CHANGES IN SYSTEM
The Kara settlements—Descriptions of the prisons by Kennan—Filthy state
of the prison buildings at Ust Kara—Gold mining—Illicit trade in
“stolen gold”—Improvements in the prison system—The new prison of
Alexandrovsk—Mr. Foster Fraser’s account of the excellent state of the
prison in 1901—The prison at Verkhni Udinsk—The island of Saghalien
used as a penal colony—Disadvantages of the place—Coal mining chief
industry—Climate uncongenial—Exiles sent by sea from Odessa—Terrible
sufferings on the voyage—Convict marriages—Deplorable conditions on
the island—Prison discipline in force at Alexandrovsk—Punishments
inflicted—The plet.
Of the partial attempts made by Russia to reform the methods of
inflicting penal servitude on wrong-doers, I shall speak more at large.
A detailed account must be given of the new prisons erected more in
conformity with modern ideas; and the persistent pursuit of that
will-o’-the-wisp, penal colonisation by deportation to the desert island
of Saghalien, with its futile processes and disappointing results,
claims attention. Before leaving the older methods of enforcing hard
labour, it will be well to describe its last stronghold and the system
obtaining there until quite a recent date. “Kara the Black,” so called
from a Tartar word, aptly describes the series of prisons and convict
settlements established in the valley of the Kara River to work the
mines, chiefly gold mines, the private property of the Czar. There are
other mines of salt and silver, the latter chiefly at Nertchinsk,
supposed to have been worked out, and now leased to private hands with
profitable return, in spite of their deadly unhealthiness from the
quicksilver emanations that poisoned them. The annals of Nertchinsk are
as horrible as any in Siberian prison history, and the ancient prison of
Akatui in the district still stands to bear witness to the cruelties and
tragedies practised upon the unhappy politicals who inhabited it. The
silver mines were reopened at Algachi in the neighbourhood, where there
was a prison which Kennan saw and unhesitatingly condemned. “As a place
of confinement,” he writes, “even for the worst class of offenders, it
was a disgrace to a civilised state, and the negligence, indifference
and incompetence shown by the government in dealing with its admitted
evils were absolutely inexcusable.” Speaking further of the Nertchinsk
district and of the mines at Algachi and Pokrovski and others, Mr.
Kennan was of opinion that the prisoners permitted to work in them
suffered less than those, the larger proportion, who were doomed to
unbroken idleness in the overcrowded, foul-smelling prisons. It was
irksome enough to work eight or ten hours daily in an icy gallery, three
hundred feet below ground; the mines were badly ventilated, and the
gases liberated by the explosives used may be injurious; but there are
no deadly exhalations from poisonous ores to affect the health, and no
doubt the worst feature of penal servitude in Siberia was not the hard
labour in the mines but the almost inconceivably foul condition and
enforced idleness of the prisons.
Returning now to the Kara prisons, seven in number, two of them were
allotted to politicals, one for each sex, and of the remaining five the
total population was approximately eighteen hundred convicts. Half of
them were detained as prisoners; the other half were permitted generally
to join the “free command.” The latter were still convicts, receiving
rations and restricted to the settlement, but residing in barracks or in
their own houses. The prison building of Ust Kara, at the Lower
Diggings, is compared by Kennan to “a long, low, horse-car stable made
of squared but unpainted logs, which are now black, weather-beaten, and
decaying from age.” It was in the form of a square surrounded by logs
twenty-five feet high, closely set together, and sharpened at the top
like enormous lead pencils. Entrance was gained after ascending a few
steps through a heavy wooden door opening upon a long, low and very dark
corridor with a wet, slippery floor, much broken and damaged. The first
sensation was that of damp air laden with the fetid odours that
constantly vitiate all Siberian prisons. Kennan was unable to compare it
to any known bad smell. He says, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air,
every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and
is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated
by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed
human bodies.... To unaccustomed senses, it seems so saturated with
foulness and disease as to be almost insupportable. As we entered the
corridor, slipped upon the wet, filthy floor, and caught the first
breath of this air, Major Potulov (the commandant) turned to me with a
scowl of disgust, and exclaimed, ‘It is a repulsive prison.’” In the
cells there was absolutely no ventilation whatever. Even the brick oven
drew its air from the corridor. The walls of squared logs had once been
whitewashed, but had become dark and grimy, and were blotched in many
places with extensive bloodstains, the life blood of countless
insatiable enemies, bed-bugs, crushed to death in unceasing warfare. The
floor was deeply encrusted with dry, hard-trodden filth. The sloping
wooden platforms on which the convicts slept side by side, closely
packed, without bedding or covering, were inconceivably dirty. All the
cells were the same except that in one a shoemaker’s bench diffused the
quite pleasing odour of fresh leather.
