INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL PRECEPTS

Beginning in the late 1860s the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) made a concerted effort to turn the north Pacific island of Sakhalin into a penal colony. It did so in order to solve many of the problems associated with the malfunctioning Siberian exile system, over which it exerted primary authority.^[1] By the mid-1880s Sakhalin had replaced Nerchinsk as the epicenter of katorga – a penal labor regime separate from yet operating conjointly with exile (ssylka) – but it was replicating many of the old problems while generating new and unique ones, such as fugitive prisoners murdering Japanese seasonal fishermen to steal their boats. By now, grandiose dreams of an agriculturally productive autarkic island economy had given way to the bureaucratic status quo ante and traditional disdain for convicts and their families. The autocracy still assigned the vast majority of exiles to the Siberian mainland; but as I have argued elsewhere,^[2] Sakhalin was important because it crystallized in miniature Russia’s penal and imperial policies.
Dostoevskii was not the first to observe that one measure of state/society relations is the manner by which a state administers its prisoners; and few states past or present have enacted penologies that could be described as laudable.^[3] Yet if late imperial Sakhalin’s history is in a sense only another chapter in one long tale of human woe, then analysis of its particularities can identify phenomena and associated precursors peculiar to Russian society in general.
This article addresses tsarist penology’s effects on women sent to Sakhalin – both convicts and those women who accompanied their husbands (sometimes fathers) into exile. Officials euphemistically referred to the latter (along with their dependent children) as dobrovolґnye (“voluntaries”), in tacit ignorance of the socioeconomic factors compelling them to accompany convict relatives. The regime sought to capitalize upon these societal outcasts’ biological and supposed feminine characteristics to achieve its goal of creating a long-lasting penal colony. Similar efforts date from the beginning of transuralic exile in the late sixteenth century, but on Sakhalin this statist goal led to the coercion of virtually every woman, whether convict or not, into some form of sexual enslavement.
Yet, bad as things were, one should caution against a blanket definition of these women as having been merely victims. “A proportion of exiles always seem to succeed where they go…,” observes John Simpson,^[4] and Mahnaz Afkhami has demonstrated how contemporary women exiles exercise personal agency. Various other studies similarly show how slaves and other oppressed groups have carved out autonomous spaces, wherein they exercise ultimate decision making power.^[5] Feminist theories on prostitution and Michel Foucault’s concept of power-as-exercised-via-constructed-sexualities further elucidate how tsarist women, acting within a male-dominated penologico-sexual construct, could be both victims and agents.
The victimization question sparks furious and varied debate, but most studies on prostitution fall on one or the other side of the “agency v. structuralist” argument.^[6] Structuralist Kathleen Barry, for example, relies heavily on Marxian and Weberian models of social stratification, as well as on Foucault, to assert that “In the first instance and the final analysis, prostitution is not about women at all.”^[7] Such statements have drawn fire from the other side, which seeks recognition for prostitutes as actors who exercise personal agency over their own lives.^[8] The most persuasive studies account for both sides in this debate. Belinda Carpenter argues the need to “re-think prostitution” by “disrupting the dualisms” that prevent ideological opponents from even being able to communicate with each other.^[9] In this vein, Joanna Phoenix observes that “continued involvement in prostitution is made possible for some women because, put simply, such involvement comes to ‘make sense’ within the social and material conditions in which they live…, via the construction of a specific ‘prostitute-identity’ which is constituted by and within a shifting set of meanings for men, money and violence.” For a group of modern-day prostitutes Phoenix studied, “involvement in prostitution came to represent both a gendered survival strategy and a gendered victimization.”^[10]
Based on these arguments, I think Barry is wrong to argue that social structures supporting prostitution and male-dominated conceptions of sexuality render all women victims and only victims. Her structuralist-determinist model^[11] obscures Foucault’s more persuasive assertion, that power cannot exist a priori human interaction but is generated by the negotiation characterizing every type of human interaction. Despite the existence of social hierarchies that allow certain individuals and groups greater opportunities to exercise power (as traditionally defined), there always exists a perpetual fluctuation of power (as defined by Foucault^[12]), because power is constantly being negotiated and renegotiated, from among the largest social groupings (e.g., nations) down to that most elemental of social dyads, two individuals. Foucault, essentially paraphrasing Nietzsche, was therefore able to conclude that “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” Based on his notion that “there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled…,” I believe it can be said that one group or individual is never truly any weaker than another in any single act of negotiation. Most importantly with respect to Sakhalin’s women, as we shall see, are Foucault’s notions that sexuality represents “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women… an administration and a population”; and that individuals are capable of transmuting their sexuality into power because, in essence, this sexuality is “endowed with the greatest instrumentality” for use in “the most varied strategies.”^[13] Therefore, even Sakhalin’s women were never rendered completely helpless.^[14]

