Transcriber’s Note:
This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects.
Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_.
The position of illustrations have been adjusted slightly to avoid
falling in mid-paragraph.
Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text regarding the
few textual issues encountered during its preparation.
The History and
Romance of
Crime
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
TO THE PRESENT DAY
[Illustration]
THE GROLIER SOCIETY
LONDON
[Illustration:
_Young Girl Revolutionist Condemned to the Scaffold_
]
So severe was the Russian government in the measures adopted to repress
the revolutionists that mere school-girls were exiled, imprisoned or
executed. Many well-born girls made it their chief aim to help the
peasants, enduring the privations and hardships of the labouring
classes. Madame Vera Phillipova, a young woman of great beauty, was long
the most popular person in the revolutionary movement. She became
identified with the conspiracy of “the Fourteen,” and was thrown into
the Schlüsselburg for the term of her natural life.
~Russian Prisons~
ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL
THE SCHLÜSSELBURG
THE OSTROG AT OMSK
THE STORY OF SIBERIAN EXILE
TIUMEN, TOMSK, SAGHALIEN
_by_
MAJOR ARTHUR GRIFFITHS
_Late Inspector of Prisons in Great Britain_
_Author of
“The Mysteries of Police and Crime,”
“Fifty Years of Public Service,” etc._
[Illustration]
THE GROLIER SOCIETY
------------------
EDITION NATIONALE
Limited to one thousand registered and numbered sets.
NUMBER 307.
------------------
INTRODUCTION
The huge empire founded by the Czars of Russia in the latter half of the
sixteenth century was based upon absolute autocracy. The Czar by virtue
of his divine origin exercised absolute authority over the many diverse
elements consolidated under his sovereign will. From the earliest times
no idea of personal liberty was tolerated; the slightest expression of
independence in thought and action was peremptorily forbidden. The
attitude of the government has ever been uncompromisingly severe toward
all malcontents, and Russian history for the last two centuries is one
long record of conspiracy constantly afoot, and constantly repressed by
savagely cruel coercion. Imprisonment, the absolute loss of physical
freedom, has taken a wider meaning in Russia than in other countries,
for it is the lot in one form or another of two classes of offenders:
the ordinary criminal under a civil code, from which capital punishment
is now excluded, and the political dissidents deemed criminal by the
arbitrary government of the land and deserving of exemplary and
vindictive punishment. Russian prisons are in some respects the worst
and most horrible the world has seen, and they are more especially
reprehensible in these latter days when humane considerations are
allowed weight in the administration of penal institutions.
In giving a description of Russian prisons as they have been and to some
extent still remain, it is fair to state that the facts are
authenticated by unimpeachable evidence. We have the statements of
eye-witnesses speaking from their own knowledge, and these unsparing
critics have not always been foreigners and outsiders; Russians
themselves have also raised their indignant voices in energetic protest,
and official reports can be quoted to substantiate many of the charges.
On the other hand, Russian methods have found champions and apologists
among travellers, who were, perhaps, superficial observers, easily
misled, and their accounts cannot in the least upset the conclusions
arrived at by more thoroughgoing and disinterested investigators. Such
men as George Kennan, indefatigable, honest, courageous and of the
highest veracity, have framed an indictment from which there is no
appeal. The facts have been vouched for, moreover, by the trustworthy
narratives of those who have themselves been personal victims of the
worst horrors inflicted, and buttressed by confidential reports from
great Russian functionaries sent direct to the Czar. Secret despatches
which have fallen into hands for which they were not intended, and have
been made public by the searchers for truth, frankly admit the justice
of the sentence passed upon at least one frightful portion of Russian
penal institutions,—the system of exile to Eastern Siberia.
