UNDER THE WATCH TOWER—THE LISBON POLICEMAN—THE INCENDIARIES
A man soon becomes used to prison, if he only has some inner resources.
One quickly becomes used to the peace and complete freedom in one’s
cage—no anxieties, no distractions.
At first, books were not allowed; the superintendent assured me that it
was forbidden to take books from my home. I asked him to buy me some.
‘Something instructive, a grammar now, I might get, perhaps, but for
anything more you must ask the general.’ The suggestion that I should
wile away the time by reading a grammar was extremely funny,
nevertheless I caught at it eagerly, and asked the superintendent to buy
me an Italian grammar and lexicon. I had two red notes with me, I gave
him one; he at once sent an officer for the books and gave him a letter
to the chief police-master in which, on the strength of the paragraph I
had read, I asked him to let me know the cause of my arrest or to
release me.
The local superintendent, in whose presence I wrote the letter, tried to
persuade me not to send it.
‘It’s a mistake, sir, upon my soul, it’s a mistake to trouble the
general; he’ll say “they are restless people,” it will do you harm and
be no use whatever.’
In the evening the policeman appeared and told me that the head
police-master had bidden him tell me that I should know the cause of my
arrest in due time. Then he pulled out of his pocket a greasy Italian
grammar, and added, smiling, ‘it luckily happened that there was a
dictionary in it so there was no need to buy one.’ Not a word was said
about the change. I was on the point of writing to the chief
police-master again, but the rôle of a miniature Hampden at the
Pretchistensky police station struck me as too funny.
Ten days after my arrest a little swarthy, pock-marked policeman
appeared at ten o’clock in the evening with an order for me to dress and
set off to the committee of inquiry.
While I was dressing the following ludicrously vexatious incident
occurred. My dinner was sent me from home, a servant gave it to the
non-commissioned officer below and he sent it up to me by a soldier.
They were allowed to send me from home about a bottle of wine a day. N.
Sazonov took advantage of this permission to send me a bottle of
excellent Johannisberg. The soldier and I ingeniously uncorked the
bottle with two nails, the wine had a delicate fragrance that was
apparent at a distance. I looked forward to enjoying it for the next
three or four days.
One must be in prison to know how much childishness remains in a man and
what comfort can be found in trifles, from a bottle of wine to a trick
at the expense of one’s guard.
The pock-marked policeman sniffed out my bottle and turning to me asked
permission to taste a little. I was vexed; however, I said that I should
be delighted. I had no wine-glass. The monster took a tumbler, filled it
incredibly full and drank it without taking breath; this way of imbibing
spirits and wine only exists among Russians and Poles; I have seen no
other people in all Europe who could empty a tumbler at a gulp or even
toss off a wine-glassful. To make the loss of the wine still more
bitter, the pock-marked policeman wiped his lips with a snuffy blue
handkerchief, adding ‘First-class Madeira.’ I looked at him with hatred
and spitefully rejoiced that he had not been vaccinated and nature had
not spared him the smallpox.
This connoisseur of wines conducted me to the chief police-master’s
house in Tverskoy Boulevard, showed me into a side-room and left me
alone there. Half an hour later, a stout man with a lazy, good-natured
air came into the room from the inner apartments; he threw a portfolio
of papers on the table and sent the gendarme standing at the door away
on some errand.
‘I suppose,’ he said to me, ‘you are concerned with the case of Ogaryov
and the other young men who have lately been arrested?’
I said I was.
‘I happened to hear about it,’ he went on, ‘it’s a strange case, I don’t
understand it.’
‘I’ve been a fortnight in prison in connection with the case and I don’t
understand it, and, what’s more, I simply know nothing about it.’
‘A good thing, too,’ he said, looking intently at me; ‘and mind you
don’t know anything about it. You must forgive me, if I give you a bit
of advice; you’re young, your blood is still hot, you long to speak out,
that’s the trouble, don’t forget that you know nothing about it, that’s
the only safe line.’
I looked at him in surprise, his face expressed nothing evil; he guessed
what I felt and with a smile said, ‘I was a Moscow student myself twelve
years ago.’
A clerk of some sort came in; the stout man addressed him and, after
giving him his orders, went out with a friendly nod to me, putting his
finger on his lips. I never met the gentleman afterwards and I do not
know who he was, but I found out the value of his advice.