BUREAUCRATIC PRELIMINARIES

Russia acquired sovereignty over Sakhalin through its 1875 treaty with Japan,^[15] but it had been sending small groups of penal laborers (katorzhnye) to the island since the 1850s, mostly to work in the coal mines at Duй Post. After 1875, and despite Golos’s call that year for settlement by free Russian emigrants,^[16] the number of convicts gradually increased, so that by autumn 1876 723 male and 116 female penal laborers were in Duй Prison, and another 308 males and 35 females were assigned to a so-called model farm nearby. The only other penal laborers on the island appear to have been a group of 44 men and 11 women in the prison at Korsakovsk Post.^[17] An unknown but certainly smaller number of exile-settlers (ssylґno-poselentsy – convicts who had completed the labor portions of their sentences) lived in settlements throughout the island.
Living conditions on the island were poor due to chronically inclement weather, inefficient communications with the mainland, and bureaucratic malfeasance. Officials, soldiers, and prisoners suffered alike. In 1876 the officer in charge of Duй’s penal laborers, a Colonel Dedernikov, complained to the Main Administration of Eastern Siberia (GUVS), in Irkutsk, that transports persistently arrived with many of their supplies missing.^[18] Six years later, regional officials were still complaining to Irkutsk about insufficient supplies of flour and other foodstuffs.^[19] Malnutrition would plague Sakhalin’s exiles until the colony was disbanded after Japan’s 1906 invasion.
“The katorga women assigned to Sakhalin,” added Dedernikov in one report, “not having received any sort of [labor] position and remaining without appropriate supervision, fall completely from a moral life and increase the number of those with syphilis...” Thus Vera Ivanovna, Marґia Shirokova, and other women were living cheek-by-jowl with the men in Sakhalin’s prisons, with predictable results. Dedernikov recommended that a separate women’s prison be constructed.^[20] But the administration merely built a separate jail, to hold new women arrivals pending assignment elsewhere and to incarcerate women who committed new crimes on the island. Few women penal laborers ever received jobs; instead they along with other women were incorporated into Sakhalin’s peculiar and predatory male environment. Dedernikov’s report also highlights officials’ prevalent fears of sexual contamination, about which more will be said below.
By the close of Alexander II’s reign the main katorga regime centered in the Kara Valley in Nerchinsk oblastґ had long been foundering due to insufficient mineral reserves. Most of the convicts there and elsewhere languished in kamery (large, communal cells) with nothing to do except gamble, drink, and go mad.^[21] As early as 1873 an MVD inspector had written that “it is necessary to conclude that katorga exists neither as a concept of punishment nor as a concept implemented.”^[22] This and the desire to turn Sakhalin into a penal colony that would by contrast prove lasting and productive sparked an MVD plan “to send to Sakhalin all women sentenced to katorga in Eastern Siberia….”^[23] As expressed by Mikhail N. Galkin-Vraskoi, director of the just established Main Prison Administration (GTU),

One of the major impediments to the establishment of exile-settler life – and following this, a colony on the island – is the insignificant number of women compared to the quantity of male criminals located on Sakhalin…^[24]

In concert with most Russian officials Galkin-Vraskoi believed that women exerted a civilizing influence on the frontier. Like Victorian England Alexandrine Russia saw women, whether in the guise of wives, helpmeets, or even prostitutes, as key to taming the exiled male convict, whose bestial behavior included a marked proclivity to engage in homosexual sex. Gazing askance at Australia and Sakhalin, London and Petersburg respectively sought to forestall such perversions by ensconcing women in these islandic Sodoms.^[25] That such efforts led to their sexual enslavement was of little concern. Therefore Russia was not alone in using women this way: scenes of enforced concubinage and prostitution of women convicts on Australia mirror almost exactly those on Sakhalin. Moreover, sexual enslavement of women and children is today a world-wide problem.^[26] But perhaps uniquely, Russia’s policies toward and treatment of women convicts and convict-related women dovetailed with their sexual exploitation as early as the late sixteenth century, when exile to Siberia began.^[27] As GTU’s director, Galkin-Vraskoi legitimated the autocracy’s sexual enslavement of women; but he also exemplified how anachronistic the regime had become.
Entrusted to GUVS and IOGU chinovniki, the transfer of women penal laborers began haltingly and was never executed according to plan. The MVD-GTU designated Siberia’s katorga women for Sakhalin, but mainland officials seem to have retained most of them. On 22 March 1880, Eastern Siberia’s governor-general Dmitrii G. Anuchin ordered that only “healthy women” were to be transferred, because he was concerned that unhealthy ones would spread syphilis and other diseases among the Russian Far East’s preponderantly male population.^[28] Yet Anuchin was also troubled by the entire undertaking, as suggested by a separate letter that same day to Zabaikalґe’s military governor exempting from transfer women

over forty years of age, held in hospital, pregnant, having here [Irkutsk guberniia and Zabaikalґe oblastґ] a husband, family, close relatives, a household [domoobzavedenie]; or awaiting a husband, whose arrival is without question; along with those whose remaining labor [terms equal only] several months.^[29]

