Comparative calm reigned during my first years at Rykovsk Prison. There were such incidents as the murder of an exile-settler, but they didn't provoke a sensation among the local populace, half of which consisted of murderers. Still, the murder of the clerk Gennisaretskii intrigued our settlement to a certain degree, if only because everyone regretted that, as the talented choirmaster, he’d been mad about church singing. His fellow countryman, the young joiner Ivan, had been living as a worker in his home. Neighbors observed that this young chap got on with his master's elderly wife. When, after a dark autumn night, Gennisaretskii was found lying face-down with a crushed skull (the blow having been delivered using a thick pole or stake) near the settlement's state garden, suspicion fell on Ivan. Investigation established that he had changed clothes that night; his shirt was found with traces of blood; and certain other incriminating clues were found. Also, all of Gennisaretskii's belongings and even money was still in his place, so it couldn't be suspected the murder resulted from a robbery. Ivan was arrested, but he stubbornly protested. The Khabarovsk Court oversaw the case via correspondence, and acquitted him given an absence of unspecified clues. As soon as Ivan walked out of prison, he went to Aleksandrovsk District and there lived openly with the murdered Gennisaretskii's wife.

I purposely expressed out loud that this murder was an example of unpunished criminality. In my day, so many murders were committed on Sakhalin but so few of the guilty were exposed! Prison administrators’ ineptitude and inattentiveness at producing evidence explain this.

Similar murders, typically committed outside the prison, little influenced laborers’ everyday lives. Also, punishment with birch rods was not a great occurrence there, and did not even merit talk. Lashings were quite rare, as I recall. In a word, the prison found itself in a period of calm. But this was the calm before the storm.

A month after Gennisaretskii's murder, suddenly, like a terrifying peal of thunder, the horrible news spread: the mortifying L— — , the very one my comrades and I met in Aleksandrovsk, had been named Rykovsk Prison's warden.