TREATMENT OF POLITICALS
Withdrawal of privileges accorded to politicals—Lunatics confined in
association with other prisoners—Suicides—Many escapes attempted—Fresh
deprivations—The politicals separated and confined in common prisons
of the Kara district—Subjected to “dungeon conditions”—Much
disease—Finally transferred to the state prison—Hunger strike which
lasted thirteen days—Some remarkable female revolutionists—A hunger
strike instituted by the women—Attempts to pacify them—The resignation
of the governor Masyukov demanded—Madame Sigida strikes Masyukov in
the face—Subjected to flogging and dies—Three of her companions commit
suicide—Thirteen of the men determine to put an end to their
lives—Governors, good and bad—Deutsch’s account of Nikolin’s
régime—The atrocities committed by the governor Patrin at Saghalien.
The changed attitude of the government toward the state prisoners at
Kara dated, as we have said, from the end of the year 1880, under the
initiative of Loris Melikov, and this action, so inconsistent with his
supposed views as a liberal minister, has never been explained. Kennan
suggests that it was caused by bad advice, carelessly adopted. But, as
Leo Deutsch tells us, the harsh régime was introduced at a time when the
revolutionary agitation had revived in great strength, and the dominant
bureaucracy was more than ever on the defensive, ready to wreak its
revengeful feelings upon the captives it held in durance. In any case,
the orders issued evidenced a retrograde policy and a revival of the old
methods of repression with new punishments superadded. All existing
privileges, even the most trivial, were withdrawn. A peremptory stop was
put to all correspondence with relatives and friends; work in the open
air for ordinary criminal convicts was forbidden; and all the politicals
who had finished their sentences of imprisonment and were living in the
“free command” were again immured, with the old inflictions of leg irons
and half shaved heads. At three days’ notice they were sent back to
prison, many of them leaving their wives and children alone and
unprotected in a vicious and disorderly penal settlement.
When they reëntered they were herded with the rest in the new political
prison at or near the Kara Lower Diggings, a building somewhat better
than those for common criminals, being larger, more spacious and better
lighted, with four _kameras_, each warmed with a brick oven and provided
with the conventional _nary_ or sleeping platforms. At first the windows
looked out upon the valley, an open if not very picturesque prospect.
This was the case in other prisons for all criminal convicts, but it did
not please Governor-General Anuchin, who ordered the whole place to be
shut in by a high stockade. “A prison is not a palace,” he cynically
declared, as he condemned his fellow creatures to be deprived of all
view and restricted in the matter of light. Anuchin, in his report to
the Czar, dated two years later, admits that the life of state criminals
was “unbearable,” but quite forgot how far he himself contributed to
their sufferings.
Under the brutal system in force, insane companions, often raging
lunatics, were confined with the rest. There were no asylums in Siberia,
and the insane lived in association with the sane, adding much to the
miseries of both. “In more than one place in the Trans-Baikal we were
startled,” says Kennan, “as we entered a crowded prison _kamera_, by
some uncared-for lunatic, who sprang suddenly toward us with a wild cry
or with a burst of hysterical laughter.... 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.”
Several painful episodes soon followed the recommittal of the “free
command” to prison. One was the suicide of Eugene Semyanovski, a young
journalist connected with the underground journal _Onward_, who had
gained his conditional freedom and lost it. He left a letter to his
father bemoaning his hard fate, written the night before his reëntry to
prison, and shot himself in his bed. Another political hanged himself in
the prison bath-house, and a third poisoned himself by drinking water in
which he had soaked lucifer matches. Another most affecting incident was
the mental failure of Madame Kovalevskaya, a brilliant woman, who had
been actively concerned in the revolutionary propaganda as the only
means of securing free institutions in the empire. She was sentenced to
penal servitude at Kara, where she presently joined the “free command.”
Her husband was also exiled, but was sent to Minusinsk in Eastern
Siberia, so that no less than a thousand miles intervened between the
pair. Their only child had been left behind at Kiev in Russia. Madame
Kovalevskaya’s insanity declared itself after she went back to Kara
prison and while Colonel Kanonovich was still in command, and she was
then allowed to join her husband, but after partial recovery she was
returned to Kara. Eventually, after the cowardly oppression of her
comrades, she committed suicide.
Another consequence of the increased severity in the treatment of
politicals was their widespread determination to break prison. Many
escapes were attempted, and although they were for the most part
frustrated, the feeling of unrest was so general that the authorities
resolved to use more severe methods of coercion. A high official stated
that they meant “to reduce the prison to order and give the politicals a
lesson.” Daily life was made more and more irksome; privileges, great
and small, were withdrawn; all books were removed; money, underclothing,
beds and bedding were taken from them; they might possess nothing more
than the bare necessaries allowed to ordinary convicts. But worse than
all, the whole number, kept hitherto in one prison, was broken up into
small parties and distributed among the various common prisons of the
Kara district, where they were to be treated under “dungeon conditions.”
This treatment meant more than the deprivation of small luxuries as
above mentioned; it also entailed the loss of all exercise in the open
air or communication with the outside, and a diet of only black rye
bread and water, with sometimes a little broth thickened with barley.