Anuchin’s letter demonstrates, I think, genuine empathy toward these women. Indeed many subordinates followed his restrictions to the letter, certifying for transfer as few women as possible. For instance in May 1880, Blagoveshchensk (capital of Amur oblastґ and through which all transferees were supposed to pass as they traveled along the Amur River to Nikolaevsk-na-Amure, there to depart for Sakhalin) retained fifty-four out of a party of sixty-six women. Twenty were withheld simply because they had received imperial pardons. Yet of the rest eight were ill, another eight were beyond the age limit of forty years, three had been wrongly separated from family members, and five were pregnant.^[30] Similarly, in November 1881 the Zabaikalґe MVD bureau informed Anuchin that since the beginning of January, it had dispatched from Kara a total of fifty-five women; however, it was proud to report that 150 still remained there per his restrictions. A roster shows that twenty-three-year-old Aleksandra Ermolaeva was exempt because she was “weak”; Marґia Bashpatova because she had a husband at Kara; and Aksinґia Prokopґeva because she had a six-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.^[31]
But in a pair of letters to IOGU governor Konstantin N. Shelashnikov in March 1880, Anuchin related that interior minister L.S. Makov and his just-named successor M.T. Loris-Melikov were urging him to increase the number of women certified for transfer. Shelashnikov accordingly responded by sending a doctor to re-examine those “exempt women” still in Irkutsk Jail and Aleksandrovsk Prison (near Irkutsk).^[32] The doctor, himself an IOGU official, nevertheless refused to certify more than twenty-nine of the 170 women in Aleksandrovsk. And of those he did certify, he admonished that eight were with

breast-feeding and very young children and in my opinion [should] not be assigned for removal, since the children, especially the breast-feeders [who he elsewhere attests were particularly prone to illness], will hamper and burden the transfer...^[33]

Nevertheless, under pressure from Petersburg Anuchin and Shelashnikov began more forcefully to order that women be forwarded, even if they were ill. Some subordinates complied, others did not. In July the Primorґe oblastґ MVD bureau informed Anuchin that “the majority of [women who had arrived in Nikolaevsk and along the upper Amur] display contagious, chronic forms of syphilis, and when asked where they had contracted these illnesses, the women responded ‘on the road’….” These women said chinovniki in the towns through which they passed were aware of their conditions, but provided neither treatment nor refuge.^[34] Instead they seem to have been raping them, then spreading syphilis among later transferees.
Analysis of 125 women gathered in Blagoveshchensk as of mid-summer 1882 demonstrates the extent to which Anuchin was forced to violate his own regulations. Ten were over forty years old. According to the very documents that accompanied her, one Lukeriia Lifanova was actually close to sixty. Restrictions other than the age limit had been violated. Eleven of the women had children, many very young: Agafґia Skorokhodova carried with her a six-month-old son, Nikolai; and Marґia Stepanova’s son was only a month older. Although the entire group was scheduled for removal to Sakhalin, Blagoveshchensk officials determined that almost half needed to be retained for various reasons, the most prevalent of which was cited as “age or illness.” Curiously, only one woman was retained because of syphilis. Several others had already completed their sentences and should never have been sent to Blagoveshchensk in the first place.^[35]
How many women penal laborers were originally in Siberia is unknown; but it appears a majority of those transferred never reached Sakhalin. As parties proceeded further east, their numbers progressively dwindled. GUVS’s Governing Council reported that in March, June, and October 1881, Irkutsk dispatched a total of fifty-two women to Zabaikalґe. Of this total, Zabaikalґe officials found only thirty-four fit enough to continue down the Amur. In the end, only twenty-eight arrived in Primorґe oblastґ.^[36] Chinovniki in the distant Zabaikalґe, Amur, and Primorґe oblasti proved more resistant than local IOGU officials to following Anuchin’s orders. But whereas much of this resistance stemmed from genuine concern for these women, it is also clear that many officials sought to satisfy more solipsistic needs.
If at times circumstantial, the evidence nevertheless strongly suggests that officials coerced many of these women into various positions of sexual servitude. The same Governing Council report states that at the insistence of the emperor, a total of thirty-one of the women transferred to Blagoveshchensk during 1881 were kept there “for services” (dlia uslug). If this was indeed Alexander II’s decision it is remarkable, for in this context “for services” was like “domestic service” a euphemism for concubinage. That same year Prince Nikolai D. Shakhovskoi, katorga commander of Primorґe oblastґ, apparently unilaterally decided to assign as “domestic servants” for his staff twenty of the forty-eight women transferred to Nikolaevsk-na-Amure. As of February 1882, the remaining unassigned women from this group were still awaiting delivery to Sakhalin aboard the schooner Ermak. But the pattern already established suggests what many were doing until their ship arrived, so to speak. Ending its litany of administrative abuses the Governing Council sourly wrote, “As such, during the past year [1881] not a single woman penal laborer was delivered to Sakhalin.”^[37]
Gross malfeasance was a hallmark of most operations involving the Siberian bureaucracy. Still, Petersburg’s effort to populate Sakhalin with females enjoyed success. By September 1883, 420 women made up part of the island’s total katorga population of 3,457. That year 99 women and over 600 men graduated to exile-settler status on the island.^[38] Yet at least the figures on women seem to have resulted not so much from transfers out of Siberia as from shipments out of Odessa. In 1879 Galkin-Vraskoi, as one of his first acts as GTU director, had ordered that all women newly-sentenced to either katorga or exile-to-settlement (ssylka na poselenie) be shipped directly to Vladivostok, whence most crossed the Tatar Straits to Sakhalin.^[39] From that year on the regime appears to have no longer exiled female criminals to mainland Siberia.

