# Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 2/Chapter VIII

Siberia and the Exile System Volume 1
CHAPTER VIII
THE HISTORY OF THE KARÁ POLITICAL PRISON
ALMOST the last work that Colonel Kononóvich accomplished at the mines of Kará was the erection of the new political prison near the Lower Diggings. Captain Nikólin would not allow me to inspect this building, nor would he allow Mr. Frost to photograph it; but from convicts who had been confined in it I obtained the plan on page 225 and the picture on page 226, and from memory Mr. Frost drew the sketch on page 224. In general type it differs little from the common-criminal prisons, but it is larger, better lighted, and more spacious than the latter, and is, in all respects, a more comfortable place of abode. It contains four kámeras, exclusive of the hospital, or lazaret, and in each of them there are three windows, a large table, a brick oven, and sleeping-platform accommodations for about twenty-five men. There are no beds, except in the lazaret, and all the bed-clothing that the prisoners have was purchased with their own money. Originally the palisade did not entirely inclose the building, and the prisoners could look out of their front windows across the Kará valley; but Governor-general Anúchin, on the occasion of one of his rare visits to the mines, disapproved of this arrangement, remarked cynically that "A prison is not a palace," and ordered that the stockade of high, closely set logs be so extended as to cut off the view from the windows, and completely shut the building in. It is hard to see in this order anything but a deliberate intention on the part of a cruel official to make the life of the political convicts as miserable ​and intolerable as possible. Every common-criminal prison in Kará, without exception, has windows that overlook the settlement or the valley; and every burglar and murderer in the whole penal establishment can see from his cell some-
thing of the outside world. The political convicts, however, in the opinion of the governor-general, had no right to live in a "palace" from which they could see the green trees, the glimmer of the sunshine on the water, and the tender purple of the distant hills at sunset or at dawn. They must be shut up in a tight box; the fresh invigorating breeze ​from the mountains must be prevented from entering their grated windows; and the sight of a human being not clothed in a turnkey's uniform must never gladden their weary, homesick eyes. I have wished many times that his Excellency Governor-general Anúchin might be shut up for one PLAN OF THE KARÁ POLITICAL PRISON.
year in the political prison at the mines of Kará; that he might look out for 365 days upon the weather-beaten logs of a high stockade; that he might lie for 365 nights on a bare sleeping-platform infested with vermin; and that he might breathe, night and day, for fifty-two consecutive weeks the air of a close kámera, saturated with the poisonous stench of an uncovered excrement-bucket. Then he might say to himself, with a more vivid realization of its meaning, "A prison is not a palace."
When Colonel Kononóvich, in 1881, resigned his position as governor of the Kará penal establishment, his place was taken by Major Pótulof, who had previously been connected in some official capacity with the prison administration of the Nérchinsk silver mines. Shortly after Pótulof assumed command, all of the male political convicts, who then numbered about one hundred, were transferred to the new political prison erected by Colonel Kononóvich at the ​Lower Diggings, where they were divided into gangs of twenty-five men each and shut up in four large kámeras. Their life, as described in letters surreptitiously written by
some of them to their friends, was hard and hopeless, but not absolutely intolerable. They were allowed to exercise every day in the courtyard, they were permitted to receive small sums of money from their friends, they had in the prison a fairly good library consisting of books purchased ​by them or sent to them from European Russia, and they could amuse themselves occasionally by working with carpenter's or blacksmith's tools in a small shop situated in one corner of the courtyard. On the other hand, they were living under very bad sanitary conditions; some of them were kept night and day in handcuffs and leg-fetters; two or three of them were chained to wheelbarrows; those who still had possession of their mental faculties were forced to listen constantly to the babbling or the raving of their insane comrades; they were no longer allowed to diversify their monotonous existence by work in the gold placers; they were deprived of the privilege of enrolment in the free command at the expiration of their terms of probation; they were forbidden to communicate with their relatives; and their whole world was bounded by the high serrated wall of the prison stockade. That their life was a terribly hard one seems to have been admitted, even by the most indifferent of Siberian officials. In March, 1882, Governor-general Anúchin made a report to the Tsar with regard to the state of affairs in Eastern Siberia, in the course of which he referred to the political convicts at Kará as follows:
In concluding this part of my report [upon the prisons and the exile system], I must offer, for the consideration of your Imperial Majesty, a few words concerning the state criminals now living in Eastern Siberia. On the 1st of January, 1882, they numbered in all 430 persons, as follows:
| a. | Sent to Siberia by decree of a court and now |
| | 1. In penal servitude | 123 |
| | 2. In forced colonization | 49 |
| | 3. In assigned residences [na zhityó]. | 41 |
| b. | Sent to Siberia by administrative process and now |
| | 1. In assigned residences [na zhítelstvo] | 217 |
| | Total | 430 |
​All of the state criminals belonging to the penal-servitude class are held at the Kará gold mines under guard of a foot company of the Trans-Baikál Cossacks consisting of two hundred men. The sending of these criminals to work with the common convicts in the gold placers is impossible. To employ them in such work in isolation from the others is very difficult, on account of the lack of suitable working-places, their unfitness for hard physical labor, and the want of an adequate convoy. If to these considerations be added the fact that unproductive hard labor, such as that employed in other countries merely to subject the prisoner to severe physical exertion, is not practised with us, it will become apparent that we have no hard labor for this class of criminals to perform; and the local authorities who are in charge of them, and who are held to strict accountability for escapes, are compelled, by force of circumstances, to limit themselves to keeping such state criminals in prison under strict guard, employing them, occasionally, in work within the prison court, or not far from it. Such labor has not the character of penal servitude, but may rather be regarded as hygienic. Immunity from hard labor, however, does not render the lot of state criminals an easy one. On the contrary, complete isolation and constant confinement to their own limited circle make their life unbearable. ... There have been a number of suicides among them, and within a few days one of them, Pózen, has gone insane. A number of others are in a mental condition very near to insanity. In accordance with an understanding that I have with the Ministry of the Interior, all sufferers from mental disorder will be removed, if possible, to hired quarters in the town of Chíta, since there are in Siberia no regular ​asylums for the insane, and all the existing institutions of that kind in European Russia are full.
It is a fact worthy, perhaps, of remark that the life of the political convicts at Kará, which Governor-general Anúchin describes as "unbearable," was made unbearable by the direct and deliberate action of the Government itself. Anúchin caused to be erected in front of the prison windows the high stockade that hid from the prisoners the whole outside world and turned their place of confinement into a huge coverless box; while the Minister of the Interior, apparently without the least provocation, abolished the free command, and ordered the "complete isolation" which resulted in the suicide and insanity that the governor-general seems to deplore. The condition of the state criminals was not "unbearable" under the administration of Colonel Kononóvich. It became unbearable as a consequence of the orders that forced the latter's resignation.
It was hardly to be expected that young and energetic men would quietly submit to a state of things that was officially recognized as " unbearable," and that was gradually driving the weaker among them to suicide or insanity. In April, 1882, less than a year after Colonel Kononóvich's resignation, and less than a month after the delivery of Governor-general Anúchin's report to the Tsar, a few of the boldest and bravest of the state criminals at Kará made an attempt to escape by digging a tunnel under the prison wall. The excavation, which was made under the floor in one of the kámeras, was not discovered; but owing to the marshy nature of the ground upon which the building stood, the hole quickly filled with water, and work in it was abandoned. It then occurred to some of the prisoners that they might ​escape by concealing themselves during the day in the small shop in one corner of the courtyard where they were allowed to work, and then scaling the stockade from its roof at night. The most serious difficulty in the way was the evening "verification." After supper every night the prisoners in all the cells were counted, and the men concealed in the workshop would be missed before it grew dark enough to render the scaling of the stockade reasonably safe. This difficulty the prisoners hoped to overcome by making dummies to take the places of the missing men in the kámeras. It was not customary to waken prisoners who happened to be asleep at the time of the evening verification. The officer on duty merely included them in the count without disturbing them, and as he did not enter the dimly lighted cell, but made his count from the door, he was not likely to notice the difference between the figure of a dummy and the figure of a real man lying asleep on the platform with his face to the wall. If the proposed stratagem should succeed, the men who escaped were to make their way down the valley of the Amúr River to the Pacific Ocean, and there endeavor to get on board of some American whaling or trading vessel. In the mean time their comrades in the prison were to supply their places with dummies at every verification, in order to conceal their escape as long as possible, and give them time enough to reach the coast before the inevitable hue and cry should be raised. Late one afternoon in April, when all necessary preparations had been made, two political convicts named Muíshkin and Khrúshchef concealed themselves in a large box in the prison workshop, and just before the time for the evening verification their places were taken by two skilfully constructed dummies in convict dress which were laid on the sleeping-platform in the cell that they had occupied. The substitution was not noticed by the officer who made the evening count, and at a late hour of the night Muíshkin and Khrúshchef crept out of the box in the workshop, climbed up on the roof, scaled ​the stockade without attracting the attention of the sentry, and stole away into the forest. A few days later two more men escaped in the same way, and at the end of two weeks the prison authorities were counting every night and morning no less than six dummies, while the six prisoners represented by these lay figures were far on their way towards the coast of the Pacific. Sometime in the course of the third week after the departure of Muíshkin and Khrúshchef two more dummies were laid on the sleeping-platforms in the prison kámeras, and a fourth couple escaped. In getting away from the stockade, however, one of them unfortunately fell into a ditch or a pool of water, and the splash attracted the attention of the nearest sentry, who promptly fired his rifle and raised an alarm. In ten minutes the whole prison was in commotion. A careful count was made of the prisoners in all the kámeras, and it was found that eight men were missing. A few days before this time a visit of inspection had been made to the prison by Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy, chief of the Russian prison administration, and General Ilyashévich, governor of the Trans-Baikál, and when the escape was discovered these high officials were on their way from Kaŕá to Chíta. In response to a summons from Major Pótulof they hurried back to the Lower Diggings and personally superintended the organization of a thorough and widely extended search for the missing men. Telegrams were dispatched to all the seaport towns along the coast of the Pacific, as well as to all points on the Amúr that could be reached by telegraph; descriptions and photographs of the fugitives were mailed to police officials throughout Eastern Siberia; orders were issued to arrest all suspicious or unknown persons; and searching parties of natives, stimulated by the promise of reward, scoured the forests in all parts of the Trans-Baikál. It was impossible, of course, for men who were unfamiliar with the country, who had neither guides, maps, nor compasses, and who were enfeebled by long imprisonment, to elude, for any ​great length of time, so persistent and far-reaching a pursuit. Although two of them, Muíshkin and Khrúshchef, made a journey of more than a thousand miles, and actually reached the seaport town of Vládivostok, every one of the fugitives was ultimately recaptured and brought back to Kará in handcuffs and leg-fetters.