The removal was made forcibly. Cossacks were concentrated at the Lower
Diggings in anticipation of resistance, or perhaps to provoke it, and
suddenly a descent was made upon the prison in the dead of night. A
strong, armed force marched into the prison with bayonets fixed, and
seized the poor politicals as they were roused from sleep. They were
stripped, searched, driven forth with blows and otherwise cruelly
maltreated. The next morning, having been robbed and despoiled of all
their private possessions, they were marched off under escorts to the
other Kara prisons. They marched continuously for ten miles without food
or drink, or a halt for rest, and one man who was chained to a
wheelbarrow rolled it all the way. Goaded to desperation, those
prisoners who were not ironed attacked the Cossacks with stones, but
they were speedily overpowered. They arrived in a state of utter
exhaustion at the common prisons, and were lodged two and two in
“secret” cells, hitherto employed only for the safe custody of the worst
criminals, which were bare rooms with no more furniture than the open
_parasha_, or bucket, and with only the stone floor to sleep on.
These essentially “dungeon conditions” spent in the secret cells of the
ordinary criminals were continued for two months, and at length the
health of the politicals became grievously impaired. Foul air,
insufficient food, close confinement and the lack of all exercise
brought on an epidemic of scurvy, which resulted in serious illnesses in
many cases. They were still without underclothing, bedding or nourishing
food, although the authorities held prisoners’ moneys out of which the
cost might have been defrayed. All the politicals were then transferred
to the Lower Diggings, and lodged in the new cells of the state prison.
Seven or eight prisoners were crowded into a narrow space obtained by
dividing each _kamera_ into three parts by the creation of partitions.
The sleeping platform nearly filled each interior and left little
standing room, and the pollution of the air was “simply maddening.”
Protest and remonstrance were continuous, and only ceased when threats
of flogging were made, a form of punishment never yet inflicted on
politicals.
At length the unhappy victims of such savage repression had recourse to
a “hunger strike,” the last terrible weapon of the otherwise helpless
prisoners. It is a strange and almost incomprehensible fact that the
Russian prison authorities have always yielded to the pressure exercised
by a number of prisoners resolutely determined to starve themselves to
death. Our deepest sympathy must be accorded to the great courage that
inspires this last appeal against intolerable cruelties. We admire and
understand it, but are amazed that it should be so effectual with the
brutal and otherwise insensible oppressors. When the much wronged
politicals delivered their ultimatum, the authorities at first received
it with indifference, but soon became anxious and at length despairing,
as the refusal to take food was steadfastly persisted in. Not a morsel
of sustenance was taken. “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 heard in the
building were the footsteps of the sentries, and now and then the
incoherent mutterings of the insane.”
Overtures were made and amelioration in their condition was promised;
fears of flogging were ridiculous, the officials said, and nothing of
the kind had been contemplated. But the strike continued, for the
strikers had no confidence in the plausible assurances of the governor.
On the tenth day of starvation, the state of affairs was desperate. The
indomitable sufferers had reached the last stage of physical exhaustion,
and release by death seemed close at hand. The struggle was anxiously
watched from St. Petersburg. Telegrams passed daily between the local
authorities and the minister of the interior, who could only suggest
medical intervention, which does not seem to have been tried beyond
feeling pulses and taking the bodily temperatures. The wives of the
strikers were finally granted the unusual privilege of an interview, on
condition that they would implore their husbands to take food. These
loving entreaties, backed by fresh promises from the commandant, finally
overcame the resolution of the politicals, and on the thirteenth day of
abstention the great hunger strike ended.
The physical endurance called forth by a hunger strike has been well
described by Leo Deutsch, who was driven to refuse food by his ill-usage
in the Odessa prison in the early stages of his sentence. His well-known
character for sturdy defiance had so disturbed the prison authorities
that they had taken extraordinary precautions to secure him, by lodging
him in a dark underground cell, with no bedding except straw infested
with rats, and no ventilation. He decided to starve himself in protest.
They threatened to feed him artificially; he retorted that he knew how
to bring on sickness. Then they listened to his very justifiable
protest, and on the fourth day he ended his strike. He says, “It was
only when I began to eat that I realised how fearfully hungry I was. I
could have devoured an ox.... During the two following days I felt very
seedy, as though I had had a bad illness.”
Hunger strikes were more especially the weapon of the weaker sex,
although there was no weakness among the women revolutionists, and the
movement owed much of its vigour and vitality to their indomitable
courage and unconquerable strength of character. In the days to come,
when the great, patient people of a cruelly oppressed and misgoverned
land have achieved its emancipation, ample justice must be done to the
feminine champions, who entered boldly into the fray and fought
strenuously for the vindication of the rights of their fellow countrymen
to freedom and independence. Many of their names will then be honoured
and revered with the greatest of those known to history. Russian women
of all stations, and some of them of the highest rank, have won the
admiration of the whole world, for their disregard of self, the
sacrifice of all ease and comfort, and the braving of the worst dangers
and the most poignant sufferings in their constant efforts to oppose
political slavery. We may be inclined to quarrel with their methods,
overlooking the greatness of their provocation, and believing that
nothing could justify the violent means adopted, but we cannot withhold
our sympathy for the ardent souls who have dared employ them.
