Chapter II: Part 2

The train slows for a halt. Station-lamps shine mistily through the brooding night. Lanterns bob to and fro on the platform as fur-capped train-hands pass, tapping wheels and opening journal-boxes. At each door a fire-tender is catching and stowing away the wood which a peasant in padded sheepskins is tossing up from his hand-sled below. It is Chelliabinsk, whose old importance as the clearing-house of the convicts has been passed on to the new city of the railroad. Here the just completed northern branch, linking Perm to Petersburg, meets the old southern line from Samara and Moscow.

A short stop and the train moves on again. The day is done and gradually each saunters into his own warm compartment, which the width of the Russian gauge makes as large as a real room. One can read at the table by the window, under the electric drop-light, or, propped in pillows, one can stretch out luxuriously on the easy couch that is nightly manoeuvred into an upper and lower berth. Practically always after crossing the Urals, the number of passengers has so thinned out that each may have a stateroom to himself.

Presently you push the bell labeled, “Konduktor.” A uniformed attendant appears standing at the salute. “_Spate_” (sleep) is sufficient direction. The sheets and pillows are dug out and the transformation of the couch into a bed is effected. “_Spacoine notche_” (good-night) he says, and you fall asleep to the rhythmic throb of the engine.

During the following hours the train enters the Tobolsk Government, the oldest province of Siberia, whose 439,859 square miles of area, nearly four times as large as Prussia, extend roughly from the railroad northward to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Urals eastward so as to include the lower basin of the Ob-Irtish river system. This ancient province has seen much of Siberia’s history, whose predominant features have been two, growth and graft.

Out of evil, somehow, in a marvelous way has been coming good. In the earliest days, with what smug satisfaction did the Stroganovs find that the native inhabitants would trade ermine for glass beads! Yet the fruit of their sharp dealing and purchased protection and special privilege was the expedition that won Sibir, founded Tobolsk, and opened to Russia the way into northern Asia. The imperial commissioner who came to Tobolsk shortly after Kutchum Khan’s overthrow, to collect the yassak tribute of ten sable-skins for each married man and five for each bachelor, was detected culling the choice skins for himself, and substituting cheap ones for his master. But his agents had sought out the paths and extended the Russian Empire far into the northern forests.

By despotic oppression the inhabitants of Uglitch town, condemned for testifying to the murder of Dimitri, the Czarevitch, came here into exile in 1593, carrying with them the tocsin-bell that had tolled alarm when the Czar wished silence. But they, together with the deported laborers settled by the same arbitrary will along the Tobol River, started the permanent settlement of the new realm.

A succeeding functionary called on the natives for a special tribute of ermine for the Czarina’s mantle. He collected so many bales of it that the taxed began to wonder at the stature of the “Little Mother,” and sent a special deputy to Petersburg. The legate discovered that the Empress was as other women, and on his disclosures the official was unable to save his own, let alone the ermines’ skins. Yet while the governor was plundering the fur-merchants of Tobolsk, the frontiers were extending, until by 1700 they reached eastward to Kamchatka and Lake Baikal, southeast to the Altai foothills at Kuznetz, and north to the Arctic Ocean.

At Tobolsk in 1710 Peter the Great established the capital of his reorganized province of Siberia. Prince Gagarin, whom he appointed its first governor, found here a systemless extortion unworthy of an efficient statesman. With the thoroughness of genius he built up in the unhappy province a regular organization of rascality. His pickets patrolled the roads into Russia, to prevent the escape of those who might carry the tale of his oppression. He arranged with high officials at Court that any petitioners who evaded this frontier net should be handed over to an appropriate committee. Thus fortified, he began collections of as much as could be wrung from his luckless subjects. Every traveler paid Gagarin’s tariff, every farmer sent him presents of stock, every trapper forwarded the best of his catch. The fur-trader’s donations and the merchants’ loans were assisted into Gagarin’s warehouses by thumbscrew and thonged knout.

While these things passed in Tobolsk there came periodically to Petersburg delegations of outwardly contented citizens attesting the wisdom of their governor. They brought to the Czar and the Grand Dukes, in addition to the punctiliously rendered tax yassak, gifts of especially fine furs. Such was the completeness of Gagarin’s control that not an echo of the true state of affairs reached the ears of the astute Peter.

At length, in 1719, Nesterov, the Minister of Finance, was privately approached by some Tobolsk merchants and was supplied with evidence sufficient to hang half the officials in Siberia. In a dramatic presentation the Minister furnished this to the Imperial Senate, showing so bad a case that Gagarin’s own agents in the ducal circle rose up against him. The Czar sent Licharev, a major of the Guard, to Siberia, to proclaim in every town and hamlet that Gagarin was a criminal in the eyes of the Emperor. As this messenger approached Tobolsk, official after official came out to turn state’s evidence, trying to assure his personal safety. The highways to Russia were guarded by Peter’s own troops, with orders to seize all outgoing travelers who might be transporting Gagarin’s accumulated spoil, which with commendable prudence the Czar had allocated to himself.

When Peter was in England he had remarked casually to an acquaintance, “In my realm I have only two lawyers, and one of these I intend to hang as soon as I get back.” It was particularly unfortunate for this ex-governor that the remainder of the legal profession did not feel himself called upon to explain to Peter the Gagarin campaign contributions. No one ever needed an attorney more. He was under trial before an imperial judge who did not know a technicality from a tort, and whose preliminary procedure was to order a reliable gallows.