Governor-General Anuchin twice addressed the Czar Alexander III, in 1880
and 1882, after long tours of personal inspection, in such condemnatory
terms that the mighty ruler upon whom the terrible burden of
responsibility rested, was moved to endorse the report in his own
handwriting with the words, “It is inexcusable, even criminal, to allow
such a state of affairs in Siberia to continue.” The frightful system
which allowed an irresponsible bureaucracy to sentence untried persons
to exile by so-called “administrative process” is fully explained and
described in the present volume.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION 5
I. GENERAL SURVEY 13
II. TWO FAMOUS FORTRESSES 36
III. THE EXILE SYSTEM 68
IV. THE OSTROG AT OMSK 99
V. LIFE IN THE OSTROG 128
VI. TIUMEN AND TOMSK 160
VII. VAGABONDAGE AND UNIONS 185
VIII. TREATMENT OF POLITICALS 211
IX. CHANGES IN SYSTEM 247
X. SAGHALIEN 269
List of Illustrations
YOUNG GIRL REVOLUTIONIST _Frontispiece_
FORTRESS OF PETER AND PAUL _Page_ 38
RUSSIAN PRISONERS ” 229
RUSSIAN PRISONS
CHAPTER I
GENERAL SURVEY
Commencement of judicial reform in Russia—Abandonment of knout and
branding iron—The plet—Two classes of prisons, the “lock-up” and the
“central” or convict prisons—Experiences of a woman exiled from
Russia—Testimony of Carl Joubert—The state of the central prisons—The
“model” prison in St. Petersburg—Punishments inflicted—The food in
different prisons—Attempted escapes—Myshkin—His early history and
daring exploits—Failure of his plan to rescue Chernyshevski from
Siberia—His escape, recapture, and sentence of death—The prisoner
Medvediev.
A definite movement toward judicial reform began in Russia in the early
sixties. The old law courts with their archaic procedure and evil repute
as sinks of bribery and corruption were abolished. Trial by jury was
revived, and justices of the peace were established to dispose of the
smaller criminal offences. Shortly afterward, two of the most
disgraceful features in the Russian penal code, the knout and the
branding iron, disappeared. The punishment of splitting the nostrils to
mark ineffaceably the prisoners exiled to the salt mines of Okhotsk also
ceased, and the simple Chinese no longer were surprised with the sight
of a hitherto unknown race of men with peculiar features of their own.
The knout, however, had long served its devilish purpose. It was
inflicted even upon women in the time of Peter the Great, and was still
remembered as an instrument which would surely kill at the thirtieth
stroke, although in the hands of a skilful performer a single blow might
prove fatal.
Flogging did not go entirely out of practice and might still be ordered
by peasant courts, in the army and in the convict prisons. But another
brutal whip survived; the plet is still used in the far-off penal
settlements, although rarely, and only upon the most hardened offenders.
It is composed of a thong of twisted hide about two feet in length,
ending in a number of thin lashes, each a foot long, with small leaden
balls attached, and forms a most severe and murderous weapon. The number
of strokes inflicted may vary from twenty-three to fifty and at
Saghalien in some cases reaches ninety-nine. If the victim has money or
friends, the flogger is bribed to lay on heavily; for when the blow is
so light as to fail to draw blood, the pain is greater. By beginning
gently the flagellator can gradually increase the force of each blow
until the whole back is covered with long swollen transverse welts which
not uncommonly mortify, causing death.
At one time trial by court-martial could sentence a soldier to the
frightful ordeal of the “rods,” flogging administered by comrades
standing in two ranks between which he moved at a deliberate pace while
they “laid on” the strokes with sticks upon his bare back. This is
exactly the same penalty as that of “running the gauntlet,” or
“gantlope,” well known in old-time military practice, and sometimes
called “Green Street” in Russia, for the rods used were not always
stripped of their leaves. The infliction might be greatly prolonged and
the number of strokes given sometimes amounted to several thousand.
Devilish ingenuity has now replaced the physical torture of knout and
plet by a modern device for inflicting bodily discomfort, nothing less
than riveting a wheelbarrow to a man’s legs, which he must take with him
everywhere, even to bed,—the apology for a bed on which he passed the
night.
