Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Peter Kropotkin

I was far away, in the Vitím mountains, when the Polish exiles, who were employed in excavating a new road in the cliffs round Lake Baikál, made a desperate attempt to break their chains, and to force their way to China across Mongolia. Troops were sent out against them, and a Russian officer -- whom I will call Potalov -- was killed by the insurgents. I heard of it on my return to Irkutsk, where some fifty Poles were to be tried by court-martial. The sittings of courts-martial being open in Russia, I followed this, taking detailed notes of the proceedings, which I sent to a St. Petersburg paper, and which were published in full, to the great dissatisfaction of the governor-general.

Eleven thousand Poles, men and women, had been transported to East Siberia alone, in consequence of the insurrection of 1863. They were chiefly students, artists, ex-officers, nobles, and especially skilled artisans from the intelligent and highly developed workers' population of Warsaw and other towns. A great number of them were kept at hard labor, while the remainder were settled all over the country, in villages where they could find no work whatever, and lived in a state of semi-starvation. Those who were at hard labor worked either at Chitá, building the barges for the Amúr -- these were the happiest -- or in iron works of the Crown, or in salt works. I saw some of the latter, on the Léna, standing half-naked in a shanty, around an immense cauldron filled with salt-brine, and mixing the thick, boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the gates of the shanty were wide open, to make a strong current of glacial air. After two years of such work these martyrs were sure to die from consumption.