For some score of years subsequent to Gagarin, the governors of Siberia were, in any event, moderate. The province grew apace, increased by exiles, by land-seeking colonists, by raskalniks,--nonconformists of the Greek Church, self-called “Old Believers,”--who preferred to come to Siberia rather than follow Peter’s orders and shave off their beards.

Then Chicherin the Magnificent came. His life was a round of celebrations. Wonderful stews he concocted for his sybaritic revels. At _obeid_ an orchestra of thirty pieces supplied the music. Artillery in front of the residency saluted him with salvos when he drove out. In Butter-Week all Tobolsk drank the spirits which their governor bountifully provided. It is hardly necessary to say that the money for these entertainments did not come from Chicherin’s private purse: the city merchants groaned over forced loans and benevolences; and at last their cry reached the throne, and Chicherin too was removed.

With his passing, the Tobolsk Province fell to less spectacular rulers, but under good and bad it grew steadily, until in 1860 there were a million inhabitants within its borders, a population which at the present time has risen to a million and a half. Some forty thousand of these are exiles; some eighty thousand raskalniks; and forty thousand Tatars, who feed the flocks where their ancestors once bore sway, living peacefully side by side with the Russians. Some fifteen thousand are descendants of the Samoieds and Voguls with whom the first Stroganov from the adjoining Russian province of Archangel traded his wares. Some twenty thousand are Ostiaks whose forebears were alternately allies and enemies of Yermak.

The capital city, Tobolsk, on the Tobol River hard-by its junction with the Irtish, has grown from a precariously held camp of two hundred and fifty fugitive Cossack soldiers to a city of thirty thousand. Tiumen, the easterly city on the Tura River, another of Yermak’s camps, has grown into a great distributing-centre for produce brought by the river-highways. From the railway line northward as far as the city of Tobolsk extends a farm-belt, a continuation of the black-earth region of great Russia. The fertility of the land may be judged by the number of villages met as the train speeds on, and the large proportion of enclosed fields on both sides of the track. Some of the finest agricultural soil in the world lies here, such soil as composes the prairies of Minnesota and Dakota. Three million head of live stock graze in the district, which has a yearly production of ten million hundredweight of wheat alone, four million of rye, and nine million of oats. Five million more settlers may live and thrive, and the harvest will feed the ever-growing cities of Europe when Siberia comes to be the new granary of the old world. The stress and turmoil of Tobolsk are passed. Happy the people who have no annals!

Gradually, as the train rolls eastward beyond the Ishim River Valley, the farm country opens out into the unfenced prairie of the Great Steppe. The clustered wooden villages that flanked the line through Tobolsk appear less and less frequently, till at last we seem to glide over an immense white sea, frozen into perpetual calm and silence. Here and there a gray thicket of stunted trees and bushes, here and there a grove of naked-limbed birches, mutely exhibit Nature’s desolation.

As the sullen landscape bares itself, one thinks of the prison caravans tramping these wastes; of the early neglected garrisons which Elizabeth’s favorite General Kinderman proposed to victual on crushed birch-bark and relieve the Crown of their expense; of all the misery and the wrong that the steppes of Siberia have symbolized. No sign of man’s handiwork or of Nature’s kindliness is seen,--only the cold snow and the bare birches, while regularly as the ticking of a clock the telegraph-poles and the verst-spaced stations snap back into the wastes. The dominant reflection is not, how great is the achievement which has mastered these steppes! but, how infinitesimal is all that man has done in this ocean of untrodden snow! Hour after hour we are driving on. Yet never is there passed a landmark to conjure into imagination a picture of progress. One moves as in a nightmare, where he runs for seeming ages, hunted forward, yet can never stir from the spot. The horizon-bounded circle of vision is as the ever-receding rim of a giant dome, the rails ahead and behind bisecting its white immensity. Above, the vast bowl of the blue sky dips and meets it, imprisoning us. Where are the fields and villages; the bustling activity of human life that tells of man’s mastership? Hour after hour passes without a change in the drear monotony of the landscape; for miles on miles not a trace is seen of human dominion. Grim Nature spreading her shroud over plain and pasture is despot here, and Winter is ruler of the Siberian Steppe.

One could ride due south a thousand versts, through Golodnia the “hunger steppe” to the borders of Turkestan, and find the same monotonous plain, snow-covered save where the dryness of the south has thinned its fall. One could ride from the Caspian Sea due east to China, with each day’s march a counterpart of the rest. Five hundred thousand square miles of area are covered with grass and gaudy flowers in the spring, with low brush and green reeds where the salt swamp-lakes receive the tribute of snow-fed streams. In midsummer the growing grass scorches under a heat of 104°. In winter snow is everywhere,--in feathery flakes that the midday sun does not soften during whole months of a cold which is a ferocity. Thirty to forty degrees below zero is not unusual, and the land is swept by bitter winds that pierce like daggers through doubled furs and felts. Yet there dwell on the central plateau of Asia a million people, and one million cattle and three million sheep are scattered over the tremendous range. As the herds have become hardened through the centuries and survive in measure despite the severity, so also have the men. From the train-windows now one may chance to see infrequent straggling herds of long-horned cattle, lean and gaunt, scratching away the snow in search of food. Mounted on little shaggy ponies are figures buried in skins, who keep guard over them.