Then a police-master came in, not Miller, but another called Tsinsky,
and summoned me to the committee. In a large rather handsome room, five
men were sitting at a table, all in military uniform, with the exception
of one decrepit old man. They were smoking cigars and gaily talking
together, lolling in easy chairs, with their uniforms unbuttoned. The
chief police-master was presiding.
When I went in, he turned to a figure sitting meekly in a corner, and
said, ‘If you please, father.’ Only then I noticed that there was
sitting in a corner an old priest with a grey beard and a reddish-blue
face. The priest was half-asleep and yawning with his hand over his
mouth; his mind was far away and he was longing to get home. In a
drawling, somewhat chanting voice he began exhorting me, talking of the
sin of concealing the truth before the persons appointed by the Tsar,
and of the uselessness of such duplicity considering the all-hearing ear
of God; he did not even forget to refer to the everlasting texts, to the
effect that all power is from God and that we must render to Cæsar the
things that are Cæsar’s. In conclusion, he said that I must put my lips
to the Gospel and the Holy Cross in confirmation of the oath (which,
however, I had not given, and he did not insist on my taking) to reveal
the whole truth sincerely and openly.
When he had finished he began hurriedly wrapping up the Gospel and the
Cross. Tsinsky, barely rising from his seat, told him that he could go.
After this he turned to me and translated the spiritual advice into
secular language: ‘I will only add one thing to the priest’s words—it’s
useless for you to deny the truth, even if you wish to do so.’ He
pointed to the heaps of papers, letters, and portraits which were
intentionally scattered about the table. ‘Only an open confession can
mitigate your lot; to be at liberty or in Bobruisk in the Caucasus
depends on yourself.’
The questions were put to me in writing: the naïveté of some of them was
amazing: ‘Do you know of the existence of any secret society? Do you
belong to any secret society, literary or otherwise? Who are its
members? Where do they meet?’
To all these it was extremely easy to answer by the single word: ‘No.’
‘I see you know nothing,’ said Tsinsky after looking through the
answers. ‘I have warned you, you are making your position more
difficult.’
With that the first examination ended.
... Eight years later, in a different part of the very house in which
this took place, there was living the sister of the new chief
police-master, a woman who had once been very handsome, and whose
daughter was a beauty.
I used to visit there; and every time I passed through the room in which
Tsinsky and Co. had tried and examined us; then and afterwards, there
hung in it the portrait of Paul, whether as a reminder of the depths of
degradation to which a man may be brought by unbridled passion and the
misuse of power, or as an incitement of the police to every sort of
brutality, I do not know, but there he was, cane in hand, snub-nosed and
scowling. I stopped every time before that portrait, in old days as a
prisoner, later on as a visitor. The little drawing-room close by, full
of the fragrance of beauty and femininity, seemed somehow out of place
in this stern house of strict discipline and police examinations; I felt
unable to be myself there, and somehow regretful that the blossom that
was unfolding so beautifully should flower against the gloomy brick wall
of a police office. The things that we said and that were said by the
little circle of friends that gathered round them sounded so ironical,
so surprising to the ear, within those walls accustomed to hear
interrogations, secret information, and reports of wholesale police
raids, within those walls which alone separated us from the whisper of
policemen, the sighs of prisoners, the clank of gendarmes’ spurs and
Cossacks’ sabres....
A week or two later, the little pock-marked policeman came and took me
to Tsinsky again. In the vestibule several men in fetters, surrounded by
soldiers with guns, were sitting or lying down; in the lobby also there
were several men of different classes, unchained but strictly guarded.
The little policeman told me that they were all incendiaries. Tsinsky
was out at the fire and we had to await his return; we had arrived
between nine and ten in the evening; no one had asked for me by one
o’clock in the night, and I was still sitting very quietly in the lobby
with the incendiaries. First one and then another of them was sent for,
the police ran backwards and forwards, chains clanked, and the soldiers
were so bored that they rattled their guns and did drill exercises.