Small wonder that contagious diseases were rife in such an atmosphere;
scurvy, typhus and typhoid constantly prevailed and the prison surgeon
admitted that the first was endemic, saying, “We have more or less
scurvy here all the year round.” The infected were not at once removed
to hospital, but lay there to pollute and poison the air breathed by
their comparatively healthy comrades. All the conditions of this were so
manifestly odious that the commandant did not attempt to explain, defend
or excuse them, but, as Kennan tells us, “he grew more and more silent,
moody and morose as we went through the _kameras_.” He knew too well
that it was beyond his power to remedy the abounding evil; he might
listen to grievances, hear petitions and complaints, but was powerless
to relieve them.
The middle Kara prison was on precisely similar lines, but the air was
fresher during the day time, when the bulk of the inmates were absent at
the mines, to which the hard-labour prisoners proceeded in the early
morning and where they spent the day. Their midday meal was taken with
them, to be eaten beside the camp fire in any weather, even the fiercest
winter storms. They returned to the prison late in the afternoon, and
dined on a fairly good meal of hot soup, bread and meat and a cup of
brick tea. This they ate on their sleeping platforms, and passed the
night without removing their clothing.
The gold “placers” at Kara were generally in deep gravel pits, and the
auriferous sand was located beneath a stratum of clay, gravel or stones,
in what had once been the bed of the stream. The work consisted in
breaking up and removing this overlying stratum, extracting the gold
bearing sand and carrying it to the machine, where it was washed in
several waters which in flowing away left deposits of black sand and
gold particles. Pick and crowbar were in constant use by the convict
labourers, working in their leg irons silently and listlessly under the
close surveillance of a cordon of Cossack sentries. The average daily
task was of ten hours, but much time was lost in going to and fro, and
the annual amount washed was some four hundred pounds. A large quantity
of gold was stolen by the surreptitious washing of convicts of the free
command. They disposed of it to “receivers,” who ran great risks but
generally managed to smuggle it across the frontier. This illicit trade
flourishes in spite of the fact that it is a penal offence to be in
possession of the precious metal or “golden wheat,” as it is technically
called. But the great profits accruing outbalance the risks, and small
speculators are always to be found who will secretly buy the stolen
treasure secured by the convicts at large.
One notorious criminal at Kara living in the free command acquired
considerable wealth by illicit trade in “stolen gold.” His name was
Lissenko, and his crimes had been many and heinous. In one of his
robberies he murdered a whole family, men, women and children. Leo
Deutsch came across him and describes him as a man of about sixty years
who had still the strength of a giant. He says: “He struck me as being
crafty, cunning and reckless, but not a malicious kind of fellow, and he
was extremely pious withal. No one who knew him personally could easily
believe him to have murdered innocent children.” Deutsch asked him how
he could have the heart to kill a child. “Oh, I cried all the time I was
doing it,” he replied, “but still I killed them. It was just God’s
will.” His questioner then asked, “Well, and would you murder me if you
met me in a safe place?” “If I knew you had a lot of money about you I
should certainly wring your neck,” said the man, with cheerful
frankness. “But there! one doesn’t kill without some good reason.”
The search for gold, belonging really to the government, or more exactly
to the Czar, was almost openly practised at Kara. Whole families, both
men and women, engaged in it, taking out with them a shovel and wooden
vessel to the banks of the neighbouring streams, and often obtaining
gold dust to the value of a couple of rubles a day. No one protested,
and the authorities hardly interfered, for the officials themselves did
not scruple to profit by the illegal trade. Far more gold was obtained
by unlawful than lawful means. The middlemen got a good price from the
Chinese traders, who could always find a way to pass the gold into
China, where it would fetch a higher price than that paid by the
imperial exchequer. It is contended that these illicit gold finders have
greatly benefited Siberia. Their restless energy in prospecting has led
to the discovery of numberless gold mines, which are now being very
profitably worked, seldom to the enrichment of the finders, but to that
of the middlemen and through them to that of the country.
