Anton Chekhov’s ‘Sakhalin Island’
Anton Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island provides a valuable glimpse into Russia’s much neglected Eastern territories during the last decades of the Tsarist Empire. Written in 1890 and first published in 1893 as a series of nine articles in the journal New Times, and published in book-form in 1895, Sakhalin Island chronicles Chekhov’s three-month-long stay on Sakhalin Island where, as a tourist, he documented the state of the island’s penal colony, gathered through his numerous interactions with those from the very top of the island’s bureaucracy and to the very bottom of the island’s social hierarchy. Chekhov’s account provides a wealth of information regarding the state of Russia’s island penal colony. Perhaps information which could be argued, to a reasonable extent, as an indictment of the Tsarist regime’s neglect of its penal system, if not of the autocracy itself.
In analysing Sakhalin Island’s significance as a source of late imperial Russian history, one would easily recognize its apolitical nature, which is rather unusual for a memoir written by a man with such a high level of education. Indeed, if one from a more liberal Western background were to simply read off a list of everything that Chekhov had witnessed as “injustice” across Sakhalin Island, one would probably come to the conclusion that it was an indictment of the Tsarist system itself. It is perhaps this ambiguity which makes Chekhov’s travel memoir transcend both politics and history. By telling his account “as-is” Chekhov had stumbled into the realm of journalism, which makes his travel memoir more open to interpretation.
If one were to describe Sakhalin Island most important argument, it is perhaps that the exile system is a lifelong suffering inducing machine. The word ‘machine’ is important in this context since all throughout his account, Chekhov constantly reminds his reader that being exiled to Sakhalin Island is akin to being fed into the bureaucratic machine of the Russian exile system. This is because once a person is exiled from European Russia, there is little to no possibility that he or she will ever be allowed to go back ever again. Chekhov was appalled by such an unnecessary suffering. He thinks that being exiled to Siberia after serving one’s sentence is not only a cruel form of injustice, but a form of death penalty “clothed in another form less repugnant to human sensibilities.”[1] The exile system is completely impersonal, machine-like, in its lack of compassion, guilt, or even empathy. It is, in a way, the cruel manifestation of the successful bureaucratization of the Russian Empire. It is no surprise, therefore, that Chekhov’s memoir is almost devoid of any mention of the Tsar’s influence on the convicts, except perhaps for his mention of the rare mass prisoner amnesty during major royal events, such as an accession to the throne or the marriage or the death of a monarch or a Grand Prince,” or even a rare visit from a royal to the far flung regions of the empire. Thus, even if Chekhov’s memoir lacks any discussion of politics, it is nevertheless made-up by Chekhov’s interest in morality.
Chekhov’s sense of morality is simply incidental, however. Being an outsider, Chekhov was able to “see” what others around him, even the most educated bureaucrat on the island, could no longer discern. What to Chekhov is cruel and unusual punishment was therefore simply seen as “normal” by those around him. It is through his description of these “routines” which creates the most revulsion from his readers.
In one of his descriptions of the immoral machine-like nature of the penal system, Chekhov describes that almost anything and everything that is deemed by some prison official a “wrongdoing” is punishable by birching, which is a corporal punishment with a birch rod. These include — but certainly not limited to — the prisoner’s inability to complete a daily work quota, “drunkenness”, “rudeness”, “disobedience”, and even as inane as prisoners “whose petitions proved to be unworthy of attention would be flogged.”[2] Indeed, this was applied even to merchants who were supposed to be exempted from corporal punishment.[3] As if it would be any consolation, Chekhov describes that in cases where the means of punishment is the “lash”, doctors would sometimes examine the individuals to be punished to assess their “‘capacity to endure corporal punishment according to the sentence of the court’”.[4] Such an examination, as personally witnessed by Chekhov, is so arbitrary that the Russian ethnic-German doctor’s examination is done within a minute.[5] As a doctor himself, Chekhov was obviously appalled by this overt misapplication of his profession. Worse still, the fact that this form of “disgraceful and outrageous spectacle” was codified under Article 478 of the Statute on Exiles means that the law itself warrants such brutality.[6] Morality was therefore justified by the law rather than the other way around. It is this inversion that Chekhov had witnessed being repeated throughout the island. Oftentimes, the legislated standard of morality is so low or “immoral” that it eventually loses all its purpose — as a check to human nature.