In the mean time the prison authorities at Kará were making preparations to "give the political convicts a lesson" and "reduce the prison to order." This they purposed to do by depriving the prisoners of all the privileges that they had previously enjoyed; by taking away from them books, money, underclothing, bedclothing, and every other thing not furnished by the Government to common criminals of the penal-servitude class; by distributing them in small parties among the common-convict prisons at Ust Kará, Middle Kará, and Upper Kará; and by subjecting them to what are known to Russian prisoners as "dungeon conditions" (kártsernoi polozhénie). Anticipating, or pretending to anticipate, insubordination or resistance to these measures on the part of the politicals, Ilyashévich and Gálkine Wrásskoy concentrated at the Lower Diggings six sótnias of Cossacks, and after ten days of inaction, intended, apparently, to throw the prisoners off their guard, ordered a sudden descent upon the prison in the night. This unprovoked attack of an armed force upon sleeping and ​defenseless prisoners is known in the history of the Kará political prison as "the pógrom of May 11." Three or four hundred Cossacks with bayoneted rifles marched noiselessly into the courtyard under direction of Lieutenant-colonel Rúdenko, filled the prison corridor, and then, throwing open suddenly and simultaneously the doors of all the kámeras, rushed in upon the bewildered politicals, dragged them from their sleeping-platforms, and proceeded with great roughness and brutality to search them, deprive them of their personal property, strip them of their clothing, and hale them out into the courtyard. All the remonstrances and protests of the sufferers were answered with insults; and when some of the more impetuous of them, indignant at the unprovoked brutality of the assault, armed themselves with boards torn up from the sleeping-platforms and made an attempt to defend themselves, they were knocked down and mercilessly beaten by the Cossacks with the butt-ends of their guns. Among the prisoners most cruelly maltreated were Voloshénko, Rodiónof, Kobyliánski, Bobókhof, and Orlóf. It is not necessary to go minutely into the details of this scene of cruelty and violence. I do not wish to make it out any worse than it really was, and for my purpose it is sufficient to say that before noon on the 11th of May, 1882, the bruised and bleeding political convicts, robbed of all their personal possessions and stripped of the boots and underclothing that they had bought with their own money and that they had previously been permitted to wear, set out in three parties, on foot and without breakfast, for the common-criminal prisons of Ust, Middle, and Upper Kará. They were guarded by convoys of from fifty to one hundred Cossacks, who had express instructions from Governor Ilyashévich not to spare the butt-ends of their guns. The party destined for Ust Kará, in which there was one man chained ​to a wheelbarrow, asked permission to stop and rest on the road, as they had had nothing to eat or drink that day and were marching a distance of fifteen versts (about ten miles). The soldiers of the convoy, however, refused to allow them to stop, and pricked them on with their bayonets. Thereupon the prisoners who were not handcuffed attacked the Cossacks with stones. An unequal contest followed, in the course of which the men who resisted were knocked down and beaten again with the butt-ends of guns, and all who were not already manacled had their hands tied securely behind their backs. Late in the afternoon, bruised, tired, hungry, and thirsty, they reached Ust Kará, and after being again carefully searched were shut up by twos in the dark and dirty "secret" cells of the common-criminal prison, where they threw their weary bodies down on the cold, damp floors and congratulated themselves that the day was over. The parties sent respectively to the Amúrski prison ​and the prison in Middle Kará had an experience similar to that of the Ust Kará party, except that they were not beaten by their guards. Before dark the hundred or more state criminals who had occupied the kámeras of the political prison were distributed in small parties among the common-criminal prisons of Ust Kará, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kará, and Upper Kará; the long-term [bez sróchni] convicts were in both handcuffs and leg-fetters, and all were living under "dungeon conditions." In this manner Governor Ilyashévich and Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy put down the "insurrection" that a hundred or more sleeping prisoners presumably would have raised when they awoke, taught the "insurgents" a valuable and much-needed "lesson," and showed the Minister of the Interior how vigorously and successfully is subordinates could deal with a sudden and threatening emergency — and with sleeping men! The political prison had been "reduced to order," but it was the order" that once "reigned in Warsaw."
For two months the political convicts lived under "dungeon conditions" in the cells of the common-criminal prisons, seeing little of one another and knowing nothing of what was happening in the outside world. Bad air, bad and insufficient food, and the complete lack of exercise soon began injuriously to affect their health; scurvy broke out among them, and in less than a month several, including Tíkhonof and Zhukófski, were at the point of death, and many more were so weak that they could not rise to their feet when ordered to stand up for verification. During all of this time the prison authorities had in their possession money belonging to these wretched convicts; but they would not allow the latter to use it, nor to direct its expenditure for the underclothing, bedding, and nourishing food of which the sick especially were in such urgent need. It was not until scurvy threatened to become epidemic that Major Khaltúrin, a cruel gendarme officer from ​Irkútsk who had succeeded Major Pótulof in the command of the political prison, consented to allow the prisoners to have bedding.
In the women's prison at Ust Kará the state of affairs was little better. The women, of course, had had nothing whatever to do with the escape, nor with the artificially created "insurrection," but they had, nevertheless, to take their share of the consequences. The new commandant, Major Khaltúrin, believed in strict discipline with no favors; and he regarded the permission that had tacitly been given the women to wear their own dress instead of the prison costume as an unnecessary concession to a foolish and sentimental weakness. He therefore ordered that their own clothing be taken away from them, and that they be required to put on the convict garb. Some of the women were sick and unable to change their dress, others did not believe that the order would really be enforced, and they refused to obey it, and finally the overseer of the prison resorted to violence. The scene that ensued produced such an effect upon Madam Léschern that she attempted to commit suicide.
Outside the political prison at the Lower Diggings were living a number of women who had voluntarily come to the mines in order to be near their husbands. Previous to the escape and the pogróm these women had been allowed to have interviews with their imprisoned husbands once or twice a week, and had received from the latter small sums of money, with the help of which they contrived to exist, After the prison had been "reduced to order" and the political convicts had been subjected to "dungeon conditions," interviews between husbands and wives were no longer permitted; and as the prisoners' money was all held in the possession of the authorities, the unfortunate women and children were soon reduced almost to starvation. Vera Rogatchóf, wife of Lieutenant Dmítri Rogatchóf, a young artillery officer then in penal servitude, was brought to ​such a state of destitution and despair that she finally shot herself.
On the 6th of July, 1882, eight of the political convicts, who were regarded by the Government for some reason as particularly dangerous, were sent back in chains from Kará to St. Petersburg to be immured for life in the "stone bags" of the castle of Schlusselburg. A few days later — about the middle of July — all the rest of the state criminals were brought back to the political prison at the Lower Diggings, where they were put into new and much smaller cells that had been made by erecting partitions in the original kámeras in such a manner as to divide each of them into thirds. The effect of this change was to crowd every group of seven or eight men into a cell that was so nearly filled by the sleeping-platform as to leave no room for locomotion. Two men could not stand side by side in the narrow space between the edge of the platform and the wall, and the occupants of the cell were therefore compelled to sit or lie all day on the plank nári without occupation for either minds or bodies. To add to their misery, paráshas were set in their small cells, and the air at times became so offensive and polluted that, to use the expression of one of them in a letter to me, "it was simply maddening." No other reply was made to their petitions and remonstrances than a threat from Khaltúrin that if they did not keep quiet they would be flogged. With a view to intimidating them Khaltúrin even sent a surgeon to make a physical examination of one political, for the avowed purpose of ascertaining whether his state of health was such that he could be flogged without endangering his life. This was the last straw. The wretched state criminals, deprived of exercise, living under ​"dungeon conditions," poisoned by air laden with the stench of excrement-buckets, and finally threatened with the whip when they complained, could endure no more. They resolved to make that last desperate protest against cruelty which is known in Russian prisons as a golodófka, or "hunger-strike." They sent a notification to Major Khaltúrin that their life had finally become unendurable, that they preferred death to such an existence, and that they should refuse to take food until they either perished or forced the Government to treat them with more humanity. No attention was paid to their notification, but from that moment not a mouthful of the food that was set into their cells was touched. As day after day passed, the stillness of death gradually settled down upon the prison. The starving convicts, too weak and apathetic even to talk to one another, lay in rows, like dead men, upon the plank sleeping-platforms, and the only sounds to be heard in the building were the footsteps of the sentries, and now and then the incoherent mutterings of the insane. On the fifth day of the golodófka Major Khaltúrin, convinced that the hunger-strike was serious, came to the prison and asked the convicts to state definitely upon what terms they would discontinue their protest. They replied that, the conditions of their life were unbearable, and that they should continue their self-starvation until the excrement-buckets were taken out of their cells, until they were permitted to have books and to exercise daily in the open air, until they were allowed to direct the expenditure of their money for better food and better clothing than were furnished by the Government, and until he [Khaltúrin] gave them a solemn assurance that none of them should be flogged. The commandant told them that the talk about flogging was nonsense; that there had never been any serious intention of resorting to the whip, and that, if they would end their strike, he would see what could be done to improve the material conditions of their life. Not being able to get any positive assurances ​that their demands would be complied with, the prisoners continued the golodófka. On the tenth day the state of affairs had become alarming. All of the starving men were in the last stages of physical prostration, and some of them seemed to be near their death. Count Dmitri Tolstoï, the Minister of the Interior, who had been apprised of the situation, telegraphed the commandant to keep a skórbnoi list, or “hospital sheet," setting forth the symptoms and condition of the strikers, and to inform him promptly of any marked change. Every day thereafter a feldsher or hospital-steward went through the cells taking the pulse and the temperature of the starving men. On the thirteenth day of the golodófka Major Khaltúrin sent word to the wives of all the political convicts living at the Lower Diggings that they might have an interview with their husbands — the first in more than two months — if they would try to persuade them to begin taking food. They gladly assented, of course, to this condition, and were admitted to the prison. At the same time Khaltúrin went himself to the starving men and assured them, on his honor, that if they would end the hunger-strike he would do everything in his power ​to satisfy their demands. The entreaties of the wretched, heart-broken women, and the promises of the commandant finally broke down the resolution of the politicals, and on the thirteenth day the first hunger-strike in the history of the Kará political prison came to an end.