The glaring shortcomings of Eastern Siberian prisons were gradually
recognised by the government, and a commendable, if not extensive,
attempt has been made to provide new and improved buildings, both to
serve as forwarding prisons, and for the confinement of penal-servitude
convicts. A larger scheme was introduced for the penal colonisation of
the island of Saghalien by the deportation of exiles thither by sea, of
which I shall have much more to say. The best of the new prisons on the
mainland are those of Alexandrovsk, forty miles above Irkutsk on the
Amgara River, of Gorni Zerentui at the Nertchinsk mines, and of Verkhni
Udinsk, fifty miles east of Lake Baikal and six hundred miles from Kara.
The prison of Alexandrovsk, which was visited by the untiring
investigator, Kennan, had been originally built to serve as a
distillery, but was reconstructed and turned into a great central prison
in 1874. When Kennan was there, it held about a thousand prisoners and
was deemed to be almost a model prison. It is a large two-storied brick
building with a tin roof, standing in a spacious enclosure surrounded by
a high, buttressed brick wall. It contains fifty-seven general cells, in
each of which from five to seventy-five occupants are locked up; ten
cells for separate confinement, and five secret cells for the isolation
of the most dangerous and refractory prisoners. The cells, as Kennan
found, were large and lofty; the ventilation was good and the air pure;
floors and sleeping rooms were kept scrupulously clean, the only fault
in the latter being the absence of bedding. The corridors outside the
cells were spacious, well lighted, and the air was wholesome. Neatness,
cleanliness and good order prevailed in the great kitchen; the food
prepared was palatable and good. The daily rations per week consisted of
three pounds of rye bread, seven ounces of meat, three ounces of barley,
with potatoes and other vegetables occasionally. The prisoners were
permitted to purchase tea and sugar out of their own earnings and
private funds. A schoolroom, well furnished and supplied, existed in the
prison, and there were many citizens’ shops,—carpenters, shoemakers, and
tailors,—and two-thirds of the money earned was at the disposal of the
handicraftsmen. Other labour intended to be “hard” was enforced at the
mills, where rye seed was ground into meal and where the prisoners
worked for three or four hours daily. At night the _kamera_ was crowded
and dimly lighted; and when visited, was not quite so sweet and
odourless as during the daytime, but, on the whole, the prison was
infinitely superior to the foul dens already described.
Mr. Foster Fraser, the English traveller, who saw the Alexandrovsk
central prison in 1901–2, gives a no less favourable report. He
describes it as a great square building, with lofty corridors, colour
washed, and with sanded floors, the _kameras_ containing on an average
fifty men each. The prisoners, who hailed from all parts of the polyglot
and scattered Russian Empire, were criminals of the worst stamp, mostly
heavy-jowled, sullen, brutish men, but there were some few young and
innocent looking lads. In the cells large numbers lounged away the day
in complete idleness, but all asked for employment, and were glad to get
it by being taken into the various shops. Some were clever and skilful
at particular trades, cabinet-making, tailoring, bookbinding, designing
patent locks, watch-mending or making musical instruments. The
impression conveyed was that of workshops of well contented artisans.
Conversation was general and many were smoking cigarettes. Care was
taken to classify prisoners by their religions; Mahometans, Tartars and
Caucasians were kept together in one hall; Jews were in another with
their synagogue hard by. The desire to brighten the gloomy surroundings
was to be seen in the existence of a theatre with stage and scenery,
where excellent amateur performances were given, and also musical
entertainments, for singing was much cultivated and there was no lack of
good voices among the convicts. A large library was kept up, to which
free access was permitted for several hours daily to those who could
read, by no means a large proportion.
There is a second Alexandrovsk prison, one of the _étapes_, or
forwarding prisons, newly built in 1886–8, and on good lines, but much
handicapped by the common blot on all such places, overcrowding. Great
numbers, far in excess of available accommodation, were collected here,
awaiting distribution to various points. Mr. Fraser’s verdict on this
_étape_ prison is unfavourable. “The rooms were overcrowded and the
stench almost choked me. The men looked dirty and uncared for. They had
no work; they were just huddled together, waiting often six or eight
months before they were sent off. Among them were half a dozen young
fellows in ordinary clothes, with nothing of the criminal about them,
the youngest seventeen, the eldest twenty-one. They were political
exiles banished by ‘administrative process’ for rashly joining in some
socialistic demonstration, and were on their way to Yakutsk into the
frozen depths of the sub-Arctic Circle.”