Russian prisons are of several classes. There are first the “lock-ups,”
or places of detention for the accused awaiting trial, scattered
throughout the country, and quite unequal in the aggregate to the
accommodation of the number of prisoners on hand. It has been estimated
that to lodge all adequately, half as many more than the existing
prisons would be required. Those of another class, the houses of
correction, the hard labour or “central” prisons where compulsory labour
is exacted, are very much like the “public works” convict prisons in the
English system. Many of these are established in European Russia; more
are to be found in Western Siberia, and, on somewhat different lines, in
the penal settlements of Eastern Siberia.
In the provincial “lock-ups” or _ostrogs_ the conditions have always
been deplorable. They are horribly overcrowded with wretched, hopeless
beings for whom trial is often greatly delayed, and who lie there in
inconceivable discomfort at the mercy of brutal and extortionate
gaolers, “packed like herrings in a cask, in rooms of inconceivable
foulness, in an atmosphere that sickens even to insensibility any one
entering from the open air,” says one writer.
The same author gives the experiences of a lady who was expelled from
Russia for opening a school for peasants’ children, and who was
transferred to the Prussian frontier from prison to prison. “At Wilna,”
she says, “we were taken to the town prison, and detained for two hours
late at night in an open yard under a drenching rain. At last we were
pushed into a dark corridor and counted. Two soldiers laid hold of me
and insulted me shamefully. After many oaths and much foul language, the
fire was lighted and I found myself in a spacious room, in which it was
impossible to take a step in any direction without treading on the women
sleeping on the floor. Two women who occupied a bed took pity on me and
invited me to share it with them.... The next night we were turned out
from the prison and paraded in the yard for the start under a heavy
rain. I do not know how I happened to escape the fists of the gaolers,
as the prisoners did not understand the evolutions and performed them
under a storm of blows and curses; those who protested were put in irons
and sent so to the train, although the law prescribes that in the
cellular wagons no prisoner shall be chained.
“Arrived at Kovno, we spent the whole day in going from one police
station to another. In the evening we were taken to the prison for women
where the superintendent was railing against the head gaoler and
swearing that she would give him ‘bloody teeth.’ The prisoners told me
that she often kept promises of this sort. Here I spent a week among
murderesses and thieves and women arrested by mistake. Misfortune unites
the unfortunate, and everybody tried to make life more tolerable for the
rest; all were very kind to me and did their best to console me. On the
previous day I had eaten nothing, for prisoners receive no food on the
day they are brought to prison. I fainted from hunger, and the prisoners
brought me round by giving me some of their black bread; there was a
female inspector, but she did nothing but shout out shameless oaths such
as no drunken man would use.
“After a week’s halt at Kovno, I was sent on to the next town. After
three days’ march we came to Mariampol. My feet were wounded and my
stockings full of blood. The soldiers advised me to ask for a vehicle,
but I preferred physical suffering to the continued cursing and foul
language of the chiefs. I was taken before the commander, who remarked
that as I had walked for three days I could very well manage a fourth.
On arrival at Volkovisk, the last halt, we were lodged provisionally in
the prison, but the female side was in ruins and we were taken to the
men’s quarters, and had nowhere to sit but on the filthily dirty and
foul-smelling floor. Here I spent two days and nights, passing the whole
time at the window. In the night, the door was constantly thrown open
for new arrivals; they also brought in a male lunatic who was perfectly
naked. The miserable prisoners delighted in this, and tormented the
maniac into a paroxysm of passion, until at last he fell on the floor in
a fit and lay there foaming at the mouth. On the third day a soldier of
the depot, a Jew, took me into his room, a tiny cell, where I stayed
with his wife.
“The prisoners told me that many of them were detained by mistake for
seven or eight months, awaiting their papers before being sent across
the frontier. It is easy to imagine their condition after a seven
months’ stay in this sewer without a change of linen.... I had been six
weeks on the road and was still delayed, but I got leave to send a
registered letter to St. Petersburg, where I had influential friends,
and a telegram came to send me on to Prussia immediately. My papers were
soon found, and I was sent to Eydtkuhnen, where I was set at liberty.”