While these events were taking place, a young married woman about twenty-four years of age, named Maria Kutitónskaya, who had been condemned to penal servitude on account of her revolutionary activity in Odessa, finished her prison term in Kará, and was sent as a forced colonist to a small village called Akshá, situated in the southern part of the Trans-Baikál, on the frontier of Mongolia. She had been an eye-witness of the brutalities that attended the "reduction of the political prison to order" by Rúdenko and Pótulof; she had seen the "lesson" given to the political convicts with the butt-ends of guns; she herself had felt the shame and misery that impelled Madam Léschern and Mrs. Rogatchóf to attempt self-destruction; she was acquainted with the causes and history of the long and desperate hunger-strike that had just ended; and, stirred to the very depths of her soul by a feeling of intense indignation, she determined, as a last resort and at the cost of her own life, to assassinate General Ilyashévich, the governor of the Trans-Baikál, and thus call the attention of the world to the cruelties practised by his authority, and in part under his direction, at the mines of Kará. She was at this time pregnant, and was aware of her condition; she knew that it would be impossible to escape after committing the crime that she contemplated; she knew that she was about to sacrifice her own life, and probably the life also of her unborn child; but so intense were the emotions aroused by all she had seen and known at Kará, that she was ready to commit murder, and to die for it, upon the chance that the deed and its investigation would give publicity to the wrongs and outrages that she and her companions had suffered. As soon as she could get together money enough for her traveling ​expenses after her arrival at Akshá, she bought a small, cheap revolver from a common-criminal colonist, ran away from her place of banishment, and, hiring horses from the peasants in the villages through which she passed, made her way towards Chíta, which was the governor's place of residence. As it was not customary for young and attractive women to travel entirely alone in that part of the world, she was regarded with a good deal of interest and curiosity by the peasants, and just before she reached her destination she was arrested by a village official upon suspicion. She persuaded this man to take her to Chíta and turn her over to the isprávnik, with whom she was personally acquainted. To the isprávnik she admitted frankly that she had run away from her place of exile, but said that in so doing she had not intended to escape, but merely to get an interview with the governor. After some conversation the isprávnik went with her to the governor's house, and, leaving her in a reception-room, went to apprise Ilyashévich of her presence and her desire for an interview.
"Have you searched her?" inquired the governor suspiciously.
"No," replied the isprávnik; "I did n't think of it."
"Never mind," said Ilyashévich. "What can a woman do?" And with these words he entered the reception room where Madam Kutitónskaya, with a cocked revolver hidden under a handkerchief in her right hand, was awaiting him. As he advanced to greet her she raised the revolver, and saying, "This is for the 11th of May," shot him through the lungs. The wound was not mortal, but he fell to the floor and was carried to a couch by some of the servants, while the isprávnik seized and disarmed Madam Kutitánskaya, caused her to be bound, and sent her under strong guard to the Chíta prison. Her life there was a life of terrible loneliness and misery. She was put into a cold, dirty, "secret" cell, which the district architect of the ​Trans-Baikál described to me as "hardly long enough to lie down in or high enough to stand up in." Her own dress and under-clothing were taken away from her, and in place of them she was given an old prison suit that had already been worn by a common convict and was full of vermin. She lived under strict "dungeon conditions," and for three months lay without bed-clothing on the bare floor. When, as a result of such hardships and privations, she became sick, and asked for straw to lay down on the planks where she slept, she was told by the chief of police, Mélnikof, that there was no straw for her. But for the food smuggled into her cell and the aid surreptitiously given to her by sympathetic common-criminal convicts in the same prison, she would undoubtedly have died before the meeting of the court appointed to investigate the case. After three months of this wretched existence she was tried by court-martial and sentenced to be hanged. Then, for another whole month, she lay under sentence of death, arguing with herself, through many long, sleepless nights, the question whether or not she should make known to the authorities her pregnant condition, which had not yet become apparent. She knew that an announcement of the fact that she was with child would, in accordance with the custom in such cases, secure a long reprieve if not a commutation of her sentence; but, on the other hand, life held no hope for her, and she believed that if she allowed herself to be hanged under such circumstances, the fact of her pregnancy, which would inevitably be discovered after her death, would intensify the feeling of horror that she hoped would be excited by the series of events which had led up to the catastrophe — would give to such events even greater publicity, and would inspire all lovers of humanity and justice with a deeper and bitterer hatred of the Government. The questions that tormented her most wore first, whether, if she allowed herself to be hanged without revealing her condition, she would not be the murderer of her unborn child, and secondly, whether that child ​would die when she died, or would live for a time in her dead body. This last ghastly doubt seems to have been particularly harrowing to her in her morbid mental condition, but even in the face of such reflections she finally decided to allow herself to be hanged. Early in January, 1883, the Government, without reference to her condition, of which it was still ignorant, commuted her sentence to penal servitude for life and sent her with a returning party of common-criminal exiles to the city of Irkutsk. Although it was mid-winter, she was not provided with a sheepskin overcoat, nor with felt boots, and she might have perished from cold on the road if the common criminals in the party had not taken pity upon her and furnished her with warm clothing at the expense of their own comfort. When she reached Irkútsk she was in such a condition that she had to be lifted out of her sleigh. As a result of this prolonged agony of mind and body, her child, a short time afterwards, was born dead in the Irkútsk prison. When we left Siberia in 1886 she was still living. All that I know of her life since that time is that it has ended.
When one of my informants first knew Madam Kutitónskaya she was a happy, careless school-girl in Odessa, and no one would have ventured to predict that in less than ten years she would develop into a woman of such extraordinary energy, courage, self-control, and firmness of purpose. There are few things more remarkable in the records of heroism than the determination of Madam Kutitónskaya to allow herself to be hanged, with a child in her womb, in order that the horror of such an execution might stir the emotions of every man and woman who heard of it, and give wider publicity to the series of events of which it was the final ​outcome. Such, however, is the type of character that is forged in the furnace of oppression and tempered in the cold bath of solitary confinement.
The statements that I have made with regard to the events that led to the shooting of Governor Ilyashóvich are based upon conversations with the political convicts who were actors in them, and upon three independently prepared accounts in manuscript of the escape, the pogróm, and the hunger-strike. The story of the attempted assassination, and of Madam Kutitónskaya's life in prison is from one of her letters, written after her arrival in Irkútsk. The brief transcript of her intentions, thoughts, and reflections, while lying under sentence of death in Chíta, was obtained from an exiled lady who had many long talks with her in the Irkútsk prison, and whose acquaintance I subsequently made. The whole story, in its main outlines, is known to political exiles throughout Siberia, and I heard it in half a dozen different places. All the efforts that I dared make to get at the Government's side of the case were unsuccessful. The officials to whom I applied for information — with a few exceptions — either manifested such a disinclination to talk that I could not pursue the subject, or else made preposterous attempts to deceive me. A young surgeon in the Irkútsk prison whom I questioned about Madam Kutitónskaya was so frightened that he got rid of me as soon as possible and never dared return my call. The isprávnik of Nérchinski Zavód, who went to Kará with some of the recaptured fugitives after the escape, described the political convicts to me as lofki moshénniki [clever rogues] who were not deserving of either sympathy or respect. Most of them, he said, were "priests' sons, or seminarists who had been expelled from school." Lieutenant-colonel Nóvikof, who was for three years or more commander of the Cossack battalion at the mines of Kará, assured me that the political convicts were mere malchíshki [miserable insignificant boys], without any definite aims or convictions; that out of one hundred ​and fifty of them that he had known at Kará only three or four had any education, and that Madam Kutitónskaya's attempt to assassinate Governor Ilyashévich was "a mere crazy freak" — that "she didn't know herself what she did it for." The attentive reader will see that I have had no difficulty in making my choice between such preposterous statements as these and the clear, coherent, and detailed narratives of the political convicts themselves. If my history of the Kará political prison is one-sided, it is simply because the other side either refused to give me information, or was too ignorant to state its own case with any show of plausibility.