Some of the most remarkable female revolutionists were concerned with
the hunger strikes in Eastern Siberia and were victims of the methods
inflicted in retaliation of outraged discipline. There were those who
emulated the crime of Vera Zassulich, who in 1878 tried, but failed, to
shoot General Trepov, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, for
ordering the corporal punishment of a political prisoner. Madame
Kutitonskaya fired at General Ilyashevich, the governor of the
Trans-Baikal, to avenge the intolerable ill-usage of the political
prisoners on the 11th of May, 1882. Madame Hope Sigida struck Colonel
Masyukov in the face, to shame him into withdrawing from Kara, where he
was commandant of the political prisons, and where his indignant female
charges had boycotted him, insisting upon his removal. Madame Elizabeth
Kovalskaya deliberately showed her contempt for the governor-general of
the Amur, Baron Korv, by refusing to rise in his presence, and was in
consequence removed to the central prison in Verkhni-Udinsk.
The lives and antecedents of some of these female exiles who suffered so
bitterly for their opinions, merit special notice. Maria Kutitonskaya
was a pupil in a girls’ school at Odessa and joined the revolutionists
while still a young girl. She was arrested with Lisogub, a wealthy man
who lived in extreme poverty in order to devote his fortune to the
revolutionary funds, and she was condemned to four years’ hard labour.
Madame Kutitonskaya was the uncompromising foe of the prison officials
and constantly resisted the irksome rules imposed. With three other
women, Mesdames Kovalevskaya, Bogomoletz and Elena Rossikova, she was
removed to Irkutsk and there got into contest with the chief of the
police, against whom they organised a hunger strike in which they
persisted for ten or eleven days, until the prison doctor grew alarmed
and representation was made to the governor of the district who brought
the police officer to reason.
Madame Kutitonskaya was a lady of great personal attractions, with fair
face and winning manner, and was greatly admired. After her attempt to
assassinate General Ilyashevich, she was closely confined on bread and
water in a damp, gloomy dungeon. The ordinary convicts brought her food,
fell at her feet and christened her “Cupidon Skaya,” as a pet name in
recognition of her beauty. The story of her murderous attack is told in
full by Kennan.
“Stirred to the very depths of her soul by a feeling of intense
indignation” at the shameful ill-treatment of the politicals at Kara,
she did not hesitate to sacrifice her life and that of her unborn child
by committing a deed that must give publicity to the wrongs she and her
companions had suffered. When interned in the town of Aksha in the
Trans-Baikal district, she purchased a small revolver from a released
criminal colonist, ran away from her place of banishment and made for
Chita, where the governor resided. She was too pretty to travel alone
without attracting attention and when she reached Chita she was
arrested. At the police station she did not deny her identity but
pleaded that she was eager to have an interview with the governor.
Accordingly, she was detained in the reception room while a message was
sent to Ilyashevich which brought the general to her. They had neglected
to search her, and she held her revolver ready cocked under a
handkerchief as the governor entered, shooting him forthwith through the
lungs. The wound was not mortal, and the assailant was promptly seized
and carried off to the Chita prison.
Her subsequent treatment was abominable. She was lodged in a “secret”
cell, cold, dark, dirty, too short to allow her to lie down at full
length, and too low to permit her to stand upright. Her own dress and
underclothing were taken from her, contrary to the usual treatment of
women politicals, and a ragged petticoat infested with vermin was given
her in exchange. Despite her condition, she was obliged to lie for three
months without bed-clothing on the bare floor. Serious illness seized
her, and she begged at least for a little straw to sleep on; it was
contemptuously denied her. But for the succour brought by her criminal
comrades, she could not have survived until her trial. This at last took
place before a court-martial, and she was sentenced to be hanged. Had
she made known her pregnancy, it might have gained her a reprieve, but
she forbore to speak, although she suffered bitterly at the prospect of
becoming the murderess of her unborn child. The feeling was intensified
by the dreadful thought that it might remain alive after she had died.
The question was solved by the unexpected leniency of the government, by
whom the death penalty was commuted to penal servitude for life at the
creditable intercession of her intended victim. She was then removed in
mid-winter to Irkutsk, and would have been entirely unprovided with warm
clothing but for the charity of her criminal comrades, who gave her felt
boots and a sheepskin overcoat. The immediate result of her treatment
was the birth of a still-born child, and she herself succumbed
eventually to lung trouble.
Madame Kovalevskaya is described by Deutsch, who knew her well, as one
of the most notable women in the revolutionary movement. She was the
daughter of a landed proprietor named Vorontsov, her brother was Basil
Vorontsov, a well known political economist, and she married
Kovalevskaya, a tutor in a gymnasium of Kiev. She had thrown in her lot
with the advanced party in the early sixties, and she devoted herself
constantly to the work. In appearance she was short in stature,
gipsy-like in appearance, alert and energetic in manner, keen witted,
ready and logical in speech. She took the lead in theoretical
discussions, imparting life and spirit into debate without becoming
personal or hurting people’s feelings. Her gifts were exceptional; she
was a brilliant creature born to play a distinguished part in society.
At an early age she had opened a peasant school and sought to improve
the mental condition of the poorer classes. Her efforts soon drew upon
her the attention of the police, and she was harried and thwarted by
them until they drove her into the ranks of the revolutionary party. The
circle in Kiev to which she belonged was broken up, its members were
arrested and she and her husband were exiled to Siberia. Her fiery and
uncompromising temper kept her in constant antagonism with the
authorities, and her active protest against the ill-treatment of her
comrade politicals brought her prominently to the front, with the fatal
consequences already described.
