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Title: The Terror in Russia Author: PĂ«tr Kropotkin Date: 1909 Language: en Topics: Russia, repression, prison, exile, execution, suicide, torture, police violence Source: Retrieved on 20th May 2021 from http://www.revoltlib.com/anarchism/the-terror-in-russia/view.php
The present conditions in Russia are so desperate that it is a public
duty to lay before this country a statement of these conditions, with a
solemn appeal to all lovers of liberty and progress for moral support in
the struggle that is now going on for the conquest of political freedom.
In the struggle for freedom each country must work out its own
salvation; but we should not forget that there exists a web of
international solidarity between all civilized countries. It is true
that the loans contracted by the heads of despotic states in foreign
countries contribute to support despotism. But Russian exiles also know
from their own experience how the moral support which the fighters for
liberty have never failed to find in the enlightened portions of the
civilized nations has been helpful to them, and how much it has aided
them to maintain faith in the ultimate victory of freedom and justice.
It has been decided, therefore, to issue the present statement,in which,
after a careful inquiry, a large amount of well-authenticated facts has
been brought together, giving an insight into the deplorable conditions
that now prevail in Russia. Attention has been chiefly directed to the
conditions which are found in the Russian prisons and among the
exiles--conditions so deplorable that they leave far behind all that as
been published in this country about the Russian prisons and exile for
the last thirty years--even during the reaction that set in after the
year 1881.
In preparing this statement the utmost pains have been
B
taken to eliminate all facts and accusations which have not been
authenticated. Either they have been officially corroborated by
sentences of the Courts pronounced upon police and prison officials
convicted of gross abuses of their powers; or they were the subject of
interpellations in the Duma, and were not contradicted by the Ministry;
or they were reported in the moderate papers of the Russian daily Press,
with a full specification of names and dates, notwithstanding all the
rigors of censorship, and were not contradicted either by the official
âInformation Bureauâ or the official and semiofficial organs of the
Press. Any evidence which, although substantially correct, might have
been suspected of exaggeration, has been carefully excluded.
There is no question that the movement of the years 1905â1907 has
produced a deep change in the whole aspect of thought and sentiment in
Russia. The peasant, the workman, the clerk, the small tradesman are no
longer so submissive to every rural police officer as they formerly
were. New ideas, new aspirations, new hopes, and, above all, a new
interest in public life have been developed in them, since it was
officially declared in October, 1905, that the nation would henceforward
have the right to express its wishes and to exercise legislative power
through its representatives, and that the policy of the Government would
be a liberal policy. But, after it had been solemnly declared that the
political life of the country was to be reconstructed on new principles,
and that, to use the very words of the Czarâs Manifesto, âthe population
is to be given the inviolable foundation of civil rights, based on the
actual inviolability of the person, and freedom of belief, of speech, of
organization, and meeting â--after that declaration had been solemnly
promulgated, those who tried to realize these principles have been
treated as rebels, guilty of high treason.
Not only are the representatives of the advanced parties prosecuted for
all they said and did during the years 1906â1907, but even the most
moderate party, the Ocobrists, who take their standpoint on the letter
of the October manifesto, are treated by the officials, high and low, of
M. Stolypinâs Government as preaching treasonable doctrines. The only
political party which has hitherto received the Czarâs personal
approval, and is recognized by him as loyal, is the Union of the Russian
Men; but, as it now appears from revelations which have at last reached
the Law Courts, this party has not only taken a lively part in the
organization of pogroms against the Jews, and the âintellectualsâ in
general, but its President is now indicted before a Criminal Court on
the charge of instigating and paying for the murder of Herzenstein, a
member of the First Duma, who was considered as the best financial
authority in matters concerning the peasants. He is similarly charged
with complicity in the murder of M. Yollos, another respected member of
the same Duma, also an authority on matters affecting the peasantry.[1]
As regards the present Ministry, it has declared itself during recent
debates in the Duma incapable of governing the country without
maintaining the state of siege over portions of Russia. This system,
however, has lately been so much extended that at this moment nearly
two-thirds of the provinces of the Russian Empire have been placed under
the rule of specially nominated Governors-General, who have been given
almost dictatorial powers, including the right of putting people to
death without trial, and without even sending them before a Court
Martial. This unheard-of right was confirmed lately by a decision of the
First Department of the Senate, which has recognized that in the
provinces where a state of siege has been declared such a power of life
and death without trial was actually conferred upon the
Governors-General by the decree of the Czar ordaining the rules to be
followed during a state of siege.
At the same time it is the policy of the present Government to institute
prosecutions against all those who, during the years 1905â1907, taking
the words of the Imperial Manifesto in their proper sense, had acted in
conformity with those words, considering that the nation had been really
granted political rights. The publishers of books, which were issued in
those years by the hundred and which at that time were held to have
satisfied the rules of censorship, are now prosecuted on the ground of
having committed breaches of the law and are condemned to one and two
yearsâ imprisonment in a fortress. Organizers of meetings and speakers
who were expressing ideas absolutely lawful from a constitutional point
of view are now prosecuted as revolutionists. Organizers of armed
resistance against pogroms (Jew-baiting) are now treated as
revolutionists of the worst description, and an uninterrupted succession
of trials is directed against men of peaceful life for what is now
described as a breach of the law, but was quite constitutional two years
ago. In fact, it may be said, as it is said in the Press of Russia
itself, that these prosecutions can be described only as the revenge of
bureaucracy for all that was said during those months against its
misrule. These prosecutions, of which a few examples will be given in
this statement, are increasing so fast in number that it is feared that
all liberal-minded men in Russia, however moderate their opinions, will
in turn be arraigned before military and other exceptional Courts if the
present régime continues.
Another feature of the present state of things is the large number of
prosecutions which are a direct result of the work of agents
provocateurs like the well-known Azeff. Much prominence was lately given
to the Azeff affair, and it was indeed a remarkable discovery that a man
who had taken most active part in the organization of the murder of the
Minister of the Interior, Von Plehve, in July, 1904, of the Grand Duke
Sergius in 1905, and of General Bogdanovitch at Ufa, had organized all
these plots with the knowledge and partly with the money of the Russian
secret police, or at least of that part of that police which has for its
special mission the Okhrana (âProtectionâ) of the Emperor himself. But
the Azeff scandals are only the most striking of many other scandals
which have been lately discovered. Indeed, it has been proved by the
materials brought before the First Duma by Prince Ouroussoff that quite
a number of agents provocateurs were in 1905â1906 organizing pogroms of
the Jews, the killing of the intellectuals in Tomsk and in Tver, the
plots against the Governors of the different provinces, and so-called
âexpropriationsâ--that is, extorting money under menace of death. For
these purposes the agents of the police imported from abroad large
quantities of revolutionary literature (as has been proved in the case
of Azeff), and also arms and explosives; or else they organized the
manufacture of bombs within Russia itself, sometimes with money granted
by the head of the Police Department, as was revealed in the Lopukhin
case.
The policy of the Government of M. Stolypin having been for the last two
years to wreak vengeance on those who took any active part in the
liberation movement that followed the Manifesto of October 30, 1905, it
is easy to conceive what masses of people have been arrested, brought
before the Courts, transported to Siberia, or exiled to different parts
of the Empire by simple administrative orders. The result is, that the
prisons of Russia are so overcrowded at the present moment that they
contain, according to official statements, something like 181,000
prisoners, although the utmost capacity for which they were designed is
only 107,000. But as there are several provinces in which the arrests
were especially numerous, we learn from the official statements made in
the Duma during the discussion on the Prisons Budget, that there are
lock-ups and transfer prisons in which the number of prisoners is three
to four times as great as their holding capacity. The consequence of
this overcrowding is that the prison administration finds it absolutely
impossible to supply to their inmates even the small degree of sanitary
accommodation which is ordained by law. Typhus has spread in alarming
proportions in the prisons of the Empire, and its presence has already
declared itself in 65 provinces out of 100.
In most of these overcrowded prisons the inmates have absolutely no beds
or bedding; and in many not even the wooden platforms along the walls
which were formerly used. They sleep on the bare floor without any
covering or bedding but the old, worn-out clothing, literally full of
vermin, which is delivered to them by the prison administration. Under
such conditions it is impossible to speak of any sanitary arrangements.
The sufferers from typhus and scurvy lie side by side with the other
prisoners, and it is only when prisoner is in a dying condition that he
is removed to some hospital. Cases are known of typhoid patients being
brought on stretchers before the Court and sent back by the judges. A
man was hanged while suffering from typhus, and having a temperature of
104°.
All this leads necessarily to acts of rebellion among the prisoners,
which in their turn lead to repression in the most abominable form, and
to wholesale shootings. Brutality of the worst kind has become quite
habitual in all the lock-ups, and appalling facts will be found in the
documents which I produce further on. Even men who are condemned to be
executed are horribly beaten before they are taken to the scaffold, so
that in one of the Moscow Courts Martial a man, condemned to be hanged,
had to apply to President of the Court for his promise that he should
not be beaten to death before execution. The promise in this case was
kept, but as a rule the tortures to which men condemned to death are
submitted before the execution takes place are so horrible that in a
considerable and steadily growing number of cases of suicide the men who
were ready to face death calmly could not face the tortures that
preceded it. As to the number of death sentences pronounced by the
Military Courts and the executions, they are not on the decrease, as M.
Stolypin informed Mr. W. T. Stead in July, 1908. They remain stationary,
although there is a decided diminution in the number of acts of violence
committed by the revolutionists, and in crime altogether (see Chapter
III.).
Last summer a discussion took place in the Times with regard to the
number of exiles transported to different parts of the Empire by
Administrative Order, and it was stated by one of the refugees in London
that, contrary to M. Stolypinâs affirmation that their number did not
exceed 12,000, there were no less than 78,000 prisoners under those
conditions. The Duma lately called on the Department of Police to supply
exact figures, and the figures given by the Department were 74,000. The
state of these exiles is even more dreadful than has been described in
the English Press. It is exaggeration to say that in certain parts of
North-Eastern Siberia the position of the exiles is simply desperate,
and it is not to be wondered at that acts of rebellion, such as were
lately heard of in Turukhansk, should take place.
In short, if the present conditions had to be described in a few words,
it might be said that while the agricultural population and the workmen
in the towns have been raised to a certain conception of individual
self-respect, and while aspirations towards a more human treatment and
increased liberty have spread far and wide over the country, we find, on
the other hand, among the bureaucracy, high and low, and among its
inferior agents in the villages, a real spirit of hatred and cruel
revenge against the slightest manifestation of love for freedom, the
result being that the relations between the population and the ruling
classes have become extremely strained all over Russia. At the same time
large numbers are being driven to despair by the arbitrary acts of the
lower agents of the Government in the villages and in the small
provincial towns. There is at the present time a scarcity of grain in
many provinces of European Russia and Siberia, and even famine prevails;
but the Government has ordered all the arrears in the payment of taxes
and in repayment of previous famine loans to be levied at once, and this
is done now, notwithstanding the famine, with a severity which has long
been unknown. For the smallest arrears of a few shillings the property
of peasant families is sold at auctions, at which the police authorities
are the only bidders; cattle, horses, and even the stores of grain and
the coming crops are thus sold for a few shillings to some village
police official, who afterwards sells them back to the ruined peasant
for three or four times the price he has paid.
Moreover, it is estimated that there are now at least something like
700,000 peasants and working men in European Russia alone who have been
thrown out of their regular mode of life during the last two years, in
consequence of repression after strikes and the like, and who at the
present time are mere outlaws wandering from one city to another,
compelled to conceal themselves under false names, and without any
possibility of returning to their native places and to their previous
occupations. There are nearly three-quarters of a million persons whom
only a general amnesty would permit to return to regular life and
regular earnings.
Such is the condition of Russia, as every one may ascertain for himself
from the numerous documents out of which abstracts are given in the
following pages.
Earnest appeal is therefore made to all those to whom human progress is
dear to use all the weight of their influence to put an end to this
reign of White Terror under which that country now lies. It is well
known from history that the White Terror such as was seen in the
twenties the last century in France after the return of the Bourbons, in
Italy before 1859, and later on in Turkey, has never restored
tranquility in a country. It only paves the way for new disturbances, it
spreads in the country a feeling of utter contempt for human life, it
induces habits of violence, and beyond question it would be to the
interest of humanity as a whole, and of progress in general, that the
state of affairs which now prevails in Russia should be brought to an
end.
Numbers of Prisoners. Overcrowding.--From an official document
communicated to the State Council on March 15, 1909, by the
administration of the prisons, it appears that on February 1, 1909,
there were in the lock-ups of the Empire 181,137 inmates. This figure,
however, does not include those prisoners who are in transportation, and
the numbers of whom are estimated officially at about 30,000. Nor does
it include an immense number of persons detained at the police lock-ups,
both in the towns and in the villages. No approximate idea as to the
number of this last category can be obtained, but it has been suggested
in the Russian Press that it may be anything between 50,000 and 100,000.
The worst is that it is especially in the Police lock-ups that the
ill-treatment of the prisoners is the most awful. The famous torture
chambers of Grinn at Warsaw, and Gregus at Riga (both condemned by
courts) were precisely police lock-ups.