DEMOGRAPHY

Demographic evidence on the Sakhalin penal colony is most prevalent for the last fifteen years of its existence, that is, 1891-1906. Anton Chekhov made his celebrated visit to the island in 1891, and in addition to writing a journalistic memoir he compiled while there a census of some 10,000 residents. This census accounts for virtually every exile on the island, with the exception of approximately 3,000 penal laborers in the prisons to which he was denied access. For our study of women convicts this hardly matters, since only a handful were ever in prison at any one time. As a rule Chekhov did not count children or soldiers and other non-penal inhabitants, with the exception of many of the dobrovolґnye. “I recorded free persons only if they directly participated in an exile’s household,” explains Chekhov, “ – for example, if they were married, legally or illegally, and generally belonged to his family, or lived in his house as workers, lodgers, etc.”^[40] I researched versions of the Chekhov census archived in what were at the time the Lenin Library and Central State Archive of Literature and Art.^[41] The latter had only a partial, microfilmed sampling, whereas the former peremptorily (albeit temporarily) closed before I could complete a full review. Nonetheless, I was able to compile a database consisting of 312 females and 562 males divided between Duй Post and Aleksandrovsk Post, which in 1884 became Sakhalin’s administrative center. Counting the dobrovolґnye as exiles, my sample represents 9 percent of Sakhalin’s total 1891 exile population. Comparison with certain general statistics given by Chekhov shows it to be a mostly representative sample.
Another census is that conducted as part of the 1897 imperial census. It contains a bevy of information, though with respect to individuals is not as precise as Chekhov’s. That year, Sakhalin had a total population of 28,113: exiles still serving their sentences accounted for 47 percent; the combined category of peasants and cossacks (virtually all of whom were former convicts) around 33 percent; indigenes (Giliaks, Oroks, Ainu) 15 percent; and a small number of administrators, soldiers, townspeople, clergy, and foreigners made up the rest. Almost half the population was between the ages of twenty and forty; three-quarters was male. More than twenty-five languages and language groups were represented, including Ukrainian, Armenian, Finnish, and Tatar. Great Russian was the principal language of 56 percent of the population. A total of 7,641 females were on the island; but the census fails to distinguish between them in many cases.^[42]
A flurry of accounts by visitors to the island appeared in the years leading up to the Russo-Japanese War. Besides Chekhov’s, among the best is a report by Dmitrii A. Drilґ, a Ministry of Justice criminologist who inspected the island in 1896. He found that only 10 percent of exile-settlers’ farmsteads had “any substance.” Half were “only pro forma, for [the benefit of the appearance of] the [Sakhalin] command…,” while the rest were defunct, having been abandoned by those assigned to them. As a result, the large majority of exiles relied on government rations. Drilґ divided Sakhalin’s women into two categories. The first, consisting of penal laborers, exile-settlers, and peasants-formerly-exiles, numbered 2,143. The second, consisting of “free women, who have either voluntarily followed their husbands, or are the peasant offspring of exiles…,” numbered 1,373.^[43]
Vlas M. Doroshevich’s memoir of his 1897 visit to the island is more of a literary exercise than even Chekhov’s. A correspondent for Odesskii listok and Rossiia, his greatest success came with Sakhalin (Katorga), published in 1903. It is especially remarkable for his psychological portraits of individual exiles.^[44] Foreign visitors also recorded their impressions of Sakhalin. Some, like the Englishman Charles Hawes, condemned the colony; others, like his countryman Harry De Windt and the American Benjamin Howard, praised it as an emulative model.^[45] All these accounts, except perhaps for the more sober assessment by Drilґ, often err on the side of exaggeration. Nonetheless, when used along with archival and statistical data they reveal much about life on the island.
Chekhov’s census shows that over 67 percent of the women on Sakhalin were between the ages of twenty-six and forty. By comparison, males had a more even age distribution, and were more than twice as likely to be over age fifty. Two major factors explain this difference. First, most of the sample dobrovolґnye were younger than their husbands. Sarra Bermann was five years younger than her husband Rafain, a Jew from Minsk who had attained peasant status and was working as a trader in Aleksandrovsk. Thirty year-old Natalґia Kononenko was seven years younger than her penal laborer husband, Nikita. Such spousal age differences were common throughout Russia, and so at least in this respect Sakhalin mirrored the general society. Second, we know that younger women committed crimes and were exiled in much larger numbers than older women.^[46] According to Hawes, “any female criminal under forty, whose sentence is not less that two years, may be sent from Russia to Sakhalin”^[47] – this and Petersburg’s colonial goal certainly increased the number of female convicts of child-bearing age exiled to the island.
What Chekhov categorized as “rank” (zvanie zapisyvaemogo) typically identified a person’s status within the judicial system. Forty-two percent of the sample’s women were “free”; 29 percent were penal laborers; and 25 percent were exile-settlers. The rest were either “peasants-formerly-exiles,” “other,” or gave no answer. Typical of these 131 freewomen was forty-two-year-old Klementina Chislevskaia, who arrived with her husband Bronislav in 1886. Only two sample freewomen were unmarried. Ustinґia Prunlaeva was a twenty-six-year-old resident of Aleksandrovsk okrug, who had arrived three years before the Chislevskiis. Cohabitating with an Olgor Bouton, a penal laborer from Kursk, Prunlaeva like most Sakhalin women had no occupation. The other unmarried freewoman was Prunlaeva’s namesake, Ustinґia Vasiilґeva, also age twenty-six and a resident of Aleksandrovsk okrug. Apparently because she did not want to remain alone in their village of Tashek (location unknown), she had accompanied her convict father Nozhedґ and free mother to Sakhalin, where they shared a hut with two married couples, each comprising a penal laborer and his free wife.
