Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/80

 and consequently sentences, with some one else. Strange as it seems, this was actually done, and in my day the practice flourished among convicts on the road to Siberia, was consecrated by tradition and defined by certain formalities. At first I could not believe it, but I was convinced at last by seeing it with my own eyes.

This is how it is done. A party of convicts is being taken. to Siberia. There are some of all sorts, going to penal servitude, to penal factories, or to a settlement; they travel together. Somewhere on the road, in the province of Perm for instance, some convict wants to exchange with another. Some Mihailov, for instance, a convict sentenced for murder or some other serious crime, feels the prospect of many years' penal servitude unattractive. Let us suppose he is a crafty fellow who has knocked about and knows what he is doing. So he tries to find some one of the same party who is rather simple, rather down-trodden and submissive, and whose sentence is comparatively light, exile to a settlement or to a few years in a penal factory, or even to penal servitude, but for a short period. At last he finds a Sushilov. Sushilov is a serf who is simply being sent out to a settlement. He has marched fifteen hundred miles without a farthing in his pocket—for Sushilov, of course, never could have a farthing—exhausted, weary, tasting nothing but the prison food, without even a chance morsel of anything good, wearing the prison clothes, and waiting upon every one for a pitiful copper. Mihailov addresses Sushilov, gets to know him, even makes friends with him, and at last at some étape gives him vodka. Finally he suggests to him, Would not he like to exchange? He says his name is Mihailov, and tells him this and that, says he is going to prison, that is not to prison but to a “special division.” Though it is prison it is “special,” therefore rather better. Lots of people, even in the government in Petersburg for instance, never heard of the “special division” all the time it existed. It was a special, peculiar little class in one of the remote parts of Siberia, and there were so few in it, in my time not more than seventy, that it was not easy to get to hear of it. I met people afterwards who had served in Siberia and knew it well, who yet heard for the first time of the “special division” from me. In the Legal Code there are six lines about it: “There shall be instituted in such and such a prison a special division for the worst criminals until the opening of works involving harder labour in Siberia.” Even