The number of inmates in the prisons has been growing steadily for the
last four years. In 1905 the average daily figure for all the prisons of
the Empire was 85,000 ; it reached 111,000 in 1906 ; 138,000 in 1907 ;
170,000 in 1908, and on February 1, 1909, it was 181,137. The holding
capacity of all the prisons of the Empire being only 107,000 persons,
overcrowding is the necessary result, and in some places there are from
three to four times more inmates than the prison could possibly contain
under normal conditions. The result of this overcrowding is that scurvy
and typhus have developed in an alarming proportion, and that, as has
been said in the Introduction, nothing is done to prevent the epidemic
from spreading over all the prisons of Russia. Unfortunately, it must
also be said that the leniency with which countless complaints about
brutal treatment in prisons has been met by the Ministry, and the
continual release, by personal orders of the Emperor, of those prison
officials who have been condemned by the Russian Courts to imprisonment
for the brutal treatment of the prisoners, seem to have created among
the prison authorities the idea that in tormenting the prisoners they
act in accordance with the wishes of the Government. The Ministry of the
Interior, as seen from the debates in the Duma, is fully aware, through
the official reports addressed to it by the prison governors, of the
terrible overcrowding in some of the lock-ups and of the resulting
epidemics. But it takes no measures to prevent either the overcrowding
or the spread of these epidemics among the prisoners.
Even in the great prisons like the Butyrki prison of Moscow, within a
few hours of the Ministry of the Interior, even in this prison we are
informed by the members of the Duma who have served their time in it,
the dress and the linen delivered to the prisoners are falling to pieces
; even in the pillows, which are filled with straw, the straw is changed
only once a year. No mattresses are delivered, not even pieces of felt
to lie upon, and no blankets ; fresh new linen is delivered only when
the visit of a member of the superior administration is expected.[2]
In this prison, which contains 1,300 hard-labor convicts, one-half of
whom are politicals, the rooms, which are each twelve paces long by five
wide, contain twenty-five prisoners, and the time allowed for taking
fresh air is only minutes. Out of the inmates placed on the sick list,
65 percent. are attacked by scurvy ; they remain in the common rooms,
all in chains, and are continually beaten and thrashed by the warders.
After having beaten a man they will put him into the Black Hole; and the
deputies of the Duma imprisoned in this place write about a man
Chertetsoff, who, after being beaten for seven days in succession, went
mad and died three days later.[3]
The same prison has become such a nest of infection that at a special
meeting of the Committee of the Sanitary Inspectors of Moscow on the
2^(nd) of March, 1909, it was stated that during the week, from the
15^(th) to the 20^(th) of February, no less than 70 men were taken ill
with recurrent typhus. The illness has been spread to the barracks of
the sappers by the men who kept guard in the prison, and ten deaths have
already taken place there. The Committee concluded that it was
absolutely necessary to improve the food of the prisoners ; but this is
precisely what the prison authorities will not admit.
The lock-up of the First Don District (province of Don Cossacks) was
built for 50 inmates--it contains 205 ; a room, 14 feet long, 10 feet
wide, and 8 feet high, with only two windows, contains 26 prisoners. In
the Kostroma prison, which was built for 200 persons, there are 400
prisoners. Each prisoner has, as a rule, less than 170 cubic feet of air
space, and the allowance has never attained 240 cubic feet (which would
mean 3 feet by 8 feet in a room 10 feet high. The rooms are full of
parasites. In the Kamenetz prison, built for 400 persons, there are 800
inmates. Each room, calculated for 20 persons, contains 40.
From the Vyatka Transfer prison, one of the chief transfer prisons on
the highway to Siberia, a prisoner writes as follows:--
âWe are kept, from 60 to 70 of us, in rooms calculated to hold 30 to 40
persons only. There are no beds, not even those sleeping platforms which
formerly were used instead of beds in Russian prisons. We all sleep on
the bare floor, and no blankets are supplied. The damp is awful, and the
rooms are full of parasites. The politicals are kept together with the
common law convicts. The food [which is described in full] is execrable.
All meals are served within the space of four hours, and for 20 hours we
remain without food, shut up in our rooms, with windows tightly
fastened, and are not allowed to go out of our rooms for any reason
whatever.â[4]
At the Ekaterinodar prison in the Caucasus, as has been stated by the
town authorities at a meeting held on the 5^(th) of April last, there is
room for 360 prisoners ; but the jail contains 1,200 inmates, out of
whom 500 are ill with eruptive typhus. The hospital accommodation is for
80 persons only, the remainder continue to lie with the others in the
common rooms. The governor of the prison also fell ill with eruptive
typhus.[5]
With regard to the Tiflis central prison in the Mehteh Castle, 403
political and common law prisoners detained there have lately written to
the Duma deputy, M. Tcheidze, in the name of 840 inmates of that
terrible fortress, complaining of the most abominable sanitary
conditions and the unlimited brutality of the prison authorities. Four
men been shot during the last month by the sentinels for having
approached the windows, the order issued by the commander of the castle
in January last being : âShoot without any warning at the slightest
uproar, and as soon as a prisoner approaches the window aim at the head
so as to occasion death.â[6]
Last year it became known that several prisons were nests of typhus
infection. Thus the Ekaterinoslav zemstvo repo that the Lugansk prison
was a breeding-place of typhus for the city and the whole district. In
the Kieff prison, which was built for 500 inmates but contains 2,000,
the typhus epidemic began already in 1908, and soon in this old
building, renowned for its typhus epidemics since 1882, hundreds of men
were laid down with typhus. The infirmary, which has accommodation for
95 persons only, contained 339 sick prisoners, the average space which
the patients were enjoying being only 210 cubic feet per person (3 feet
by 7 feet by 10 feet). The mortality was appalling. From the prison the
epidemic spread to the city of Kieff, with the result that the official
figures for Kieff for the year 1908 were 9,150 cases of typhus, out of
which 2,188 were in the prison.[7]
The head of the prison administration, M. Hruleff, having sent his
special commissioner, M. Von Bötticher, to report about the condition of
the prisons in the provinces of Kieff, Podolia, and Volhynia, the
Commissioner has now sent in a report concerning the Lukoyanoff prison
of the province of Kieff. Nearly 2,500 prisoners have died from typhus
alone in this old prison--about five hundred every year. In January last
there were 222 typhus cases in this prison and 423 in February.[8] The
great development of typhus is due to over-crowding, the prison, which
has been built for 600 inmates, containing regularly 1,800.[9]
During last winter the epidemic appeared almost everyhere. In Pyatigorsk
it appeared in January ; in Perm in February. It was eruptive typhus,
and the chief doctor of the zemstvo infirmary, M. VinogrĂĄdoff, died on
February 2^(nd), after having been infected while he received in the
infirmary 18 typhus patients brought from the local prison.[10] In
February 70 persons had already died, but the prison administration, as
the ex-member of the Duma, M. Polétaeff, writes to the St. Petersburg
papers, refused even to permit the prisoners to improve their food at
their own expense.[11] Many soldiers and warders were infected in their
turn, and another prison doctor, Pilipin, and two warders, as also
several soldiers of the military garrison, died from typhus.
In the government of Ekaterinoslav the prisons of Lugan and Bakhmut (a
prison which was built for 50 persons, but had 350 inmates) soon were
infected. In a few weeks the number of typhus patients in this last
prison reached 54, and 100 a few days later.[12] In the capital of the
province, at Ekaterinoslav, where 1,317 persons were kept in a building
that had been built for 300 inmates, typhus was raging. There were 130
patients in February, 235 in March. There appeared also cholera, which
was due to the rotten food distributed to the prisoners and to
contaminated water.[13]
In Poltava typhus has raged since November last, and continues still. In
the province of Kursk the typhus epidemic broke out in seven different
jails ; in the provincial prison all sick continued to be kept in
chains, and they were transported in this way to the zemstvo infirmary ;
16 warders all fell ill. In Simpheropol there were in February 86 cases
of recurrent typhus and 3 of eruptive typhus ; in March there were 200
cases, and the epidemic showed no signs of abatement.
The same ravages were apparent in the prisons of Kherson, Zenkoff,
Radomysl, Berdichef, and several other towns of South-West Russia.[14]
The same in Warsaw (where the prison of the Praga suburb was built for
150 inmates but contained 400 and all the prisoners slept on the bare
floor),[15] at Minsk, in Vyazma, government of Smolensk, where 37
prisoners out of 139 and 3 warders out of 10 were stricken by
typhus.[16]
Orel, Nijni-Novgorod, Totma, &c., &c., are now in the same condition,
and finally in the great Butyrki prison of Moscow there were 70 new
typhus cases during one week, from February 22^(nd) to March 1^(st).
Only later in March an abatement of the epidemic was reported.[17]
At Simpheropol 30 typhus patients are reported; in the childrenâs
reformatory of Ekaterinoslav, 14 boys out of 19 are stricken with
typhus. At the Uman and Berdichef jails, no more prisoners are received
on account of the terrible epidemic which is raging in these
prisons.[18]
The relatives of the political inmates of the Perm prison wrote to the
Duma deputy of that province, asking him to do something for them. The
prison administration does not allow any additional food to be given to
the typhus patients.
There are three cases on record--two of them at Kharkoff and one at
Ekaterinoslav--of persons ill with typhus who have been brought before
the Courts during their illness. Thus, in the first days of April last,
two men accused of robbery were brought before the Court Martial of
Kharkoff. Seeing that one of them was quite unable to answer the
questions, having not yet recovered from a second attack of recurrent
typhus--he was looking like a corpse--the President of the Court asked
the Prosecutor to postpone the prosecution, and added : âThere is no
need to call a doctor ; you have only to look yourself at that man.â The
Public Prosecutor, after having approached the prisoner, withdrew his
accusation, and the man was returned to the prison.[19]
On February 26^(th) the Court Martial, sitting at Ekaterinoslav, was
also compelled to interrupt its sitting because one of the lawyers drew
the attention of the Court to the fact that one of the prisoners brought
before them was ill with typhus. A doctor was called in, the temperature
of the prisoner was 104°, and he was returned to the prison.
In St. Petersburg it happened in the beginning of March last, that when
a party Of 75 prisoners was brought by rail to this city, several of
them were ill with typhus. They were sent to the transfer prison, but
there being no room to receive the new-comers, they had to lie all the
night on the floor in the passages.[20] Equally bad accounts are given
of the typhus epidemic in the Kursk, Penza, Tver, Tchembar, and several
other prisons. In this last prison the typhus patients were kept
together with all the others in the common rooms. The prison doctor, M.
Jimsen, died from typhus.[21]
Private persons and societies for the aid of prisoners are prevented
from doing anything to improve the food of the prisoners, and according
to the paper Novaya Russ, the Minister of Justice has forbidden the
prison authorities to give any information concerning the health of
their inmates.
Mode of Transfer of Typhus Patients to an Infirmary.--The following
statement, made by a lady in Central Russia and published in the Review
Russkoye Bogatstvo, edited by Korolenko, is typical :--
âLast summer we were occasionally in the yard of the infirmary of our
zemstvo. I saw two carts entering the yard, accompanied by soldiers.
Approaching these carts, I saw that they contained typhoid patients who
had been brought to the infirmary from the prison. It was a dreadful
sight, and made my hair stand on end. One can hardly believe that in the
twentieth century, with our present civilization, men could be treated
in such a way and brought in such a condition. The men, all unconscious,
laid like logs in the cart, knocking their heads against its wooden
frame. They had not even put a handful of straw under their heads. The
men were lying almost one upon the other. Some were in the last agony ;
two of them died an hour or one and a half hours later. All of them were
in chains. I saw how the two dead were carried to the chapel--both were
fettered. I asked why the chains had not been taken from the dead; it
would have been done if they were dogs. They replied that the chains can
be taken off only after the death certificate has been signed by the
prison doctor. Later on I learned that the typhus patients were kept in
the very same room with the others. In our infirmary special rooms were
prepared for the typhus prisoners, and warders were brought from the
prison to watch them. Accustomed continually to beat the prisoners,
these warders began to do the same in the infirmary, so that the zemstvo
authorities had to interfere, but, I am afraid, in vain ; they continued
to do on a small scale what they had been used to do on a large scale in
the prison.â[22]
Many pages could be covered with the description of the ill-treatment
and the tortures in different prisons of Russia. Only some striking
instances, however, can be mentioned here.
It is known through the daily Press that there were so many complaints
about the misrule of the head of the Moscow police, General Rheinbot,
that a special Commission was sent out by the Senate, under Senator
Garin, to inquire into the affair. The head of the police just mentioned
has been dismissed ; perhaps he will be brought before a Court, and
striking instances arising out of his misrule have already been
communicated more or less officially to the daily Press.[23] Thus, one
of the witnesses, M. Maximoff, examined by the Commission, who had been
kept in one of the lock-ups the Moscow police, deposed as follows:--
âHere I saw the most brutal treatment of the arrested people. The
policemen used to beat those whom they would arrest as much as they
liked....It was terrible to live there day by day, and to think that
either I would be killed too, or I myself would perhaps become a
murderer in resisting these men....They used to beat people in an awful
way, sometimes quite innocent men, such, for instance, as an official of
the Institution of the Empress Marie, Andrei Gavrilovitch Surkoff. He
refused to enter a dark room where they wanted to put him, so they began
to beat him with the butt-ends of their rifles, on the head, in the
stomach,...everywhere. Finally, he grew wild and seized the nose of the
secret agent, Orloff, with his teeth. Only then did they stop. It was
then ten oâclock, and at midnight he had been sent to lunatic asylum,
and as far as I know he is quite mad by this time.â
The names of the agents of the secret police who used thus to treat
prisoners are given in full by the witness. The same witness describes a
most terrible case of a woman who was arrested on suspicion of robbery ;
she would not declare herself guilty.