Ninety-two sample women were penal laborers. Despite their sentences they generally had no occupations. Administrators did allow a handful to work at Duй or as domestic servants, and some lived near the prisons and worked as seamstresses; but most were in settlements where no jobs could be found.^[48] Officials treated the majority of katorga women just like exile-settlers. Thus fifty-eight-year-old Nadezhda Malygina, a widow hailing from Tambov who had been on Sakhalin since 1886, lived in “house no. 5” in Aleksandrovsk Post. Both literate and a “worker,” she was a rarity on Sakhalin. Then there was Khana Fuks, a twenty-five-year-old former resident of Warsaw who lived with her husband Leba, also sentenced to katorga. They shared a hut with two other couples, one of which consisted of a young, albeit widowed, Orthodox penal laborer named Voglinova, and her cohabitant, Karl Baumgart, an unmarried Lutheran exile-settler.
Life in the settlements was even more miserable than in prison. When after talking to a group of starving and unemployed exile-settlers Doroshevich coined the aphorism “Katorga begins when it ends,” he was acclaimed by convicts and officials alike.^[49] Seventy-seven sample women were exile-settlers. It is likely that most had arrived on Sakhalin as penal laborers, then graduated after serving what were juridically-speaking their katorga sentences. Hence forty-year-old Iulґena Sergeeva, who arrived in 1878, had like many been on the island for ten or more years. But a number of others were more recent arrivals, like Ekaterina Klimnokova, who had been on the island for seven years. Those in her cohort had either received briefer katorga sentences (it was possible to serve as few as two years) and therefore became exile-settlers sooner, or had arrived on the island qua exile-settlers. Many of Sakhalin’s women exile-settlers had been convicted of vagabondage, or brodiazhestvo, a serious crime in imperial Russia. Female exile-settlers generally gave no occupations, at least that Chekhov felt he could note. Exceptions existed, however: a twenty-one year-old woman identified only as Pavelskova worked as a laundress; Aleksandra Ershova worked as a charwoman in Aleksandrovsk okrug.
Finally, the sample identifies a small group of nine women as “peasants-formerly-exiles.” They had completed their sentences, regained their rights, and now belonged to the peasant soslovie. Seven lived in Aleksandrovsk okrug, two in Duй. Nastasґia Giranditskaia, of the latter, was at age sixty-seven one of Sakhalin’s oldest residents. A widow, she had been born in Mogilev and arrived on Sakhalin in 1875. Most of the eight others were age thirty or younger. All except one, who worked as a charwoman, had no occupation. They had been on Sakhalin an average of fourteen years by 1891.
Chekhov also collected information on literacy. “Usually the question is phrased in the form: ‘Are you literate?’” he explains. “Instead I asked: ‘Can you read?’ which often saved me from incorrect answers because peasants who cannot write and can only read printed words say they are illiterate.”^[50] Despite this more accurate questioning technique, only sixteen (5.6 percent) of the sample women were literate. The proportion of literate men was much higher (49.8 percent).^[51] In addition, eight of these literate men, half of them exiles, described themselves as “educated.” Just one woman, Anna Ivanova Maeva, wife of Duй’s mine foreman, regarded herself as such.
Over 85 percent of both males and females included in the sample were Russian Orthodox. The next two largest denominations were Roman Catholics (6.8 percent) and Muslims (4.1 percent). Although accounts indicate that individuals in these categories (mostly Poles and Caucasians, respectively) tended to be shunned by the hegemonic exile population, they were subject to the same policies as the majority. Minority religionists freely practiced their beliefs. For example the Dagestanian Vas Khasan Mamet served as mullah for Aleksandrovsk Post’s small Muslim community, and was allowed to build a mosque at his own expense. Sixty-five-year-old Ultamaban Dzhaksambetov, who arrived four years before Mamet and by 1891 had attained peasant status, brought with him from Tashkent his free wife Batyna, two years his senior, then chose as his second wife an exile from Semipalatinsk named Sasena, half Batyna’s age. Chekhov reports that although Catholics on the island had no resident priest, the administration arranged for a clergyman to visit once a year. “Lutherans on Sakhalin have a society…” and “gather… for prayers and for exchanging ideas,” “[t]he Tatars [i.e., Muslims] choose a mullah from among themselves, the Hebrews choose a rabbi, but,” adds Chekhov, “they do this unofficially.”^[52] Yet half a dozen years later six non-Christian clergymen were active on the island and, in addition to its eighteen Orthodox churches, chapels, and shrines, there were two mosques as well as three so-called prayer houses that each served the spiritual needs of Catholics, Jews, and Lutherans.^[53]
By 1897 Sakhalin’s 13,168 convicts (penal laborers and exile-settlers) and 9,529 “peasants and cossacks” respectively accounted for 47 and 34 percent of its total population. Females accounted for 13 percent (1,650) and 39 percent (3,680), respectively, of these two groups (though the above mentioned Drilґ figures for 1896 should be kept in mind). Statistics on household composition help to indicate how women lived on Sakhalin, where administrators accounted for only 70 of 5,664 householders (khoziaka, f.; khoziain, m.). Data on average household size show that nearly 28 percent of households consisted of just one or two persons, while incrementally larger households were statistically less significant.^[54]

AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD SIZE (%)

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/gentes.jpg>

It is true that many exiles, like the above-mentioned Khana Fuks, lived in huts crowded with several others. Thus Chekhov describes the living arrangements at “…Duй, a horrible, ugly, and in all respects rotten place, where only saints or profoundly depraved people would live of their own volition.”^[55] Twenty-seven families there lived in so-called “barracks for families”; but euphemisms failed to disguise what were dingy kamery that had long ago been scheduled for demolition. Chekhov entered four of the kamery, which contained almost nothing except sleeping platforms (nary) and chamber pots. The first, replete with broken windows, housed two convicts and their free wives; a convict, his free wife and daughter; and a Polish settler and his cohabitant, a woman penal laborer. All slept contiguously on a single nara amidst a stifling atmosphere. The second kamera was similar but more crowded. Chekhov watched a piglet slobbering on its muck-encrusted floor and smelled the stench of bedbugs and “something sour.” Of the two other kamery one contained a convict, his free wife and seven children, including two daughters aged sixteen and fifteen; the other the jailer, his eighteen-year-old wife and daughter.^[56]
Yet as the graph above indicates, a significant number of exiles either lived alone or with just one other person. In a chapter entitled “Two Murderers Married,” Doroshevich romanticizes the life shared between a woman called Sharonichka and her husband Pishchikov. Both were separately convicted of murdering their spouses and exiled to Sakhalin, where they met and fell madly in love. Doroshevich also describes a different union, utilitarian and celibate:

Unlike other prisoners Grebeniuk “has been given a cohabitant,” regardless of the fact that he is still a penal laborer and should not enjoy this particular luxury.
His elderly woman came here “because of her husband,” that is, because she murdered him. She is much older than Grebeniuk, and not pretty.
“Well, I do respect her, and she respects me. We live appropriately, and do not offend God!”
Their cohabitation really was established early on out of reciprocal need, rather than for any other reason. Grebeniuk chose her for her diligence and housekeeping. Unlike Grebeniuk, she is free from compulsory labor.^[57]