It is asserted by our author that this horrible picture was not one whit
overcharged. “To Russians every word rings true and every scene looks
normal. Oaths, filth, brutality, bribery, blows, hunger, are the
essentials of every _ostrog_ and of every depot from Kovno to
Kamtchatka, from Archangel to Erzerum.” It is summed up by Kropotkin as
follows: “The incredible duration of preliminary detention, the
disgusting circumstances of daily life; the congregation of hundreds of
prisoners into small dirty chambers; the flagrant immorality of a corps
of jailers who are practically omnipotent, whose whole function is to
terrorise and oppress; the want of labour and the total absence of all
that contributes to the moral welfare of man; the cynical contempt for
human dignity and the physical degradation of prisoners—these are the
elements of prison life in Russia.”
Another writer of more recent date, Carl Joubert, whose works on Russia
have been widely read, says, “I am aware that in no part of the world is
the lot of a prisoner a happy one. It is not intended that it should be;
but in civilised countries they are, at least, given the opportunity of
keeping themselves clean and decent. They are treated as human beings
and their health is considered; but in Russia it is different. The
prisoners in Russia, whether before or after the trial—and a great many
of the political prisoners have no trial—the Russian prisoners are
considered beasts, and treated accordingly. The warders know what is
expected of them; and if a warder shows any glimmering of humanity in
his treatment of the prisoners committed to his charge, his services are
dispensed with and a stronger-hearted warder takes his place.
“I said that Russian prisoners have no sex; but I must qualify that
statement. In so far as the normal treatment of the women is concerned,
they are separated from the men, but no other distinction is made. If
they are young and attractive, however, their sex can procure for them,
and worse still, for those who are dear to them, a certain amount of
consideration from those in authority over them on the road to Siberia.”
The penalties inflicted by the Russian code may be classed under four
heads. The first is hard labour with the loss of civil rights, so that
the convict’s property passes to his heirs; he is dead in law, and his
wife may marry another; he endures his term either after deportation to
Siberia, or in one of the “central prisons” which have been built on
purpose in European Russia, and where he spends a third or fourth of his
entire sentence, until he goes finally to Siberia or Saghalien as a
penal colonist. These central prisons were created to substitute a more
regular and more severe treatment than was possible at a distance from
home, and the aim was achieved. According to the best authorities, the
central prisons are practically “hells upon earth.” “The horrors of hard
labour in Siberia,” says Peter Kropotkin, “have paled before them, and
all those who have had experience of them are unanimous in declaring
that the day a prisoner starts for Siberia is the happiest in his life.”
A few specific details may be quoted about one or two of these prisons.
In that of Kharkov, in Little Russia, at one time two hundred of the
five hundred inmates died of scurvy in the course of four months. In the
Byelogorod prison, nearly half of a total of three hundred and thirty
prisoners died within a year, and forty-five more in the following six
months. At Kiev the scourge of typhus was endemic. In one month in the
year 1881 the deaths were counted by hundreds and the places of those
who died were promptly filled by others similarly doomed. All the rooms
occupied were very damp, the walls sweating with moisture, the floor
rotten in many places, the cesspools overflowing and the neighbouring
ground saturated. The epidemics were officially explained and the causes
acknowledged by the chief board of prisons. It was urged that although
the prison was dreadfully overcrowded, there was plenty of room
elsewhere.
The chief prison in St. Petersburg at one time was the Litovski Zamok,
and it was credited with being kept clean, but the buildings,
old-fashioned, dark and damp, were only fit to be levelled to the
ground. A newer prison is the House of Preliminary Detention which is
ambitiously designated as the “model,” and which was built on the plan
of modern prisons in Belgium and at an immense cost. Kropotkin
characterises it as the only clean gaol for ordinary prisoners in
Russia. Cleanliness in it amounts to a craze; the scrubbing brush is
never idle; broom and pail are used with demoniacal activity. Particles
of asphalt dust from the floor continually load the atmosphere and make
breathing difficult. The three upper stories are infected by the
exhalations from the lower, and the ventilation is so abominably bad
that at night when the doors are shut the interior of the cells is
suffocating. Endeavours to remedy this have ended in a recommendation to
rebuild the prison entirely as nothing less will serve. The cells are
large enough, ten feet in length by five feet wide, and it is yet
essential to keep the traps in the door constantly open to prevent
asphyxiation.