One detects a new type among the crowds at the stations,--flat faces, round eyes, square thickset bodies. Here on the borderland, the old race has fused with the Slav and has become metamorphosed. The sons of the Tatars, whose very name was distorted into that of a dweller in Tartarus by those who feared their fierce valor, have become shopkeepers, train-hands, waiters, and butchers, who come to sell meat and milk to the chef of the wagon restoran. Sometimes, at the stops, figures, gnome-like in enveloping red capote and grotesquely padded furs, hold their ponies with jealous rein, staring curiously at the locomotive and passengers.

Looking long from the windows at this steppe, a drowsy hypnotism steals over the mind--a dull stupor of unbroken monotony. It is better to do as the Russians--pay no attention whatever to the landscape outside, but make the most of the life within the moving caravansary,--cards and cigarettes and liqueurs, tea and endless talk, with yarns that take days for the spinning.

The uniformed judge, passing by, joins you. He is traveling to a new appointment with his swarming family of children, shawl-decked females of unknown quality and quantity, the household bedding, and the ancestral samovar, all crowded into one stifling compartment. He discusses volubly the confusions of the Code, and propounds a unique theory of his own as to Russian jurisprudence, to the effect that all the best laws of other nations have been adopted, with none of the old or conflicting enactments repealed. The general drops into the circle. He is interesting when one has pierced the crust, but dogmatic. At every station the soldiers of the garrison, not on sentry-duty, jump to one side, swing half-around, and stand at the salute until he passes, to the huge inconvenience of the porters. He would undoubtedly vote the Democratic ticket to repay Mr. Roosevelt for putting Russia under the alternative of stopping the war perforce, or forfeiting sympathy, when Japan was said to be breaking under the strain.

“Russia was beaten this time. What of it? _Nietchevo!_” says the general.

“_Nietchevo_,” we echo, as we sip our tea.

“But the Japanese are wily insects,” observes his companion, the young service-medaled major. “I was in Vladivostok when our prisoners came back. They tried to get money for the checks the Japanese had given them. That was how the big mutiny began. You know, when our men were taken captive, the Japanese treated them very well, much good food, vodka, let them write home all about it, and gave them enormous pay, six yen, three dollars a month, charging the expense all up to the Czar for after the war. When at last the prisoners were to be released, the Japanese promised every man double pay, twelve roubles. But they gave them the money? No, the insects gave them each an order payable by the Russian commander in Vladivostok. So the transports came, and these men were sent ashore with these checks in their hands, and they went up to the commandant of the city, and asked for their cash that the Japanese had promised. What money did the commandant have for them? What could he do? He ordered them to go away. So they stood and discussed on the street-corners. And more men still came from the transports. Then they said, ‘We will ask the general of the forts.’ So they marched to the forts in a big crowd, and the general he also told them to go away. For a long time they talked and they persuaded the sailors to help them. So they went again to the forts, and the sailors shot at the forts, and the general ordered the artillery to shoot. But the artillery would not, so the men broke in and killed the officers and got arms and went back to the city commander. Him, too, they killed, and all Vladivostok was in mutiny for two weeks. Not an officer dared show himself. General Orlov persuaded them to let him into the town. Then many were shot, but at last the city was quiet. The Japanese are very sly insects.”

His story ends and the two officers go back to join their families. The train throbs on across the steppe.

The German gas-plant drummer, with his new Far Eastern outfit, is gathering from the missionary doctor details of treaty-port life, which are being treasured up as valuable reference data. The French fur-merchant dips back into his library copy of de Maupassant.

The rigor of the outside scene seems at length to be changing. A few scattered houses appear, and trees and fenced fields, and villages, with curling smoke rising from the chimneys. Men and children are walking about, and finally we come to the Irtish River, over which the train rumbles on a half-mile bridge. Spires and gilt domes are visible, dark wooden houses, and bright white-painted churches with green roofs. Droshkies and carts are passing in the streets, and presently we draw up to the station of Omsk, the second city of Siberia.

The junction of the Trans-Siberian Railway with the Irtish River, which is 2520 miles long and open from April to October, would of itself make Omsk a centre of great strategic importance. But in addition to this main river-highway, which is navigated by some hundred and fifty steamers, there are affluents by which one can sail from the Urals to the Altai, from the Arctic Ocean to China, and these lines of communication centre here.

From Omsk, following the Irtish down past Tobolsk, one can steam by the Obi to Obdorsk, within the Arctic Circle. Indeed, a regular grain-export service was planned via the Kara Sea to London by an ambitious Englishman. It failed after some promise of success, because of the ice-packs in the Gulf of Obi. From Omsk, following the Irtish upstream, steamer navigation extends as far as Semipalatinsk, in the Altai foothills. Smaller craft may go nearly to the Chinese frontier.

By the Tobol and Tura rivers, Tiumen, in the Ural foothills, may be reached, four hundred and twenty miles from Semipalatinsk. By ascending the Obi, a boat may go fourteen hundred and eighty miles east from Tiumen to Kuznetz on the Tom; through a canal from an Obi confluent the Yenesei River System may be entered, and from it by a short portage the Lena System. In all twenty-eight thousand miles are navigable by small craft, and seven thousand miles by steamer. Omsk is the pulsing heart of this mighty interior waterway system.