âThe agent of the secret police, Lyndin, was examining a young woman
suspected of robbery. She explained how she and the watchman were tied
by the robbers. Lyndin did not believe her, and began to beat her with
his fists in the breast, so that blood flowed from her mouth, and she
fell in a swoon ; a few hours later she had a terrible internal
hĂŠmorrhage. We saw that beating and we could not stand it. I shouted to
Lyndin: âScoundrel that you are why do you kill a human being?â
Whereupon he took out his revolver and threatened to shoot me, but I and
another prisoner began to break the partition which separated us. Then
they stopped the beating. Three days later they arrested the real
robbers, and it was discovered that the woman was absolutely innocent.â
It is very seldom that such facts are brought before the Courts. Still
it happens occasionally, and then the most scandalous state of affairs
is sometimes revealed. Thus in Alexandria, government of Kherson, the
present head of the Investigation Department of the police of this
district, a certain Tchernyavsky, while he was not yet promoted to that
post and was a simple police officer, aided by several prisoners whom he
had trained to be his executioners, actually tortured the common law
prisoners under arrest. At last the fact leaked out, and the governor of
the province ordered an inquiry to be held, whereupon a long succession
of witnesses came to testify that they had been fearfully beaten in
prison while they were under arrest, and not only beaten, but their hair
was pulled out, wounds were inflicted by sharp needles, even the fire
torture was resorted to. A medical examination of these witnesses fully
confirmed the fact that several of them had broken ribs, broken
tympanums, and other serious wounds. However, Tchernyavsky was not
dismissed from prison service ; he was only transferred to the political
Investigation Department. The inquiry, however, is continuing, and there
is a vague hope that this time the affair may not be hushed up.[24]
In March, 1909, in the city of Dvinsk, the police official Leiko and two
of his subordinates were prosecuted for tortures practiced at the
police-station.[25] But the prosecutions are of no use, as all these
torturers know well that they have the full approval of the Union of
Russian Men, and as soon as this Union applies to the Czar, asking him
to pardon them, they will be pardoned.
At VorĂłnezh, on March 5^(th) last, the prisoner KatasĂĄnoff, who had been
brought to the psychial hospital of the zemstvo, died from wounds
inflicted upon him by the local prison administration.[26]
Tortures are so habitual in the EkaterinoslĂĄv prison that according to
the testimony of M. AntĂłnoff, who was kept in that prison and has
related his experiences in the St. Petersburg newspaper Ryech, November
21, 1908, âbeating and thrashing of the prisoners was continued even
upon those who were to be executed in a few days. Thus, the prisoner
Gutmacher was beaten with sticks and thrown on the floor, and kicked by
the warders down to the very day when he was hanged.â This is so
habitual that the ex-deputy of the Second Duma, M. Lomtatidze, in a
letter which he wrote to the members of the present Duma and which was
reproduced by all the Russian newspapers, communicated following fact:--
âSuch treatment,â he wrote, âhas become so habitual that one
anarchist-communist, SinkĂłff, having been condemned to death, applied to
the President of the Court Martial, asking him to co communicate with
the respective prison authorities to ensure that he, SinkĂłff, should not
be beaten before being hanged, and he promised, in his turn, to march to
the scaffold without saying a word, a without bidding his last farewell
to the other prisoners. The President of the Court Martial promised to
do so, and I think kept his word.â[27]
The daily Russian papers having mentioned several cases of ill-treatment
of the prisoners, especially in the AlgachĂ and AkatĂși prisons of
Eastern Siberia, as also the ill-treatment of prisoners in the
SchlĂŒssellburg, where they are kept in chains, even in those cases in
which this is contrary to law, and the cold in the cells is so intense
that the prisoners cannot sleep otherwise than in their sheepskins, the
head of the prison administration, M. Khruleff, has lately issued a
circular, in which he forbids the prison authorities to treat the
prisoners brutally, as they are doing; but this circular will evidently
remain a dead letter. In the meantime the prisoners are resorting to the
only means of protest which they have at their disposal, that is, the
famine strike, which consists refusing to take any food. Such a strike
took place in April last at the St. Petersburg House of Correction,
where six hundred prisoners refused all food for a number of days, and
in Kresty prison, also at St. Petersburg.
In Tobolsk, on March 18, 1908, thirteen prisoners were hanged for an
âinsurrection.â The head of the military guard, however, told the Court
that there was absolutely no insurrection whatever, and that, if he had
been allowed to do so, he would have taken all the prisoners to the
punishment cells without the slightest resistance on their part; but the
warders jumped upon them, using their rifles and shooting them down.
This was the cause of the scuffle which followed, and for which thirteen
men have been executed.
One of the most scandalous affairs took place in the Astrakhan prison;
it has been brought before a Court, and therefore its details have
become known. The governor of that prison was a certain Schéffer. One of
the prisoners, IvÂŽnoff, was killed by the warders. The prison doctor
gave a testimony of natural death, and the man was buried. However,
SchĂ©fferâs assistant, M. Pribylovsky, protested, and intended to bring
the affair before a Court. The result was that he was found killed on
March 9^(th) last in a street of Astrakhan. Then the assistant of the
head of the police, a certain YermakĂłff, a friend of the man killed,
began a prosecution for this last murder; it so happened that he had
seen the assassins, and when he came to the office of the head of the
police, RakhmĂĄninoff, he discovered in one of the agents of RakhmĂĄninoff
(the agent appointed to watch the revolutionary socialists) the assassin
of SchĂ©fferâs assistant. He wanted to arrest him, but RakhmĂĄninoff made
the man disappear. Shortly after that another agent of RakhmĂĄninoff
burned himself in a cell, and RakhmĂĄninoff himself was found dead in the
lodgings of the governor of the province. This mysterious affair was
told at full length in a signed article in the newspaper Ryech, April
19, 1909.
âEvery moment we expect some terrible scene of wholesale beating to
break out, and we continually have poison in readiness,â one of the
inmates of a great prison in Siberia writes to her friends.
Last April all those thirteen prisoners who had been condemned to death
at the Alexandrovsk prison of the government of Irkutsk, shared in equal
parts the poison which they had obtained, in order to swallow it the
moment the death sentences would have been confirmed by the
Governor-General.
In March last, in the Kursk prison, out of three persons condemned to
death, one vainly tried to kill his two other comrades, and finally
succeeded in killing himself.[28]
In the Tambof prison, when the Court Martial was sitting last March, and
continually pronounced death sentences, there were five attempts at
suicide in the prison. Two of them were successful.[29]
All these facts have received a wide publicity in the Russian Press, and
through the interpellations in the Duma, as also during the discussions
which took place in the Duma when the Prison Budget was under
discussion.
Thus on March 16, 1909, when the official figures about the overcrowding
of the prisons were received by the Duma, it became evident that the
sudden increase of the prison population during the last three years was
the reason why an epidemic of typhus is now raging in almost every
Russian prison, and almost every town. The Director of the Russian
Prison Department admitted in the Duma the fact of the existence of
typhus epidemics as well as cases of ill-treatment. He added, however,
that his Department is energetically combating these evils. But
nevertheless the overcrowding of prisons continues.
âThe prison population,â said the Deputy Gherasimoff at the sitting of
March 22, 1909, âhas increased during the last year alone by 100,000
persons.â With regard to the treatment during the Duma debates of the
prisoners, it was mentioned how often the political prisoners were
beaten by the warders. In the Vladimir prison five âpoliticalsâ were
flogged. In the Ekaterinoslav prison the above-mentioned fact about the
ill-treatment of Gutmacher, who was tortured after being condemned to
death, and beaten with sticks before the execution took place, was
confirmed in the Duma. Not only men but women, not excluding invalids,
are beaten in the prisons. In the Kostroma prison, the prisoner
Phillipof, for having thrown some crumbs out of the window, was put in a
strait-waistcoat and beaten to death. âOur prisons,â concluded the
Deputy Gherasimov, âare places where humanity is outraged, and where
crime is born and bred.â
Finally, on April 7 (20), 1909, after having received from the
Sevastopol prison a long letter from the Duma Deputy, Lomtatidze, in
which he described in what a terrible way men were executed day after
day under his very windows, and after having reproduced this letter in
full in their interpellation the Social Democratic section of the Duma
addressed to the Prime Minister the following questions:--
âIs it known to the President of the Council of the Ministers--
â(1) That in the Sevastopol prison those who are condemned to death are
systematically submitted to beating and all sorts of tortures before the
death sentence is executed?
â(2) That executions take place even when the condemned man is
unconscious, as was the case with a certain Vogt, who was ill with
typhus and had a temperature of 40 degrees Centigrade (104 degrees
Fahrenheit)?
â(3) That these abominations take place under the very windows of the
infirmary, which renders still worse the condition of prisoners under
treatment?
âAnd if this is known, what measures does the President of the Council
intend to take to put an end to such cases and to prosecute the guilty
persons?â[30]
The letter of the Duma Deputy Lomtatidze, having been translated in full
in the Daily News of April 13, 1909, it suffices to mention only the
following facts:--
During less than one year (the past year) 70 persons were executed in
the prison hospital yard within five yards of his window (one of the
hospital windows). The scaffold is clearly seen from the hospital. There
are now awaiting execution, 15 condemned prisoners, and 90 awaiting
sentence.
The prisoners are continually beaten till they are half unconscious, and
are often executed in this state.
A certain prisoner named Vogt, though he was ill with typhoid, was taken
from his bed and dragged to execution while in a delirious state. M.
Lomtatidze adds: âPerhaps this was better, but on me this execution has
produced the deepest impression of all.â
The soldiers have been ordered to shoot at the prisoners as soon as
there is any noise in the cells, and as the cries of those who are being
beaten and pinioned prior to execution are heard, it is inevitable that
the other prisoners should cry out, or even call âFarewellâ to those
comrades who are being dragged to the scaffold.[31]
On May 16, 1909, the Social Democrat section brought once more the wide
question of prisons before the Duma.[32]
Even as they are reported in the papers it would be too long to quote
here the debates in full. Therefore, only a few of the main facts are
stated, each of which has been carefully verified before being brought
before the Duma.
All the cases already stated before the Duma, when questions were put
regarding the Ekaterinoslav and Sebastopol prisons--said the Social
Democratic Deputy--go to prove that there we have to deal âwith a
carefully organized system of political revenge on a limited circle of
persons.â
In the Orel county prison the physical ill-treatment of prisoners began
in the end of 1907, and during 1908 it acquired the aspect of an
organized system.
The prisoners are here beaten terribly, till a state of unconsciousness
supervenes, and they are half dead. In December, 1907, the assistant of
the prison governor--a certain Levitsky--when receiving a prisoner,
announced: âWe have been given a free hand, do you understand? We will
go scot-free. If I choose I can shoot you like a dog...!â During 1907
the prisoners were continually beaten. The same continued during the
past year.
A prisoner who petitioned the governor Tchijov, in the name of other
prisoners, for some small thing, was taken to a special cell and beaten
in a horrible way in the presence of the chief warder. He was beaten by
a warder and by the head of the hospital. In his own cell he was again
beaten by a warder.
Last year in May a note was found and this was attributed (not proved)
to a certain prisoner Akoutin. He was then put in irons--hands and
feet--and taken to the âlightâ cell No. 2 (where prisoners are beaten
chiefly). A mad orgy of punishment took place. He was thrown senseless
on the asphalt floor. Thence the warders were forced to take hi to the
hospital ward, where in a few days he died.
A fourteen yearsâ old boy was terribly beaten and put in irons by order
of the governor. There was no reason for this, as the boy had just been
brought from another prison.
The warders beat also the companion of the boy, with whom he had
arrived, on the head till he was senseless, and then dragged him about
the cell, playing football his senseless body. The first boy had to
watch this. One of the chief warders became so lively at this game of
football that the others, fearing he would kill the prisoner, called on
him to desist.
In the Orel central hard-labor prison the prisoners were and are
continually beaten. Latterly the cases of a Socialist Revolutionist
Dyakoff and a Moscow lawyer Zhdanoff have come to light. The former was
mercilessly beaten. Zhdanoff had handed in some petition for the
procureur. He was called up to the procureur, who insulted him. When
Zhdanoff returned to his cell, the beating began. He was beaten so
terribly that the warders decided they had killed him. This was reported
to the assistant of the governor. When the assistant arrived, he began
to swear at the warders that they had âkilled a prisoner without
permission.â Then they saw that the prisoner still breathed. He was
taken to the hospital; when he had revived he was taken back to solitary
confinement, where he is now and where he is being beaten every few
days. The warders say openly, âYou wonât live long.â
Prisoners are brought to this prison from other prisons for
âcorrectionâ--rather for murder. Even the soldier-guards speak with
horror and terror of what happens within these walls.
The procureur never visits the prison, and though the treatment of
prisoners was brought to his knowledge through his Deputy, and the
latter promised that a legal inquiry should be made, of course nothing
has been done.
Evidence was then read to the Duma concerning the Tobolsk hard-labor
prison. It is similar to the above.
In the Boutyrki prison in Moscow the prisoners are continually stripped
and searched, the warders pushing their filthy hands into the prisonersâ
mouths. The cases of beating and the Black Hole punishment are endless.
Here are a few cases:--
A prisoner was slow in taking off his cap to the governorâs assistant.
The assistant snatched off the cap and gave the prisoner a furious blow
in the ribs. The warders constantly beat the prisoners.
One prisoner had his temple smashed by a blow given with a pair of
handcuffs.
A sailor was so beaten in July, 1908, that he committed suicide.
Real tortures take place in the Black Hole and in the âsecretâ cells.
âEnter with a lamp into this cell,â writes a prisoner, âand the black
patches of coagulated blood will tell you what happens in the Black
Hole.â
Recently a prisoner, officially reported perfectly healthy previous to
this, died three days after illtreatment in the Black Hole.
A prisoner, acknowledged insane, was terribly beaten and flogged.
One prisoner in the hospital struck a warder during a fit. He was
strapped with leather thongs to his cot for seven days. These straps
were neither removed nor loosened for one single moment for any need
during seven days and seven nights. His right arm has now become
paralyzed.
Another prisoner was bound to his cot in a similar way in his cell for
five days, during which time he was unconscious.