How far from the real truth were the statements made to me by officials with regard to the character of the political convicts at Kará, I purpose to show by giving brief biographies of three or four of the men and women who took an active part in the series of events that I have tried to describe, or who were identified with the later history of the political prison. One of the ablest and most distinguished of them was Anna Pávlovna Korbá, whose portrait, made from a photograph taken before her exile, will be found on page 247. She was the daughter of a Russian nobleman named Paul Mengart, and was born in the province of Tver, near Moscow, in 1849. She was carefully educated under the direction of her mother, a cultured and deeply religious woman, and at the early age of eighteen or nineteen she was married to a Swiss gentleman residing in Russia named Victor Korbá. Her beauty and accomplishments made her greatly sought after in society, her husband was wealthy and was proud of her social success, and for a time she lived the life of a woman of the great world. This life, however, could not long satisfy a young girl of bright mind and serious character, and in 1869, when she was only twenty years of age, she made an attempt to fit herself for something better. A school for the higher education of the daughters of the nobility was opened about that time in ​connection with a boys' college in St. Petersburg, and Madam Korbá at once enrolled herself as a student, with the intention of finally completing her education in one of the institutions for women at Zurich or in Paris. In 1870 her husband failed in business: she was forced to abandon the hope of finishing her collegiate training abroad, and a short time afterwards went with her husband to reside in the small provincial town of Minsk, where he had obtained employment. Here she began her career of public activity by organizing a society and raising a fund for the purpose of promoting popular education and aiding poor students in the universities. Of this society she was the president. In 1877 the Russo-Turkish war broke out, and opened to her ardent and generous nature a new field of benevolent activity. As soon as wounded Russian soldiers began to come back from Bulgaria, she went into the hospitals of Minsk as a Sister of Mercy, and a short time afterwards put on the uniform of the International Association of the Red Cross, and went to the front and took a position as a Red Cross nurse in a Russian field-hospital beyond the Danube. She was then hardly twenty-seven years of age. What she saw and what she suffered in the course of that terrible Russo-Turkish campaign can be imagined by those who have seen the paintings of the Russian artist Vereshchágin. Her experience had a marked and permanent effect upon her character. She became an enthusiastic lover and admirer of the common Russian peasant, who bears upon his weary shoulders the whole burden of the Russian state, but who is cheated, robbed, and oppressed, even while fighting the battles of his country. She determined to devote the remainder of her life to the education and the emancipation of this oppressed class of the Russian people. At the close of the war she returned to Russia, but was almost immediately prostrated by typhus fever contracted in an overcrowded hospital. After a long and dangerous illness she finally recovered, and began the ​task that she had set herself; but she was opposed and thwarted at every step by the police and the bureaucratic officials who were interested in maintaining the existing
state of things, and she gradually became convinced that before much could be done to improve the condition of the common people the Government must be overthrown. She soon afterwards became a revolutionist, joined the party of ​"The Will of the People," and participated actively in all the attempts that were made between 1879 and 1882 to overthrow the autocracy and establish a constitutional form of government. On the 5th of June, 1882, she was arrested and thrown into the fortress of Petropávlovsk, and some months later was tried before the Governing Senate upon the charge of being a terrorist. At the end of the trial she was asked if she had any last words to say in her own defense, and she replied as follows:
"I do not admit my guilt. I will, however, admit that I belong to the revolutionary party, — the party of the Will of the People, — and that I believe in its principles and share its views. As for an organization that chooses and prefers a path of bloodshed, I do not know of any such organization, and I doubt whether any such organization exists. Such a party may arise in time, if the revolutionary movement extends; but if I be living when the time comes, I will not belong to it. If the party of the Will of the People adopts the policy of terror, it is not because it prefers terrorism, but because terrorism is the only possible method of attaining the objects set before it by the historical conditions of Russian life. These are sad and fateful words, and they bear a prophecy of terrible calamity. Gentlemen — Senators, you are well acquainted with the fundamental laws of the Russian Empire. You are aware that no one has a right to advocate any change in the existing imperial form of Government, or even to think of such a thing. Merely to present to the Crown a collective petition is forbidden — and yet the country is growing and developing, the conditions of social life are becoming day by day more and more complicated, and the moment approaches when the Russian people will burst through the barriers from which there is no exit."
The presiding judge, interrupting: "That is your personal opinion."
Madam Korbá, continuing: "The historical task set before the party of the Will of the People is to widen these ​barriers and to obtain for Russia independence and freedom. The means for the attainment of these objects depend directly upon the Government. We do not adhere obstinately to terrorism. The hand that is raised to strike will instantly fall if the Government will change the political conditions of life. Our party has patriotic self-control enough not to take revenge for its bleeding wounds; but, unless it prove false to the Russian people, it cannot lay down its arms until it has conquered for that people freedom and well-being. As a proof that the aims of our party are wholly peaceful, I beg you to read the letter written to Alexander III. soon after the 1st of March. You will see from it that we desire only reforms, but reforms that shall be sincere, complete, and vital."
Madam Korbá's last words did not soften towards her the hearts of her judges, and of course she did not expect that they would. She was found guilty, and was sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude with deprivation of all civil rights, and forced colonization in Siberia for life at the expiration of her penal term. At the date of my last advices from the mines of Kará she was still living, but she was greatly broken, and there was little probability that she would long endure the hardships and privations of penal servitude.
near Irkútsk, but ultimately he was transferred to the small town of Villúisk, in the sub-arctic province of Yakútsk, where he lived many years under the strictest police ​surveillance. When, in 1870, the modern revolutionary movement began, it was the dream of all the ardent young Russian revolutionists to rescue Chernishéfski from Siberian exile, and enable him to escape from the Empire to some place where he could continue his work unmolested. Several attempts were made to liberate him, but they all failed, and the project was finally abandoned as impracticable. In 1875 a young student in the Technological Institute at St. Petersburg named Hypolyte Muíshkin conceived the idea of going to Siberia in the disguise of a captain of gendarmes and presenting himself boldly to the isprávnik in Villúisk with forged orders from the gendarmerie directing him [Muíshkin] to take charge of the exile Chernishéfski and carry him to Blagovéshchinsk, on the Amúr River. Such transfers of dangerous political exiles were not at that time uncommon, and Muíshkin felt confident that he should accomplish his purpose. He went as a private traveler to Irkútsk, resided there several months, succeeded in getting into the corps of gendarmes as a subordinate officer, and in a short time made himself so useful that he was generally trusted and was given the freedom of the office. He provided himself with the necessary blanks, filled them up with an order accrediting him as a gendarme officer intrusted with the duty of taking the exile Chernishéfski to Blagovéshchinsk, forged the signatures, affixed the proper seals, provided himself with the uniform of a captain of gendarmes, and then resigned his position in the gendarmerie upon the pretext that he had received news that made it necessary for him to return at once to European Russia. He disappeared from Irkútsk, and as soon as he deemed it prudent to do so he set out for Villúisk, with the uniform of a gendarme officer in his satchel, and a forged order in his pocket directing the isprávnik of Villúisk, Captain Zhírkof, to turn over the exile Chernishéfski to him for conveyance to Blagovéshchinsk. Muíshkin was an accomplished conspirator, an eloquent talker, and a man of fine personal presence, and ​when he presented himself in the uniform of a gendarme officer to the isprávnik at Villúisk he was received at first with unquestioning deference and respect. He stated his business, and produced the order directing the isprávnik to turn over the distinguished exile to him for conveyance to Blagovéshchinsk. The plot came very near succeeding, and probably would have succeeded if Muíshkin had had money enough to bring with him two or three confederates in the disguise of soldiers or gendarmes and in the capacity of escort. It is very unusual for a commissioned officer to travel in Siberia without at least one soldier or Cossack to look after his baggage, to see about getting post-horses promptly, and to act generally in the capacity of body-servant. The absence of such a man or men was especially noticeable and unusual in this case, for the reason that Muíshkin was to take charge of an important and dangerous political offender. The absence of an escort was the first thing that excited the isprávnik's suspicion. It seemed to him very strange that a gendarme officer should be sent there after Chernishéfski without a guard of two or three soldiers to help him to take care of the dangerous prisoner, and the more he thought about it the more suspicious the whole affair appeared to him. After a night's reflection he decided not to turn over Chernishéfski to this gendarme officer without the sanction of the governor of the province, who resided in Yakútsk, and at breakfast the next morning he told Muíshkin that Governor Chernáief was his — the isprávnik's — immediate superior, and that without an order from the governor he did not feel justified in surrendering an exile of so much importance as the political economist Chernishéfski. He proposed, therefore, to send a courier to Yakútsk with Muíshkin's papers, and to await the return of this courier before taking any action.
"Very well," replied Muíshkin coolly. "I did not suppose that it would be necessary to obtain the consent of the governor before complying with the orders of the imperial ​police; but if such consent is indispensable, I will go to Governor Chernáief myself and get it."
When Muíshkin set out for Yakútsk, the isprávnik, whose suspicions had meanwhile grown stronger, said to him, "It is not proper for an officer of your rank to travel about without any escort, and if you will permit me to do so I will send with you a couple of Cossacks." Muíshkin could not object, and the Cossacks were sent — the isprávnik instructing them that they were on no account to lose sight of this gendarme officer, because there was something suspicious about him, and it was not certain that he really was what he pretended to be. As soon as Muíshkin had gone, the isprávnik wrote a letter to the governor, apprising him of his suspicions, and sent it by another Cossack, with directions to get ahead of Muíshkin if possible and deliver it before the latter reached his destination. The Cossack overtook Muíshkin on the road, and in the course of conversation among the soldiers the fact transpired that the third Cossack had a letter from the isprávnik to the governor. Muíshkin knew then that the game was lost, and at the first favorable opportunity he attempted to escape by dashing suddenly into the woods. The Cossacks, in pursuance of their instructions, endeavored to keep him in sight; but he drew his revolver, fired at them, wounded one of them, and finally made his escape. For nearly a week he wandered around in the great primeval forests that border the river Léna; but at last, half dead from cold, hunger, and exhaustion, he was captured. After some months of imprisonment in Irkútsk he was sent under strong guard to St. Petersburg and was there thrown into the fortress of Petropávlovsk. For nearly three years he lay in a bomb-proof casemate of the Trubetskói bastion awaiting trial, and all that I know of this part of his life I learned from an exile in Siberia who occupied a cell in the fortress near him. This gentleman said that Muíshkin was often delirious from ​fever, excitement, or the maddening effect of long solitary confinement, and that he frequently heard his cries when he was put into a strait-jacket or strapped to his bed by the fortress guard.