Strict individual separation was the rule established in this St.
Petersburg House of Detention, and it extended to both cells and
exercising yards. The space allotted to the latter was circular in shape
and was divided into segments by walls radiating from a common centre to
the circumference. Each inmate walked to and fro singly in his own
compartment, under the surveillance of an official standing on a raised
platform in the centre. Nothing was visible from within the partition
but the backs of the lofty prison buildings topped with a narrow strip
of sky.
The rule of cellular isolation was defeated, however, by the ancient
prison device of rapping on the walls according to a conventional
alphabet based upon a fixed number of blows for each letter. The letters
are arranged in certain groups as follows:—
a b c d e f
g h i k l m
n o p r s t
u v w x y z
Words are composed by knocking so many times on the wall for each
letter. First, the horizontal line on which the letter stands is counted
and its place numbered on the vertical line. Thus to frame the word
“you,” the first signal for “y” would be four knocks, indicating the
vertical line; then a pause and five taps to give the place on the
horizontal line. Three taps followed after a short pause by two taps
would form the letter “o,” and four short taps with one final tap after
a pause would fix the letter “u.” These sounds are not only
distinguishable in cells alongside each other but in those far distant
if the wall is the same. Communications by this means passed
continually, although the system was abhorrent to the authorities and
severe punishments were imposed upon all caught in the act.
Punishments were the only break in the monotony of this dull solitary
life, and they were varied and ingenious. A prisoner guilty of minor
offences, such as smoking or the secreting of a match or a morsel of
bread saved from a meal, might be condemned to kneel for a couple of
hours on the bare flags of a freezingly cold thoroughfare, or be cast
into a dark cell, originally intended for cases of ophthalmia, and kept
there for months, frequently until he became blind or mad or both.
Cruelty was of common occurrence in this House of Detention. It was here
that General Trepov ordered a prisoner Bogolubov to be flogged for not
removing his hat when he came into the great man’s presence, and
punished others who protested by confining them in cells near the
lavatory amidst all kinds of filth, and heated to a temperature of 110
degrees Fahrenheit.
The personal experiences of an officer who spent a long time in a prison
near St. Petersburg were afterward published in a liberal journal. “In
the evening,” he reports, “the governor went his rounds and usually
began his favourite occupation—flogging. A very narrow bench was brought
out and soon the place resounded with shrieks, while the governor smoked
a cigar and looked on, counting the lashes. The birch rods were of
exceptional size, and when not in use were kept immersed in water to
make them more pliant. After the tenth lash the shrieking ceased, and
nothing was heard but groans. Flogging was usually applied on groups of
five or ten men or more at one time, and when the execution was over a
great pool of blood remained to mark the spot. People in the street
without would cross themselves and pass to the other side. After every
such scene we had two or three days of comparative peace; for the
flogging had a soothing effect on the governor’s nerves.”
“On one occasion,” says the same writer, “we were visited by an
inspector of prisons. After casting a look down at us, he asked if our
food was good or if there was anything else of which we could complain.
Not only did the inmates declare that they were completely satisfied;
they even enumerated articles of diet which we had never so much as
smelled.” The food here and elsewhere was neither plentiful nor
palatable. “It consisted of a quarter of a pound of black bread for
breakfast; and a soup made of bull’s heart or liver, or of seven pounds
of meat, twenty pounds of waste oats, twenty pounds of sour cabbage and
plenty of water.” The daily sum allowed to cover cost was one penny,
three farthings, not a great deal when officials expected to embezzle a
substantial part.