The train leaves the station, which is at a distance from the town, and once more we are en route. The eye rests gratefully upon the ribbon of cultivated fields which follow the Irtish down. But we reënter the steppe, and again the desolation settles over all. In hours of looking, not a habitation is seen, not an animal, not a tree,--only the same white billows. This Barbara district in the Tomsk Government has an area of fifty thousand square miles. Kainsk, some seven hundred versts from Chelliabinsk, is the centre. The section, though covered with the fertile black earth of the adjoining regions, is, owing to lack of drainage and adequate rainfall, arid and almost untilled.

The round-faced civilian from the compartment further up, whose familiarity with the country has made him a welcome accession, joins us at the window. He looks out over the level plain of the Barbara Steppe with manifest satisfaction.

“You admire the landscape?” we ask satirically.

He smiles. “We got big money when the line went through here. I made my first fortune then.”

He sighs at the memory of old times, and tells of the railway-building days when the Czar had given the order for a road across the continent, and the soldiers of fortune, of whom he was one, had gathered to the task.

“Not a kopeck had I when the Dreyfus brothers made their big speculation in Argentine wheat and went down, leaving us young clerks stranded in Kiev. You know Kiev? Great pilgrimages come there to see the bodies of Joseph and his brethren, all preserved just as when they died. We heard by accident of a grading job under a big contractor out here. None of us knew anything about construction, but three of us grain-clerks wrote a letter saying we would put the work through, and started. We had just enough money to get to Samara. In Samara was a merchant much esteemed, whom I went to see. He went on our bond, never having seen us before, and gave us enough money to come. So it was in the old days. The country was flat as a board. We had but to lay down the ties and spike the rails. Thirty versts we made of this line. It cost us thirty thousand roubles a verst, but we got fifty thousand. Would that we might do that now again.”

The contractor, his round jolly face glowing with the recital and his eyes shining through gold-rimmed glasses, is entertaining a growing company, for the judge has stopped to gossip, and the railroad official.

“I took my money and bought an estate in the country of the Don Cossacks,” the contractor is saying. “I paid ten per cent to the Government for taxes when I bought the land. I had to pay no more taxes then all my life, but my heir would pay taxes, or, if I sold, he who bought would pay. So it was done in the Hataman Government.”

“It is just,” says the judge. “Why should they, who get the property, not pay taxes?”

The contractor shrugs his shoulder and continues: “For five years I farmed, and though I had a German overseer, I did not prosper. So I went to one of the cities of Russia and thought to put in a tramway. The men of the city said, ‘Are all the horses dead? He of the spectacles is mad.’ Yet by importunity I got them to give me the right to make a tramway. There were in Petersburg then many Belgians, with much money, wishing to give it away. So I went to them and said, ‘Here is a great franchise, but who will build the line and gain the riches?’

“‘We will, we will,’ said the Belgians.

“From them I got a hundred and eighty thousand roubles clear, and an interest. I sold the interest quickly to other foreigners, Frenchmen, and went away. Yes, the tramway was built, and the people crowded to ride on it as I had said. But when it was going well, and the profits were yet to come, the people said, ‘Shall foreigners oppress our city?’ So the town bought the tramways for what they said was the cost, and the Belgians went away. And they did not come back to Russia. Thus were many railways and tramways built and taken. The foreigners will not come back now, and Russians too do not enter these pursuits, lest the Government come after them later. It is _hudoo_ (bad).”

“But is it not worse that these men should make a tramway and draw vast money from the people?” says the railroad official. “For me, I think the Government should do it all.”

“_Ni snaia_, I don’t know,” says the contractor. “But I who bought stocks with the Belgians’ money (foolishly thinking that the business which I knew not was safe, while that which I knew was shaky), I will not give again to the stock-people the money I shall make from the oil-fields of Sakhalin, where I go now.”

“But,” says the railway chinovnik, “does not the State do these things better? Look you at this very railway. For years any who wished might have built into Siberia. An Amerikanski, and Collins, an Angleski, came proposing railroads, but all things slumbered. Then in 1891 the Czar ordered the road to be built, and in ten years we had laid the eight thousand versts to Vladivostok. I read that the line of Canada, where too there are steppes and highlands as ours, took ten years for but half the distance. We made two versts a day for all the years, and they but one. Who other than the Government could spend a billion roubles for a line that will bring money returns only in the far future?”

“Ah, you chinovniks, you say, lo, we do all this! But it was such as I built that road, and because you gave us big money. And is not the money to support it now got from the peasants’ taxes while so many clerks and operators waste time in the offices? I have seen a third as many men as at Omsk do the same work. And your trains go as the water-snails, twelve versts an hour for freight, twenty versts an hour for the mail-trains, thirty-five versts for the express. One can go eighty versts in Europe.”

“Truly, truly, but why go so fast? It costs more for fuel, and the track has to be made straight. What good does it do you to come in sooner? If a man is in a hurry to get somewhere, can he not take an earlier train?”

The group mulls over this knotty point of logic, which is complicated by the fact that our own train is twelve hours late. They cite hypothetical men with varying sorts of engagements, and then lightly switch to talk of the nourishing properties of beer, the utility of agricultural machinery, and the old tiger battue of Vladivostok.

The birch groves become more frequent now, pines begin to appear, and at last the country has become forested. Several of the passengers bestir themselves for departure, gathering multitudinous bundles, and making the circuit in demonstrative hand-shaking farewells.

“We come to Taiga, whence they go to the stingy town of Tomsk,” the government engineer observes.

“Why do you call it the stingy town of Tomsk?”