The sick and healthy are herded together.
Every day there are new cases of prisoners becoming mentally deranged.
The officials choose to consider most of these cases âshamming,â and
many such prisoners commit suicide.
Those prisoners who are violent are kept strapped in their cots for
whole days, where they lie in a state of untold filth.
Sixty-five per cent. of the prisoners are suffering from scurvy, and
their fetters cut into their swollen legs. The death-rate is enormous.
The consumptives die in fetters in the crowded cells, with other
prisoners looking on.
In Tiflis, in the fortress, the governor issued, in January of this
year, the order that âany prisoner approaching a window is to be shot at
without warning, and the head is to be aimed at so that there may be no
wounded.â As the air is unbearable the prisoners inevitably approach the
windows. This order is a sure way of getting rid of prisoners.
In one day one was killed and two wounded in the same cell.
On April 3^(rd) a youth aged 20 was shot. This prisoner had been brought
to Tiflis from Moscow in view of his serious state of health.
There are other numerous cases.
In Ekaterinoslav, the Duma Deputies said, there are 192 prisoners ill
with typhoid, and the number is growing. There is one sanitary officer
who nurses all these sick. The doctor visits them twice a week.
The death-rate is enormous; the typhoid patients remain fettered.
In Bachmut, a prison for 84, which now holds 350 inmates, there are 54
cases of typhus.
A similar communication was received from Pavlograd in April.
Communications have been received from Kieff and Moscow giving the
numbers of typhoid and typhus cases (see above).
Founded on these facts, the Social Democratic Party presented a list of
four questions in which the above facts are put forward. We translate
the fourth question:--
â4. Whether the above-mentioned facts are known to the President of the
Council of Ministers, to the Ministers of Justice, of the Navy, and the
Minister of War ; then what measures have been taken by them for the
protection of the life and health of the prisoners; for the abolition of
the tortures, beating, and murders now practiced; for the prevention of
the insulting and rough behavior of the prison officials, and the
various methods of injury and torture, and also of other unlawful
actions and abuse of the powers given to prison officials, and the
powers of supervision given to the procureur, and what has been done for
the prosecution of guilty persons?â
In aditition to all the above evidence I will give here facts taken from
a detailed inquiry which was made in Russia on behalf of those
interested in the condition of Administrative exiles in Siberia and
Northern Russia. In many prisons and police lock-ups, when the prisoners
were being questioned, guilty or innocent alike were treated with a
violence that made even the innocent confess to crimes that sent them to
the gallows. The prisons of the Baltic provinces and Poland were
specially celebrated for this, but in many other places the same horrors
were committed. Here are a few facts.[33]
At Vilno, when the sessions of the Assize Courts commenced, twenty-six
ordinary (not political) prisoners asked to see the Public Prosecutor,
and informed him of the terrible torture they had undergone in the
County prison.
The Deputy of the Duma--M. Kisileff--received information from twenty
peasants from the KozlĂłff district (government of Tambov) about the
horrible treatment they had received in the KozlĂłff prison. They were
beaten with nagaikas and with rods of iron until they lost
consciousness, then cold water was thrown over them, and when they
regained consciousness the beating was recommenced.
In Ekaterinoslav, at a trial in a Court of justice, the following facts
were attested to. The police, with their chief officer, Trousévitch,
burned the fingers of the prisoners and whipped the soles of their feet
to force confession. Trousévitch was condemned by the Court to one
monthâs arrest, the three policemen to seven daysâ imprisonment, the
others were acquitted.
In prison No. 1 of Tobolsk an underground passage, dug by the prisoners
with a view of making their escape, was discovered. All the prisoners
were put into chains, many were put into the punitive cells, and twelve
âleadersâ were transferred to other prisons. The prisoners began to
protest, upon which the political prisoners, condemned to penal
servitude, were flogged. After that there was a strike in the prison and
the authorities called in troops, by whom, on July 16^(th), one prisoner
was killed, four wounded, and all the others severely injured.
In Novi Marghilan, on February 10, 1907, at a trial concerning an attack
on the house of a rich moneylender and the theft of 50,000 rubles, the
Court Martial condemned three men to death, six to hard labor, and six
were acquitted. The trial was public, and it was proved that during the
preliminary examination the prisoners had been tortured. One prisoner
had kerosene poured over his back, which was set fire to. The burns were
shown in Court. Another prisoner had finely cut up horse-hair forced
into his interior organs.
The demoralizing influence of the âstate of siegeâ tells on the local
administration. The prison authorities of Kazan thought of a new sort of
torment; they tried to incite the common law prisoners to insult
physically and morally the âpoliticalâ women. But they did not succeed.
On February 2, 1907, the common law prisoners demanded to see the Public
Prosecutor, and requested him to draw up a protocol about the manner in
which the authorities treated them and urged them on to harm the
political female prisoners. It was stated in this protocol that the
assistant director of the prison, Goremykin, and the chief inspector
urged the men to violate the political during their walks, for which
rewards were promised.
However, it was above all at Riga that torture flourished. Here are two
facts.[34] A woman--aged about 40--was arrested on the charge of having
helped to conceal criminals. She was sent to the well-known agent of the
police, Oger, and on her arrival thither she was immediately beaten with
nagaikas and indiarubber sticks.[35] A loaded revolver was forced into
her mouth with the threat that she would killed on the spot if she did
not point out the hiding-place of a person the police believed her to
know. A police officer and two policemen tortured her.
The second fact, which was also mentioned in all the leading dailies,
and was not contradicted, was the following: The head of the Secret
Police, Gregus, his assistant, Mihéef, and two spies, Anton and Davos,
were the chief torturers. Before commencing, Davos generally examined
the prisonerâs skin, and would remark, âItâs all right, he can stand
it.â Sixteen anarchists were tried by Court Martial, and it appears that
one of them, GrĂŒnning, had incurred the special hatred of the
detectives. This youth of 23 had had all the hair pulled out of his head
and beard, and several of his ribs were broken. With the butt of a
revolver he had had his head broken and his face so disfigured that he
was unrecognizable. After the torture he was unable to move, and two
warders dragged him to his cell, and flung him down by the door. His
comrades raised him, brought him back to consciousness, and washed his
wounds. His sufferings were terrible; he could neither sit nor lie. But
notwithstanding all this GrĂŒnning did not give the information needed,
and it was only thanks to this that his sentence was fifteen years hard
labor, instead of a death penalty. This sentence was a great surprise to
GrĂŒnning and his comrades. But GrĂŒnning was sent to a punitive battalion
in Livonia, pending a new examination (after a judicial sentence!), and
a week later it became known that he had been shot âby mistake.â The
second victim of the same torturers was Karl Legsdin (Kenin), who was
sentenced to death by a Field Court Martial, and executed. During the
examination he had had his toe-nails torn out, and certain of his organs
so squeezed that right up to his execution he had internal hĂŠmorrhage.
This torture was invented by MihĂ©ef, who was called âa bruteâ even by
his executioner, Davos. The face and body of Legsdin were so frightfully
bruised that he could neither sit nor lie, but had always to stand.[36]
This is what happened in Lodz. For having made an attack on the County
Exchequer on May 30, 1906, four persons were sentenced in Warsaw to
capital punishment, which was later altered to penal servitude. In all,
thirteen persons were accused, and at the preliminary examination they
had all pleaded guilty. At the trial it was proved that while they were
in the Lodz prison they were tortured during several days, they were
beaten with nagaikas till in some places the flesh literally tore off in
pieces ; when they lay helpless on the floor their tormentors jumped
from chairs on to their bodies ; their heads were twisted round, their
pulled out, their teeth broken. After several months the traces of this
treatment were so evident that no denial possible. Under it all the
thirteen prisoners pleaded guilty, but the Court would not take this
confession into consideration and--having no proofs against them--it
completely acquitted nine of them (Sovremennik, July 14, 1906, No. 73).
The Novyi Put (May 8, 1906, No. 106), also stated that in a secret
chamber in Lodz the politicals were tortured ; they were beaten till
they became unconscious, their teeth were pulled out, their heads
pressed by screws till the screws broke their bones, and so on. S.
Sonnenstein, a youth of 18 ; Futterman, a boy of 15 ; and a young girl
of 18, A. Wesen, were all tortured in this way.
Warsaw is also well known for its tortures, and the most important part
there was played by a spy named Grinn. Here is one of many facts.[37]
The four working men, Setchka, Kempsky, Steblinsky, and Savitsky, having
been brought before a Court Martial under the accusation of having
murdered a certain Chaki, a clerk of the Secret Police Department in
Warsaw, were all acquitted, because during the trial the prisoners
declared before the Court that after their arrest they were tortured to
such an extent that they confessed to a crime they had not committed.
The fact was confirmed by Doctor Falz, who had examined their bodies and
found on them the traces of the tortures. It was Grinn who directed and
ordered the tortures. A fifth prisoner went mad during his
âexamination,â and is now in an asylum.
In March, 1908, the Governor of Bessarabia dismissed a police officer,
Obnimsky, and the head of the district police in Soroki, Levitski, on
account of the mysterious death of a village publicanâs nephew. This boy
of 15 was accused of stealing 25 rubles from his uncle, and at the
latterâs request he was taken to Obnimskyâs office, where Obnimsky,
together with another man, questioned the boy. The boy died during this
examination.[38]
The ill-treatment of those who have been condemned to death--down to the
very moment of the execution--and the terrible physical sufferings
inflicted in the most barbarous way in the morning hours which precede
the execution, and during the execution itself, have created quite
epidemic of suicides in the prisons of Russia.
As a part of the above-mentioned inquiry, I have now before me a list of
those suicides in the prisons which have found their way to the daily
Press in Russia. This list extends from January, 1906, to November 1,
1908, and contains 160 cases, out of which 30 took place in 1906, 70 in
1907, and 60 during the first ten months of 1908.
Here are some abstracts from that terrible list. They contain a few
cases for 1906, and the whole list for 1908:--
In 1906
1. In a political prison in Moscow, John Fedouloff, 23 years old, hanged
himself.
2. In a political prison in St. Petersburg, a medical woman-student, M.,
shot herself.
3, 4. In Uman, in consequence of police outrages, there is a regular
epidemic of suicides and cases of madness: a wine merchant, Gervitz
hanged himself ; a man named Toulchiner was saved just time from the
rope; two others went mad.
5. In Odessa, a political prisoner, Leibovitch, poured kerosene on his
bed, set it on fire, threw himself on the bed, and thus ended his life.
6. In Moscow, K. Schvetz hanged himself when under arrest.
7. In Orel, a peasant, E. Soboskin, being in solitary confinement,
hanged himself.
8. In St. Petersburg, in the Cross prison, in a punishment cell a
sailor, Arnold, hanged himself.
9. In Elisavetgrad, Larionoff, condemned to death, waited for the
execution three months, went mad and hanged himself, but was saved,
after which he was condemned to hard labor.
10. In the Vasilkov prison an unknown deserter poisoned himself by means
of carbolic acid.
11. In Toula, Starostin, being arrested, soaked his clothes in kerosene
and set himself on fire.
1908
101. At the Simferopol prison the political prisoner Stalberg poured
kerosene over his bed-clothes and set fire to them, but was rescued.
102. At Odessa, Komatch, the son of a chemist, poisoned himself in
prison.
103â4. At Warsaw, two members of a band of robbers hanged themselves in
prison.
105. At Omsk, a peasant sentenced to death seized the revolver of a
policeman and wanted to kill him, but at the approach of a patrol of
soldiers shot himself.
106. At Yalta, the political prisoner Nikolay Timoshin burned himself to
death in prison by drenching himself with kerosene.
107. At the Kieff prison the political prisoner Gostilin, sentenced to
death with the other revolutionary socialists of Kursk, poisoned
himself.
108. At Petersburg, at the Roshdestvensky police-station, an unknown
man, arrested for robbery, hanged himself.
109. In the Tchita prison, Krivtsoff, sentenced to penal servitude, cut
his throat.
110. At the Nizhni-Novgorod prison, Ustinoff, an artisan, sentenced to
death for the murder of a policeman, poisoned himself, not wishing to
fall into the hands of the executioner.
111. At Tchita, a woman named Kozhevin, sentenced to death for murder,
poisoned herself before the execution.
112. At Riga, Neruoff committed suicide on the eve of the day appointed
for his execution.
113. At St. Petersburg, a peasant woman named Kryloff, aged 32, poisoned
herself while being conveyed by a policeman to prison, where she was to
undergo a term of confinement in accordance with a legal verdict.
114. At St. Petersburg, in the Viborg Solitary Confinement prison, a
political prisoner, the journalist, I. P. Remezoff, attempted to burn
himself, but was rescued.
115. At Kieff, Fodosenko, sentenced to death, poisoned himself.
116. At the Tsaritsin police-station the unemployed Masloutoff, aged 18,
arrested for posting up proclamations of the Social Democratic Party,
burnt himself with kerosene.
117. In a cell of the Kharkov prison, Tcherukovsky soaked his clothes
with kerosene and burnt himself to death.
118. In a prison hospital at St. Petersburg, the prisoner Kuptsoff, aged
34, hanged himself.
119. At Odessa, an old merchant arrested for murder hanged himself.
120. Kuznetsoff, a political prisoner, hanged himself in a St.
Petersburg prison.
121. Domushkin hanged himself at the Yalta police-station.
122. At the Odessa prison, a political prisoner, Helen Smirnoff, poured
kerosene over her clothes and her bed, and set fire to them.
123. At the Sevastpool prison, the political prisoner Gulbinsky hanged
himself.
124. In the solitary cell of a St. Petersburg prison, a political
prisoner named Bernstein hanged himself, but was rescued.