Verkhni Udinsk is the first halting place after leaving Lake Baikal on
the road to Kara, and all exiles to Eastern Siberia passed through it,
including the political prisoners. For many years the _étape_ prison
there was one of the foulest on the whole route. It is to the credit of
the Russian government that this abominable prison has been abolished
and replaced (in 1886) by a new forwarding prison constructed on the
most approved lines. It is a large building of four stories, built of
brick, with a stucco front painted white, and having two spacious wings,
a large inner courtyard and separate buildings for political prisoners
and military guard. The _kameras_ are even better than those at
Alexandrovsk, large, lofty, well ventilated, and each above the basement
floor has an extensive view across the surrounding country through at
least three large windows. The corridors and imposing staircases, and
even the solitary confinement cells, are of large size. It was built to
lodge 440, but of course was constantly occupied by a much larger
number. When Mr. Kennan expressed his unbounded approval of the very
best prison he had seen in Russia, or indeed in any country, his
conductor assented, “Yes; if they do not overcrowd it, it will be very
comfortable. But as the old prison intended for 140 was often filled
with as many as seven hundred, we shall probably be expected to find
room for three thousand in this.” I have come across no later
information on this point, and it is to be hoped that the substitution
of the sea passage to Saghalien has had a beneficial effect in reducing
the numbers passing along the land route, and that the Verkhni Udinsk
prison has sufficed to meet the demands on its accommodation.
After very considerable delay, a new prison at Gorni Zerentui, to serve
for the Nertchinsk mines, was completed in 1888. The crying need for
such a prison was first realised in 1872, and in 1874 a committee was
appointed to report and submit plans. Seven years later no more progress
had been made than the erection of a few log huts and the repair of some
older buildings, on which nearly 40,000 dollars had been expended.
Constant changes of plan had tended to vexatious delay. Opinions were
divided as to whether brick or logs was the most suitable material, but
preference was finally given to the latter, because the prison could not
be permanent, as the mines were certain to become worked out. But
already brick had been employed and the building was far forward, so it
was at length completed, and was occupied at the date given.
The advantages offered by the island of Saghalien as a place for penal
settlement were very early impressed upon Russian prison administrators.
They were rather sentimental than physical, for the island was perhaps
as unsuitable for human habitation as any place on the face of the
globe. The climate was uncongenial, and worse even than its latitude
indicated. Alexandrovsk, the chief town, is in the same latitude as
Brighton in England, and yet its mean annual temperature is just below
freezing point. No sea current wafted any warmth northward from Chinese
waters. On the contrary, a bitterly cold stream swept its eastern coast,
issuing from the ice-bound sea of Okhotsk, and the western shores of
this narrow elongated island are, so to speak, under an immense
refrigerator, the snowy mountain tracts of Siberia, separated from it by
only a narrow and shallow channel. Sparse sunlight pierced through the
heavy clouds and fogs that enveloped this inhospitable land. The milder
season was too brief to allow of great success in the germination of
crops, and the long, low valleys between the mountains were too damp and
marshy to favour agriculture. Dense forests clothed a large portion of
the island, containing poor trees of inferior, stunted growth, with
comparatively valueless wood. A scant population of degenerate tribes
eked out a wretched existence as fishermen and seal hunters. Few
settlers came to it from China or Japan.
The report of experts definitely decided against Saghalien as an
agricultural colony. The soil forbade all hope of raising grain to
support those who worked it. Food must be imported to maintain life;
cattle breeding might succeed, but with difficulty, and fish must remain
the staple diet. One source of natural wealth which might be developed
was the coal fields, in which the island was supposed to be rich, but
the quality of the coal was inferior to the Australian and very much
below that of Newcastle and Cardiff. Mr. Hawes, a later traveller
(1903), contests this, however, and describes the coal as a good
lignite, superior to the Japanese as a steam coal, and says it commands
a higher price. As an article of commerce, it suffers from the
difficulties of lading for export. There is not a single harbour on the
whole circumference of the island, and approach is often hindered by
want of beacons and constantly prevailing fogs.
Coal mining in Saghalien began in 1858, and some 30,000 tons were
extracted during the first ten years. The production was very costly;
the mines were worked by candle light; the ore was bad and much mixed
with stone. The largest deposits are upon the western coast, and it is
mined chiefly at Dui and Vladiminsk. Mr. Hawes saw a seam of brown coal
exposed on the banks of the river Tim. At Vladiminsk the coal was on the
ground, level, and easily reached by tunnelling into the cliff, and when
it failed at one spot, another was soon discovered. The coal sells to
the merchants at twelve shillings per ton, of which the convicts now
employed receive ten per cent.