“I will tell you. Tomsk, before the railroad came, was the biggest, finest, and wealthiest of our cities. She was the capital of the great Tomsk Gobernia, with three hundred and thirty thousand square miles of area, and a million and a half people. The Tom brought the big river steamers to her wharves. In the city she had sixty thousand inhabitants, increasing every year; a university, Stroganov’s Library, a cathedral, fine public buildings. The merchants were rich; the miners came down from the Altai; all things were prospering. When the railway was ordered, the engineers came through to locate the line. All they asked was a hundred thousand roubles. But how stingy were the people of Tomsk! They had given two million roubles for their university, where the students made speeches and got sent to the Yakutski Oblast, yet they would not give a hundred thousand roubles to the engineers. ‘Give fifty, give even forty thousand,’ said the engineers. But the people of Tomsk said, ‘Are we not the seat of government for all western Siberia? Have we not Yermak’s banner in the cathedral? Are we not Tomsk? You must bring the railway here anyway.’ But if the engineers had done that, who could say where it would have ended? All the other cities would begin to make excuses. So the grades to Tomsk became suddenly so bad that the line had to be run away south here, eighty-two versts. The station where one changes was named, in mockery, Taiga, ‘in the woods.’ The merchants flocked out begging the engineers to come back to Tomsk. They offered all that had been asked and much more. They hung around the office and wept over the blue-prints. But how can a professional man change his plans and sacrifice his reputation? One cannot do such things. So Tomsk was left, and her trade now falls far behind that of the other cities, Omsk and Irkutsk. We in Siberia smile at her and call her the stingy city of Tomsk.”

“We have, too, another jest, of the Tomsk Czar,” chimes in the judge. “There appeared one day there a stranger calling himself Theodore Kuzmilch, who bought a little house which he never left save to do some act of charity. For years he lived; then, when he died, the house was turned into a chapel because of his good deeds. Many years after his death, a merchant started the tale that this was the Czar Alexander I, who did not die in the Crimea, but left a false body to be carried to Petersburg and entombed in state. He had, it was told, not really died, and, disappointed at his powerlessness to help his people, had come, self-exiled, to Siberia. But we others laugh at this tale of Tomsk as an imperial residence.”

The twenty minutes’ stop at Taiga ends, and the train renews its journey through the forests.

With rolling hill and long-stretching forests, the watershed bounding the eastern limits of the Obi Basin is crossed near Achinsk, and the drainage-basin of the mighty Yenesei River, one million three hundred and eighty thousand square miles in area, is entered. It just fails to equal in length the Mississippi-Missouri System. Including the administrative territory “Yeneseik” of the East Siberian Gobernia, the river sweeps from the Chinese borderland north beyond the Arctic Circle. In the far south, where it rises among the Minusink Mountains, the valley country is like the Italian Alps, mild and very fertile. Iron-mines of prehistoric antiquity are found in these valleys, relics of the old Han Dynasty of China.

Of the twenty million bushels of grain produced throughout the Yeneseik territory, nearly a third comes from the Minusink oasis. The railroad pierces the central plains, farmed in the most favorable spots only, and capable of enormously extended cultivation.

Through alternating forest, field, and plain the train moves on, and crossing the three thousand-foot Yenesei bridge, enters the city of Krasnoyarsk. When we pull out, the engineer, who has been chatting with the erstwhile contractor, observes, “This town was a main hotbed of the great strike. They are well in hand now, but we had our time with them in 1905. Even I knew nothing of what had been prepared.”

He goes on to tell the most curious tale of the organized strike movement which introduced the disturbances subsequent to the Russo-Japanese War.

“On September 15 at noon, no one knows by whom or from what station, a signal of dots and dashes was tapped off. Each telegraph-operator answered the message and passed the word to the next, standing by until it was repeated back. Then, leaving all things in order, he stepped from the operating-room into the railway-station. With a motion he gave the countersign to the ticket-sellers, and each, as he received it, shut his desk, and walked out. The word went to the engineers, and each, at the signal, drew his fires and left the engine and its train forsaken on its tracks. Every postman put away his mail, closed the safe, and left his office; every diligence-agent locked his doors. From Astrakan to Archangel, from Warsaw to Vladivostok, the electric summons went, and the whole realm of Russia was paralyzed.

“With two thousand roubles, offered by the Governor-General of Poland, before them, and ten bayonets on the tender behind, an engineer and a fireman were secured to run one coach, containing a terrified prince, from Warsaw to the frontier. In the south, a few cars were started by soldiers, but beyond such rare instances, for three weeks not a train was moved. More than this, not a telegram was transmitted, not a letter delivered. Everywhere was black silence, as if all the Russias had been swept from the face of the world.

“‘More wages, and the constitution,’ was the slogan of the strikers. The official cohorts met the issue courageously, with bribes and bayonets, and little by little got the upper hand. Force and money were used unstintingly to win the operators needed and break the front of the strike. A few, who, contrary to the expectations of their mates, had remained loyal to the officials, were finally secured and protected by the soldiery. As in time one train after another was manned and moved, the men who had stayed away lost heart, knowing but too well what would be the fate of those who were left outside the breastworks. First singly, then in crowds, they returned, and the great strike was broken.”

“Here in Krasnoyarsk there was revolutionist rule for a while as well,” the manager remarks. “The troops were driven out, and we had to wait for reinforcements. Yet when I came to my office there were sixty thousand roubles in the safe, not a kopeck of which had been touched. Some of the best employees were condemned. I was very sad, and the service was very poor when they marched away.”

“What became of them?” we ask.