Interestingly, despite the fact that Chekhov had supposedly read copious amounts of literature regarding the island, its history, its climate, its people, etc., he nevertheless neglected to add even the simplest historical account of Sakhalin Island in his fairly lengthy travel memoir.[7] Indeed, what is glaringly missing is a meaningful historical background of the island. This is rather surprising since even journalists add a certain degree of context to their work to at least illuminate their readers as to the significance of their account.
One could perhaps argue that this “history” is already provided by Chekhov’s account, which indicates that the island was intended by the autocracy to serve a dual purpose: to become a penal colony as well as an autarkic agricultural colony. But this is simply a statement of a historical fact, and not even a substantial one at that. For instance, questions such as who made the decision, how the decision was made, when the decision was made, etc. are all excluded in Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. Since Chekhov never discussed the island’s historical and political background, one is left simply with the analysis of the island’s “morality” — which is, in itself, limited to the analysis of the penal colony’s compatibility with the notion of an autarkic agricultural colony. Casual readers are therefore left with little but philosophizing, facts, and nothing else.
On balance, Chekhov had understood the problems on Sakhalin Island, but he simply puts the blame on the incompetent bureaucracy or even to the settled-exiles themselves.[8] He complains that bureaucratic incompetence led to the settlement sites selected randomly with little consideration for the fertility of the land, the topography, or even its accessibility.[9] He also blames the bureaucracy for the problem of overpopulation in new settlements as officials often have no idea as to the maximum capacity a land could support.[10] Certainly, there are many instances that the bureaucracy is obviously to blame, but if viewed on a larger context, the bureaucracy’s incompetence is simply a symptom of a systemic problem. In fact, Chekhov had almost deduced the crux of the problem by commenting that the whole affair seems to indicate that
. . . the administration itself does not believe in the agricultural colony … [since] a settled exile will not be needed land for long — six years in all — since, when he has received peasant-in-exile’s rights, he will certainly abandon the island, and under such conditions, the question of land-plots can hold merely a purely formal significance.[11]
Unfortunately, he never made the leap to indicate the role of the autocracy in prolonging the injustice in the penal colony. Perhaps, this is because he genuinely did not have any idea or because he was fearful of being exiled himself. In analyzing his account, however, it would be rather surprising if anyone would argue that Chekhov had not known of the root cause of the problem.
Chekhov was aware that the Sakhalin penal colony had two layers of authority, the bureaucracy[12] and the military[13]. However, maybe because of self-censorship or because he is living within the system itself, his memoir never explains the significance of these two institutions. In fact, he seems to only notice the superficial, such as the ineptness of the bureaucracy, the cruel punishments[14], the arbitrariness of the justice system,[15] prostitution brought by poverty,[16] etc. Since Chekhov was unable to make the connection, it is therefore necessary to consult an outside source to illuminate why Chekhov’s work is an indictment of the Tsarist system.
In his historical study of the Sakhalin Island penal colony, Andrew Gentes argues that the dual-authority described by Chekhov was part of Alexander II’s (r. 1855–81) intention to remain in full control of society despite the changes that came with the Great Reforms. On the one hand, Alexander II had allowed for the emancipation of the serfs as well as for the creation of the local institutions of government; on the other hand, he also further strengthened the police state.
According to Gentes, in the early 1860s the war ministry was supposedly campaigning for the reduction of its policing duties within the exile system, but was ultimately unsuccessful.[17] Instead, the war ministry became more embedded within the exile system. Chekhov himself had contact with the soldiers as his armed escorts, and he had also noticed their “exceptionally strong measures and unavoidable surveillance” system for their capacity to terrify both the convicts and non-convicts alike.[18]
Contrary to the often touted notion of Alexander II as the “Tsar Liberator” or the advocate of liberal ideas, Gentes argues that Alexander II used “the law (lower case) … [as] a device through which to maintain a most un-Enlightened system of government which maintained class distinctions and elite privileges ….”[19] Moreover, Gentes believes that while Alexander II had allowed for reforms which extended the political and judicial freedoms of judges and bureaucrats — essentially giving power to these individuals to “supplant police power with legal procedures”, the tsar also created a parallel control for this freedom through the “use of bureaucratic procedures to expand upon and rationalize the exercise of police power.”[20] This dual-layer of “reforms” acted as Alexander II’s fail-safe. Logically, it would certainly have been foolish had Alexander II simply left the whole autocratic apparatus unchanged. Furthermore, Gentes contends that Alexander II “was unnerved by serf emancipation” and had therefore put in place the essential elements of controlling the masses prior to introducing the reform period.[21] Most importantly, Gentes believes that the establishment of Sakhalin Island as a penal colony could be attributed to the very nature of the autocracy itself — its de facto power to push through ideas against all better judgement. Pertinent to this is the existence of medieval conditions and lawlessness which could be attributed to the fact that Sakhalin Island was established under the counsel of Alexander II’s most trusted lieutenants [who] “favoured police methods over legal procedures.” Worse still, most of the “penal colony’s advocates were conservatives descended from the landed nobility, affiliated with either the military or the interior ministry, and close to the royal family.”[22] It was through this reality that Alexander II’s Great Reforms should be viewed in their proper context, not in the present Western view of liberalism.