The adoption of Saghalien as a penal colony commended itself to the
authorities for several reasons. In the first place, the conditions of
life were more irksome than on the mainland; the work would, it was
thought, be much harder; and the place itself was wilder, more savage
and solitary,—all of which would combine to increase the severity of the
punishment. Moreover, the prospect of remaining forever as a settler
upon a remote island, after the term of hard labour was accomplished,
would still further act as a deterrent to crime. Accordingly, it was
resolved to inflict this harsher penalty upon recidivists and recaptured
fugitives, the _brodyagi_, or runaway convicts, of whom so many
thousands were always at large and who, when recaptured, as well as all
the “Ivan-don’t-remembers” who would not tell their names, were
sentenced to penal servitude for a fresh term of four years in
Saghalien. Again, Saghalien by sea was better than Siberia by _étape_
process, with its long painful journey, the sufferings it entailed on
the travellers, and the burden of corruption inflicted upon the local
population by the way. Last of all, it would tend to free Siberia of the
convict element, and assist the colonisation and development of the new
territory, with manifest benefit to the convicts on release by the
opportunities offered for rehabilitation and betterment of character and
position.
These were the views expressed by Governor-General Anuchin in his famous
reports to the Czar in 1880. But they had already taken effect, and
deportation to Saghalien had begun practically some years previously.
The first body of convicts, eight hundred in number, were sent there in
1869, but they went across the whole continent of Asia, having already
travelled from Russia, and descending the long length of the Amur River,
some two thousand miles, completed a total journey of 4,700 miles before
reaching its mouth at Nikolaevsk, where they arrived decimated by
disease and all more or less suffering from scurvy. After that, sea
transportation was used, the party starting from Odessa and voyaging
through the Suez Canal by the Red Sea, Indian and Northern Pacific
Oceans, but under very neglected and imperfect conditions, so that those
who embarked were subjected to terrible privations and cruelties on this
voyage half round the world.
As time passed, and the last century drew to its close, deportation
direct to Saghalien steadily increased. Twice a year the steamer
_Yaroslav_, one of the Russian volunteer fleet, the appointed convict
ship, performed its sad mission and brought out its living freight of
eight hundred exiles from Odessa. Besides these, many hundreds regularly
arrived from the mainland, who were convicts due to become exiled
settlers. The latest law provided that the penal colony should be the
receptacle of all males sentenced to more than two years, of all females
not over forty years of age, sentenced to the same period, and of any
political prisoner at the discretion of the imperial government.
Criminals, on arrival, are classified according to their sentences and
located in the various gaols in the three administrative districts of
Alexandrovsk, Timovsk and Korsakovsk. The largest prison centre is at
the first named; the second in importance is at Korsakovsk; and there
are two prisons in the Timovsk district, one at Derbensk, the other at
Rikovsk.
When Mr. Hawes visited the island in 1902, he found a principal gaol at
Alexandrovsk known as the “testing,” or probation prison, for the worst
criminals, those with a sentence of twelve years and upward, whose
fetters are not removed and who are confined in a quarter styled the
“chained” prison. There is a second prison known as the “reformatory,”
for those with lesser sentences, into which convicts from the testing
prison, after passing a minimum of four years, may be promoted. These
last-named prisoners are permitted to work in gangs beyond the walls,
under escort, without very strict discipline, so that many leave their
parties to work on their own account in various forms of depredation.
The “ticket-of-leave” men, or free commands, were entered on the lists
of the reformatory prison and included the vagrants, _brodyagi_, who
were deported after recapture on the mainland. Immediate release from
jail is the boon conceded to any convict, even the very worst, whose
freeborn wife has elected to come out from Russia and join him. He
becomes then an exile settler of one of the “peasant” class, so-called,
whom it is hoped will assist colonisation. The same boon is conceded to
female convicts. “Free” husbands, however, are not often eager to share
their lot. According to Mr. Hawes, there were only six of these loyal
spouses on the whole island. But the women convicts have the chance of
being chosen to join in a convict marriage or temporary coupling of
parties, which is not only permitted but strongly encouraged. The
consequences of such unions are deplorable. The effect on the woman is
most demoralising, and too often the offspring, when children are born,
have inherited the criminal taint. The civil contract cannot be entered
into without divorce in the case where a husband still exists in Russia,
although many widows have simplified the matter by murdering their
husbands before leaving home, often, indeed, the cause of their
deportation. Figures quoted for one year, 1897, show that there were
2,836 murderers in durance upon the island, and a much larger number if
ex-convicts were included, and of this total, 634 were women who had
murdered their husbands. Clergymen on Saghalien refused to give a
religious sanction to these civil contracts unless there had been a
formal dissolution of the Russian marriage. The civil bond sat lightly
on both parties; the women in particular elected to go their own way,
and if interfered with or if they found their marriage ill-assorted or
irksome, they at once transferred themselves to some other master. The
results of this outrage upon the most sacred of human institutions must
assuredly lead to its abolition; they are identically the same as
reported by Mr. George Griffith to be the case in New Caledonia. He
says: “I saw about seventy-six separate and distinct reasons for the
abolition of convict marriages at the convict school. On every face and
form were stamped the unmistakable brand of criminality, imbecility,
moral crookedness and general degeneration.”