In a low voice he answers, “They went to the Yakutsk.”

Everybody is silent for a moment.

“Where did you say?” inquires the missionary.

“The Yakutski Oblast,” answered the chinovnik.

In Europe people talk of the rigors of Russia’s winter. In Russia of the cold of Siberia. In Siberia, along the railway, when the thermometer gets down into the forties and the sentries pick up sparrows too numb to fly, they say, “It’s as cold as the Yakutsk.”

“One starts to the Yakutsk by the steamer-towed prison barge, following down the Yenesei from Krasnoyarsk,” the engineer continues. “For the first thousand versts northward the way is through a mighty forest region. The interior is almost as unknown as when the Samoieds were its sole inhabitants. Marshes covered with trembling soil, to be crossed only on snowshoes, alternate with thickets, called _urmans_, of larches, cedars, firs, pines, and beeches.”

“It is not alluring,” we observe.

“The cold of the winter seems largely to arrest decay, and the fallen trees, remaining unrotted, form a nature-made _cheval de frise_, impossible to traverse save along the hunters’ trails. Another thousand versts up the Upper Tunguska River, at whose limit of navigation is a crossing into the Lena System, and the Yakutsk Province begins; eastward to the coastal range overlooking Behring Sea, and northward to the Arctic Ocean, a million and a half square miles of desolation, extends this exiles’ oblast. Prison-stations are located in the forsaken tundra country beyond the Arctic Circle, where scattered clumps of creeping birches and dwarf willows struggle to maintain existence in the few unfrozen upper inches of ground, congealed perpetually beneath to unmeasured depths. Here, where the average winter temperature is eighty below zero, come the exiles deemed most formidable.”

“How long do men last in the Yakutski cold?” we ask the engineer.

“Oh, sometimes a strong man will outlive his sentence and return. The friends of our strikers ask me sometimes about one or another, but we have heard nothing of them since they marched away in chains. May fate keep us from that road!”

The theme is not enlivening, and soon we go forward into the observation-car.

After crossing the Kan River at Kansk, the railroad turns abruptly southwest, through the hilly country of the Irkutsk Gobernia, and climbing into the highlands of the Altai, enters the watershed of the Angara. The drainage-basin of this river equals the combined areas of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It is as well adapted to agriculture as parts of the best provinces of Central Russia in the same latitude.

The train pulls next into the station of Nishneudinsk. A booted peddler is making his way down the platform, with knives, combs, caps, and cheap knick-knacks. He stops to show us something special, a miniature of multicolored minerals, glittering from a hundred crystal facets. The Russian engineer picks out the flaky quartz, the iron pyrites,--“fools’ gold,” as they called it in old Nevada times,--green porphyry, iridescent peacock ore of copper, and some black crystals like antimony, which show here and there. Malachite, serpentine, topaz, and numberless other minerals are in the mass, which glitters in kaleidoscopic changes. A small piece of gold ore tops the pile.

“Cabinetski?” asks the engineer.

“Da, da,” assents the peddler. “Cabinetski.”

“It comes from one of the domains of his Imperial Majesty’s Cabinet,” explains the engineer. “Stretches of forest, belts of fertile river valley, fur districts, hundreds of thousands of square versts, the best mines in these Urals which produce sometimes yearly seven million roubles, the entire Nerchinsk region, producing six million roubles, are ‘cabinetski,’” he remarks. “Even I, Ivan Vasilovich Poyarkov, am ‘cabinetski’!”

He explains the origin of the term, going back to the old days when princedoms went to the courtiers of Catherine. Always for a great enterprise it was necessary to have a friend at Court. So the rich merchants and miners would form, with powerful members of the inner circle at St. Petersburg, alliances such as that made by the Stroganovs with Boris. Gradually, as time went on, the protected were swallowed by the protectors, until one by one the various estates had passed into the hands of the nobles of the Imperial Court. The mines in the Altai, which Demidov had opened up, were taken over in 1747 by the Emperor, those in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast at about the same time. With the passing of the years, what had been graft and expropriation was transmuted into vested interest, until now it is the established right of the Imperial Cabinet, or the Grand Dukes, to receive the revenues of these vast domains. In the mining regions their perquisite is from five to fifteen per cent. Save for the tax, however, miners are free to operate upon the ducal estates, and many are thus engaged.

A fur-capped station-agent clangs the big bronze bell, waits a moment, and then clangs twice. The passengers climb back into the box-like steel cars of the express. The third bell sounds, and the train starts. We sit down beside the engineer and the conversation takes up the “cabinetski” again.

“We have great traditions. One Governor, Neryschkin, of the ‘cabinetski’ mines at Nerchinsk, marched to fight the Czar. In 1775 he was appointed chief of the mineral belt in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast. He sat for eleven months at home with closed shutters. Then, on Easter Sunday, singing a devil’s hymn, and with a fat female on either side, he drove to church and ordered the service amended to suit a rather bizarre taste. He organized a series of glittering shows at the Crown’s cost, gave free drink to the populace, and throwing out many of his subordinates, appointed convicts in their stead. When he had used up all the tax-money in his keeping, he drew up cannon before the house of the rich merchant Sibirayakov, the operator of the mines, and made him hand out five thousand roubles. Finally he got together an army of Tunguses and the peasants, to march against the Czar. He was caught on the way and sent to Russia for punishment. It is the great honor of our service to be governor over the ‘cabinetski’ mines. Perhaps I shall rise there some day. Perhaps not. But I shall not march against the Czar.”

