Weekly expositor. (Brockway Centre, Mich.) 1882-1894, 1889-01-24
RUSSIAN METHODS.
The Life OF Political Prisoners In
Petropavlovsk.

Petropaviovsk.
The following is an extract from Mr..
George Kennan's article on Russian
State Prisoners" to appear in the March
number of the Century Magazine.
In considering the life of political
prisoners in the fortress OF Petropa-
vlovsk, the reader must bear steadily
in mind the fact that the men and
women who thus languish for months
or years in the silent bomb-proof case
mates Of the Trubetsl1oi bastion are all
persons who have not had trial.
Their case is by no means that OF con-
demned criminals undergoing just pun
ishment for offenses of which they
have been duly convicted in a court of
justice. 1t is rather that of presuma-
bly, innocent persons, deprived for an
unreasonable length of time of the
right to be heard in self-defense, and
treated meanwhile as If their guilt was
unquestionable. That q very large
proportion of the men and women
thrown into prison in Russia upon po-
litical charges are in fact innocent is
not matter of opinion, it is q matter
OF official record. / have shown in a
previous paper that out of more than o
thousand persons arrested for alleged
| participation in the so-called ''revolu-
tionary propaganda" of 1925
only 1893 were ever brought to
trial, and even OF this rel
atively small number 90 were
acquitted by court OF judges OF the
governments own selection. Nine
tenths, therefore, of these prisoners
were entirely innocent, not only of real
crime but even of the vague and
shadowy offenses set forth in section
250 of the Russian Penal Code; and yet
all Of them were subjected before their
release TO from six months to three
years Of rigorous solitary confinement
in the House OF Preliminary Detention,
or in the damp prison sepulchers of the
Trubets!1oi bastion. That a system
which brings about such results is in
the highest degree arbitrary and I'M
just, and that the subsection of presum-
ably innocent persons to two or three
years of such treatment pending the
trial is cruel in the extreme, are pro-
positions that hardly admit of argu-
ment. Whether such wrongs and
crueltes are adequate to excuse the
violent measures Of retaliation adopted
by the terrorists is question to which
different answers may be given by diff
ferent people; but it will, l think, be
generally admitted that the confne-
ment Of an innocent man for three years
in a casemate OF the Trubetskoi bastion
ha 4
scribed, and the final release of such a
man without reparation or apology,
and perhaps without even the formal
ity of a judicial hearing, constitute ex-
treme provocation. Such was the view
taken by the eminent Russian advocate
Gerard when, in the trial of the regi-
cides at St. Petersburg in 1881, he en-
deavored to show that his client
Kibalchich had been changed from q
law-abiding citizen to revolusionist
by unjust treatment of precisely this
character; and such was evidently the
view also OF the court, which refused TO
allow Mr.. Gerard TO finish his state
mert, and which, when he persisted,
informed him sharply that the govern
ment's treatment of its subjects was
not a matter for his judgment"
That undeserved Imprisonment and
cruel treatment before trial were i'm
poFtant factors in the developement of
the Russian revolution movement clear
ly appears from tho later history of the
ninety prisoners who were acquitted at
the end of the trial of the 1913 in JAN
uary, 1873. According TO the judge
ment Of a court not at all likely to err
on the side of clemency, those ninety
young people were wholly guiltless Of
any offense against the law. They had
not even rendered themselves amenable
to the 250th section Of the Russian
Penal Code by manifesting ian in
tention to bring about change of gov
eminent at q more or less remote
time in the future" and yet they all
had been punished with three years Of
the strictest solitary confinement in the
House Of Detention or the Patropav-
lovsk fortress, and had finally been de-
MED even the poor boon of public
trial in an open court, where they
might at least have made apparent to
the world the injustice from which they
had suffered. The result was that
which might have been anticipated.
Almost every one of the persons thus
punished and then found not guilty ul-
timately became a revolutionist, and
before 1885 more thSsi = third OF them
were in Siberia, ard two OF them
Andre Zheliaboff and Sophia Perofskaya
had persisted on the scaffold with the
blood of Alexander III. upon their hands.
i do not know more significant IL
lustration than this OF one way in which
revolutionary impulses in Russia are
excited and kept alive. The agencies
which transformed these innocent young
people into r?volutionists were unwar-
ranted arrest, denial for an unreasona-
BILE length OF time the right TO be heard
In their own defense, and prolonged inn
prisonment under conditions that
threatened to deprive them OF health,
sanity or life. Three years-two years
or even one year of solitary confine-
ment in casemate OF the Trubetskio
bastion is quite enough to embitter and
exasperate TO the last degree con-
sciously innocent man; and il to such
unjust Imprisonment be added the loss
nf N hrothar eiatar Nuifa or friend in