About one o’clock Tsinsky arrived, sooty and grimy, and hurried straight
to his study without stopping. Half an hour passed, my policeman was
sent for; he came back looking pale and upset, with his face twitching
convulsively. Tsinsky poked his head out of the door after him and said:
‘The whole committee has been waiting for you all the evening, Monsieur
Herzen; this blockhead brought you here when you were wanted at Prince
Golitsyn’s. I am very sorry you have had to wait here so long, but it is
not my fault. What is one to do with such men? I believe he has been
fifty years in the service and he is still an idiot. Come, be off home
now,’ he added, changing to a much ruder tone as he addressed the
policeman.
The little man repeated all the way home: ‘O Lord, what a misfortune! a
man has no thought, no notion what is happening to him, he will be the
death of me now, he would take no notice if you had not been kept
waiting there, but of course it is a disgrace to him. O Lord, how
unlucky!’
I forgave him my wine, particularly when he told me that he had not been
nearly so frightened when he had been almost drowned near Lisbon. This
last remark was so unexpected that I was overcome with senseless
laughter: ‘Dear me, how very strange! However did you get to Lisbon?’
The old man had been for over twenty-five years a naval officer. One
cannot but agree with the minister who assured Captain Kopeykin[123]
that: ‘It has never happened yet among us in Russia that a man who has
deserved well of his country should be left without recognition.’
Fate had saved him at Lisbon only to be abused by Tsinsky like a boy,
after forty years’ service.
He was scarcely to blame.
The committee of inquiry formed by the governor-general did not please
the Tsar; he appointed a new one presided over by Prince Sergey
Mihailovitch Golitsyn. The members of this committee were the Moscow
Commandant, Staal, the other Prince Golitsyn, the colonel of gendarmes,
Shubensky, and Oransky, the ex-auditor.
In the instructions from the chief police-master nothing was said about
the committee having been changed; it was very natural that the hero of
Lisbon should have taken me to Tsinsky.
There was great excitement at the police station also; three fires had
taken place that evening—and the committee had sent twice to inquire
what had become of me and whether I had escaped. Anything that Tsinsky
had left unsaid in his abuse the police station superintendent made up
now to the hero of Lisbon; which, indeed, was only to be expected, since
the superintendent was himself partly to blame, not having inquired
where I was to be sent. In a corner in the office, some one was lying on
the chairs, moaning; I looked, it was a young man of handsome
appearance, neatly dressed, he was spitting blood and moaning; the
police doctor advised his being taken to the hospital as early as
possible in the morning.
When the non-commissioned officer took me to my room, I extracted from
him the story of the wounded man. He was an ex-officer of the Guards, he
had an intrigue with some maid-servant and had been with her when a
lodge of the house caught fire. This was the time of the greatest panic
in regard to arson; indeed, not a day passed without my hearing the bell
ring the alarm three or four times; from my window I saw the glare of
two or three fires every night. To avoid compromising the girl, the
officer climbed over the fence as soon as the alarm was sounded, and hid
in the stable of the next house, waiting for an opportunity to get off.
A little girl who was in the yard saw him and told the first policeman
who galloped up that he was hidden in the stable; they rushed in with a
crowd of people and dragged the officer out in triumph. He was so badly
beaten that he died next morning.
The people who had been captured were sorted out; about half were
released, the others were detained on suspicion. The police-master,
Bryantchaninov, used to ride over every morning and cross-examine them
for three or four hours. Sometimes the victims were thrashed or beaten,
then their wailing, screams and entreaties, and the moaning of the women
reached me, together with the harsh voice of the police-master and the
monotonous reading of the clerk. It was awful, intolerable. At night I
dreamed of those sounds and woke in a frenzy at the thought that the
victims were lying on straw only a few paces from me, in chains, with
lacerated wounds on their backs, and in all probability quite innocent.
To know what the Russian prisons, the Russian law-courts and the Russian
police are like, one must be a peasant, a house-serf, a workman, or an
artisan.
Political prisoners, who for the most part belong to the nobility, are
kept in close custody and punished savagely, but their fate cannot be
compared with the fate of the poor. With them the police do not stand on
ceremony. To whom can the peasant or the workman go afterwards to
complain, where can he find justice?
So terrible is the disorder, the brutality, the arbitrariness and the
corruption of Russian justice and of the Russian police that a man of
the humbler class who falls into the hands of the law is more afraid of
the process of law itself than of any punishment. He looks forward with
impatience to the time when he will be sent to Siberia; his martyrdom
ends with the beginning of his punishment. And let us remember that
three-quarters of the people taken up by the police on suspicion are
released on trial, and that they have passed through the same agonies as
the guilty.