Gentes’s analysis basically encapsulates what Chekhov is trying to articulate in his memoir — that Sakhalin Island is a mirror into Russia’s autocratic core. In a letter he sent to his confidant, Suvorin, Chekhov writes that “those who study imprisonment should regard Sakhalin in particular as the army regards Sevastopol … [because he thinks that Russia] have allowed millions of people to rot in prisons, to rot for no purpose, without any consideration and in a barbarous manner ….”[23] The juxtaposition here is important. During the Crimean War (1853–56), Sevastopol served as the cornerstone in the war whose loss after an eleven-month-long siege led to Russia’s capitulation and the subsequent re-examination of the Russian society, eventually leading to Alexander II’s Great Reforms. Sakhalin Island, at least to Chekhov, could also serve as an important lesson to civilized society, at least in advancing prison reforms. Indeed, as a conscientious Russian intellectual, Chekhov knew that “the whole of educated Europe” have come to realize that Sakhalin Island is a major disgrace to the “Christian civilization,” but that nothing is being done about the injustice because he thinks that prison just don’t appeal to people, that “it’s just not interesting”.[24]
In conclusion, Sakhalin Island could be argued as an indictment of the Tsarist regime, but only if one looks beyond its expressed objective of penal reform. That is, Sakhalin Island’s true historical significance was probably not evident to Chekhov’s contemporaries, maybe even to Chekhov himself, to the extent that the problem went beyond the need for penal reform. Arguably, Chekhov’s fairly privileged background within the autocratic system probably made him more tolerant of its failings, maybe even to the point that even though he had almost deduced the crux of the problem on Sakhalin Island he never really made the necessary leap that would have indicted the autocracy directly. One could argue that he was afraid of being exiled himself, and this is most likely what Chekhov had feared the most. It is therefore within this context that Chekhov had to carefully negotiate his way in presenting his experiences in a manner that intelligently conceals his true ideas. Had Chekhov written Sakhalin Island post-1905, he would most likely have written a more political and historical work than what he had produced in 1890, owing to the great reduction in censorship during this period. Unfortunately, Chekhov died in 1904, a year before the start of Russia’s great transformation under an era of great disorder and flux — an era which would eventually culminate in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the end of Tsarist Russia.
Bibliography
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. Sakhalin Island. Translated by Brian Reeve. Richmond, UK: Oneworld Classics, 2007.
Gentes, Andrew A. “No Kind of Liberal: Alexander II and the Sakhalin Penal Colony.” Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas Bd. 54, no. H. 3 (2006): 321–44. Accessed November 11, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41051703.
[1] Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (Richmond, UK: Oneworld Classics, 2007), 23.
[2] Ibid., 289.
[3] Ibid., 133.
[4] Ibid., 291.
[5] Ibid., 292.
[6] Ibid., 291.
[7] Ibid., 455.
[8] In Tsarist Russia’s penal system, a settled-exile status is gained once a convict had already served out their hard labour and had moved to enforced settlement. As a settled-exile, a convict is given a plot of land on which to farm — in line with the objective of making Sakhalin Island an autarkic agricultural colony.
[9] Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, 215–216.
[10] Ibid., 217.
[11] Ibid., 218.
[12] Ibid., 64.
[13] Ibid., 272, 275.
[14] Ibid., 292, 296.
[15] Ibid., 286–288.
[16] Ibid., 285.
[17] Andrew A. Gentes, “No Kind of Liberal: Alexander II and the Sakhalin Penal Colony,” Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas Bd. 54, no. H. 3 (2006): pg. 330–331, accessed November 11, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41051703.
[18] Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, 223.
[19] Gentes, “No Kind of Liberal: Alexander II and the Sakhalin Penal Colony,” 326.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 327.
[23] Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, 479.
[24] Ibid.