Leo Deutsch, an important political prisoner, says that his daily ration
of black bread was two pounds, with a dinner at midday of two dishes,
not bad, but insufficient and always half cold, as the kitchen was far
away. This was in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. At the
“Butirki”—this was the popular name for the central prison of Moscow—the
food, he says, “was beneath criticism; even the most robust at their
hungriest could scarcely swallow a spoonful of the repulsive malodorous
broth in wooden bowls brought to our cells at midday. This is explained
by the fact that the sum originally provided by government for our
maintenance was extremely small; and on its way through to us a great
part of it found its way into the bottomless pockets of officials great
and small, among whom there is an organised system of general
peculation. The big cauldrons used for cooking the food of several
thousand prisoners were filled up with the worst materials that were
procurable.”
George Kennan in his “Siberia” tells us he tasted the soup in the
kitchen of the Tiumen, or forwarding prison, and “found it nutritious
and good.” The bread was rather sour and heavy, but not worse than that
prepared and eaten by Russian peasants generally. The daily ration of
the prisoners consisted of two and a half pounds of this black bread,
about six ounces of boiled meat, and two or three ounces of coarsely
ground barley or oats with a bowl of _kvas_ morning and evening for
drink.
Carl Joubert says, “I inspected the rations in the prison at Tomsk. The
soup stank with the odour of a soap factory. I asked for a piece of
bread from a warder, and when I had examined it I called for a bowl of
warm water. I put the bread to soak in the water, and in a couple of
minutes I handed the wooden bowl to Dr. Anatovich, and asked him to look
at it. ‘Why should I examine it?’ he asked. But a moment later I heard
him exclaim: ‘My God! My God!’ The surface of the water was covered with
worms.” The soup at the infamous prison fortress of the Schlüsselburg
often contained cockroaches floating on the surface, and the director
thus explained their presence to a complainant: Whenever the copper lid
is lifted, the steam rises to the ceiling and dislodges the cockroaches
which fall into the soup.
Various attempts have been made to bring the Russian prisons into line
with the more modern development of penal principles, but they have
never been carried out consistently nor resulted in marked reforms. A
good deal of money has been spent in constructing new buildings on the
most approved plans, and the favourite theory in vogue, that of cellular
confinement, has been adopted to a limited extent. Such enormous numbers
have to be dealt with, and over such a wide area, that no comprehensive
uniform system could possibly be introduced to meet even a fraction of
the demand. But a certain number of cellular prisons were provided,
seemingly with the idea of intensifying the pains and penalties of
imprisonment.
The prison at Kharkov was one of the worst of its class; the cells were
dark and damp, and the régime of solitary confinement was unduly
prolonged. The most terrible sufferings were endured by the political
prisoners who were chiefly lodged in them, until special prisons were
appropriated for them, such as those of St. Peter and St. Paul and the
Schlüsselburg. At Kharkov a “hunger strike” was organised, the fixed
resolve to abstain altogether from food—a form of protest common enough
in Russian prisons until a remedy was applied to their grievances.
Concessions were then made to the extent of permitting exercise in the
open air, removing fetters from the limbs of the sick in hospital and
giving daily employment, but not before disastrous results had shown
themselves. Six of the political prisoners went out of their minds and
several died.
During the time that the Kharkov prison was used for this class of
offenders, it was the scene of some startling events. Several escapes
and attempts at rescue occurred. The case of Hypolyte Myshkin, a
determined and most courageous man, was remarkable and deserving of more
success. Myshkin was lodged at Kharkov in a small cell on the lower
story, which had once been occupied by Prince Tsitianov, a distinguished
revolutionist. He concentrated all his energies upon contriving escape,
and within the first year had manufactured a dummy figure to lie on the
guard-bed in his place, and proceeded to excavate a tunnel beneath the
prison wall. He had no implements except his hands and a small piece of
board, but he dug deep and far, disposing of the earth by packing it
into a space between the floor of his cell and the ground. He had also
made a suit of clothes to substitute for the prison uniform when at
large. The material used for this purpose was obtained from a number of
old maps, given to the former occupant of the cell and which had been
left lying on the stove. Myshkin soaked the paper off the muslin on
which it was mounted, and made a shirt and a pair of trousers. He was
actually on the point of departure, when, unfortunately, a gaoler
visited his cell at an unusual hour. He was down in his tunnel, and the
dummy betrayed him. The alarm was raised, the other end of the tunnel
was entered, and the fugitive was caught in a trap. He was transferred
to another cell from which there was no prospect of escape.