Peter III. abolished torture and the Secret Chamber.
Catherine II. abolished torture.
Alexander I. abolished it once more.
Answers given ‘under intimidation’ are not recognised by law. The
officer who tortures the accused man renders himself liable to severe
punishment.
And yet all over Russia, from the Behring Straits to Taurogen, men are
tortured; where it is dangerous to torture by flogging, they are
tortured by insufferable heat, thirst, and salted food. In Moscow the
police put an accused prisoner with bare feet on a metal floor in a
temperature of ten degrees of frost; he died in the hospital which was
under the supervision of Prince Meshtchersky, who told the story with
indignation. The government knows all this, the governors conceal it,
the Senate connives at it, the ministers say nothing, the Tsar, and the
synod, the landowners and the priests all agree with Selifan[124] that
‘there must be thrashing for the peasants are too fond of their ease,
order must be kept up.’
The committee appointed to investigate the cases of incendiarism was
investigating, that is, thrashing, for six months and had thrashed out
nothing in the end. The Tsar was incensed and ordered that the thing was
to be finished in three days. The thing was finished in three days.
Culprits were found and condemned to punishment by the knout, by
branding, and by exile to penal servitude. The porters from all the
houses gathered together to look at the terrible punishment of ‘the
incendiaries.’ By then it was winter and I was at that time in the
Krutitsky Barracks. The captain of gendarmes, a good-natured old man who
had been present at the punishment, told me the details. The first man
condemned to the knout told the crowd in a loud voice that he swore he
was innocent, that he did not know himself what he had answered under
torture, then taking off his shirt he turned his back to the crowd and
said: ‘Look, good Christians!’
A moan of horror ran through the crowd, his back was a dark-blue striped
wound, and on that wound he was to be beaten with the knout. The murmurs
and gloomy aspect of the crowd made the police hurry. The executioners
dealt the legal number of blows, while others did the branding and
others riveted fetters, and the business seemed to be finished. But this
scene impressed the inhabitants; in every circle in Moscow people were
talking about it. The governor-general reported upon it to the Tsar. The
Tsar ordered a new trial to be held, and the case of the incendiary who
had protested before the punishment to be particularly inquired into.
Several months afterwards, I read in the papers that the Tsar, wishing
to compensate two who had been punished by the knout, though innocent,
ordered them to be given two hundred roubles a lash, and to be provided
with a special passport testifying to their innocence in spite of the
branding. These two were the man who had spoken to the crowd and one of
his companions.
The story of the fires in Moscow in 1834, cases similar to which
occurred ten years later in various provinces, remains a mystery. That
the fires were caused by arson there is no doubt; fire, ‘the red cock,’
is in general a very national means of revenge among us. One is
continually hearing of the burning by peasants of their owners’ houses,
cornstacks, and granaries, but what was the cause of the incendiarism in
Moscow in 1834 no one knows, and, least of all, the members of the
committee of inquiry.
Before 22nd August, Coronation Day, some practical jokers dropped
letters in various places in which they informed the inhabitants that
they need not bother about an illumination, that there would be a fine
flare-up.
The cowardly Moscow authorities were in a great fluster. The police
station was filled with soldiers from early morning and a squadron of
Uhlans were stationed in the yard. In the evening patrols on horse and
on foot were incessantly moving about the streets. Artillery was kept in
readiness. Police-masters galloped up and down with Cossacks and
gendarmes. Prince Golitsyn himself rode about the town with his
aides-de-camp. The military appearance of modest Moscow was strange and
affected the nerves. Till late at night I lay in the window under my
watch tower and looked into the yard.... The Uhlans who had been hurried
to the place were sitting in groups, near their horses, some were
mounted on their horses. Officers were walking about; looking
disdainfully at the police, aides-de-camp with yellow collars arrived
continually, looking anxious and, after doing nothing, went away again.
There were no fires.
After this the Tsar himself came to Moscow. He was displeased with the
inquiry into our case which was only beginning, was displeased that we
were left in the hands of the ordinary police, was displeased that the
incendiaries had not been found—in fact, he was displeased with
everything and with every one.
We soon felt the presence of the Most High.