The forests of birch and pine and fir, and the hills, as the car drives eastward, close in again. The crests of mid-Siberian mountains lift their snowy heads, and the train climbs up and up toward the great central Lake Baikal, and the city of Irkutsk, 3378 miles from Moscow, and further east than Mandalay.

When, on this seventh day, the train is winding up the Angara Valley toward Irkutsk, one may mentally look back over the country that has been traversed and estimate somewhat the meaning of the railway. The Urals formed the first landmark. As in the dominion of the blind the one-eyed man is king, so after the monotony of the plains, the Ural Mountains seem great and worthy of the name given by the old Muscovite geographer, the “Girdle of the World.” By actual measurements, however, in their seventeen hundred miles of length, no peak rises over six thousand feet. Coming eastward from the Urals the line has cut through the southwestern corner of the old Tobolsk Government, has skirted the northern border of the steppe, has bisected the Tomsk Province, and after crossing the Yenesei River in Yeneseik has entered Irkutsk Province, and traversed the central highland region nearly to Lake Baikal.

Many who journey this way will have as their first impression, when the long winter ride draws to its close, a feeling of depression, almost of discouragement, so few are the settlements, so desolate seems all Nature. They see the single line of rails, without a branch or feeder in the mighty expanse from Chelliabinsk to Irkutsk, save for the stub put in for the ungenerous outlanders of unlucky Tomsk. They calculate that for a territory forty times the size of the British Isles, and one and a half times as large as all Europe, the inadequacy of a railroad less in total mileage than the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, is manifest. Statistically-informed bankers sometimes shrug their shoulders at the mention of the Trans-Siberian. “Every year a deficit,” they say. “Gross earnings but twenty-four million roubles,--one sixth of the Canadian Pacific Railway; one tenth of the Southern Railway. _Hudoo_ (bad)!” One hears expressed not infrequently in Russia the opinion that the railway is a sacrifice justified politically by Russia’s need for a link to the Pacific, but ineffectual to secure prosperity and advancement to the isolated land of mid-Siberia. It is deemed, like the Pyramids, a monument to colossal effort and achievement but of little service to mankind.

Their statistics are correct. But it is to the greater honor of the road that much which it has accomplished will never appear in credits on the account-sheets. Where the white stations of the Siberian Railway stand now were once the wooden prison-pens with their guarded stockades. Murderers and priests, forgers, profligates, and university professors, highway robbers and privy councilors, all together have tramped this way. It is its past from which the railroad has raised Siberia, the past of neglect and exile that this steam civilizer has banished to the far Yakutsk.

Closer study gives, too, a better appreciation of the railroad’s economic significance. The line holds a strategic position as truly as does the Panama Canal. Though in Siberia proper there is the enormous area of nearly five million square miles, so much of this is in Arctic tundra, impassable swamp, forest, or barren steppe, that the really habitable and arable land narrows down to a tenth of this, which lies in general between the parallels of 55° and 58° 30’ north, and is contained within a belt some thirty-five hundred miles long and two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles broad.

When it is noted that the tillable area of one hundred and ninety-two thousand square miles in Tobolsk and Tomsk, mostly along the Obi System, the stretch of twenty thousand miles in the steppe, and that of one hundred thousand in the Yeneseik and Irkutsk governments of eastern Siberia, are all in immediate proximity to the railroad, whose course is generally along the 55th parallel, the economic value of Russia’s great enterprise takes a different perspective.

Its vantage is still more emphasized when the element of the north and south watercourses is considered. One after another the great Siberian rivers are crossed,--in the Tobolsk Gobernia, the Tobol, the Ishim, the Irtish; in the Tomsk Gobernia, the Obi and the Tom; in Yeneseik, the Yenesei; in Irkutsk, the Angara. Each of these reaches far up into the agricultural zone that lies north of the railroad, bringing the harvests to its cars by the cheap unfettered water-avenues. Thus, to the part of Siberia that is capable of extensive development, the railroad is even now in a position to give great aid.

It is from such natural factors as these, not from financiers’ figures, that one must weigh the potentiality of this great line. Its direct value is enormous, its indirect commercial services greater yet. It may best be compared to a mighty river system such as that of the Mississippi. The latter’s traffic has never directly returned a dollar of the millions that have gone to maintaining its levees and training-walls and channels. Yet indirectly the return and the value, as an asset to the American people, are so great as to be incalculable. From its controlling position in relation to the cultivatable land and the interior watercourses of Central Siberia, as well as in relation to the far eastern artery, the Russian railway is an empire-builder as important as has been the Nile.

The results already achieved are noteworthy. The city of Omsk, where the railroad and the Irtish River lines meet, has risen from a population of thirty-seven thousand in 1897 to seventy thousand in 1908. Further east, Stretensk has sprung from a town of two thousand people ten years ago to over twelve thousand to-day. Irkutsk has climbed from sixty to over eighty thousand since the railroad opened.

The rural population has increased even as that of the cities. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, all Siberia contained but two hundred and thirty thousand souls; at the end of the eighteenth, one million five hundred thousand; at the end of the nineteenth, five million. Now, with the railroad-induced immigration, it approaches the seven million mark. The Steppe Government alone has risen in fifty years from five hundred thousand to one million five hundred thousand, and the Tomsk from seven hundred thousand to two million five hundred thousand.