125. At the police-station of the Narva district at St. Petersburg a
prisoner named Pybin broke his head against the wall. During his
subsequent stay at the hospital he inflicted upon himself a wound with a
knife.
126. At a prison at Odessa, V. Orloff, who was arrested for theft,
burned himself with kerosene.
127â8. At the Kazan Government prison, two prisoners, whose cases were
being investigated, poisoned themselves.
129. A convict threw himself from a boat into the water at
Nizhni-Novgorod and was drowned.
130. At Odessa, V. P. OstroĂșhoff, who had twice been sentenced to death
for the murder of a spy and for robbery, on being placed in a solitary
cell to await his execution, took poison and died.
131. At Kieff, the criminal Yushkoff, who had fulfilled the duties of an
executioner and who was kept in a separate cell, set fire to it. It is
supposed that he was insane; Yushkoff had been wounded by the prisoners
for undertaking the duties of executioner.
132. The peasant Safronoff, sentenced at St. Petersburg to two yearsâ
imprisonment, breaking loose from the guard conveying him, threw himself
into a lake and was drowned.
133. In the Saratov prison, Stepanoff, sentenced to death, hanged
himself on a strap.
134. Another man in the same prison likewise tried to hang himself but
was rescued.
135. In Kurilovo-Pokrovskoye (district of Odessa), Kuhadze, accused of
stealing horses, hanged himself in prison.
136. In the garden of the prison hospital at Simbirsk, Liakhoff,
sentenced to penal servitude for murder, hanged himself. In a letter he
says: âThough innocent, I suffer because of false witnesses.â
137. At the Simferopol prison, Kokovtseff, soaking his clothes in
kerosene, burned himself.
138. In the Simferopol prison, Odonoff, sentenced to death for a prison
mutiny, cut his throat.
139. In the Saratov prison, Popoff, on hearing of the confirmation of
his death sentence, burned himself with the aid of kerosene. He was
accused of an armed attack on a house.
140. In the Yamskaya prison at Moscow, Hokhriakoff hanged himself, but
was rescued.
141. Nazaransky, a police officer of the Spassky district of St.
Petersburg, being arrested for robbing a drunken man, hanged himself.
142â3. Two men condemned to death, Sounnev and Sareov, committed suicide
at Riga.
144. At the Kolomensky police-station at St. Petersburg, a workman,
Pocheykin, who was arrested for theft, hanged himself.
145. At Simferopol, Kravchenko, condemned to death, wounded another
condemned man, Zavortrinsky, and then cut his own throat.
146. At the Riga prison, Berzin, head of a revolutionary group,
committed suicide.
147. At a police-station at Odessa, the robber Freidenberg attempted to
wound himself fatally with a piece of iron.
148. In the Kishineff prison, a prisoner named Sibov, 23 years old,
condemned to penal servitude in Siberia, poisoned himself.
149. In Berdicheff, the agent of the Russian company for delivery of
goods was arrested for a theft ; in prison he threw himself into the
sanitary well.
150. In Odessa, in the common cell for women prisoners, T. Savitzkaia
cut her throat and stomach with a piece of glass. She was imprisoned by
the orders of the Secret Police.
150â151. In the Tomsk prison, Hondiakoff and Kouznetsoff poisoned
themselves. They were suspected of having killed a government money
collector of the government wine-shops.
152. In the Petrovsk prison, a prisoner, Agafonoff, condemned to hard
labor, hanged himself, but was saved.
153. In St. Petersburg, an imprisoned soldier, Iliin, jumped out of the
window.
154. In St. Petersburg, a young peasant, Reichstin, arrested as a
criminal, broke his head on a wall.
155. In the province of Kieff, in the Loukoyanoff prison, a former
village school teacher, Prisiajnina, condemned to death, poisoned
herself.
156â158. In Kieff, in the same prison, on three successive days three
men poisoned themselves--Kravchenko and Sinuchenko, who were condemned
to death, and Captain Lipovskii, who was condemned to exile for taking
part in the Union of Officers. The last died, but the other two were
executed.
159. In Odessa, in solitary confinement, Novikoff set fire to himself by
means of kerosene.
160. In Tomsk, in the solitary confinement cell of the reformatory
prison, Volkoff burned himself to death with kerosene.
It may be remembered that the Russian Prime Minister, M. Stolypin,
interviewed last year by Mr. W. T. Stead, and asked about the
executions, which were going on then at that time in very great numbers,
said that he had no exact figures, but he thought that 15 a month would
be a near approach to truth (the Times, August 3, 1908). I contested
these figures in the Times of August 14, 1908, and maintained that the
number of executions during the first six months of 1908 had been from 4
to 15 every day--there being, however, no executions on Sundays and
other holidays--and that it reached the figure of 60 to 90 every month.
We have now the official figures of the executions for the last four
years. The Law Committee of the Duma having asked the exact figures from
the Ministry of Interior, the Police Department of that Ministry
communicated them to the Duma on February 6, 1909. But as they are still
incomplete--they apply only to civilians, as the Department of Police
mentions in his communication to the Duma--I also place by their side
our own figures. These figures have been obtained as follows : Several
leading St. Petersburg and Moscow papers till lately gave telegrams
every day from the provincial towns, stating how many persons have been
condemned on that day and giving their names, what were the crimes
imputed to them, and how many, and who, had been executed. The daily
figures were added up, and the monthly and yearly items were published
by several papers, including the well-known Law Review, Pravo, together
with all other statistics of prosecutions. These were the figures
communicated by the Russian refugees to the London Press, and given in
the above-mentioned letter of mine to the Times. Besides, I have now
before me a carefully-prepared memorial, in which, besides matter
concerning the exiles, all the executions mentioned in the leading
Russian newspapers since 1905 till November 1, 1908, have been carefully
tabulated, according to the age, the social standing, and the supposed
crime of the executed persons. The cases of ill-treatment in prisons and
administrative executions, mentioned in these papers, up to the same
date (November 1, 1908), are also enumerated in special chapters.[39]
Here are both sets of figures, of which the official figures apply only
to civilians:--
whom 19 were hanged and 65 shot, thus raising the yearly total to 540.
+ How many military must be added to these figures remains unknown.
No official figures for the year 1909 have yet been published, but the
figures compiled from the daily papers produced before the Duma in a
recent discussion are:--
The discrepancies between the two tables as regards the death sentences
are easily explained. Our figures give the death sentences that were
pronounced, and telegraphed the same day to the papers, while the
official figures probably give the death sentences confirmed later on by
the Governors-General of the respective districts.
As regards the difference between our figures of executions in 1907 and
the official figures (508 and 456 respectively), it arises from the fact
that the official figures do not include the executions of the military.
There having been, according to an official statement, 84 executions of
soldiers in the course of the year 1907, the official figure for that
year becomes 540, and is consequently higher than our figure (by 32
cases). That our figures would be possibly below the real ones was
foreseen, as some executions may not find their way to the Press. The
same remark very probably applies to the years 1906 and 1908, for which
years we have no official figures of executions among the military.
Now, it must be borne in mind that the above figures do not include
those who were shot in the streets (in the Gapon manifestation, during
the rejoicings after the promulgation of the Constitution of October
30,1905, or during uprisings in the Baltic provinces, in the Caucasus,
and in the Russian villages), nor do they include those who have been
executed during their transfers from one prison to another (attempts at
escape, true or alleged), nor those who have been executed by simple
administrative orders of the military commanders--these last cases being
not uncommon--as it appeared from several discussions which took place
in the First Department of the Senate (see Chapter V.), when the Senate
recognized (by a small majority) that executions without even a trial
before a Field Court Martial were not illegal under the State of Siege
law, such as it was promulgated by the Emperor. For these executions,
the Senate decided, the military authorities are directly responsible to
the Emperor, whose orders they execute.
There being no official figures concerning the different categories of
executions without any trial, all we can do is to give the figures which
have been compiled for us in the above-mentioned inquiry with the same
desire of arriving at the truth as the above row of figures. They run as
follows : Shot without sentence--376 in 1905, 864 in 1906, 59 in 1907,
and 32 in 1908 (first 10 months).
In trying to excuse the large number of executions which take place in
Russia, in consequence of verdicts of Courts Martial now active in more
that two-thirds of the Russian Empire, the present ministry usually
point to the considerable number of murders and attempts to murder which
stand in the official statistics. These figures run as follows :--
These are the figures which were communicated to Duma Commission on the
abolition of capital punishment when it came together on June 3, 1909.
And in communicating them, the Department of Police added : âIn these
included all crimes committed in all the localities placed under the law
of siege (extraordinary and increased Okhranaâ).
However, in order to get any correct idea, these figures must be
compared with the numbers of murders and persons wounded in ordinary
times; and when this is done, it appears that in the numbers that are
mentioned in the above figures there is absolutely no extraordinary
increase which might in any way excuse the suspension of ordinary
justice, and the surrender of Russia to the laws that Prevail in times
of war and to the summary justice of the Military Courts.
Here are the figures for ordinary times:--
Taking the number of acts of violence immediately before the revolution,
we find that, in 1904, there were, in a population of 142,700,000, no
less than 2,800 persons condemned for murder, and 3,778 for wounding
(Official Report of the Ministry of justice for 1904). It thus appears
that in 1907 there was indeed a sudden increase of acts of
violence--provoked by the countless executions, without any form of
trial, during punitive expeditions, especially in Siberia, the Caucasus,
and the Baltic provinces, and the terrible brutalities of the police
officers in the villages. But there was no increase whatever in the year
1908. Therefore the maintenance of the state of siege in two-thirds of
the Empire cannot be defended on this ground This has been also forcibly
demonstrated during the debates in the Duma on the law of siege, on
February 11^(th) to 14^(th) (O.S.).
Under the military law which is now in action in most of the Russian
territory, the smallest agrarian disorders, and even the setting fire to
a landlordâs barn or stack are treated as implying the death penalty.
The Military Courts themselves most reluctantly pronounce the death
sentence in such cases, their members loudly condemning afterwards in
private the obligation under which they are to apply military law, and
the orders of the Emperor who wishes them to apply that law in in all
its severity.
Thus, at Ufa, the Court Martial sitting on March 3^(rd) last, pronounced
the following sentences on five local peasants who had robbed another
peasant of 1 ruble 40 kopecks (3 sh.): Pavel Abramoff, death ; Petr
Abramoff and Stepan Antonoff, 10 yearsâ hard labor ; Mihail Bagunoff, 8
yearsâ imprisonment; and Kuzma Antonoff, [40] monthsâ imprisonment.
The Court pronounced that ferocious verdict because such is the law in
time of war; but it immediately had the courage to ask the
Governor-General not to confirm their sentence, but to mitigate it. Most
Courts, however, have not that courage, and men are hanged for what,
under ordinary conditions, would imply a few months, or even a few weeks
of imprisonment.
Many similar cases could be quoted: At Moscow, a Court Martial sentenced
a peasant from one of the districts of the government of Moscow to
death, for having set fire to a stack of hay on the property of a member
of the Stateâs Council, Herr Schlippe.
At Novocherkask, the Court Martial condemned within a few days twenty
men to the death penalty--one of them for having spoken to another
prisoner about making an attempt to kill a policeman.2 In the government
of Tambov, eighteen persons were condemned last March to be hanged, and
out of them three prostitutes for having given shelter to some robber,
and one peasant for having set fire to an empty barn.[41]
The executions in Novockerkask were carried on by volunteer convicts in
such a terrible way that the agony of some of the executed lasted from a
quarter of an hour to half an hour, the executioner strangling the men
with his own hands. As the executions took place in a remote suburb of
that city, in the midst of winter, the condemned men were brought to the
place of execution half frozen.[42]
Owing to the haste with which all the affairs are conducted before the
Courts Martial, judicial errors are much frequent than is usually the
case. Thus it appeared that out of the prisoners who were hanged at
Odessa on February 1^(st) last, the men Orenbach, Greyerman, and two
brothers Truger were condemned by mistake. They not only took no part in
the defense of a house in which some anarchists had locked themselves,
receiving the police and military with shots, they ran away from this
house, together with other people, and had absolutely no knowledge of
the men who had locked themselves in the house.
After the death sentence has been pronounced it continually happens that
the condemned men wait for the execution for whole months, and the
scenes which take place at the executions are such as might be expected
only in Persia or Turkey.[43]
Men executed without any form of trial.--The worst is that the question
about the right of the Governors-General to execute people even without
sending them before a Court Martial, by simple administrative orders,
having been contested by several members of the Senate, this High Court
of Russia has again decided a few weeks ago that such right of summary
execution results from the Imperial Decree by which the rules of the
state of siege were determined, and that therefore the
Governors-General, in inflicting the death penalty by simple
administrative order, are responsible exclusively to the Emperor in
person.[44]
If all this be taken into account, one can easily see how it happens
that, the action of the regular laws being suspended, military justice,
designed exclusively for time of war, has taken the place of the civil
administration and is covering Russia with gallows.
The demoralizing effect of such a substitution upon the habits and life
of the country needs no commentary.
It is also needless to say that this large number of executions is
provoking general discontent among the educated classes. Thus, in
December last, at a general meeting of the lawyers of the St. Petersburg
judicial district it was unanimously resolved to express sympathy with
the interpellation in the Duma against the steadily increasing number of
condemnations to death and executions which have been taking place
lately.
Besides, a society was formed lately among influential persons, to work
for the abolition of capital punishment in Russia. But the authorities
have refused the registration of this society under the pretext that
capital punishment being recognized by law, any agitation against it
would be unlawful.