In October, 1878, Muíshkin was finally tried with "the 193" before a special session of the Governing Senate. All of the political prisoners brought to the bar on the occasion of this famous trial insisted that the public should be admitted to hear the proceedings, and that they — the prisoners — should be allowed to have their own stenographer. The Government declined to accede to either of these demands, and, as a consequence, most of the politicals refused to make any defense or to take any part in the proceedings. At the end of the trial Muíshkin, when asked if he had any last words to say, made a fiery speech denouncing the secrecy of the trial, and declaring that they did not desire nor expect to escape punishment, but thought they had a right to ask that they be tried in open court and that their case be laid before the people through the press. As soon as Muíshkin began to attack the Government he was ordered by the presiding judge to be silent, and when he refused, and insisted upon his right to be heard, the gendarmes were directed to remove him from the court-room. The last words he uttered before he was choked into silence and dragged out were: "This court is worse than a house of ill-fame; there they sell only bodies, but here you prostitute honor, and justice, and law!" For his original offense, aggravated by this outrageous insult to the court, Muíshkin was sentenced to ten years of penal servitude with deprivation of all civil rights, and was shortly afterwards incarcerated in the central convict prison at Kharkóf. I have not space for even the briefest description of the sufferings of the political convicts in that prison. The story has been writ ten by one of them and published surreptitiously in ​Russia under the significant title, "Last Words over the Coffin of Alexander II." I hope sometime to translate and republish this document, and I need only say now that I have the names of six politicals who went insane in that prison during the short time that it was used as a place of confinement for such offenders. Muíshkin was put into a small cell in the lower story that had formerly been occupied by the distinguished political Prince Tsitsiánof. His courage and energy soon led him to meditate plans of escape, and before the end of the first year he had made a dummy to lie in his place on the sleeping-platform, and with only his hands and a small piece of board had dug a tunnel out under the prison wall, disposing of the earth that he removed by packing it into a space between the floor of his cell and the ground. He had also made himself a suit of clothing to put on in place of the prison costume after he should make his escape. Prince Tsitsiánof, who had occupied the cell before him, was a scientist, and during his term of imprisonment had been allowed to have some large maps. These maps had been left as old rubbish on the oven, and Muíshkin had soaked the paper off from the muslin on which they were mounted and had made out of the cloth a shirt and a pair of trousers. His preparations for escape were virtually complete, and he was only waiting for a favorable opportunity, when one of the prison officials came to his cell at an unusual hour to speak to him. Muíshkin happened to be down in his tunnel, while the dummy was lying in his place on the bed as if he were asleep. The official soon discovered that the lay figure was not the prisoner, an alarm was raised, the mouth of the tunnel was found, and Muíshkin was dragged out like a rat from its hole. He was then put into another cell, from which escape was impossible. At the expiration of two or three months, fearing that he was about to become insane, he determined to do something for which he would be shot. He asked and obtained permission to attend ​service in the prison church one Sunday, and while there contrived to get near the governor of the prison; and as the latter turned around, after kissing the cross in the hands of the priest, Muíshkin struck him in the face. For this offense he would, under ordinary circumstances, have been shot; but just at that time the attention of the Minister of the Interior was attracted to the Kharkóf central prison by the large number of deaths and cases of insanity among the politicals, and Professor Dobroslávin, a sanitary expert from St. Petersburg, was sent to the prison to make an investigation. He reported that it was not fit for human habitation, said that the cases of death and insanity among the political convicts were not surprising, and recommended that all the prisoners of that class be removed. In the light of this report it was presumed that Muíshkin was insane, or at least in an abnormal mental condition, at the time when he struck the governor of the prison, and he was not even tried for the offense. Shortly afterward he was sent, with all his fellow-prisoners, to the mines of Kará. While they were in the city of Irkútsk on their way to the mines, one of the party, a man named Leo Dmokhófski, died. All the convicts in the party were permitted to attend the funeral in the prison church, and at the conclusion of the brief services Muíshkin felt impelled to say a few words over the body of his comrade. He referred to the high moral character of the dead man and his lovable personality, quoted a verse from the Russian liberal poet Nekrásof, and said, "Out of the ashes of this heroic man, and of other men like him, will grow the tree of liberty for Russia." At this point he was stopped by the chief of police, and at once taken back to his cell. For making what was regarded as a revolutionary speech within the sacred precincts of a church, and in the presence of the "images of the Holy Saints of the Lord," he was condemned to fifteen years more of penal servitude. In talking to me about Muíshkin, some of his comrades described him as ​"a born orator who never made but two speeches in his life; one of them cost him ten years of penal servitude, and the other fifteen." Múishkin himself said, after reaching the mines of Kará, that there was only one thing in his life which he regretted, and that was his speech over the dead MADAM BOGOMOLETS. (From a police photograph taken in convict dress.) body of his comrade Dmokhófski in Irkútsk. The world could not hear it, it did no good, it was merely the gratification of a personal impulse, and it added so many years to his term of penal servitude that, even if he should live out that term, he would be too old, when finally released, to work any more for the cause of Russian freedom.
Muíshkin was one of the first of the eight prisoners who escaped from the Kará political prison in April, 1882, and he was recaptured, as I have said, in the seaport town of Vlàdivostók, to which American vessels come every summer. In 1883 he was sent back to St. Petersburg, with a party of other "dangerous" politicals, and incarcerated in the castle of Schlusselburg. In the autumn of 1885, fearing that, as a result of long solitary confinement, he was about to go insane, he struck one of the castle officers, with the hope that he would be put to death. The experiment that had failed in the Kharkóf ​central prison succeeded in Schlusselburg. He was promptly tried by court-martial and shot.
In January, 1882, about three months before the escape of the eight convicts from the political prison at Kará, two married women, Madam Kaválskaya and Madam Bogomólets, escaped from prison while passing through Irkútsk N. SHCHEDRÍN. (From a police photograph taken in convict dress.) on their way to the mines. They were recaptured before they could get out of the city, and when they were brought back to their cells they were subjected to the customary personal search. These searches are always made by men, even when the prisoners are women, but in most cases they are conducted with decency and with the forms of respect. On this occasion, however, Colonel Solivióf, an adjutant of the governor-general, and a man of disreputable personal character, who happened to be in the prison when Madam Kaválskaya and Madam Bogomólets were brought back, conducted the search himself, and in the course of it not only insulted the women, but caused them to be stripped naked in his presence. He then had the audacity to go to a kámera in which were confined a number of male political convicts and boast of his exploit, remarking contemptuously, "Your political women are not much to look at." Among ​the convicts in the cell was a school-teacher named Shchedrín who, exasperated beyond endurance by the recital and the insulting taunt, sprung towards Solivióf, and, calling him a "despicable coward and liar," struck him in the face. For this insult to an officer, and for an attempt that he had made to escape, Shchedrín, upon his arrival at Kará, was chained to a wheelbarrow. In July, 1882, he, with the other "dangerous" political convicts named on page 237, was sent to St. Petersburg to be incarcerated in the castle of Schlusselburg. He was not released from the wheelbarrow, even when put into a vehicle; but as the roads were rough, and as he was constantly being bruised by the jolting of the barrow against him, it was finally found necessary to unchain him and lash the wheelbarrow on behind. Colonel Vinokúrof, inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia, told me that he saw Shchedrín, with the wheelbarrow still lashed to his vehicle, passing through the province of Tobólsk.
After the hunger-strike in the Kará political prison in the summer of 1882 the life of the prisoners became a little more tolerable. They were again allowed to have books, money, and some warm clothing of their own, and they were permitted to walk two hours a day in the courtyard. The sanitary conditions of their life, however, continued to be very bad, little attention was paid to the sick, and the death-rate was abnormally high.
Between the resignation of Colonel Kononóvich in 1881 and the appointment of Captain Nikólin in 1885 there were ​seven changes of commandment and the prison was managed in a hit-or-miss sort of way, according to the caprice of the man who was at the head of it. At one time the prisoners were allowed books, daily walks, money, and communication with their relatives, while at another time all these privileges were taken away from them. The partitions that were erected in the kámeras to reduce the size of the cells in 1882 were removed in 1884. The free command, which was abolished in 1881, was reëstablished in 1885. With every new officer there was a change in the regulations, and official whim or impulse took the place that should be occupied only by law. The best of the commandants, according to the testimony of the prisoners, was Burléi. Khaltúrin was brutally cruel, Shúbin was a man of little character, and Manáief was not only a drunkard, but a thief who destroyed hundreds of the prisoners' letters and embezzled 1900 rúbles of money sent to them by their relatives and friends in European Russia. All of these officers were from the gendarmerie in Irkútsk. On the 16th of January, 1884, the political prison was put under the exclusive control of the imperial police, and early in 1885 Captain Nikólin was sent from St. Petersburg to take command of it.
Every word that Colonel Kononóvich said to Assistant Minister of the Interior Dúrnovo in 1881 with regard to the management of the political prison was shown by the subsequent course of events to be true. The Government forced an honest and humane man to resign, and sent, one after another, half a dozen cruel or incapable men to take his place, and it reaped, in tragedies and scandals, the harvest that might have been expected.
After we left Kará the state of affairs went from bad to ​worse. In March, 1888, Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy, chief of the Russian prison administration, issued the following order with regard to the treatment of political convicts of the hard-labor class.
Ministry of the Interior,
Chief Prison Administration. No. 2926.
St. Petersburg, March 1, 1888.
To the Governor of the Island of Saghalín.
Your High Excellency: On the steamer Nízhni Nóvgorod of the volunteer fleet, which is to sail from the port of Odéssa on the 20th of March, 1888, there is a party of 525 convicts banished to the island of Saghalín. Among these criminals condemned to penal servitude are the political offenders Vassílli Volnóf, Sergéi Kúzin, Iván Meísner, and Stánislaus Khrenófski. In notifying you of this fact the Chief Prison Administration has the honor respectfully to request that you make arrangements to confine these political offenders, not in a separate group by themselves, but in the cells of other [common criminal] convicts. In making such arrangements it is desirable not to put more than two politicals into any one cell containing common criminals. In making the arrangements for confining these politicals in prison and employing them in work, no distinction whatever must be made between them and other criminals, except in the matter of surveillance, which must be of the strictest possible character. Neither must any difference be made between them and other convicts in respect to punishments inflicted for violations of prison discipline. You will not fail to inform the Chief Prison Administration of the manner in which the above political offenders are distributed on the island of Saghalín, and to forward reports with regard to their behavior.
[Signed] M. Gálkine Wrásskoy,
Director of the Chief Prison Administration.
Up to the time when the above order was issued some difference had been made in Siberian convict prisons between the treatment of political offenders and the treatment of burglars, highway robbers, and murderers. Both classes were confined in the same prisons, received the same food, and wore the same dress and leg-fetters, but the politicals were isolated in cells specially set apart for them, and were ​virtually exempt from corporal punishment. They did not enjoy this exemption, however, by virtue of any law. Theoretically and legally they were liable to the same punishments that were inflicted upon common criminals — namely, twenty to one hundred blows with the "rods" or the plet [a heavy whip of hardened rawhide with a number of lashes]. In practice, however, it was the custom for the prison surgeon to make a pro formâ examination of the political offender who had rendered himself or herself liable to corporal punishment, and certify to the governor of the prison that, in his judgment, such offender was not strong enough to take a flogging without danger to life. Whether, as a matter of fact, this certificate was true or false, the governor always made it his warrant for substituting some other form of punishment. The Government did not venture at that time to use the whip upon the backs of educated and refined men and women, and the surgeon's certificate was a mere legal fiction, intended to relieve the prison administration from the necessity of actually enforcing its right to flog political convicts and, at the same time, to hold that right in abeyance. The issuance in March, 1888, of the order above set forth marked a new departure in the treatment of political convicts, and since that time they have been put into the same cells with thieves, burglars, and murderers, and have been flogged precisely as if they were common criminals. On the 16th of September, 1888, a little more than six months after the above order appeared, two of the very political offenders named in it — Vassílli Volnóf and Iván Meísner — were flogged at the penal establishment on the island of Saghalín as the result of a collision with the local authorities, caused by the failure of one of them to take off his cap to a petty official whom he happened to meet.