More in importance than its present utility is the fact that the railway holds the key to Siberia’s future. The arable territory of the belt is equal to that of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas combined. This land is generally well-watered, in a climate suitable to grain-raising, and it is, as has been shown, in its whole extent, adjacent to river and rail transportation.

While such farming districts of the United States have some fifty inhabitants to the square mile, the most densely populated gobernia, Tomsk, has but six, and the Yeneseik but six tenths of one.

An immense further area will yield to clearing and to irrigation, as has been demonstrated in the great results secured from five hundred versts of canals in the Barbara Steppe. Coal and iron are available in many places, and timber in the greatest abundance grows in the northern district.

From a summary of these elements one may glean an idea of the Colossus sleeping beneath these snows. At a normal rate of increase, fifty million souls should populate Siberia at the close of the twentieth century. The agency of their coming and existing will be primarily the line of rails across the continent. Despite the eight hundred million roubles expended, with only far-off hopes of profit, the faulty road-bed, the light rails, the steep grades, and crawling trains, the glory of Russia is still “The Great Siberian Railway.”

III

IN IRKUTSK

The train pulls slowly up to the white station-house at Irkutsk. A swarm of porters, _nasilchiks_, white-aproned, with peaked hats, and big, numbered arm-tags, invade the carriage. They seize each piece of luggage and run with it somewhere into the crowd outside. You, encumbered with your heavy coat, laboriously follow. Irkutsk station, more than any previous one, is crowded with passengers and Cossack guards. Train officials are shouting instructions, and every few paces a sentry is standing his silent watch. This is the transfer entrepôt for all through traffic, as well as the depôt for the largest and most important city of Siberia.

Threading the press on the platform, you struggle with the outgoing human current, and in time reach the big waiting-room of the first class. It likewise is crowded with a mass of people, and its floor is cumbered with heaping mounds of baggage. One of these hillocks is constructed from your impedimenta, which are being guarded now by a porter, apparently the residuary legatee of the half-dozen original competitors within the car. The man takes the long document that witnesses your claim to two trunks, and departs. Upon you in turn devolves sentry duty for the interminable time during which those trunks are being culled out from the baggage-car.

It is an exasperating wait, but the fundamental rule for Russian traveling is, “never separate from the baggage.” The parcel-room here at Irkutsk held for six months a suit-case left by a friend to be sent to this traveler. The officials would not give it up to its owner or to any person save the forwarder, though he, oblivious to sequels, had gone on to San Francisco.

Like the rest, now, you camp, with the baggage in front of you, on the waiting-room floor. It is a very country fair, this station. At the far end is a big stand crowded with dishes, on which are cold meats, potato salad, heaps of fruit and cakes, sections of fish from which one may cut his own slices, boxes of chocolates, and cigarettes. All are piled up in heaping profusion. One can get a glass of vodka and eat of the _zakuska_ dishes free, or while waiting he may buy a meal of surprisingly ample quantity and good quality at the long tables that run down the centre of the room. Most of the Russians order a glass of tea, and with it in hand sit down till such indefinite future time as the luggage situation shall unroll itself.

We move our baggage and join the tea caravan. Across the table is a slight, brown-faced man, with an enormous black astrakan cape falling to his ankles, and wearing a jauntily perched astrakan cap on his head. “One of the Cossack settlers,” a friend from the train remarks. Beyond are half a dozen tired-looking women, with dark-gray shawls over their heads. Near them are men with close-fitting _shubas_, or snugly-belted sheepskin coats, fur inside, and rough-tanned black leather outside. Beside the lunch-stand are a couple of young men with huge bearskin caps, short coats, and high leather boots tucked into fleece-lined overshoes.

A general at one of the little side tables is talking volubly to a plump dame with furs, which are attracting envy from many sides. The lady merely nods between puffs of her cigarette, and sips her tea. A large fat merchant waddles past, wrapped in a paletot made of the glistening silvery skin of the Baikal seal. The room is stifling, full of smoke, and crowded with people. Yet no one seems to feel the discomfort, even to the extent of taking off the heavy outer coats, which, with the thermometer at twenty degrees below zero, they have worn on the sleigh-ride in, from across the river.

Your friends of the train, save those whose possessions were comprised in their multitudinous valises, are all here, fur-coated likewise and sipping tea, waiting, without a thought of impatience, for the baggage to be brought out.

At last appears your _nasilchik_. “They are got,” he cries, and balances about himself, one by one, your half-dozen pieces of luggage. Through the noisy, gesticulating, thronging passengers and heaped belongings, he shoulders and squirms a way to the door and into the anteroom.

A couple of soldiers are good-naturedly hustling out, from the third-class waiting-room opposite, a little leather-jacketed and very dirty mujik.

“I did not owe seven kopecks. I cross myself. I am not a Jew,” he loudly proclaims.

“_Nietchevo_,” says the soldier. “Out with him just the same!” The peasants and crowd loafing alongside grin appreciatingly, as the mujik is escorted, collar-held, through the great doors.

The porter and yourself follow. A plunging line of sleighs, backed up against the outer platform of the station, extends far up and down the road. Their _isvoschiks_, leaning back, are shouting for fares. In sight are your two trunks. “How much to the Métropole?” you call. The legal fare across the river to the hotel is a rouble, but the Governor-General of eastern Siberia couldn’t tell how much it would be if you didn’t bargain beforehand. “_Piat rubla!_” “_tree rubla!_” come hurtling from all sides.