As to the degrading influence of these wholesale executions upon the
population, it is simply terrible, and many facts, simply awful,
relating what is happening at night, during the executions, in what is
now called by the cabmen âThe Slaughter Yardâ at Moscow, could be added
in support of the ideas so forcibly developed by Leo Tolstoy in his
pamphlet, âI Cannot be Silent.â
On the date referred to in the previous chapter (August, 1908, some
correspondence appeared in the Times concerning the numbers of
administrative exiles in Siberia and Northern Russia. The Russian Prime
Minister, M. Stolypin, in an interview with Mr. Stead, told him that the
number of administrative exiles was only about 12,000. The Assistant
Minister of the Interior, M. Makaroff, also interviewed a fortnight
later by Mr. Stead, explained, however, that this figure could only
apply to those who had been exiled in virtue of a decision given by the
Ministry of the Interior; but there were also, he added, a considerable
number of persons who had been exiled by mere orders of the local
Governors, and about whom the Ministry of the Interior had no
information. I wrote at that time to the Times that, according to our
estimates, the number of exiles in Siberia and Northern Russia reached
the figure of about 78,000. We have now the exact figures, which have
been communicated by the Department of Police to the Law Committee of
the Duma. The Police Department, probably taking into account the
considerable number who have escaped, puts the figure at 74,000 ; but
does not state how many of these have been tried, and how many exiled by
administrative order. (Some information about this matter will be found
further on in this chapter.)
Attempts made privately to give the exact figures an distribution of the
exiles in different parts of the Russian Empire have failed; but the
total given by the Police Department (October, 1908), must be correct,
as it was based upon the numbers of men and women sent out to Siberia a
Northern Russia from the chief transfer prisons.
According to documents communicated to the State Council, the number of
persons exiled by order of the Ministry of the Interior has now reached
the figure of 15,500, and the greater part of these have been classified
as follows : Workmen, 6,362 ; peasants, 3,879; students, 540; teachers,
792 ; tradesmen, 755 ; officials of the Zemstvos, 315 ; unknown, 2,857.
It will thus be seen that while formerly the administrative exiles
chiefly consisted of students and âintellectuals,â the main bulk of them
is now composed of workmen and peasants deported either for strikes, for
agrarian disorders, or simply because they are considered by the local
police authorities to be a disturbing element.
The conditions under which these exiles live are as bad as when they
were described twenty years ago by Kennan, Stepniak, and myself, with
the only difference that at the present time exiles are also sent to
regions quite unsuitable for habitation, such as Turukhansk in the far
north, at the mouth of the Yenisei. The conditions there are described
by a reliable person writing from the district to the St. Petersburg
newspaper Ryech[45]:--
âAll the exiles are settled in the Turukhansk district, which borders
the River Yenisei, from Turukhansk to Yeniseisk, a distance of 720
miles, in which there are only 64 small villages. The main bulk of the
exiles are in 30 villages, in the largest of which, Sumarokovo, there
are only 20 houses, while in the others there are only from 5 to 7
houses, with from 30 to 40 inhabitants. In some villages the total
number of the inhabitants does not exceed 20 persons. Below Turukhansk,
in a tract of country 670 miles long, there are only 37 villages, the
largest of which, Dudinka, contains only 10 houses, the others being
mere post stations of 1, 2, or 3 houses. It is quite easy to see that
when 15 or 20 exiles are settled in such small villages they are a
burden to the population, and can find absolutely no work to live upon.
The result is that lately a band of men, 10 at first, and later on 25,
went along the river plundering the houses of some of the residents.
Sixty-five men are now being prosecuted, and have been marched on foot
from Turukhansk to Yeniseisk in order to be brought before a court
martial.â
Information of the most heartrending description as to the conditions
under which the administrative exiles live, has been communicated by
reliable persons, including several deputies of the first and second
Duma, and published in the Russian Press. We have, moreover, before us
large numbers of letters giving much information, and will give extracts
from a few of them. A mother, an absolutely trustworthy person, who has
gone into exile to accompany her young daughter, writes as follows to
the British Committee in Aid of Administrative Exiles:--
âI have followed my daughter, condemned by the Court to exile for life
in Siberia, with the intention of softening the conditions of her long
journey.... Most of the exiles, having spent something like two years or
more in prison, before coming before a Court, are quite exhausted by the
hard prison treatment. They are dressed in long rough coats and heavy,
ill-fitting shoes, and have to carry all the rest of their clothing on
their backs, in sacks weighing about 30 lb. During the part of the
journey which is made by train, men and women are put to travel together
in the carriages, under the supervision of warders and soldiers. These
men are accustomed to consider the prisoners as without rights of any
kind, and therefore permit themselves to treat them as they choose. For
women this journey is especially terrible. In one railway carriage there
were three women among a lot of ordinary criminals, and when the
commanding officer wanted to chain them in pairs, he did not hesitate to
fetter one of the women to a man, and to keep them thus for a great part
of the journey. In the carriage where my daughter was, there was a party
of women exiled for having no passports. Most of them were prostitutes.
The soldiers of the guard drank with them, and my daughter, being in
their company, had to witness the most abominable scenes.
âStill worse things are to be seen in the transfer prisons, where the
politicals are kept with the ordinary criminals, under abominable
conditions. When they come to the place of exile, they are left in some
small village, usually hundreds of miles from the small district town.
More than 100 persons are often left in a small village, and all that
the police authorities do is to see that they do not run away. Sometimes
an exile has been to give up all his winter clothing, in order to rent a
room in a peasantâs house; and many would have died from hunger and cold
were it not for the help given them by their brother exiles. The prices
in such villages are very high, owing to the numbers of the exiles; and
it is absolutely impossible for exiles to find any work, or to earn
anything, however little. Every kind of work suitable to intellectuals
is forbidden by law.
âI have spent one month with my daughter in one of these villages, and I
have seen nothing but worn faces of men vainly going about in search of
work. They tried to open a laundry, but there was nobody to give linen
to be washed-every one did their own washing. And the same was found
with all sorts of workshops. In the infirmary there was neither doctor
nor medicine, and yet it was strictly forbidden to leave the village and
go to the nearest district town. The village of which I speak and in
which my daughter is kept, is one of the best in respect of climate and
other conditions of life, and I asked myself : I âDoes the Government
know the lot it is preparing for the people whom it sends to exile in
this way? Does it know that in the conditions which prevail it is
condemning men to a slow death?ââ
Some idea of the conditions under which the administrative live may be
given by the following statement, which has been prepared for us in the
Narym district of the Government of Tobolsk :--
This district belongs to that immense region of marsh and wood which is
marked on the maps of Western Siberia as a marsh, and covers hundreds of
miles from north to south and from west to east. The only access to it
is by the rivers, on the banks of which are a few dry spots, while the
country between the rivers is covered with almost impenetrable forests,
and until lately was quite uninhabited, except for a few small villages.
A dozen little settlements of a few small have recently appeared along
some of the rivers draining this great marsh. Last year there were,
however, no less than 700 administrative exiles in this region.
The Government allowance to these exiles was, until January, 1908, 3r.
30k. (7s. 1d.) per month. But since then it has been reduced to 1r. 80k.
(3s.) per month. However, it is only the administrative exiles who
receive that allowance. Those who have been exiled by sentence of the
Courts (the ssylno-poselentsy) receive nothing. The communes of the
villages to which they are sent are bound to give them some land, but as
the exiles have no tools and no cattle, and most of them are
townspeople, they simply starve. In the larger villages the exiles have
organized their own soup kitchens, which supply one meal a day for 2
1/2d. or 3d. The money granted by the Government to the adminitstrative
exiles for their winter and summer dress, i.e., 60s. 8d. a year, is
evidently used for food, because the high prices of flour and salt make
the monthly allowance of 3s. absolutely insufficient to keep body and
soul together, notwithstanding the cheapness of meat. Very few are happy
enough to earn a few shillings by their work.
Near Tchelyabinsk there are about a thousand exiles, mostly in awful
misery.[46]
The Social Democratic Deputies in the Duma have received lately the
report of a detailed inquiry into the condition of political exiles sent
to Siberia by sentence of the Courts (ssylno-poselentsy). They have
detailed information about 110 persons who have passed through the
transfer prison of Krasnoyarsk. The greater number of them (77) are
workmen, and only 24 are intellectuals ; 58 of them are Russians, 19
Poles, 20 Jews, and 2 Germans. In fifteen cases it has been established
that these men have been exiled owing to having trusted agents
provocateurs, and in three cases testimony against them was obtained
from witnesses under physical torture.[47]
Even those who are sent to the more fertile and favored southern parts
of Siberia are not better off than the others. Those who are not
noblemen--and they are the great majority--receive in Southern Siberia
only from 2r. 40k. (5s. 2d.) to 6r. (13s.) a month, but in the latter
case they have to pay from 4s. to 6s. a month for their lodgings. In the
small district towns of Southern Siberia there is exactly the same want
of employment as in the Far North.
Those who are exiled to the most thinly populated parts of Northern
Siberia are confined to the encampments of the natives. It is well known
that skin diseases are terribly prevalent in Siberia. Nearly all the
natives are infected, as also many families of Russian peasants ; but
the exiles are compelled to lodge with the natives in their tiny huts
and tents, and are happy if they are given a corner in the log hut of a
Russian settler.
The presence of the exiles is generally felt as a heavy burden by the
native population, which is becoming more and more hostile to them, and
the feeling of hostility is increased by the presence of criminals among
them. For persons sentenced for theft and other breaches of the ordinary
law are being sent to Siberia in company with administrative exiles
transported for rebellion or other political offenses. Perhaps the
authorities do this from considerations of economy, perhaps for other
reasons.
Those who have been exiled to the northern provinces of European Russia,
namely, to Archangel, are in no better plight than those who have been
transported to Siberia. A number of them have written to complain to M.
Bulat, Deputy to the Duma, about the intolerable conditions under which
they live. Having been exiled, not by administrative order, but by
sentence of the Courts, these people receive no support from the
Government; and they get nothing from the village communities; being
themselves short of arable land, they do not give them allotments. âSave
us from starvation and unavoidable death from hunger,â they wrote to
their Deputy to the Duma.[48]
Altogether, the peasants who have been exiled for agrarian
disturbances--and they are very numerous by this time--are in the most
precarious condition. In Tsarev (government of Astrakhan), where two
hundred administrative exiles are kept, typhus is raging among them. No
medical assistance is given, and the typhus patients are sleeping by the
side of the healthy men in the common doss-houses of Tsarev, because the
owners of private houses have sent them away from fear of infection.[49]
In the face of such misery, which is an unavoidable result of the
system, we hardly dare speak of the abuse of the powers of the local
police and the gendarme authorities, which in some cases renders the
state of things still worse. Thus, in the government of Vyatka, the
exiles for a long time did not receive their dress money. In February
last they at length received the small allowance for summer clothes, the
winter allowance being still unpaid.
At Tchelyabinsk it appears, from a telegram sent to the Head of the
Prison administration by M. Tcheidze, Deputy to the Duma, that the
exiles were in the most terrible plight because the authorities had
given them no food money and no dress money, and forbade them to move
from one village to another.
The only bright feature is that the political exiles do everything
possible to maintain each otherâs courage and to prevent demoralization.
Everywhere they have organized their own societies for mutual help, to
which every one who receives any monies from home pays a regular
contribution of so much percent. With this money they start soup
kitchens, small libraries, and lectures, but the difficulty of getting
books and papers and the high cost of light in the northern parts during
the winter is extreme, and the authorities continually put hindrances in
the way of such organizations. In some places in the Far North during
the long winter nights sheer despair lays hold of the exiles. In January
last, in one of the remote settlements of the Obdorsk region, five
exiles ended their lives by suicide. A girl took the lead, and she was
followed by four men.
The following extracts will give a still more concrete idea of the life
of some of the exiles. One correspondent, writing from the Ilga canton,
says:--
âWe are here 90 persons, mostly grouped in a big trading village. We
receive absolutely nothing from the crownâ (they are
ssylno-poselentsys). âHappily enough, most of us have found some work ;
only a few of us, 10 or 12, have not. We have a mutual aid society and a
soup kitchen supplying food at low prices.â
From the government of Tobolsk one of the exiles writes to our Committee
of Inquiry:--
âIn this government we are about 2,000, Out of whom nearly 500 have been
exiled by sentence of the courts (ssylno-poselentsy). The remainder are
administrative exiles. The greater number of us are in the districts of
Tura, Berezoff (64° N. lat.), and Tobolsk, and in the districts of
Surgut, Tara, and Tyumen. About finding work I can say nothing bright.
It is only in the summer that we get some work at the fisheries, and in
the towns some students and most of the skilled workmen have well-paid
work; but the great proportion of us are in very low spirits, having
absolutely no work. The want of work is most severely felt by the
ssylno-poselentsys, because the administratives cannot do much to help
them. Since January 9, 1907, the administrative exiles belonging to the
unprivileged classes have received only 4r. 80k. (10s. 4d.) in the
Berezoff and Surgut districts, 4r. 50k. (9s. 4 1/2d.) in the Tobolsk
district, and 4r. 20k. (9s. 1d.) in the others. Married people receive
some assistance for wife and children. Noblemen and those who have
receive university education receive 11r. 25k. (24s. 4d.) per month.
There is also the dress allowance of 25r. (54s.) in August and 4r. 80k.
(10s. 4d.) in May. As to the other exiles, they receive absolutely
nothing. They are chiefly in the Tara district, a fertile region, but
most of them know nothing about agricultural work and have great
difficulty in finding anything to do.â
Martial, Executions, And The Overcrowding Of Prisons
On the historic day of the 10^(th) of May, 1906, that of the opening of
the first Russian Parliament, when the elected representatives of the
Russian nation passed through the streets towards the Tavrida Palace,
from the dense throngs which lined their passage, one great cry arose--
âAmnesty ! Amnesty! Amnesty first!â
And the first speech in the new-born Parliament was for amnesty. It was
made by Petrunkévitch, the oldest leader of the Russian Liberals :--
âOur honor, our conscience,â he said, â ordains that our first thought,
our first free word should be dedicated to those who sacrificed their
freedom to that of our beloved Fatherland â (storm of applause). âAll
the prisons in the country are overflowingâ (cries of indignation).