The testing prison at Alexandrovsk generally held some six hundred
inmates, many of them in chains and most of them in idleness; a few,
barely ten or twelve per cent., were occasionally sent out to be
employed in mining, road-making and log-hauling; and the authorities
justified this limitation by the plea that the majority of them were
such desperate characters that they could not safely be suffered to go
beyond the walls. The unutterable weariness of long-continued, unbroken
idleness bore so heavily upon this mass of caged and shackled humanity
that desperate and determined attempts at escape were of constant
occurrence. So great was their longing to be free that they would
willingly risk their lives to breathe the fresh air. The only break in
the dull round of prison life was surreptitious gambling. They would
sacrifice everything to secure the means of play; they would stake the
government clothing issued, and even their rations a month ahead. In the
latter case, as an alternative to punishment, the convict put himself in
pawn to the authorities. He was lodged in a separate cell and allowed
himself to be starved for two days out of every three; the rations saved
were accumulated and placed to his credit for the payment of his debt.
The conditions of life at Alexandrovsk not strangely incited the
prisoners to turbulence, insubordination and the commission of crime
whenever the chance came. When at large, even for a short time after
successful escape, they were veritable brigands, robbing and
slaughtering; when once more incarcerated, they were intractable and
incorrigible, and no punishment could affright or keep them in order.
The older brutal methods survive in Saghalien. Physical tortures are
superadded to the infliction of prolonged sentences. As to the latter,
many convicts are well advanced in life with unexpired sentences of
forty or fifty years. Hawes tells us he found thirteen in this class,
and fifty-one others, one of them a woman, with sentences of from thirty
to forty years, and 240 with from twenty to thirty years of unexpired
sentences. He also found a couple of offenders chained to wheelbarrows,
and the number had been much larger not long before.
Employment of corporal punishment has for the most part disappeared in
Russian and Siberian prisons; its infliction at Kara on Madame Sigida in
1889, and the universal horror inspired throughout the civilised world
by this terrible catastrophe, largely led to its abandonment; but the
practice is still in force in Saghalien. Until 1902 females were flogged
with the _rozgi_, birch rods dipped in salt. The infliction was within
the power of the chief of the prison, and although it might be lightly,
was ever arbitrarily imposed. It was not an excessively cruel, but a
most brutal and disgraceful punishment. But the plet still flourishes,
although the leaded ends are said to have been replaced by knots, and
may be a very terrible weapon in the hands of a skilful flagellator.
Until recently, it was worthy to replace the murderous knout of ancient
times. The patient was very much at the mercy of the executioner, the
so-called _palach_, a salaried convict-official, to whom his comrades
paid tribute in the Saghalien prison in food and tobacco, to curry
favour with him and persuade him to lay the leaded ends of the lash so
as to catch the wooden flogging bench rather than their bare backs. The
_palach_ spared his victim at very considerable risk, and might be
flogged for neglect of duty. In one case, an offending executioner, by
name Komeleva, was punished and flogged by the hands of his particular
enemy. So terrible was the infliction that although it incurred in 1882,
a photograph taken of the wounds in 1899, seventeen years afterwards,
showed them to be still suppurating. Three strokes of the plet were
sufficient to kill, and another story is told of a convict at Saghalien
who promised the _palach_ a bottle of vodka if he would not hit him with
the leaded ends. The victim was a hardened veteran, and when he had
received ninety-five strokes, thinking he had escaped, he called out,
“It’s no matter; you can’t hurt me now, you needn’t think you’ll get
your vodka.” But he had not reckoned with his man, for after three more
strokes he was dead. It was only necessary to draw back the plet as the
stroke was spent for the ends to injure the liver and send a clot of
blood to the heart.