Myshkin, hopeless and reckless, now sought freedom in death. Resolving
to commit an offence which would entail capital punishment, he obtained
leave to attend divine service at the prison church, and managed to get
close to the governor, whom he struck in the face when in the act of
kissing the cross in the hands of the officiating priest. Under ordinary
conditions, trial and condemnation to death would follow, but just at
this time the distressing state of affairs at Kharkov had caused so much
uneasiness that the Minister of the Interior had sent a sanitary expert
to report upon the conditions which had produced so much lunacy and so
many deaths. Professor Dobroslavin pronounced the place unfit for human
habitation, and urged the immediate removal of all political convicts.
It was no doubt supposed that Myshkin was of unsound mind when he struck
the governor, and he was not even tried for the offence, but shortly
afterward was despatched to the far-off silver mines of Kara.
Myshkin’s antecedents and his ultimate fate are of interest. He was a
young student at the Technological Institute of St. Petersburg in 1870,
when, fired by the ardent spirit of the new revolutionists, he conceived
a bold project to effect the escape of the well-known author and
political writer, Chernyshevski, at that time in Siberian exile. After
spending some time in the old Alexandrovski central prison near Irkutsk,
the prisoner was presently interned under police surveillance in
Villuisk, a small village in the subarctic province of Yakutsk. Myshkin
planned to travel across Asia disguised as a captain of gendarmerie,
present a forged order to the head of the police at Villuisk, desiring
him to hand over Chernyshevski to the sham captain, who was to escort
him to another place on the Amur river. Myshkin got safely to Irkutsk,
where he was employed in the office of the gendarmerie and became
greatly trusted. He had the freedom of the office and cleverly
abstracted the necessary blank forms, forged the signatures, affixed the
seals, got his uniform, and, thus provided with all proper credentials,
appeared before the _ispravnik_, or local chief of police, at Villuisk,
who received him with all deference and respect. Myshkin was a man of
fine presence, eloquent and well spoken, and when he produced his order
he was within an ace of success.
But there was a weak point in the plot. It was quite unusual for
officers of rank to travel without escort, and Myshkin had not had
sufficient funds to take with him confederates disguised as soldiers or
gensdarmes. The _ispravnik_ grew suspicious, the more so as the exile
Chernyshevski was an important political offender, and he hesitated to
surrender him without seeing his way more clearly. He told Myshkin that
he must have the authority of the governor to set his exile free.
Myshkin, unabashed, offered to go in person to seek the governor’s
consent, and he set off for Yakutsk, attended by a complimentary escort
of Cossacks. The _ispravnik_ astutely sent another Cossack to pass them
on the road with a letter of advice for the governor. The messenger
caught up with the first party and made no secret of his mission.
The game was up, and Myshkin, in despair, made a bolt for the woods. The
Cossacks promptly gave chase, but Myshkin drew his revolver, beat off
his pursuers and succeeded in getting away. He wandered through the
forests for a week, and was at last captured, half dead from cold and
privation. He was lodged first in the prison of Irkutsk and then brought
to St. Petersburg, where he was thrown into the fortress of St. Peter
and St. Paul, and he lay there for three years in a solitary cell
awaiting trial. He was kept in the Trubetzkoi Bastion, near a prisoner
whom Mr. Kennan afterward met in Siberia and who described his
neighbour’s sufferings feelingly. “Myshkin,” he said, “was often
delirious from fever, excitement or the maddening effect of long
solitary confinement, and I frequently heard his cries when he was put
into a strait-jacket or strapped to his bed by the fortress guard.”