Of her three friends, one, Madame Kutitonskaya, has been mentioned; a
second was Sophia Bogomoletz, whose maiden name was Prisyetskaya, and
who was the daughter of a rich landowner of Poltava. She had graduated
at a medical school in St. Petersburg and, having married a doctor,
threw herself ardently into revolutionary work. She was arrested as a
member of the South Russian Workmen’s Union and was sent to ten years’
hard labour in Siberia with a companion, Madame Kovalskaya. They escaped
from the Irkutsk prison but were recaptured in a few weeks, before they
could leave the city. When brought back, the customary search was
personally supervised by Colonel Soliviov, an adjutant of the
governor-general and a man of vicious character, and by his order the
two women were stripped naked before him. After this disgrace to
humanity and the uniform he wore, he went immediately to one of the
men’s wards and boasted of the shameful deed, adding contemptuously,
“Your political women are not much to look at.” Whereupon one of those
present, Shchedrin, who had been a school-teacher before sentence,
struck the brute upon the mouth, calling him coward and liar. For this
violent protest Shchedrin was condemned to be chained perpetually to a
wheelbarrow as already described.
Madame Bogomoletz was punished with an additional five years’ penal
sentence, to be passed as a “probationer” prisoner, serving the full
term without the remission granted to others, and with no prospect of
the “time of alleviation” or that of conditional release. She was quite
indomitable, and looked upon all prison officials as her natural enemies
to whom she would make no compromise and yield no obedience. Nothing
deterred her, no fear of punishment, threats, or infliction of the most
irksome conditions, and the whole staff trembled before her.
Elena Rossikova had been sentenced to a life term for a daring robbery
from the finance department at Kherson. She was the wife of a country
gentleman who had been a school-teacher at Elizabetgrad, and with a
confederate she had succeeded in seizing a large sum of public money,
meaning to devote it to revolutionary purposes. Her accomplice was Anna
Alexieova, afterward Madame Dubrova, a convict and a professional
burglar who had escaped from Siberia. They had entered the government
treasury through a tunnel driven under the stone floor in the vault of a
house adjoining, a wild and desperate scheme for two young and
inexperienced girls. That they planned and dared effect it bears witness
to the determined character of the Russian women revolutionists. Kennan
says the thieves were caught before they could remove all the stolen
money, but, according to Leo Deutsch, they succeeded in their attempt.
The next day, however, a woman was intercepted as she drove a cart laden
with sacks through the town, and the sacks were found to be stuffed full
of ruble notes, to the number of a million. Arrest followed, including
that of the convict, who at once confessed her share in the transaction
and gave such information as led to the recovery of the greater part of
the stolen money.
Madame Rossikova, as the elder woman and originator of the plan, was
condemned by court-martial, before which she was arraigned, to hard
labour for a long term at the mines; Anna Alexieova was sentenced merely
to exile as a forced colonist and she married Dubrova, a missionary at
Krasnoyarsk. The two girls began as philanthropists, eager to benefit
and improve the peasant class, but developed under the persecution of
the authorities and their unjust, overbearing treatment into pronounced
revolutionists. Both were large-minded women, capable of the greatest
self-sacrifice and acting in accordance with a high moral standard.
Madame Rossikova had given proof of her sincerity by accepting the
ordeal known as “going to the people”; in other words, she lived for
seven or eight months like a common peasant woman, in a peasant village,
that she might see how best to reach and help the people. She had long
disapproved of terrorism, but became a pronounced terrorist herself,
moved to the fiercest indignation by the reports that reached her of the
sufferings of her exiled friends.
Perhaps one of the most celebrated of the female revolutionists was
Madame Vera Phillipova, born Figner, who never found her way to the
mines of Kara, where she would undoubtedly have become prominent among
the most active champions of her party. She was long the most popular
personage in the revolutionary movement; her name was in everybody’s
mouth, her fine traits, her unfailing and unlimited constancy, her
undefeated, self-sacrificing devotion to the cause, her talents for
organisation, her boundless inventive powers, her tireless energy,—all
won for her profound respect from her comrades; and even her enemies,
the members of the court-martial which condemned her, were forced to
admire her dignified demeanour when arraigned and tried for her life. A
mere girl, of striking beauty, and possessing extraordinary personal
influence, she freely spent herself in the service of her fellows. Like
many other well-born girls, her chief aim was to help the peasants, and
she devoted herself to the rough life in small villages on the Volga,
enduring all the hardships and privations of the labouring classes, and
her self sacrifice was greatly stimulated by what she saw of misery,
poverty and hopeless ignorance.
It was borne in on her that reform could only be effected by the most
reckless measures, and she became a terrorist heart and soul, vowed to
violence, and prepared to go to any extreme. In this temper, she readily
joined in the plot for the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II, on
his return from Livadia to St. Petersburg, and the dynamite for use in
the bombs was stored in her house. This did not absorb all her energies,
and she was still active in the organisation of secret societies and in
preaching revolutionary principles among people of good society, to
which she belonged by birth and education; for she was the daughter of a
distinguished general and was well received by the best people.
At Odessa she mixed much with the military set and thus became
identified with the conspiracy of “the Fourteen.” Nearly all of those
concerned were military or naval officers, five of whom, with Vera
Figner and Ludmilla Volkenstein, were condemned to death. She knew that
she and her companions had been betrayed, and she might have escaped by
timely flight into another country, but she scorned to yield, although
arrest was certain, and she held her ground, only to be convicted and
thrown into the Schlüsselburg, condemned to imprisonment for the term of
her natural life.
