchinsk. There yawned the pit of Blagodatsk, the most dread lead and silver mine of the empire, founded under the iron sceptre of Peter the Great and fattened upon the blood of Nikita Demidov’s serfs. Into this dark chasm, political convicts were cast alongside the dregs of common felons: thieves branded with hot iron upon both cheeks, and counterfeiters whose nostrils had been torn asunder by the executioner’s pincers.
The descent began at dawn to the muffled rattle of a cracked drum. To reach the veins of ore, the men were compelled to drop sheer down forty-eight rotten larchwood ladders, suspended over the abyss within an airshaft weeping with brackish, freezing water. The chains welded to the nobles’ ankles scraped against the ice-glazed rungs; every misstep courted a three-hundred-fathom plunge into the dark.
Below reigned a stifling damp laden with mephitic vapours. By the guttering glimmer of a tallow candle luted with clay to the peak of their leather caps, hands that once wielded the gold sword and the pen of academies now gripped the heavy miner’s pick. The air was so starved of life that the flame paled to a sickly blue, threatening at every strike of the drill to abandon the galley-slaves in a blind sepulchre.
The code of the katorga was savagely simple: none reascended without having hewn and crushed his three poods of sulphide ore for the day. Major Leparsky, military commandant of the mines, watched over this herd of ghosts with the precision of a clerk of death. Every morning, the grating of bolts and the crash of iron bars roused the common dormitory: a barrack of unhewn logs where stagnant water froze solid in tubs three paces from the earthen stove.
Upon registers bound in sheepskin, kept within the blockhouse chancery, the scribe recorded punishments with cold, bureaucratic detachment. For a gaze deemed too haughty before a Cossack officer: fifty strokes of birch rod upon the bared back. For a whispered jest passed to a chain-mate: an entire night lashed upright to an iron post in an iron carcan that forbade the slightest give of the body.
Yet, beneath this vault of crushing rock where the convicts’ ordeal seemed to have extinguished every vestige of human dignity, a marvel was wrought each evening. The prince-artisans learned the patience of the iron. Prince Trubetskoy, the poet Obolensky, and the young lieutenants of the Imperial Guard invented a secret tongue, measured by the rhythmic clink of their fetters against the basalt walls. The music of their chains became an anthem of brotherhood, a subterranean symphony that baffled the vigilance of the Cossack sentries.
The despot in Petersburg had foreseen everything, save the heart of woman. One winter morning, when the frozen ground rang like steel beneath the horses' hooves, a figure swathed in worn furs appeared before the palisades of Nerchinsk. Princess Ekaterina Trubetskaya, defying the Emperor’s threats, forsaking her palaces, her titles, her fortune, and even her rights as a mother, had brought to its close her wild odyssey from Moscow to the lead mines.
The governor, commanded by imperial ukase to daunt her by every conceivable indignity, compelled her to sign away her civil life: she would henceforth be nothing more than the wife of a hard-labour convict, consigned to the same oat gruel, the same pestilential hovels, stripped for ever of the right to return. When at last she crossed the threshold of the mine and, falling upon her knees in the silver dust, pressed her trembling lips to the heavy, rusted fetters of her husband, the guards themselves bared their fur caps in an awe bordering on terror.
That night, for the first time since the great Nikita Demidov had disembowelled Mount Ural, Siberia ceased to be merely the living grave of Russia. Between the miry drifts where the ore groaned and the dying campfires on the taïga, the condemned understood that no Tsar’s bolt, no mine of oblivion, would ever smother the human soul beneath fifty feet of granite.