Myshkin’s trial caused a great sensation. The government had refused to
allow the proceedings to be taken down in shorthand, and the prisoner
declined to make any defence; he made a fiery speech, however,
denouncing the secrecy of the trial and declaring that the public ought
to hear the whole case through the press. He was ordered out of court,
and being removed by force, his last words, half stifled, were: “This
court is worse than a house of ill-fame; there they sell only bodies,
but here you prostitute honour, justice and law.” This insult aggravated
the original offence, and the court increased his sentence to ten years’
penal servitude with forfeiture of all civil rights.
Myshkin was a born orator, but by his own admission he lived to regret
his eloquence. When on his long journey to Eastern Siberia, one of his
comrades died at Irkutsk, and he was moved to make a brief oration at
the funeral. He spoke out in church, eulogising the high moral character
of the deceased, and declaring that “out of the ashes of this heroic man
and others like him will grow the tree of liberty for Russia.” Here the
police interfered; Myshkin was dragged out of church and sentenced later
to an additional fifteen years’ penal servitude. So it was said of him
that he never made but two speeches in his life, one of which cost him
ten and the other fifteen years of imprisonment. Myshkin regretted the
second speech, which, he said, would do no good, as the world could not
hear; it was the mere gratification of a personal impulse, and it added
so many years to his detention, that, even if he lived to emerge from
exile, he would be too aged to work effectively in the cause of Russian
freedom.
Myshkin afterward escaped from Kara, when a more rigorous régime had
been introduced by Count Loris Melikov, and permission to work in the
open air had been withdrawn. One prisoner, Semyonovski, driven to
desperation, committed suicide, and several condemned to long terms made
up their minds to break prison. Myshkin and a comrade were the first to
go; a second and a third pair followed; a fourth couple were caught in
the act, and the authorities, spurred on to extreme activity by the
presence at Kara of the head of the prison department, recaptured six of
the fugitives. Myshkin succeeded in reaching Vladivostok, and was on the
point of embarking on board a foreign ship when he was recognised and
retaken.
Myshkin and thirteen others who were deemed dangerous were sent back to
St. Petersburg in 1883, where they were lodged at first in the fortress
of St. Peter and St. Paul and then in the “stone bags” of the fortress
of Schlüsselburg. The dread of insanity from a new term of solitary
confinement drove Myshkin to repeat the same tactics as at Kharkov. He
struck one of the officers, and found more prompt retaliation this time,
for he was tried by court-martial and shot.
Another striking incident occurred at the Kharkov prison. Two prisoners
on their way there were nearly rescued by an attack on the prison van.
One of the guards was shot, and the release would have been effected had
not the horses taken fright and stampeded, which led to their recapture.
The attack was made by a number of mounted men, armed, and one of these,
Alexei Medvediev, also called Fomin, was afterward caught in Kharkov
station. He was committed to the gaol, but managed to escape with a
party of ordinary criminals by burrowing under a wall. They did not get
farther than a wood near-by when they were recaptured. Medvediev’s
friends arranged a plan to set him free again. Two of them, disguised as
gensdarmes, brought a forged order to the prison gate calling for the
prisoner, who was to be escorted, they said, to the gendarmerie office
for examination. The false gensdarmes were detected and taken into
custody, sent for trial and condemned to death. The sentence was
afterward commuted to penal servitude for life, and they were sent to
Kara. Medvediev was treated after the same fashion, but he was detained
in various prisons of Western Siberia, closely guarded, and was at last
returned to the Alexis Ravelin in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul
for five or six years. He is described by a comrade—Leo Deutsch—as “a
man of consummate bravery who literally despised danger, and was always
ready to embark on the most terrible adventure. He had been a postilion
and had received only a scanty education at an elementary school, but by
his own exertions he had gained a respectable amount of knowledge.... At
Kara he became an adept in various handicrafts; he was an excellent
tailor, shoemaker, engraver and sculptor, and afterward, when he was
living as a free exile, he became a watchmaker and goldsmith.
Unfortunately, soon after he left the prison he fell a victim to
alcoholism, to which he had an inherited predisposition; all attempts at
reclaiming him were vain, and in a few years he was beyond hope.”