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 All existing privileges, even the most trivial, were withdrawn.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, BogomoletzBogomoletz 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.

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.