[Illustration:
_Russian Prisoners_
_After the painting by Marckl_
]
The Fortress of Schlüsselburg is situated on an island in Lake Ladoga,
about forty miles from St. Petersburg. The worst of all fates meted out
to political prisoners in Russia is imprisonment in the subterranean
dungeons of this fortress. No news penetrates the walls of the isolated
prison and no information from within leaks out. Few ever leave the
prison alive except to be transferred to an insane asylum.
While in the Schlüsselburg, Vera Figner studied Italian and English, and
translated many of Kipling’s works into Russian. After she had spent
altogether twenty years in prison, she committed the offence of striking
an officer. Her mother, who had promised not to intercede for her, could
no longer keep silent; and appealed to the Czar, with the result that
the life sentence passed upon the famous revolutionist was reduced to
one of twenty years. Instead of releasing her immediately, however,
Plehve kept her two more years in the Schlüsselburg, saying, “There is
still too much life left in her.” To her unspeakable grief, her mother
died a few weeks before she was released in 1904.
She was exiled to a tiny village close to the arctic regions, and a year
and a half afterward she was allowed to return to her estate in the
Kazan province. She has since made a trip to Italy for her health, and
although her nervous system received such a shock that she has never
fully recovered, she has renewed activity for the cause to which she has
devoted her life by lecturing in foreign cities.
Another woman revolutionist who afterward suffered greatly at Kara was
Madame Anna Pavlovna Korba, the daughter of a German nobleman
naturalised in Russia, named Meinhardt. She had married a Swiss
gentleman living in Russia. She was the friend of Madame Löschern von
Herzfeld, who had been one of those banished, but afterward pardoned, in
“the case of the 193.” She was again arrested at Kiev with arms in her
hand, and suffered a second exile with a long imprisonment at Kara. On
her return from the campaign of 1878–9 in Turkey, where she had worked
as a nurse, she adopted the revolutionary programme. The “white terror”
was at its height; the government was active in pursuing the politicals
who were pledged to destroy the Czar; and in 1882, Soudyehkin, the chief
of the secret police, laid a heavy hand on them, arresting them in
batches, executing many and burying the rest alive in St. Petersburg
dungeons. Anna Korba, undaunted, threw herself into the fight, and
strove earnestly to replace those who had fallen in the ranks. She was
arrested for being concerned in the manufacture of dynamite bombs at a
secret laboratory, and her trial ended in exile at Kara with twenty
years at hard labour, which nearly killed her.
Madame Elizabeth Kovalskaya, whose fruitless effort to escape from
Irkutsk has been described, deliberately planned to offend a great
official in order to secure her removal. One day, when Baron Korv, the
governor-general, visited the prison, she failed purposely to rise from
her seat in his presence. Baron Korv objected harshly to this mark of
disrespect to a man in his position, and Madame Kovalskaya quietly
replied that she had not elected him to it. The enraged official left
the prison saying he would send instructions how to deal with this
refractory female, and shortly afterward an order came to remove her to
the central prison at Verkhni Udinsk, as her unruly behaviour had a
demoralising effect at Kara.
The new removal would have been in accordance with Madame Kovalskaya’s
wishes, but it was most savagely carried out. The blame lay with the
commandant of the Kara political prison. Colonel Masyukov, an officer of
the gendarmerie, had held this post for about ten years. He was a man of
weak character, of low mental calibre, without judgment and quite
unfitted for the functions he discharged. Once an officer of the guards,
he had wasted his substance in riotous living and had accepted this well
paid post to discharge his liabilities and his gambling debts.
Colonel Masyukov stupidly supposed that the female prisoners stirred up
by Madame Kovalskaya would have risen to resist her transfer. He
resolved, therefore, that she should be conveyed away secretly without a
word of notice. A subordinate officer, named Bobrovski, accompanied by a
party of gensdarmes and ordinary convicts, burst into her cell at four
o’clock in the morning and dragged her out of bed, half naked, with no
more covering than her nightdress. She was hurried to the office and
here ordered to put on the coarse garments of a common criminal. After
this she fainted, and, wrapped up unconscious in a blanket, was carried
out to the bank of the river Shilka, where an open boat was in readiness
to carry her to Stretensk, the steamboat navigation not being yet
practicable. In this small boat she travelled seventy miles for three
days and nights with the soldiers of her escort who had already treated
her with shameful indignity.
This forcible seizure had aroused the whole prison, and the other women,
maddened by the victim’s shrieks and believing that her honour was being
outraged, became perfectly infuriated. They declared a hunger strike
forthwith and refused food unless Masyukov was dismissed from his post.
The commandant now deeply regretted his foolish action, and took counsel
a little too late from his more sensible subordinates, especially one
wise old sergeant, Golubtsov, a tactful man of long experience and much
common sense. On his advice the male prisoners were called in to pacify
their incensed women comrades and persuade them to abandon their strike.
They suggested that the commandant should be requested to apologise to
his offended charges, a satisfaction altogether scouted as insufficient
by the strikers. The famishing women still insisted upon the withdrawal
of Masyukov. The condition seemed impossible of concession by the
authorities, but it was hoped that the commandant might himself solve
the difficulty by applying for a transfer elsewhere. This settled the
question for the moment, and the women consented to take food on the
clear understanding that if Masyukov had not disappeared within a
certain period, the hunger strike would be recommenced.