âThousands of hands are stretched out to us with hope and beseeching.
And conscience urges us to spare no possible effort to prevent the
wasting of further lives in the victory so soon to be ours....â
At the very next sitting of the first Duma the Liberal Deputy Rodicheff,
in a speech of passionate eloquence, raised the question again:--
âEverywhere and always during the electoral campaign,â he said, âone and
the same cry was raised above all others--âAmnesty !â We are witnesses
that this is the demand of the whole nation, not only of those who
suffer in the prisons or of their friends. Blood is not shed now so
often as it was three months ago; but, gentlemen, this last month 99
persons were executed in Russia.... We, here in the Duma, cannot work ;
that feeling oppresses us. Those bloody specters are here--here in this
very hall. They must be removed in order that we may do our work.â
One after another member of the Duma, themselves recent sufferers from
arbitrary imprisonment, told harassing tales of what they had witnessed.
âI, myself,â said Father Krassoun from the rostrum, âwas kept in a
prison, packed with 400 people who were receiving a daily allowance of 6
kopecks ([50] 1/2d.), barely enough to escape starvation--not enough to
escape perpetual hunger. I asked them, âWhy were you beaten with
nagaikas? Why were you thrown into prison?â And the reply was always,
âThe police arrested us because we refused to bribe them!ââ
âYou have heard here of the ghastly specters which soar above our land,â
said the Deputy Miklasheffsky; âI will remind you of two victims
personally known to me-the student, Grigoriev, and the barrister,
Tararykin. Grigoriev was shot because another man, to save his own life,
declared that Grigoriev had spoken at a certain meeting; and this
declaration was enough to condemn the boy. Tararykin, the barrister,
tried in vain to convince the officer, who ordered the soldiers to shoot
him, that he was acting illegally. He was nevertheless shot without
trial or investigation.â
General Kouzmin-Karavaeff--himself a military procureur and a Deputy
sitting on the Right of the Constitutional Democrats--appealed in the
Duma against the horrors of official bloodshed.
âOver six hundred men,â he said, âwere, during the last four months,
hanged or shot, or otherwise deprived of life by most horrible methods,
without trial or after mock trials. This figure is appalling, and it
shows us once more that the chief motive of capital punishment here, in
Russia, is sanguinary vengeance.â[51]
Sitting after sitting of the Dumaâs first session was devoted to appeals
to the Czar and the Government for amnesty. This subject also had the
first place in the Dumaâs answer to the Crown Speech. It was an appeal
to deaf ears. After a hopeless struggle, which lasted over a fortnight,
the Duma gave way and began its legislative work. But complaints and
petitions poured in upon the Deputies from every constituency, depriving
them of the necessary calmness. Then the continuous interpellations to
the Government began.
On May 21, 1906, the following interpellation was unanimously presented
by the Duma to M. Stolypin:--
âDoes the Minister know that the authorities have filled all prisons to
overflowing? That among the prisoners are persons admitted to be
innocent? That in contravention of even the exceptional and martial
laws, prisoners are kept beyond the term legally ordained, no charge
being brought against them, whereby they are driven to utter despair and
voluntary starvation?â
The Cabinet waited a full month before answering this interpellation.
On May 25^(th) the Deputies of the Duma made another attempt to stay the
hand of the executioners. A telegram was received by the Duma to the
effect that eight men had been condemned to death in the Baltic
provinces by a summary Court Martial, that they had wished to appeal to
a higher Court on the grounds of complete neglect of procedure at their
trial; but that the Governor-General had refused them the right of
appeal and confirmed the sentence. The Duma begged the Government to
postpone the execution and to allow the appeal of the condemned to be
heard. Upon this, a hasty order was sent from St. Petersburg that the
eight men were to be immediately executed; and when this was done the
Government informed the Duma that, unfortunately, it was now too late to
discuss the matter.
The numerous interpellations and requests put to the Government to
postpone the executions always met with the answer--
âWe cannot do that. So long as the law exists we are obliged to carry it
out.â
The Duma decided to remove this obstacle, and, on May 31, 1906, a Bill
was brought in, consisting of two paragraphs:--
(1) Capital punishment to be abolished, and (2) until the revision of
the penal code is done, capital punishment to be replaced by the
heaviest sentence immediately preceding it on the scale of punishments.
After having passed the usual legal stages, this Bill was unanimously
adopted by the Duma on July 11, 1906, but it never received the Czarâs
sanction, and the executions have continued at the same rate.
During the debates upon the Bill the Deputy Nadvorsky told the Assembly
that two hundred Warsaw barristers had sent a formal complaint to the
Senate against the Governors-General of Lublin and Warsaw, by whose
orders seventeen youths were shot without trial.[52] The Senate divided
in its resolution upon this remonstrance. Some Senators declared that as
the Governors were acting under martial law, they had the right to adopt
whatever measures they might find expedient. The minority found that
martial law does not give the right of indiscriminate execution, but
that nevertheless this complaint must be rejected because only those who
were victims of illegal behavior on the part of Governors had the right
to complain. Owing to this disagreement the Senate adjourned the
examination of the case until unanimity be arrived at. Again and again
this case was debated in the Senate, the last time in May, 1909, but the
Senators remained firm in their disagreement, some maintaining that,
under martial law, Section 12, the Governors-General have the right to
execute at their own discretion, and are responsible only before the
Czar, and others repeating that the act was no doubt illegal, but that
only the victims had the right to complain. As the victims were already
in their graves the Governors-General, till now, continue their rule
unhindered.
Looking through the official shorthand reports Dumaâs session one meets
upon every page interpellations to the Government concerning numberless
illegal and arbitrary acts, such as the exile of thousands of village
schoolmasters, peasants, workmen, and intellectuals. I give a few chance
quotations.
The Deputies Rostovtseff and Khruscheff received the following telegram
from the town Ostrogorsk, on June 1^(st):--
âAfter our husbands had remained four months in prison, they sent a
telegram to M. Stolypin on April 28^(th), asking for release or trial.
On May 2^(nd) an answer was received ordering their immediate
deportation : nine to the Narym region (a desolate corner of Western
Siberia) for four years, and one, a consumptive, to the Astrakhan
province for three years. These prisoners were mostly members of the
zemstvos, and arrested without reason, nothing suspicious being found
upon them and no charge brought against them. They were not even
interrogated. Signed--the wives of Dr. Shiriaeff, the engineer
Andrianoff, &c.â
At the same sitting another telegram was received from Voronesh, sent by
the wife of Dr. Romanoffsky, who had just been sent for a three yearsâ
exile to the Narym region.
âI implore you to examine our case. My husbandâs banishment is through
an entire misunderstanding. In the written order of exile my husband is
described as âteacher,â not âdoctor,â and the name is given as
âRomanoff,â not âRomanoffsky.â He was deported without being once
interrogated.â
From the town Uman a telegram was received by the Duma on the same day,
informing the Duma that 36 peasants, driven to despair by long
imprisonment without trial or accusation, had refused food for six days,
requesting trial, declaring their decision to die if it were further
refused.
To finish with this one single sitting of the Duma, I will mention also
an interpellation concerning the barbarous illegalities in the Baltic
provinces, which are placed under several headings:--
the military and officials, &c.
This sitting was not at all of an exceptional character. On the
contrary, during almost every other sitting the quantity of
interpellations with regard to various atrocities, illegal imprisonments
and executions were much more numerous. The contents of those
interpellations are painfully monotonous: âPrison overflowing.â
âPrisoners kept for months without trial or investigation, starving
themselves.â âThirty-five prisoners in Riga threatened with execution.
Immediate measures urgent.â âThe barrister Pukhtinsky, of Tchernigov,
has been kept for three months in prison without charge, and is now in
exile in Siberia. His wife and five children are utterly destitute.
Pukhtinskyâs only offense was that he, as a councilor of the Tchernigov
Corporation, was disliked by the local authorities.â âThe engineer
Farmakovsky, of Minsk, is kept in prison in spite of his serious illness
and the order of the magistrate for his release. In the same prison are
Councilor Havansky, Dr. Kaminsky, the barrister Rogalevitch, many
journalists, and others. They have been imprisoned for many months, and
no reasons have been given for their detention.â âTwo youths, aged 18
and 19, of the town of Warsaw are being court-martialed for having
struck their schoolmaster. Execution threatens them.â
That was on June 6^(th), when twenty-six interpellations concerning
various atrocities and illegalities were submitted to the Duma. At the
next sitting, June 9^(th), thirty-two interpellations of the same kind
were made. This constantly increasing number made it impossible for the
Duma even to debate the cases. They were simply handed over to a
parliamentary Commission of 33, for transmission to the Ministry, which
still remained silent upon the point. It was, however, a burning
question demanding immediate and earnest attention, as may be seen from
the following quotations:--
âOn April 11^(th) we were imprisoned in the Iljesk prison, by order of
the district chief. The soldiers robbed us of all our money, and at the
order of the policeman Volokhovsky they began to strike us with the
butt-ends of their rifles an kick us until they were tired. We were
wounded all over and blood ran from our mouths, noses, and ears. Some of
us had broken ribs, legs, and arms. Vidhovsky, an old man and a cripple,
was more brutally treated than any of the others. He was dragged by the
hair into a cell and lost consciousness. When he regained it he asked
for the priest, but the request was refused. For the six subsequent days
we were kept without food, and only on the seventh day were given 10
kopecks (2 1/2d.) each for food. Up to now no charge has been brought
against us, and we have not been interrogated. Only the chief of the
district explained to our wives that we had been arrested because some
man named Binegraet had sent a denunciation to the effect that we had
taken part in the festivities at the granting of the Constitution.â
âWe, peasants of the village Kitoff, beg you to protect us the police.
On June 5^(th) they killed three men and wounded three others without
cause. For Godâs sake investigate the case protect us!â
During the debates of the 9^(th) of June, the Deputy Rosenbaum told the
Duma of the imprisonment of many innocent people in the town of Minsk.
âWhen,â he said, â we told our Governor, M. Kurloff, about it, he
answered, âPerhaps there are innocent people in prison. But when once
they are in prison they must not be let out.ââ
This governor, Kurloff, is a celebrity in Russia. He it was who, after
the granting of the October Manifesto, surrounded a meeting of citizens
with troops, and ordered them to shoot down the people as they left the
hall. Hundreds were shot. After that exploit Kurloff was promoted to the
chief directorship of all prisons in Russia. During his two yearsâ
tenure of that office, SchlĂŒsselburg, the famous fortress, emptied
during the amnesty of 1905, was refilled tenfold, and chains, flogging,
and other barbarities were introduced.
The sanitary condition of the Russian prisons was brought to such a
pitch that typhus and scurvy began to decimate the prison population.
Yet, as we shall see from official figures, the number of prisoners is
always on the increase.
A few months ago Kurloff received a further promotion to that of
Assistant Minister of the Interior, assistant of Stolypin.
On the above-mentioned day (June 9, 1906) the Duma learned that eleven
persons had been condemned to death in Riga, the accusation being
exclusively based upon their own depositions, extorted from them by
terrible tortures. They were flogged, the wounds being subsequently
filled with salt, their hair was pulled out, and loaded revolvers were
held against their foreheads.
According to the Russian law, the Government has the right to adjourn
its answer to interpellations of the Duma for one month, and in this
case it fully availed itself of this privilege, in spite of the fact
that the interpellations were of the most urgent character. But at last
this month came to an end, and the members of the Government began to
answer a few of the interpellations. The answers, however, completely
disappointed the Duma. On the 14^(th) of June the chief military
procureur, Pavloff, while fully admitting the facts about the lawless
executions and death sentences mentioned in the interpellations,
contented himself with the declaration that the Governors-General
received the powers to act under martial law according to their own
lights ; that, when they forbid persons condemned to death by Court
Martial to appeal, and order their immediate execution, they act within
their rights, and that the Central Government has therefore no power to
interfere (Report of the nineteenth sitting of the First Session).
On the 21St of June the Minister of Justice, Scheglovitoff, answering an
interpellation concerning the two Warsaw youths court-martialed for
having struck their teacher, declared that the central authorities were
unable to interfere because it lay within the powers of the
Governors-General to deliver any offender they chose to a Court Martial
instead of to a civil magistrate. Thus a possible punishment of a short
term of imprisonment may be replaced by capital punishment at the
discretion of a Governor-General.
On the same day, however, M. Stolypin, answering interpellations in the
Duma, while admitting the guilt of some officials, declared that he was
not responsible for the illegalities of the previous Government, and
promised to prevent their recurrence during his tenure of office.
âI repeat,â he said, âthat the most sacred duty of the Government is to
protect peace and law, the freedom, not only of labor, but also of life.
And all measures of pacification which I take do not signify the coming
of reaction, but that of order, which is necessary for the introduction
of the most important reforms.â
More than three years have passed since that time. Not even the first
step has been taken for the introduction of the reforms foreshadowed by
Stolypin, while the number of prisoners and exiles kept without trial is
ever increasing, according even to the official figures.
The number of interpellations continued to increase, and the Ministry
began to answer them wholesale.
On July 16^(th) the Assistant Minister of the Interior, Makarof,
answered 33 interpellations at once. His answer was purely formal. He
admitted a few cases in which persons had been imprisoned without an
order even having been signed, but in the majority of cases he satisfied
himself that such a had been issued; and as the Governors-General had
been given the right to imprison people according to their own
discretion, everything was done in observance of the law.