At the mines of Kará, however, Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy's order had much more tragic consequences than these, inasmuch as it led there to the flogging to death of a cultivated ​woman, the suicide of three of her companions, and an at- tempt at self-destruction on the part of more than twenty men. I have received from political exiles in Siberia four separate and independent accounts of the series of events that led up to this tragic climax, and it would be easy to compile from them a graphic and sensational story of "Si- berian horrors." I have no desire, however, to exaggerate or color with imagination the facts of Siberian convict life, and I shall therefore lay aside these exile manuscripts, and offer the reader, instead, a translation of a private letter written to me by a Russian gentleman who lives near the mines of Kará, who is not an exile nor a political offender, who occupies a position that affords him every opportunity to know the truth, and who not only writes coolly and dis- passionately, but confines himself to a bare statement of facts. The letter is as follows:
X , Eastern Siberia, April 11-23, 1890.
My Dear Mr. Kennan: The events herein described seem to me so important that although I have already written about them once I am going to repeat what I said for fear that my first letter has not reached you. I give you facts only, and I assure you, upon my honor, that they are facts, and facts with regard to which there is no doubt or question.
On the 5th of August, 1888, Baron Korf, governor-general of the Amúr, paid a visit to the Kará convict prisons. One of the political prisoners — Elizabeth Kaválskaya — did not rise to her feet when the governor-general entered her cell, and upon his making some remark to her with regard to it she replied that she
​did not think it necessary to get up. About a week later General Khoróshkin, the governor of the Trans-Baikál, ordered that she be taken to the central convict prison at Vérkhni Údinsk. The execution of the order was attended with rough treatment. and in- sult. Lieutenant-colonel Masiúkof, the gendarme officer in command of the political prisons, intrusted the whole matter to a petty officer of the prison administration, named Bobrófski. The latter did not think it necessary to inform Madam Kaválskaya beforehand that she was to be taken away, but suddenly appeared in her cell with a file of soldiers at four o'clock in the morning, and dragged her, half-naked, out of bed. The soldiers tore off from her all of her own underclothes, making meanwhile various insulting remarks, and dressed her forcibly in the clothing provided by the Government for common criminal women. At this she fainted, whereupon they laid her, still unconscious, upon a blanket, carried her down to the bank of the river, and put her into a small boat for transportation to Strétinsk. [The water in the Shílka was so shallow at that time that the steamers were not running.] As a result of all this the women in the women's political prison demanded that the commandant Masiúkof, who had permitted such treatment of Madam Kaválskaya, be removed, and they enforced their demand with a hunger-strike [voluntary self-starvation] that lasted sixteen days. Although the men's political prison was secretly in communication with the prison of the women, the male convicts did ​not participate in this hunger-strike for the reason that, in their opinion, the action of the commandant Masiúkof was not the result of an evil intention, but rather of a weak character and general stupidity. [It is said that Masiúkof, really, is not a bad man.] Finally, at the expiration of sixteen days, the male political convicts persuaded the women to abandon their hunger-strike, and ELIZABETH KAVÁLSKAYA. (From a police photograph taken in convict dress.) send memorials to the governor of the Trans-Baikál and the chief of the Irkútsk gendarmerie. All of these memorials embodied a protest, on the part of the signers, against the violent treatment of Madam Kaválskaya, and some of them contained a demand that Masiúkof, as the person chiefly to blame for the trouble, should be removed. In due course of time the memorials were answered. The governor of the Trans-Baikál replied that the right to pass judgment on the acts of officials belonged exclusively to the Government which employed such officials, and that any person who should affront or insult a Government official would be held to legal accountability. The colonel of gendarmes in Irkútsk, who was Masiúkof's direct superior, replied that he expected to come to Kará soon, and that he would then make a personal investigation. Some weeks later this officer—Colonel von Plótto—did go to Kará, instituted there an inquiry into the ​circumstances of the case, and then promised the politicals that, at the expiration of a certain fixed period, Masiúkof should be removed. The specified time elapsed, and Masiúkof still continued to hold his position as commandant of the political prisons. Then began in the women's prison a second hunger-strike, which was supported this time by the convicts in the men's prison, and which lasted twenty-two days. It ended in Masiúkof's promising that within three months he would leave Kará of his own accord. During these three months the women refused to send or receive anything that would have to pass through his hands — that is, they gave up correspondence with their relatives, and declined to take money, books, etc., sent to Masiúkof for them. The three months ended August 31, 1889. [You see the affair had dragged along for a whole year.] Madam Sigída [Hope Sigída] then tried to shame Masiúkof into leaving Kará by striking him in the face. She was at once seized and thrown into the common criminal prison of Ust Kará [that is, separated from her companions]. Immediately after this, on the 1st of September, 1889, began the third hunger-strike in the women's political prison, which was finally broken up by the removal to the common criminal prison of Miss Kalúzhnaya, Miss Smirnítskaya, and Madam Kavaléfskaya. Madam Kavaléfskaya and Madam Sigída continued for a time to starve themselves, but were fed by force. Masiúkof made a report upon this series of occurrences, and, as a result of it, a proclamation was received from the governor of the Trans-Baikál and read to the political convicts, saying that, in view of the disorders at Kará, the governor-general had directed the commandant of the political prisons to resort to various severe disciplinary measures, among them corporal punishment. At the same time the governor or director of the Kará penal establishment received an order from Governor-general Korf directing him to punish Hope Sigída with 100 blows of the "rods" in the presence of the surgeon, but without previous surgical examination. The surgeon of the Kará prison hospital, Dr. Gúrvich, thereupon gave notice officially that, in his opinion, Madam Sigída could not endure so much as ​a single blow, and that, furthermore, since he was not legally obliged to witness punishments inflicted by administrative order and without the sentence of a court, he should decline to be present. [It should be noted here that there had been no formal inquiry into the circumstances of Madam Sigída's case and no examination [slédstvie].] The governor of the Kará penal establishment, Gomulétski, did not at once execute the order of the governor-general, but reported to his immediate superior the statement and declaration of the prison surgeon. Baron Korf thereupon directed that the previous order be executed without the presence of the surgeon. Gomulétski still put off the punishment, Masiúkof refused to take charge of the affair, and finally Bobrófski — the same officer who had ill-treated Madam Kaválskaya — was brought from Nérchinski Zavód to serve as executioner. [I forgot to mention in its proper place the fact that after the Kaválskaya affair Bobrófski was promoted to be assistant superintendent of the convict prisons in the whole Nérchinsk mining district.]
On the 6th of November, 1889, Bobrófski arrived at Kará, and immediately carried the order of Governor-general Korf into execution.
Many stories are in circulation with regard to the repulsive details of this infernal act of cruelty, but I will not write them to you because I cannot answer for the truthfulness of them. After the execution Madam Sigída, in a state of unconsciousness, was carried back into the prison, and on the 8th or 9th of November she died — I think from poison. On the night of the 10th Marie Kavaléfskaya, Marie Kalúzhnaya, and Nadézhda Smirnítskaya, who also had taken poison, were brought from their cells to the prison hospital, and died there, one after another. A few days later — November 15th — Dr. Gúrvich was summoned by Masiúkof to the men's political prison to treat twenty more ​convicts who had poisoned themselves. All were saved except Iván Kalúzhni [brother of the young girl who committed suicide on the 10th], and Sergéi Bobókhof, both of whom died on the morning of November 16th. It is said that, at first, the authorities lost their heads and became demoralized; but the governor of the Trans-Baikál soon took energetic measures to prevent the affair, as far as possible, from becoming known. He went to Kará him- self, as did also the territorial procureur and the colonel of gen- darmes; but what happened afterward I do not know.
I was unable to write you more promptly with regard to this affair on account of circumstances beyond my control.
With sincere respect, I am yours
N——— N———.
Hope Sigída, the heroine of this terrible prison tragedy, was the daughter of a well-known merchant named Malak- siánof, who lived and was engaged in business in the city of Táganrog in European Russia. She was born there in the year 1864 and was therefore, at the time of her death, about twenty-five years of age. She received a good educa- tion, and was graduated from the women's gymnasium in Táganrog with the highest honors and the gold medal for the year. It was her intention to continue her studies in one of the high schools for women in St. Petersburg, but, soon after her graduation, her father failed in business, and she was forced to become a teacher in one of the public schools in order to help to support her family. In 1884 she was married to Mr. A.S. Sigída, an officer of the Táganrog Circuit Court. Both she and her husband were revolution- ists, and in 1885 they, with a number of others, established in Táganrog a secret printing-office, devoted to the dissemina- tion of revolutionary ideas. On the 23d of January, 1886, this printing-establishment was discovered and captured by the police, and Madam Sigída, with many others, was arrested and thrown into prison. She was held in solitary confinement from January, 1886, to October, 1887 — almost two years — and was then tried, found guilty, and sentenced to a long term of penal servitude at the mines of Kará.
​A lady in Russia who knew Madam Sigída well, and who was at one time closely associated with her, has writ- ten me the following estimate of her character:
Hope Sigída was a woman naturally endowed with great men- tal ability and intrepidity. In her appearance and behavior there was nothing whatever to suggest the blue-stocking, or the "Nihil- ist," and for that reason all who knew her merely in her official capacity as a teacher in the public schools were astonished when she was arrested in the secret printing-office. But, apart from the official side of her character, there was another, never seen by the curious eyes of the uninitiated. She was a conspirator. You know, Mr. Kennan, how innocent, and even praiseworthy, are the objects that a Russian has to attain by means of conspiracy. If you try to help your comrades and friends by bringing them to- gether at intervals for study and discussion, the Government im- mediately invents anew and previously unheard-of crime called "organizing circles for self-cultivation." If you try to teach poor peasants to read, and to instruct them with regard to their rights and duties as human beings, you are accused by the Government of another "crime" — viz: "having dealings with peasant laborers." Of course, Hope Sigída had every reason to be a conspirator. She was a woman of great independence and self-reliance, she had a rarely developed sense of justice, she was intelligent and cultivated in the highest degree, she was absolutely fearless in the domain of thought, and she was a fanatical idealist. She naturally played a leading part, therefore, both in the gymnasium and in the "circle for self-cultivation," and by all of her associates in those organiza- tions she was greatly beloved. In personal appearance Madam Sigída was very attractive. She was a rather slender brunette of medium height, with an oval face full of expression and energy, and remarkably beautiful eyes. She was always dressed neatly and with taste, but very simply.
