In those days a woman propagandist was something unheard of and unseen.
In fear of this new phenomenon the warden of the Bratzlau jail thought
it necessary to incarcerate me immediately in a dark cell and handcuff
me. A month passed in wandering about country prisons, till gendarmes
came, took me away from the police and dragged me first to a Kieff
jail, then to Moscow, and finally to Petrograd, where I was tried with
other offenders after being kept in prison for four years in solitary
confinement. The condition of the imprisonment was serious. Of the
300 prisoners held for total only 193 survived, among whom there were
37 women. During all of my imprisonment I made no explanation to the
judicial authorities, and I was condemned to five years of convict
labor. But it was not dreadful. Nothing was dreadful when one had faith
in one's righteousness.
My healthy organism and ripe age helped me endure the many years'
torments at a time when the young, tender lives fell sick quickly and
were carried off one after another by death, leaving a feeling of
atrocious pain and indelible bitterness.
But we all retained our eagerness for activity, so early interrupted by
an evil hand. The thought of returning to the party, to revolutionary
work, lived in our minds in the form of a red-hot nail, and aroused all
our abilities, all our power to seek a means to escape. There, to the
fighters, to the bright populists, our spiritual vision was directed.
I was already in on the rights of a settler, beyond the Baikal, in
Barguzin, when, together with three men comrades, I moved into the
hilly taiga, with its thousands of impediments and dangers. Our daring
escape, which ended in our capture while wandering about unfathomed
abysses and rocks, has been described by Tiutchev. I, as a former
hard-labor criminal, was condemned to four years more of penal
servitude and forty whips, which, however, the authorities did not dare
to apply, "in order to arouse against the administration the political
exiles," as the Military Governor of the Outer Baikal said in his
report.
I was thus forced to go, in 1882, after another year of imprisonment,
to the same old Kara mines, at that time full of prisons for convicts
and politicals. Both the first and the second perished there of
scurvy, typhus, endless tuberculosis, but mostly the convicts, as the
officials disregarded them entirely and kept them in the most shameful
conditions.
My second arrival at Kara was for me rather a joyous occasion. When
I first came there I was the only woman doing hard labor; it was not
fashionable yet to send women to mines. But now I found already sixteen
or eighteen feminine comrades, and all of my second term I passed
in the best society in the world. The annual term of convict labor
consisted of eight months and my term flew past me unnoticed. Only one
thing was aggravating, and that was to see how the frailer among us in
health gradually sank and surely neared their graves, in the blossom of
their lives.