COHABITANTS, CONCUBINES, AND PROSTITUTES

Grebeniuk’s unnamed cohabitant, whose tasks included feeding the backyard piglets, here serves to introduce the administration’s deployment of women. Although their general unemployment has been noted, according to the 1897 census a number of women did hold jobs. For example 173 worked for the administration, courts, or police. The category “officials and workers in private service [and] assistants” accounted for 317,^[58] most of whom were probably domestic servants in one capacity or another. Chekhov was surprised to learn that officials’ wives routinely employed exiles as nursemaids. But a majority of domestic servants probably conformed to what Hawes observed: “I have often seen them – those of them that had been retained by officials, nominally for cleaning and sewing purposes, I say nominally, because the real purpose was openly known….”^[59] The largest number of women, 3,336, was ascribed to agriculture (zemledelie).^[60] However, the data do not distinguish between sosloviia, and therefore one suspects that many of the women in this category were Giliaks or other indigenes. Furthermore, the category was largely nominative, for most convicts had given up on agriculture.^[61]
What, then, did most women on Sakhalin do? The majority became either cohabitants, concubines, or prostitutes. Chekhov describes the “divvying up” of new arrivals:

When a party of women reach Aleksandrovsk today, they are accompanied ceremoniously from the pier to the prison. The women, bent under the weight of bundles and knapsacks hanging fore and aft, stagger along the road, pale from seasickness, while mobs of women, men, children and office workers follow behind, like the troops of people who follow comedians at a fair. The scene brings to mind a run of herring on [Sakhalin’s] Aniva River, when the fish are followed by whole schools of whales, seals and dolphins determined to feast on the spawning herring. The peasant settlers follow the crowd with obvious and honorable intentions: they need housewives. The women look to see whether they can find fellow countrywomen. The clerks and guards need “girls.” This usually happens in the early evening. The women are locked up in wards which have been prepared for them, and then all night long the talk goes on in the prison and at the post about the new arrivals, about the joys of family life, about the impossibility of homesteading without women, etc.

Within twenty-four hours administrators would variously allocate these women. “No thought is given to the agricultural colony during this distribution…,” adds Chekhov. “One [group is] designated as servants for the officials…. A second batch of women enter the harems of the clerks and the guards. The third batch, the majority, go to live in the settlers’ huts.”^[62] Bidding and bribery influenced who would go where, and even married women with children were not exempt from the auction.^[63]
To sanction a cohabitatory arrangement a chinovnik simply wrote the man’s and woman’s names beside each other in a ledger. These unions technically violated both civil and religious law. Yet from the administration’s point of view there was little way around this – legal marriages were rare because most exiled husbands could not persuade the wives they left behind to sanction divorce. Sakhalin officials routinely ignored laws against adultery and fornication in the hopes of promoting both procreation and a stable penal colony.
According to Chekhov cohabitants were beaten just as often as wives traditionally were in Russia. Yet women carried an especial value in Sakhalin males’ eyes due to the uneven gender ratio, which among exiles was 3.3 males to each female.^[64] This allowed certain individuals considerable power over their men. “While the cohabitant is working or playing cards somewhere,” writes Chekhov,

the female cohabitant lolls in bed, lazy and hungry.… Her cohabitant returns home; there is nothing to do, there’s nothing to talk about with the woman; the samovar should be lit, but there’s no sugar or tea. Seeing his lazy cohabitant, a feeling of boredom and lassitude overwhelms him, but he never mentions his hunger or vexation. Instead he sighs, and falls into bed.^[65]

Doroshevich, who consciously emulated Chekhov, recreates this scene faithfully, down to the lack of tea. But despite disparaging his female cohabitant as a baba who “speaks with unusual impudence, with a kind of impertinent aplomb,” Doroshevich reveals a nuanced understanding of the reasons for her behavior. “I did housework in Russia and I’m to do still more here! What a surprise!” she says. Then, about her cohabitant, who frets over the cooking “like a baba” because his mate refuses to work, she muses:

Perhaps he’ll satisfy me. But I’m not going to cringe before him. A guard already came and asked me to be his cohabitant. He’s just one of many. I can decide to take anyone I want!

The man tells her to be quiet. “I speak as I wish,” she replies.