In February, 1890, soon after the receipt in Europe of the first news of the Kará tragedy, the St. Petersburg Nóvoe Vrémya and the Journal de St. Petersbourg [the official organ of the Russian Foreign Office] declared that "the reports of the flogging to death of Madam Sigída and the suicide of three other female prisoners at Kará, in the province of the ​Amúr, are unqualified falsehoods." The denial was doubtless inspired by the chief of the prison administration or the Minister of the Interior, but it was none the less futile and ill-advised, because the salient facts of the MADAM SUKHOMLÍNA. (Went voluntarily to the mines with her husband in 1888.) case were at that time known, and known through official statements and admissions, to at least half the population of Eastern Siberia. Only a month later the chief of the prison administration himself admitted the flogging, but pleaded justification. He declared that "Kennan and others etherealized Nihilist women out of all recognition," that the political exiles and convicts "brought troubles upon themselves by being excitable and intractable" and that "an example was necessary."
In June, 1891, a gentleman living in a European city wrote to the editor of The Century Magazine, apparently for publication, a letter upon this subject, in which he gave what seemed to be an officially inspired version of the facts; and, as I have not been able to find any other defense of the action of the East-Siberian ​THE HISTORY OF THE KARA POLITICAL PRISON 271 officials in this case, I submit the letter for what it may be worth. X Hotel, X , June 3, 1891. To the Editor of the Century Magazine : Sir : As your contributor Mr. George Kennan and other per- sons still circulate stories as to flogging in Russia, and insist that Madam Sigida was flogged to death, I ask space for a few words in reply. More women have been flogged in the United States than in Russia during the last ten years. Indeed, I doubt if there is any instance of flogging a Russian lady except Madam Sigida. Her case was as follows : In the year 1888 the discipline of the prisoners in Siberia being very bad, an ordinance was adopted rendering them liable to flog- ging for grave breaches of discipline. Good conduct was, of course, all that was necessary to avoid punishment. The prisoners at Kara, however, came to a resolution that if any of their number was flogged they would all commit suicide. Shortly after this Madam Sigida sent for the governor of the jail, on the pretext of important business, and on his arrival she struck him in the face. There could scarcely be a grosser or more unprovoked breach of discipline, especially as such a blow is considered a greater insult in Russia than elsewhere. [This was more than a year after the ordinance.] That Madam Sigida was a healthy woman at the time is evident from the fact that she had just gone through a " hunger-strike " which lasted either fourteen or seventeen days. No delicate woman could have endured this. But as she was pulled down by long fasting the prison doctor refused to permit her to be flogged until she had recovered her strength. The pun- ishment was accordingly postponed, and she was not flogged until about three weeks after the " hunger-strike " was over. The flog- ging would not have been considered severe if inflicted by the White Caps or Regulators of America. Three days afterward Madam Sigida, and three female companions who had not been flogged, died, and the male prisoners also took poison, though with less fatal results. It is admitted that the other three women com- mitted suicide. It is admitted that Madam Sigida was one of those who had agreed to commit suicide if any prisoner was flogged, and it is admitted that she died on the same day with the suicides. Yet, in the face of all this, an attempt has been made to persuade the American public that she was flogged to death. It is not ​alleged that the prison doctor ascribed her death to the flogging. It is not alleged that any one who saw her after the flogging saw her terribly cut up and fainting from weakness, or giving any other indication of fatal flogging. The only evidence that the flogging, which she actually courted, was unduly severe, is that she died in three days afterward — the day when the other prisoners committed suicide. Your obedient servant,
C—— M——.
There seems to me to be very little in the quibble that Madam Sigída was not flogged to death because, so far as we know, she did not actually die under the lash. If Mr. C—— M——'s younger sister, a cultivated, generous, im- pulsive, and patriotic young Irish girl, we will say, had been sent to the Andaman Islands for twenty years as a hard-labor convict because she had helped to maintain a secret "Home Rule" printing-office in Belfast; if, driven to despair by cruel treatment of herself and her companions in penal servitude, she had starved herself twenty-two days in order to bring about, by the only means of compulsion open to her, the removal of the officer responsible for such cruel treatment; if, finally, she had been fed by force through a rubber tube; if, in the abnormal mental condition that would naturally be caused by so terrible an experience of hunger and outrage, she had committed a breach of prison discipline ; if she had then been stripped, held by the wrists on a sol- dier's back, and flogged until she fainted; and if, at last, in an agony of helplessness, shame, and despair, she had taken her own life, I do not think that Mr. C—— M—— would re- gard it as an overstatement if I should say that his sister had been "flogged to death." But the question is unimpor- tant. It seems to me that, so far as moral responsibility is concerned, Madam Sigida and her three companions were just as truly put to death by the East-Siberian officials as if their throats had been cut in the prison courtyard by the prison executioner. You may so treat a high-spirited
certainly commit suicide if she can; but the mere fact that she dies by her own hand does not relieve you from moral accountability for her death.
distinction is now made between politicals and common criminals. Many of the former—but how many I do not know—have been transferred from Kará to the famous and dreaded mine of Akatúi, in the Nérchinsk district, where ​they live and work with ordinary felons of the hard-labor class. This is a return to the method of treating politicals that was practised more than forty years ago, when the gifted Russian novelist Dostoyéfski was sent to Siberia in chains, and worked and was flogged with common criminals in the convict prison of Omsk. Most intelligent Russian officials are now ashamed of that episode in the history of their literature and their Government. The time, I hope, is not far distant when they will be even more ashamed of flogging women, chaining school-teachers to wheelbarrows, and subjecting political convicts generally to treatment from which they gladly escape by suicide.
On the 12th of November Mr. Frost and I left the mines of Kará forever, and with glad hearts turned our faces, at last, homeward. As we drove away, with Major Pótulof, from the Lower Diggings, two political convicts, in long gray overcoats, who were walking towards the prison at a distance of one hundred and fifty or two hundred yards from the road, saw and recognized us, and as we passed they stopped, removed their caps, and made towards us what the Russians call a "waist bow" — a bow so low that the body is bent at right angles from the waist. It was their last mute farewell to the travelers who had shown them sympathy and pity, and it is the last remembrance I have of the mines of Kará.
We spent that night in the house of the overseer of the Ust Kará prison, at the mouth of the river, and on the following morning remounted our horses for another ride across the mountains to Strétinsk. Major Pótulof opened a bottle of white Crimean wine after we had climbed into our saddles, and, pouring out a glassful for each of us and for himself, said, "Here's to the beginning of a journey to America!" We drank the stirrup-cup with bright anticipations of a return to home and friends, thanked Major Pótulof for his kindness and hospitality, promised to apprise him by telegraph of our safe arrival at Strétinsk, and rode away into the mountains.
​The country lying along the Shílka, in the vicinity of Kará, is inhabited, away from the river, only by a tribe of
half-wild nomads, known to the Russians as "Orozhánni," They acknowledge allegiance to the Russian Grovernment, pay taxes, and are nominally Christians; but they rarely come into the Russian settlements, unless brought there by ​a desire to exchange their furs or reindeer for knives, kettles, or tobacco. The Russian priest at Kará visits them from time to time to conduct religious services; and the picture of an Orozhánni encampment during one of these services, on page 273, is from a photograph made and given to me by a political exile in Nérchinsk.
For two days after leaving Kará we rode on horseback across the rugged, forest-clad mountains that skirt the river Shílka, suffering constantly from cold, hunger, and fatigue. On the third day we reached Botí, the village from which we had taken our horses, and found most of the population engaged in threshing out grain with flails on the ice. The peasants manifested great pleasure at seeing us, and said we had been gone so long that they had almost given us up for lost. The excitement and anxiety of our life at Kará, and the hardships of our ride across the mountains in a temperature below zero had so exhausted my strength that when we reached Botí my pulse was running at 120, and I could hardly sit in the saddle. I should not have been able to ride on horseback another day. Fortunately, we found the river at Botí solidly frozen, and were able to continue our journey in sledges on the ice. Late on the night of November 16th, tired, half-starved, and deadly cold, we reached the town of Strétinsk, and found food, shelter, and rest in the little cabin of the young peasant Záblikof, where we had left most of our baggage when we set out on horseback for the mines of Kará.
* ↑ It is a noteworthy fact, frankly admitted by the governor-general, that out of 430 political offenders banished to Eastern Siberia, 217—or more than half—had been sent there without trial, and without even a pretense of judicial investigation. I submit this officially stated fact for the attentive consideration of the advocates of a Russo-American extradition treaty.
* ↑ The governor-general does not say why this was "impossible," nor does he try to explain the fact that although the politicals were constantly sent to the gold placers under Colonel Kononóvich's management, no evil results followed, and not a single attempt was made to escape.
* ↑ Up to the time of our visit to the mines, three years and a half later, this promised removal had not been made. Insane politicals were still living in the same kámeras with their sane comrades, and intensifying, by their presence, the misery of the latter's existence. In East-Siberian prisons generally we found little attention paid to the seclusion or care of demented convicts. In more than one place in the Trans-Baikál we were startled, as we entered a crowded prison kámera, by some uncared-for lunatic, who sprang suddenly towards us with a wild cry or with a burst of hysterical laughter. The reasons for this state of affairs are given, in part, by the governor-general. There is not an insane asylum in the whole country, and it is easier and cheaper to make the prison comrades of a lunatic take care of him than to keep him in seclusion and provide him with an attendant. For educated political prisoners, who dread insanity more than anything else, it is, of course, terribly depressing to have constantly before them, in the form of a wrecked intelligence, an illustration of the possible end of their own existence.