This in effect came to pass. The commandant held his ground. The
malcontents again refused food, and now the men, although they thought
the suggested apology would have been sufficient atonement by Masyukov,
joined in the protest and also went out “on strike.” The commandant
thereupon came to terms; he produced a telegram accepting his
resignation; and once more food was eaten, after a week’s starvation.
But the women would not forgive Masyukov and declined to hold any
communication with him. He was “boycotted” completely to the extent even
of a refusal on their part to receive their letters from home after
passing through his hands. This high spirited resolve reacted very
painfully upon themselves. Mental torture worse than the physical was
superadded to their sufferings, and they were all but driven to despair.
No letters were sent and all which were received were returned unopened
through the post to their senders.
This absolute severance of home ties bore especially hard upon one of
the latest arrivals in the prison,—Madame Hope Sigida, “a sensitive
young creature, gentle, affectionate and attracted by all that was good
and beautiful. She was deeply attached to her family, who lived in
Taganrock, a small town in South Russia.” She had been a school teacher,
and was condemned to eight years’ hard labour because a printing press
and some bombs had been discovered in the house where she resided with
her husband who was an officer in Taganrock circuit court. The latter
was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to deportation to
Saghalien, and he died on his way to that island. Madame Sigida, in her
bereavement, felt acutely the cessation of all relations with her
distant home, and when her comrades, goaded to desperation, were upon
the point of resuming the hunger strike, she determined to sacrifice
herself for the common good. Hoping that relief might in that way come
to the rest, she planned to attack Masyukov alone. She sought an
interview with the commandant, and it was granted in due course. A most
dramatic incident followed, as told by eye-witnesses. She was driven to
the office in a carriage under escort, and was taken in to speak to
Colonel Masyukov, who the next moment was seen to jump out of the
window, evidently much excited and terrified, and take to his heels.
Then Madame Sigida came to the door, and after caressing some warder’s
children who stood there, in a quiet, unperturbed voice begged that a
telegraphic message might be despatched to the proper authorities
informing them that she had assaulted the commandant by striking him in
the face. She justified her violence as the only means of shaming him
into taking his departure. At least she succeeded in forcing him to show
himself in his character of a mean, despicable coward.
Madame Sigida was forthwith cast into a secret cell and subjected to
“dungeon conditions,” while awaiting trial for her grave breach of
discipline. Her self-sacrifice had not availed to avert the hunger
strike. It began immediately afterward by all the women prisoners, and
was persisted in for sixteen days with the same argument, that Colonel
Masyukov, now ridiculed and disgraced, must go.
Madame Sigida, still waiting judgment, refused food and remained fasting
for twenty-two days, until medical intervention was decreed. Madame
Kovalskaya struck the doctor in the face when she thought he was about
to forcibly administer nourishment. But he was a humane man and
disclaimed all such intention, and she begged his pardon.
For some time no formal inquiry into Madame Sigida’s assault was made,
and no steps were taken to deal with her case. But after the lapse of a
month or more, when the matter had been reported to St. Petersburg, a
reply came directed against the whole body of the politicals. Colonel
Masyukov, still holding his ground, assembled them and, escorted by
soldiers, behind whom he sought protection, read aloud a letter from the
governor-general in which he warned the politicals that they were in
future amenable to corporal punishment. The penalty was deemed necessary
by the authorities for the maintenance of discipline in the disturbed
state of the prison.
Consternation fell upon these long suffering victims of a despotic
government, who although defenders of their undoubted rights, as
admitted in all civilised countries, had never rendered themselves
liable to such reprisals. The penalty was, moreover, illegal in their
case, and the threat to flog was considered an undeserved and outrageous
insult. The desire to raise indignant protest possessed all, and many
would have gone so far as to counsel a general suicide. The leader of
this extreme view was Sergius Bobohov, a man of the loftiest sentiments,
who had adopted revolutionary principles from a strict sense of their
justice and necessity. Deutsch’s estimate of his character is worth
quoting at length. “Genuine sincerity, seriousness of purpose, and
boundless devotion to his ideal were his leading traits. He was the most
modest of men, but when the honour of a revolutionist was at stake, or
if it were a question of duty, he would undergo a transformation and
become a fiery and inspired prophet.” Bobohov took the threat of
flogging very much to heart, and passionately urged that an answering
threat of suicide should be addressed to the minister of the interior.
“I cling to life as much as any man,” he said, “but I am ready to face
death as a means of protest.” His arguments had weight with his
comrades, but might not have prevailed except for the disastrous course
of events.
At this moment a catastrophe was precipitated by the almost incredible
news that Madame Sigida, the assailant of Colonel Masyukov, was to be
flogged by order of Baron Korv, the governor-general and persecutor of
Madame Kovalskaya. The punishment was to be inflicted with rods in the
presence of the prison doctor, but without previous medical certificate.
The surgeon of the Kara penal settlement had given it as his opinion
that the poor creature was unfit to receive even a single blow, and
declined to be present, as the infliction was by administrative order
and without a sentence of court. The governor hesitated to inflict the
punishment, but Baron Korv persisted in the flogging, surgeon or no
surgeon. The executioner was the same subordinate official, Bobrovski,
who had distinguished himself in the misusage of Madame Kovalskaya. He
had received promotion for his brutal conduct on that occasion, and was
willing to curry favour further with his merciless superiors.