And you’re not pleasing me – though just now I’m amused. I wore the apron and did my work. Otherwise you’d all be without shirts. So go find another – a woman who’s taken a vow of silence!^[66]

Chekhov’s and Doroshevich’s stereotypes reflect the misogynism redolent in tsarist Russian culture. (“Here’s a fantastic picture!” writes the latter, introducing his scene. “Where in all of Russia will you see anything like it?”^[67]) But they also demonstrate that female cohabitants, despite a universe of male oppression, defined realms in which they alone were dominant.
The realm in which Sakhalin women were most instrumentally dominant was that of prostitution. It must first be said that Hawes, Chekhov, and others undoubtedly characterized as prostitutes many women who were in fact not earning money in exchange for sex. Studies of Australian exile show that nineteenth century accounts of women convicts and exiles reflect authors’ class prejudices and Victorian prudery as much as any actualities about prostitution.^[68] Similarly, many Russian elites regarded any hint of a woman’s sexuality outside the parameters of the marriage bed as proof positive she was a whore. Such libertines threatened a patriarchy already morbidly obsessed with syphilis.^[69] Yet even accounting for mistaken identities, many of Sakhalin’s women were clearly earning money as sex workers.
Several additional factors need be considered when addressing the issue of these women’s personal agency. Male cohabitants commonly pressured their mates into prostituting themselves, since they could earn much more than men could through physical labor. Husbands sometimes wrote letters to their wives back in Russia, describing an island paradise and urging them to leave behind what in most cases would have been desperate existences as “convict widows.”^[70] After these deluded wives arrived, their exile-settler husbands forced them into prostitution then abandoned work, unless their role as pimps is considered employment. Visitors to the island claimed that a majority of dobrovolґnye were also prostitutes. This is impossible to verify; but their lots were in a way worse than convicts’. Whereas the latter received limited rations and stipends for at least their first years on Sakhalin, dobrovolґnye received almost nothing because, administrators reasoned, they were on the island “voluntarily” and therefore should impose no additional burdens on the treasury. A wife whose husband was incarcerated in prison had to earn a living by herself. Even if she and her husband lived together in a settlement, insufficient rations and especially the addition of children compelled the couple to scrabble to survive. The near impossibility of successful farming often made prostitution the only viable option. After compelling his wife to sell herself “[t]he husband… becomes hardened, he cares nothing for cleanliness, everything seems unimportant to him,” writes Chekhov. “At the age of fourteen or fifteen the daughters, too, are sent out on the merry-go-round.”^[71] Hawes, who characterized prostitution as the real “hard labor” of Sakhalin’s women, confirms that mothers converted their huts into brothels, then employed their own prepubescent daughters. “There is not a girl over nine years of age on the island who is a virgin,” he claimed.^[72] He may not have been exaggerating.
Chekhov made a studied effort to visit every settlement on Sakhalin. He failed; but the portraits he draws of those he did visit suggest how vulnerable women were as a result of their numerical inferiority. Twice as many males as females were in the small settlement of Krasnyi Iar, on the Duika River; and in nearby Butakovo, which he did not visit but learned about through official records, only four adult females were part of a total population of thirty-nine. These like most settlements were impoverished, their inhabitants doing what they could to get by. Of the residents of Nikolaevsk, a suburb of Aleksandrovsk Post, Chekhov concluded that the men resold prison clothes, cheated foreigners and newcomers, lent money, smuggled vodka, and gambled. The women simply resorted to prostitution.^[73]
Chinovniki certainly constituted part of the prostitutes’ clientele, while creating the conditions that allowed for and necessitated prostitution. In lieu of corporal punishment, temporary incarceration was imposed on women who committed crimes on the island. Ironically, officials busted most women for prostitution, then dispatched them to those most distant parts of the island with overwhelmingly male populations, where they simply resumed their trade. A medical doctor told Drilґ that in one village comprising four women, eighty exiles, and six soldiers an emaciated woman confessed to servicing no fewer than twenty men a day.^[74] “Because of the tremendous demand” witnessed by Chekhov and others, “neither old age, nor ugliness, nor even tertiary syphilis…” limited the steady flow of johns.^[75]
Victimized by circumstance, Sakhalin women nonetheless created choices for themselves. By instrumentally using their bodies and sexuality within the “dense transfer point” of male/female negotiations, concubines, cohabitants, and prostitutes could gain leverage against and subvert Sakhalin’s particularly threatening patriarchy – a patriarchy embodied as it were by a military command that knew few boundaries and a criminal population that included innumerable rapists and murderers. Of the three prostitution was the most powerful strategic option for women trying to survive this Hobbesian jungle. Earnings through sexual labor allowed them to acquire material goods and to supplement a meager diet of potatoes and cabbage with fish, meat, and fruit. Some may even have been able to afford transport off the island after attaining peasant status. By constructing “prostitute-identities” women not only could avoid being forcibly raped but could, within their own spheres, dominate numerous males and ipso facto invert the hegemonic sexual hierarchy. Operating within a crucible of state/society and male/female relations, these women drove a wedge into dominant rules of conduct in late imperial Russia. To assert that Sakhalin’s women were nothing but victims would therefore be to deny their roles as historical actors and to violate them once again.