Friends and family of the Russian author Anton Chekhov were taken aback in early 1890 when they learnt of his plans to travel to the penal colony island of Sakhalin in the far east of the Russian empire; he was in poor health, with symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1904 at the age of 44 already apparent. 
 
Under Russia’s full control only since 1875 when Japan renounced all claims to the territory, Sakhalin is as far from Moscow to the east as New York is to the west. The Trans-Siberian Railway did not yet exist (work would begin in 1891) and Chekhov would have to travel the four thousand miles by local train, boat, horse-drawn cart, carriage and sledge. 
 
As well as being a well-known writer of short stories (his plays were written later in his life), Chekhov was also a practising medical doctor, whose patients were mostly the poor and the marginalised. Genuinely interested in conditions in godforsaken Sakhalin, he expected to put his medical skills to good use on the island as well as gain knowledge that would benefit the entire discipline of medicine. He had little time for the self-satisfied bourgeois intelligentsia of Moscow and St Petersburg, who opined endlessly on the problem of crime, on punishment and the need for tough sentences, but gave no thought to those who had to endure the sentence and punishment. The profoundly humanitarian Chekhov hoped that his visit would open Russians’ eyes to the horrors existing in their own country. 
 
Green shoots were already starting to appear on the trees and bushes of European Russia when Chekhov set off in April 1890, but further east the roads were still dusted with snow, icicles hung from roofs and branches and boats weaved in and out among floating blocks of ice. The first leg of the journey was along the Volga by steamboat to Perm, the most easterly town of European Russia. This provincial backwater would later become the setting for the writer’s 1901 play, 'The Three Sisters'. 
 
After Perm, Chekhov crossed the Ural Mountains and set foot on Siberian soil. He was captivated by the vast numbers of wildfowl wherever he looked, and he was accompanied on his journey by the wail of woodcocks and the squawk of seagulls. Other wildlife species were less welcome: bedbugs, cockroaches and mosquitoes plagued him constantly. 
 
Chekhov had packed a revolver after his Moscow friends warned him to expect highwaymen and violence in supposedly lawless Siberia but he never had cause to draw it – everyone he encountered was friendly, helpful and scrupulously honest. His biggest fear was that he would run out of tobacco, which could not be had anywhere. 
 
A traveller might drive for hours without meeting another vehicle or human being, but people did move around Siberia for various reasons. One day, Chekhov’s carriage passed a group of about thirty shackled convicts walking hundreds of miles to a remote prison camp. He was struck by how ordinary the men looked – no different to anyone else.  He stayed overnight in the towns and villages dotted throughout the region, many of whose inhabitants had heard of the author, had read his stories and so greeted him with a welcoming committee and a lavish party. Other Siberian residents had had a family or financial crisis in European Russia, and had decided to start afresh in a place where nobody knew them. Some thrived, but others discovered that, without hunting or farming skills, life in this remote wasteland was very tough indeed. Many former prisoners and exiles remained in the region after completing their sentence; they either did not want, or did not have the means, to return home. Chekhov describes them as having been cheated by life and brutalised by their experiences; the only pleasure available to them was vodka – and lots of it! 
 
After an arduous three-month journey, Chekhov finally arrived in Sakhalin. He thought he had landed in hell! Over ten thousand prisoners were incarcerated on the island, most of them murderers. Men outnumbered women four to one and prostitution – including child prostitution – was rife. Chekhov abhorred the violence and brutality that was endemic in the system, but what shocked him most was the matter-of-fact way children talked of the murder of one of their parents by the other. 
 
Chekhov had the sympathetic bedside manner of a caring doctor and prisoners opened up to him about their past, their regrets and their hopes for the future. With the aim of carrying out a full census of the inmates, he completed record cards for almost every prisoner, noting their age, marital status, level of education, religious affiliation and medical problems as well as their crime, the punishments meted out for their various misdemeanours and the psychological toll their experiences had wrought on them. 
 
After three months on Sakhalin, Chekhov returned to European Russia by boat via Hong Kong, Singapore and Ceylon. He immediately began to set up orphanages in the penal colony for its child beggars and prostitutes and collected over two thousand books to be sent to the island. His account of his overland journey was serialised in a popular journal between 1891 and 1893, and was then issued as a book in 1895. His travel notes shone a spotlight onto a hitherto hidden secret of the tsarist regime and horrified readers soon began to call for reforms to the system. The government did not respond immediately but over the next few years conditions in penal colonies gradually improved: corporal punishment for women was abolished in 1893, and a few years later the lash and the practice of shaving prisoners’ heads were abandoned. Which just goes to prove – if you want something done, ask a writer!