Details of this horrible tragedy are wanting as the lips of those who
assisted are sealed. The authorities have, indeed, dared to deny the
facts through their mouthpieces in the press, but they were well known
throughout Siberia and their truth has been acknowledged by high
officials who strove to justify the infliction. Ill-considered attempts
have been made by at least imperfectly informed champions to discredit
the whole story, which stands nevertheless as an indelible disgrace to
Russian penal administrators, whose only excuse was that the nihilist
women “had brought troubles upon themselves by being excitable and
intractable, and an example was necessary.”
So the example was made. Madame Sigida was stripped and beaten with
rods, when in a state of unconsciousness, for she soon fainted under the
infliction, and was carried back senseless from the place of punishment
to her cell. Two days later she died, but whether from the effects of
the flogging or from deliberate poisoning is not positively known. Three
of her female companions undoubtedly committed suicide, and on the men’s
side seventeen out of thirty-nine resolved to put an end to their own
lives. The result was not altogether successful. The drug, opium, was
either old or adulterated, and many who lay down to die only woke to
excruciating agony and were saved in spite of themselves. A few of them,
Bobohov among the number, tried again, choosing morphia as the means of
self-destruction, but once more the drug was ineffective and only two
actually died.
The fate of those in durance is largely dependent upon the character and
quality of those who have them in charge. Nowhere does this fact stand
out more prominently than in Russian prisons. The governor, director or
commandant is a petty despot; within his own narrow limits he is almost
irresponsible, though subject, of course, to the control of superiors,
but this has never been very closely exercised. Inspections are for the
most part perfunctory, and abuses, especially that of power, may
flourish freely without detection or interference. This ramifies through
all the grades, and the prisoner, of whatever class, is very much at the
mercy of the subordinate officials with whom he is brought into daily
personal contact. The ordinary warder is very much the same everywhere:
a man placed in authority over others often superior to himself in
antecedents, birth, education and experience of life. He is apt to
become arbitrary, tyrannical and self-sufficient from the authority he
wields, whether delegated or usurped. After all he is only an agent, a
deputy and go-between, carrying out the orders of his masters, whose
moods he reflects, whose attitude he imitates, and whose temper animates
him, inspiring him to harass and oppress or, more rarely, to be merciful
and forbearing. Warders almost invariably take their tone from their
supreme chief; hence the deep importance that attaches to the governor
in prison life.
There were good and bad rulers in Russian prisons, the latter perhaps
predominating, although occasionally a humane, well-intentioned and
considerate man was to be met with, such as Kanonovich, who for a time
governed the Kara political prison kindly and leniently, as has already
been described. After him came a succession of gendarmerie officers from
Irkutsk whose characters are summed up by Kennan as follows:—“Khalturin
was brutally cruel, Shubin was a man of little character, and Manaiev
was not only a drunkard, but a thief who destroyed hundreds of the
prisoners’ letters and embezzled 1,900 rubles of money sent to them by
their relatives and friends in European Russia.” Then came Captain
Nikolin, of whom more directly. All these were men of much the same
stamp as the “Major” of the Omsk _ostrog_ described by Dostoyevski. He
was, he says, “a fatal being for prisoners, whom he had brought to such
a state that they trembled before him. Severe to the point of insanity,
‘he threw himself upon them,’ to use their expression. But it was above
all that look, as penetrating as that of a lynx, that was feared. It was
impossible to conceal anything from him. He saw, so to say, without
looking. On entering the prison, he knew at once what was being done.
Accordingly the convicts, one and all, called him the man with the eight
eyes. His system was bad, for it had the effect of irritating men who
were already irascible.” Fortunately for the prisoners, he was under a
superior, for, as the writer tells us, “the commandant was a well-bred,
reasonable man who moderated the savage onslaughts of the major, or the
latter would have caused sad misfortune by his bad administration.”
This major was universally loathed by the prisoners, and more than once
was on the verge of murderous attack. There were times when the convicts
at Omsk were goaded to desperation by his brutality. One day a dozen men
from Little Russia swore to take his life, and their leader had borrowed
the kitchen knife and secreted it about his person. The grievance for
the moment was the badness of the food, and when the major came in to
expostulate, the assailant rushed at him, but found that his victim was
drunk, or, according to prison superstition, “under special protection.”
It was more than he deserved, for he was a blasphemous and overbearing
wretch. After having carried the knapsack for many long years, promotion
to the grade of officer had turned his head.
Captain Nikolin was an officer of gensdarmes who had been specially
selected at St. Petersburg and sent out to govern the state prisons at
Kara. Kennan speaks of him as “an old and experienced gendarme officer
of the most subtle and unscrupulous type, who had received his training
under General Muraviov, ‘the hangman, in Poland,’ and had been about
thirty years in the service.... He had the suavity and courteous manners
of the accomplished gendarme officer, ... and he greeted me with what he
intended for frank, open cordiality, softening, so far as possible, all
the hard lines of his face; but he could not bring a spark of good
fellowship into his cold, watchful gray eyes, and I felt conscious that
all his real mental processes were carefully masked.” He was very proud
of his position: that he, a simple captain of gensdarmes, had been sent
to this important command, where he was independent of local control and
entitled to correspond direct with the minister of the interior. His
whole object was to hoodwink Kennan, whom he assured blandly and
mendaciously that the prisoners led a life of ease, even of luxury,
sitting in a _kamera_ like a club smoking room, reading and writing and
pleasantly conversing. He further asserted that the “politicals”
received considerable sums from their friends in Russia; that they
bought what books they pleased, had newspapers, including the London
_Punch_ and other illustrated papers, and in a word, were “treated with
gracious clemency by an enlightened and paternal government.” Nikolin
showed the cloven foot later when he urged his colleague to seize Mr.
