Peculiar phases of criminality to be found in Siberian prisons—Country overrun with convict fugitives—Terrible privations suffered by these vagrants—The “call of the cuckoo”—The vagrants known as “brodyagi”—Number of runaway convicts in the summer months said to exceed thirty thousand—The formation of the “artel” or union in all companies of convicts—The power and methods of the “Ivans” or recidivists in the “artel”—Leo Deutsch’s story—Life of the politicals in the Middle Kara state prison—The “Sirius” or student who worked during the night—The humane governor, Colonel Kanonovich—He resigns rather than obey the government’s orders that the prisoners should be perpetually chained to wheelbarrows. Certain types of criminals and some peculiar phases of criminality have grown up in Russian, and especially in Siberian prisons. They are mainly due to the negation of proper penitentiary principles and the absence of any fixed methods of treatment. Callous indifference has generally alternated with brutal repression and savage, disciplinary punishments. The chief result has been the growth of classes of criminals seldom seen elsewhere. The so-called “habitual offender” is to be met with strongly developed and in a peculiarly vicious form in Siberia. The whole country is overrun with fugitive convicts who have made good their escape in various fashions. Some have run from the marching parties, carrying their lives in their hands as they braved the bullets of the generally straight-shooting soldiers of the escort; others have successfully evaded the police at remote points of settlement as established exiles; not a few have benefited by the exchange of identity with some one who remained behind. All have become wild men of the woods, the terror of all peaceable members of society whom they may come across in the scattered settlements or single houses of the sparsely inhabited districts. Many thousands of these vagrants are at large in the summer months, when they may live in the open air and subsist as best they can on what they find or steal. Large numbers are recaptured; many perish from cold and starvation when winter approaches; many more give themselves up voluntarily to save their lives, accepting the severest flogging or a new sentence as the penalty of their escape. Yet they are incorrigible wanderers and pass their lives in short periods of freedom and longer doses of confinement. When Kennan saw a marching party start, he was shown convicts who were treading the dolorous road for the sixth time. The captain of the escort assured him that he had known cases in which the journey had been repeated sixteen times. In other words, the vagrant had crossed Siberia just thirty-two times on foot, and had, therefore, walked as much as if he had twice made the circuit of the globe at the Equator.