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In 1890 Chekhov travelled overland across Siberia to Sakhalin with no official mandate and spent about three months going hut by hut through nearly every settlement. He filled out roughly ten thousand census cards, recording each person's name, age, status (convict, exile-settler, peasant, free), religion, literacy, marital arrangement and means of livelihood.
He records the executioner's routine, the victim's changing cries, and the officials' boredom. The episode shows corporal punishment as a bureaucratic procedure that degrades the flogger, the witnesses and the medical profession as much as the flogged.
The state justified Sakhalin as a way to turn convicts into self-sufficient farmer-colonists. Chekhov's household-level data showed poor soil, a harsh climate and inflated official harvest figures, so most settlers stayed dependent on state rations, debt or crime.
Female convicts arriving on Sakhalin were handed out to settlers and officials as 'cohabitants' to supply housekeeping, sex and children, because the colony's design needed households and not just prisoners. Free wives who followed convicted husbands had no work or rations of their own and were often pushed into prostitution to feed their families. Children born into these arrangements inherited the colony's destitution, so the penal system reproduced itself through women's bodies.