Kennan’s baggage and search it, by which high-handed proceeding, happily
avoided, much of the incriminating material so daringly secured by the
fearless American, would have been lost to the indignant readers of the
civilised world.
We have another portrait of Captain Nikolin from one who knew him but
too well. Leo Deutsch suffered for some years under his régime and
describes him “as a malicious, ill-natured man, continually devising
petty humiliations for the prisoners.” In person he was a short, heavily
built man, some fifty years of age, “with a bald head, a full gray
beard, thin, tightly closed, rather cruel lips, an impenetrable face and
cold gray eyes. His broad round face, cunning little eyes, and bristling
moustache, gave him the look of a fat, spiteful old tom-cat, and he was
always designated by that nickname. The expression of his eyes was
particularly catlike; he looked as if just ready to pounce on a victim
and stick his claws into it. He always spoke in a low voice, this
‘tom-cat;’ but he chattered unceasingly, and kept smacking his lips all
the time, his expression being always peevish and discontented.... We
petitioned our ‘tom-cat’ for leave to plant a garden in the yard; there
was space enough, the work would have been beneficial, and then we might
have had vegetables for our table, the deficiency in which particular
had been so detrimental to our health. The ‘tom-cat’ roundly refused.
‘We should need spades,’ he said, ‘and they might be used to dig a hole
whereby to get away.’ So, again, when one of us was sent some
flower-seeds and sowed them in a wooden box, the box was taken away by
Nikolin’s orders; the earth in it might have served to conceal some
contraband article. Such needless tyrannies embittered us still more
against the detested commandant. However peaceably we might otherwise
have been inclined, our hatred of this man might well have blazed out at
any opportunity; he himself probably guessed as much, for he became more
and more mistrustful, at last never entering our prison. He felt that he
had made enemies all round him, and sat lonely in his own house, or
squabbled with his cook, afraid to show himself outside. It may be a
matter of surprise that one of his many enemies did not find a way to
put an end to him, that being a not unusual course of events in Kara;
but finally he could endure such a life no longer, and applied to be
transferred elsewhere. In the spring of 1887 his application was
granted, and he departed, accompanied by the anathemas of the entire
population of Kara.” Captain Nikolin was in due course succeeded by the
Colonel Masyukov of whom we have heard so much in his conflict with the
politicals of the state prison at Kara.
Captain Nikolin’s colleague at Kara, coequal in authority, but with
independent functions, was Major Potulov, who governed the ordinary
criminal prison at Kara. He was a man of a pleasanter type, who was both
civil and hospitable to George Kennan, possibly to keep an eye upon his
motions and, perhaps, take the sting out of the condemnation his command
so richly deserved. He is described as a tall, fine looking, soldierly
man about fifty years of age, affable in manner and disposed to act
fairly by his charges, so far as it lay within his power. Where he
failed was in loyalty to his superiors, and he was gifted with rare
talents for fraud and embezzlement. He stole unblushingly, and enriched
himself largely at the expense of the state. His chief device was to
keep hundreds of prisoners on the rolls who were mere “ghosts;” men who
had disappeared by flight or death, but for whom rations were still
drawn and the value thereof shared between him and the purveyor. He was
presently detected and dismissed, but escaped justice through his
influential friends.
Patrin of Saghalien came to the front at a later date, when deportation
to the island colony was in full swing, and his evil reputation became
widespread as the most brutal and rapacious official in Russian penal
annals. His character was so well known far and wide that he figured as
the prison demon on the San Francisco stage. His was a reign of terror
in the Alexandrovsk prison, and he drove through the town armed with
revolver and Winchester rifle, committing acts of atrocious criminal
violence in the open streets. Horrible stories were current of his
misusage of his charges, of constant punishments in the dark cells or
with the plet till death was the result. He was equally harsh with his
officers. One of them, who had gone to complain of the insulting and
outrageous conduct of a comrade toward his (the complainant’s) wife, was
struck on the mouth by Patrin and felled to the ground. He had an abrupt
way of dealing with recalcitrant prisoners. One day there came before
him a young convict of an irascible temper, who had obstinately refused
to work. Patrin forthwith fell upon him, striking him on the jaw. The
prisoner, although of slight build, closed with the governor and,
showing superhuman strength, dragged him to the top of the staircase.
Now the warders who had been hanging about hurried to their chief’s
assistance, and the fight became a perfect mêlée in one confused
struggling group, all gravitating toward the edge of the stairs, down
which they suddenly fell headlong. Patrin came out on top, with the
prisoner underneath. But the latter had seized a revolver from one of
the guards, and when he was raised to his feet pointed the weapon to his
own forehead and shot himself, saying, “It was Patrin I wanted to kill.”
The political prisoners at Saghalien were subjected to the tender
mercies of Patrin, and he also had charge of the women’s prison, but his
infamous behaviour toward the women was too abominable to be told.