* ↑ Report of Governor-general Anúchin to Alexander III., Chapter V., Section 3, under the heading of "Exile Penal Servitude and the Prison Department." (See Appendix H.)
* ↑ The politicals who took part in this unsuccessful attempt to escape were Muíshkin, Khrúshchef, Bólomez, Levchénko, Yurkófski, Dikófski, Kryzhanófski, and Minakóf.
* ↑ This was the expression used by Major Pótulof in speaking to me of the events that followed the escape. It is believed by many of the politicals at Kará that the prison authorities deliberately intended to provoke them to violence, in order, first, to have an excuse for administering corporal punishment, and, secondly, artificially to create a "bunt," or prison insurrection, that would divert the attention of the Minister of the Interior from their (the officials') negligence in allowing eight dangerous criminals to escape.
* ↑ A prisoner living under "dungeon conditions" is deprived of money, books, writing-materials, underclothing, bedclothing, tobacco, and all other luxuries; he is not allowed to walk for exercise in the courtyard nor to have any communication with the outside world; and he must live exclusively upon black rye-bread and water, with now and then a little of the soup, or broth thickened with barley, which is known to the political convicts as balánda.
* ↑ The word pógrom has no precise equivalent in the English language, It means a sudden, violent, and destructive attack, like one of the raids made upon the Jews by infuriated peasants in Russian towns some years ago.
* ↑ "Secret "cells in Siberian prisons are those intended for the solitary confinement of persons accused of murder or other capital crimes. They were not generally shown us in our visits to prisons, but I was permitted by Colonel Makófski to inspect the "secret" cells in the prison at Irkútsk. These had neither beds nor sleeping-platforms, and contained no furniture of any kind except a parásha, or excrement bucket. The prisoners confined in them were forced to sleep without pillows or bed-clothing on the cold cement or stone floor, and during the day had either to sit on this floor or to stand. I saw men who had not yet been tried occupying such cells as these in the Irkútsk prison. If I had power to summon as witnesses the subordinate officials of the House of Preliminary Detention in St. Petersburg, I could prove, in a Russian court, that even in that show-prison of the Empire there were kártsers, or disciplinary cells, where there was not so much as a parásha, and where the floors were covered with excrement. Of course Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy and Mr. Kokóftsef, the heads of the Russian prison administration, were not aware of this fact; but, nevertheless, it is a fact, unless both political prisoners and the prison officials themselves severally and independently lied to me. The political offender Dicheskúlo was put into such a cell as this after the riot in the House of Preliminary Detention that followed the flogging of Bogoliúbof. I did not see the "secret" cells in the Kará prisons, but there is no reason to suppose that they were in any better condition than the kámeras that I did see and that I have described. I do not mean to have the reader draw the sweeping and mistaken conclusion that all cells, or even all "secret" cells, in Russian prisons are of this kind, nor that the higher prison officials are in all cases responsible for such a state of affairs. All that I aim to do is to make plain the conditions under which educated and delicately nurtured political offenders in Russian prisons are sometimes compelled to live.
* ↑ Tíkhonof died shortly afterwards.
* ↑ These "dangerous" prisoners were Messrs. Géllis, Voloshénko, Butsínski, Paul Orlóf, Malávski, Popóf, Shchedrín, and Kobyliánski. Nothing is known with regard to their fate. Madame Géllis, the wife of one of them, whose acquaintance I made in the Trans-Baikál, told me that she was denied a last interview with her husband when he was taken away from Kará, that she never afterwards heard from him, and that she did not know whether he was among the living or the dead.
* ↑ I have never been able to understand why a government that is capable when irritated of treating prisoners in this way should hesitate a moment about letting them die, and thus getting rid of them. However, I believe it is a fact that in every case where political hunger-strikers have had courage and nerve enough to starve themselves to the point of death the authorities have manifested anxiety and have ultimately yielded. It is one of many similar inconsistencies in Russian penal administration. The Government seems to be sensitive to some things and brutally insensible to others. It prides itself upon its humanity in expunging the death penalty from its civil code, and yet it inflicts death constantly by sentences of courts-martial in civil cases. It has abolished the knut, but it flogs with the plet, which, according to the testimony of Russian officers, can be made to cause death in a hundred blows. It shrinks from allowing political convicts to die of self-starvation and yet it puts them to a slow death in the "stone bags” of the castle of Schlusselburg. To the practical American intelligence it would seem to be safer, as well as more humane, to order political convicts out into the prison courtyard and have them shot, than to kill them slowly under "dungeon conditions." Society would not be half so much shocked and exasperated by summary executions as it now is by suicides, hunger-strikes, and similar evidences of intolerable misery among the political convicts in prison and at the mines.
* ↑ The date of the pogróm in the Kará political prison.
* ↑ I was credibly informed, and in justice the fact should be stated, that this commutation of sentence was asked for by Governor Ilyashévich, whose life Madam Kutitónskaya had attempted. Whether he felt, upon reflection, some stirrings of pity and remorse, or whether he merely wished to make a showing of magnanimity in order to throw doubt upon the reports of his cruelty at the mines and break their effect, I do not know.
* ↑ The date of the assassination of Alexander II. A translation of the letter to which Madam Korbá referred will be found in Appendix C.
* ↑ The official report of the trial of Madam Korbá and others may be found in the St. Petersburg newspaper Nóvosti, No. 9, April 9, 1883.
* ↑ Indictment in the case of "the 193." Official Copy, pp. 239 and 240.
* ↑ A brief summary of Muíshkin's speech and a description of this scene were published in the New-York Tribune for March 7 or 8, 1878.
* ↑ I have not been able to obtain a complete list of the prisoners who died, committed suicide, or went insane in the Kará political prison between 1879 and 1886, but I know of the following cases: Deaths (all except one from prison consumption): Ishútinof, Krivoshéin, Zhúkof, Pópeko, Madam Lisófskaya, Tíkhonof, Rogatchóf, Dr. Véimar, Miss Armfeldt, and Madam Kutitónskaya. Suicides: Semyónofski (shot himself), Ródin (poisoned himself), Uspénski (hanged himself). Insane: Matvéivich, Zubkófski, Pózen, and Madam Kavaléfskaya (the last named recovered). At the time of our visit to the mines eight out of the eleven women in the women's political prison were sick.
* ↑ Kononóvich, Pótulof, Khaltúrin, Burléi, Shúbin, Manáief, Burléi (a second time), and Nikólin.
* ↑ In January, 1887, three years later, Manáief was deprived of rank, orders, and nobility, and banished as a criminal to the territory of Yakútsk. (Newspapers Sibír, April 4, 1885, p. 8, and Vostóchnoe Obozrénie, Jan. 8, 1887, p. 4.)
* ↑ In the year 1884 Eastern Siberia was divided into two governor-generalships, one including the provinces of Irkútsk and Yeniséisk and the territory of Yakútsk, the other comprising the maritime territory, the Amúr territory, and the territory of the Trans-Baikál. This administrative rearrangement of the political divisions of the country took the mines of Kará out of the jurisdiction of the Irkútsk governor-general and subjected them to the authority of the governor-general of the Amúr, whose headquarters were at Khabarófka. [Author's note.]
* ↑ Elizabeth Kaválskaya was tried by court-martial at Kiev in May, 1881, and condemned as a revolutionist to penal servitude for life. While in Irkútsk, on her way to the mines of Kará, she made her escape, but was recaptured, stripped naked, and searched as described in this chapter. At the time to which this letter refers she was an invalid, or semi-invalid, and all of my other informants agree that she had consumption. Her name must be carefully distinguished from that of Madam Kavaléfskaya, which it resembles. Both women were at Kará. [Author's note.]
* ↑ It is a rule in all Russian prisons that when an officer — and particularly an officer of high rank — enters a cell, every prisoner shall rise to his or her feet and stand in the attitude of attention. Madam Kaválskaya neither rose to her feet nor noticed in any way the governor-general's entrance. [Author's note.]
* ↑ The new prison described in chapter IV. of this volume. It is distant from Kará about 600 miles. [Author's note.]
* ↑ Appointed in place of Captain Nikólin since my visit to Kará. [Author's note.]
* ↑ At the time of our visit to Kará political convicts of both sexes were allowed, as a rule, to wear underclothing purchased by themselves with their own money, and to have their own bedding. Under the order issued by the prison administration on the 1st of March, 1888, they would not be entitled to this privilege, particularly if they were about to be subjected, as Madam Kaválskaya was, to "dungeon conditions." [Author's note.]
* ↑ The distance from Ust Kará to Strétinsk is about seventy miles up-stream, and Madam Kaválskaya must have spent at least three days in the small rowboat with the soldiers who had already stripped her naked and insulted her. [Author's note.]
* ↑ Political exiles and convicts are forbidden to address to the authorities a collective petition, or to take joint action of any kind with regard to any subject, but this prohibition does not extend to a number of separate individual memorials, provided they are not identical in terms. [Author's note.]
* ↑ The other accounts that I have received from Siberia differ as to the circumstances in which this blow was given and the reasons for it. The precise facts, probably, will never be known.
* ↑ The officer who had taken the place filled at the time of my visit by Major Pótulof. [Author's note.]
* ↑ This was intended apparently to preclude the possibility of a report on the part of the surgeon that the punishment would endanger life. [Author's note.]
* ↑ Miss Marie Kalúzhnaya, aged twenty-three, was the daughter of a merchant in Odessa, and had been condemned to twenty years of penal servitude. Her story may be found in the article entitled "Prison Life of the Russian Revolutionists," in The Century Magazine for December, 1887, p. 289. Miss Hope Smirnítskaya, aged thirty-seven, was the daughter of a Russian priest, and at the time of her arrest — ten or twelve years ago — was a student in one of the high schools for women [vuíshi zhénski kúrsi] in St. Petersburg. She had been sentenced to fifteen years of penal servitude, ["Russian State Prisoners," Century Magazine for March, 1888, p. 759.] The story and portrait of Madam Kavaléfskaya were given in chapter VII of this volume. [Author's note.]
* ↑ Cable despatch dated London, February 20, 1890.
* ↑ Cable despatch dated St. Petersburg, March 13, 1890.