“On January 12, 1850, we came to Tobolsk. After we had been paraded before the authorities, and searched, in which proceeding all our money was taken from us, myself, Dourov and Yastryembsky were taken into one cell; the others, Spejechynov, etc., who had arrived before us, were in another section, and during the whole time we hardly once saw each other. I should like to tell you more of our six days’ stay in Tobolsk, and of the impression it made upon me. But I haven’t room here. I will only tell you that the great compassion and sympathy which was shown to us there, made up to us, like a big piece of happiness, for all that had gone before. The prisoners of former days[40] (and still more their wives) cared for us as if they had been our kith and kin. Those noble souls, tested by five-and-twenty years of suffering and self-sacrifice! We saw them but seldom, for we were very rigidly guarded; still they sent us clothes and provisions, they comforted and encouraged us. I had brought far too few clothes, and had bitterly repented it; but they sent me clothes. Finally we left Tobolsk, and reached Omsk in three days. “While I was in Tobolsk, I gathered information about my future superiors. They told me that the Commandant was a very decent fellow, but that the Major, Krivzov, was an uncommon brute, a petty tyrant, a drunkard, a trickster--in short, the greatest horror that can be imagined. From the very beginning, he called both Dourov and me blockhead, and vowed to chastise us bodily at the first transgression. He had already held his position for two years, and done the most hideous and unsanctioned things; two years later he was court-martialled for them. So God protected me from him! He used to come to us mad drunk (I never once saw him sober), and would seek out some inoffensive person and flog him on the pretext that he--the prisoner--was drunk. Often he came at night and punished at random--say, because such and such a one was sleeping on his left side instead of his right, or because he talked or moaned in his sleep--in fact, anything that occurred to his drunken mind. I should have had to break out in the long run against such a man as that, and it was he who wrote the monthly reports of us to Petersburg.