The next sitting, July 17^(th), a further batch of interpellations
brought their number up to 370--hardly one in ten receiving an answer.
The Duma was, after that, dissolved.
When, eight months later, the Second Duma came together, M. Stolypin, on
March 19^(th), read his Ministerial Declaration, in which he stated that
a special Bill would be introduced by the Ministry to the Duma, by which
arrest, searching, and the opening of private correspondence would be
allowed only at the written order of the judicial authorities, whose
duty it would be also to verify, within twenty-four hours, the legality
of any arrest ordered by the police. This was to become the immutable
ordinary law, which would always be enforced, except during times of war
or revolution.
In spite of this promise, exceptional laws are in force now all over the
country, and exiles and imprisonments by administrative order are more
numerous than ever.
The Second Duma understood from its first sitting that it would be a
hopeless task to try to curb the Governmental innumerable abuses. The
scope of interpellations was narrowed to that of the most crying cases,
or to questions of self-defense, i.e., when the personal inviolability
of the Deputies was infringed.
Here are a few instances of such cases. On April 12, 1907, the following
interpellation was made :--
âOn December 11, 1906, the Court Martial in Moscow, having tried the
case of two brothers Kabloff and two brothers Karakanikoff, on the
charge of having wounded a policeman, condemned them to penal servitude
for life. On the same day the Governor-General of Moscow, Hershelmann,
in spite of the law and the special circulars sent to him by the
Premier, quashed this sentence and ordered the four men to be tried by
another Court Martial. The second trial was held at once, and the four
prisoners were condemned to death and executed immediatelyâ (Official
report of Session II., Sitting 19^(th)).
On April 15, 1907, several interpellations were read in the Duma with
regard to the regular practice of tortures in the various prisons of
Riga, Astrakhan, Algachinsk, Akatuy, &c.
The interpellation concerning the system of torture practiced regularly
in the Riga and other Baltic provinces prisons became notorious all over
Europe (thanks to the revelations made by the British newspaper, the
Tribune). This interpellation was answered in the Duma by the Assistant
Minister of the Interior, Makaroff, who, while admitting that the
ill-treatment of prisoners had occurred in the Riga prisons, refused to
apply to it the name âtorture.â He said that the officials guilty of the
established offenses had been already dismissed, and judicial
proceedings taken against them. âAt present,â he said, âwe must wait to
see what the law courts will say. I consider debates upon this question
to be premature.â
This declaration was made on April 23, 1907. On May 30^(th) M. Makarof
spoke again about the tortures in the Baltic provinces in these words
:--
âI am far from the desire to maintain that the police, during
interrogations in the Baltic provinces, did not, in some cases, beat the
prisoners. I must tell you that last year already, and partly this year,
forty-two prosecutions were started against the agents of police for the
use of violence. One of these cases was stopped for want of proof ; in
another the accused was condemned to one yearâs penal servitude. The
remaining cases are still under examination.â
As a matter of fact, however, the Russian newspapers affirm that all the
principal organizers of torture in Riga and other Baltic towns continue
in their posts. The police official Gregus, who, according to the
declaration of Makaroff, was dismissed more than two years ago, is at
the head of the same secret police in the same town of Riga.
The Second Duma soon met the fate of the First. Thereupon the franchise
was curtailed, and in the Third Duma, which was convoked in March, 1908,
the majority consisted of the nominees of the Government. This majority
naturally put a stop to every interpellation that might be embarrassing
to the Government, and the terrible state of the prisons was touched
upon only occasionally during the debates upon the budget of the Prison
Department and of the Ministry of Interior, while the increasing number
of executions came to light during the debates upon the Bill for the
Abolition of Capital Punishment.
As to the interpellations concerning the prisons which were made in the
Third Duma, some of them have already been mentioned in the preceding
chapters. It must only be said that the interpellations in the Third
Duma, restricted as they are, and submitted to a preliminary debate,
have a character of gravity which the âquestionsâ addressed to the
Ministers had not in the First and Second Dumas. The interpellations are
now made in the name of whole parties, instead individual members, and
before being accepted the questions asked are the subject of a
preliminary discussion in the Duma, after which they are usually sent
before a Commission, which sees whether there are in these questions the
elements of an interpellation. Only when the Commission has accepted the
interpellation is it submitted to the Duma, and then the respective
Ministers are at liberty of either accepting the debate at once or
answering it in the course of one month.
On January 2, 1906, in Lublin, a boy of 17, Markovsky, was shot without
any form of trial. On January 3^(rd), 4^(th), and 18^(th) (O.S.) 16
young men-one of 15 years, two of 17, three of 18, and three of 19--were
shot without judgment at Warsaw (after having been tortured).
They also pointed out that the Governor-General of Kielce had issued, on
January 13â26, 1906, an order according to which every one found in
possession of arms should be executed; and if children under 14 years
should be found possessing arms, the death penalty should be applied to
their parents. The head of the Polish provinces stopped the application
of that order, because it was rendered public. But how many
Governors-General acted on such principles without giving them
publicity?
The memoir of the Warsaw lawyers was published in all leading dailies.
Also in the work of V. Vladimiroff, âSketch of Present Executions,â
Moscow, 1906 (Russian).
Officials In Crime
A painfully prominent feature of present-day Russian life is the
frequency of provocaton to violence by the secret agents of the
Government, which has attained an extraordinary development during the
last few years, since public money is lavished upon the three or four
different and rival sections of the Stateâs secret police : as also has
the participation of various police officers in all kinds of crime, of
which many striking instances have been discovered of late. The
consequence is, that death sentences are continually pronounced upon
young and inexperienced men who have been involved in various plots by
the secret agents of the Government. This has developed lately into a
widely-spread system among the secret agents and the police officers for
attaining promotion and receiving handsome money rewards.
Every one has been hearing lately of a certain Azeff, who was for
sixteen years an agent of the Russian secret police, and at the same
time the chief organizer of acts of terrorism among the Social
Revolutionists, including the murder of the Minister of the Interior,
Von Plehve, the Grand Duke Sergius, General Bogdanovitch at Ufa, and of
several plots which he denounced at the last moment against General
Trépoff, the Minister of Justice Scheglovitoff, the Grand Duke Nicholas,
and the Czar.
Azeff began as an informer in 1902. This is officially stated in the act
of accusation against M. Lopukhin (formerly head of the Police
Department, who had confirmed to the Russian refugee, Burtseff, in the
autumn of 1908, that Azeff really was a paid agent of the police). In
1904 Azeff, already then in the service of the police and in regular
relations with Ratchkovsky, the ex-head of the Russian secret police
abroad, organized the murder of the then omnipotent arch-reactionary
Minister of the Interior, Von Plehve, who had dismissed Ratchkovsky, and
in May, 1905, the same Azeff was the organizer of the murder of the
Grand Duke Segius.
Not only is this openly stated by the heads of the Revolutionary
Socialist Party, but these two events were precisely what gained Azeff
the absolute confidence of the party; and it thus appears that one
department of the Russian secret police--the Okhrana, whose special
function is the protection of the Czar--did not hesitate to sacrifice
Von Plehve a Grand Duke in order to retain their trusted agent in the
center of the Social Revolutionary Party.
All this might appear incredible, but the Russian secret police had
already inaugurated such a policy in 1881.
When, in the first year of the reign of Alexander III. a special police
was organized under the name of Okhrana (Protection), for the personal
protection of the Czar, the head of that special police--Colonel
Sudeykin--entering into relations with one of the terrorists, DegĂĄeff,
seriously invited him to induce the terrorists of the Executive
Committee to kill the then Minister of the Interior, Count Tolstoy, and
the Grand Duke Vladimir, and afterwards to betray the Committee. After
that Sudeykin, having thus proved the incapacity of the ordinary secret
police to protect such high personages, and his own cleverness in
discovering the guilty persons, would himself be nominated the head of
all the police with dictatorial rights, like Count Loris Melikoff under
Alexander II., and he would secure a good place for his accomplice
DegĂĄeff.
Ratchkovsky and Azeff continued the Sudeykin tradition. In order to
protect the Czar, the Okhrana allowed Azeff to import into Russia
revolutionary literature printed abroad, to organize workshops for
fabricating bombs, occasionally supplying some money for that; they
allowed him also to organize plots against Ministers, Grand Dukes, and
the Czar himself. All this time their diabolic policy was carefully to
protect the terrorists marked out by Azeff against an occasional arrest
by some other section of the police, so as to have them arrested by
nobody but the Okhrana, just at the moment when the plot was going to be
executed. They might thus be sure of the necessary effect being produced
on the Czar, and the victims might be immediately hanged, before they
had time to make compromising revelations that would given a clue to the
Okhrana conspiracy.
Even escapes were skillfully organized when it was necessary for the
Okhrana and its agent, Azeff, to spare some active fighting leader, only
to hand him over later on to a Court Martial to be hanged in twenty-four
hours. After that they paraded as the real defenders of autocracy ; they
obtained considerable rewards in money, proved the necessity of the
Okhrana, obtained grants for it, and maintained the âReinforced
Okhrana,â with its double pay to all its officers and officials, and its
âextraordinary supplementary budget,â from year to year.
In order to make sure of it, they also printed a special paper, the
Tsarskiy Listok (the Czarâs Leaflet), for the personal perusal of the
Czar (one of the numbers of this paper, obtained from the gendarmerie
Archives, was reproduced lately by Burtseff in his review, Byloye),
every report about the activity of the revolutionists and every arrest
of revolutionists being recorded there for the Czar, who read it with
great interest--everything being done to confirm him in the idea of the
necessity of maintaining the state of siege.
Thousands of men are thus sacrificed every year, only to provide the
agents provocateurs of the Okhrana with plenty of money.
But Azeff was not an exception. The late M. Pergament communicated in
March last (to the Novoye Vremya) some facts from his political
experience as a lawyer, and these throw some light on the widespread
system of provocation used by the Russian secret police. In one case an
agent provocateur at Vilna, dressed in a soldierâs uniform, complained
to some young boys and girls of the bad treatment he had received from
his officers. He suggested that the young people should kill the
officers, and offered them explosives for the purpose. Happily, they
mistrusted him, and did not follow his advice.
At a Court Martial at Vladimir, in February last, it was proved that
Lieutenant-Colonel Zavarnitsky, head of the secret police of this city,
had sent threatening letters, revolutionary proclamations, drawings of
bombs, and even real bombs, to all the authorities, including himself.
During the trial which took place at Cracow, in consequence of an
accusation brought by Burtseff against Miss Brzozowski of belonging to
the secret police, one of the lawyers said that in Russian Poland he had
several times seen agents provocateurs condemned to death for murders
they had organized, and known them to be liberated afterwards and to
appear as witnesses in other trials.[53]
During the last two or three years the newspapers made known several
instances in South-Western Russia where the police of the towns have
organized their own bands of so-called âexpropriators.â Under pretense
of being revolutionists who want the money for revolutionary purposes,
these bands extorted money from wealthy people under menace of death. In
one or two of such cases the fact was established before the Courts, and
the respective heads of the police were dismissed.
Quite lately a band of so-called expropriators was arrested at Tiflis,
and it appeared that its headquarters were at office of the secret
police of that city. In consequence the head of this office, a certain
Matchansky, and three of his subordinates were arrested, while the head
of the police, Tsikhotsky, ended his life by suicide. Information about
this band having been given to the judicial authorities by a young man
named Saparof, who had entered the secret police with the intention of
finding out the center of the band of expropriators, this young man was
assailed in the street by two men on March 12^(th) last and killed.
Finally, we have the Memoirs of the gendarme General Novitsky, part of
which appeared last June in a Kieff paper, and was reprinted in the
Russkiya VĂ©domosti. M. Korolenko, the well-known author, vouches for
their authenticity. General Novitsky, it appears, was perfectly well
aware of all the revolutionary plans for killing Bogdanovitch, governor
of Ufa. Over and over again he had reported this plot to the Minister of
the Interior, Von Plehve, whose orders in reply were, âDo not hurry.â
This went on till Bogdanovitch was killed by men sent for that purpose
by Azeff, agent of the Government.
All these facts have been related in the Russian daily Press, and widely
circulated through all the leading papers of St. Petersburg and the
provinces, including the semiofficial paper, Novoye Vremya. None of
those facts has been contradicted and in no case has the accuracy of the
statements even been contested.
Many more similar facts, collected for us in the course of our inquiry,
might be added to illustrate the rĂŽle of the police agents in many
affairs brought before the Courts Martial for the last two years.
Thus, three men--Jolpezin, Borisoff, and Matrosoff--accused of an armed
raid on Yasinskyâs factory, came before the Court Martial at Moscow.
Jolpezin had already twice been sentenced to death for armed robberies,
in which, as he stated at the trial, he had participated as an agent of
the secret police--provocation being his object. For the raid on the
factory Borisoff and Jolpezin were sentenced to death--this last for the
third time.[54]
At Sevastopol the agents of the secret police allowed themselves full
liberty of action as agents provocateurs. In October, 1906, some shots
were fired at a patrol. When those who had shot were arrested, they were
found to be local spies. Thereupon Admiral Skrydloff ordered four
âagentsâ to be expelled from the fortress ; but he had not the courage
to molest the principal one.[55]
At Kaluga[56] five men were brought before a judge on a charge of having
robbed a shop. It was proved by witnesses that the instigator of the
outrage was one Brovtseff, a lad of 19, who was the personal agent of
Captain Nikiforoff, head of the local police. The robbery was committed
on March 9^(th), and martial law was to be discontinued on March
30^(th). It was shown that the revolver used by Brovtseff had been given
him by Nikiforoff, who had promised him full immunity from punishment.
When arrested, Brovtseff sent Nikiforoff the following telegram :
âNikolay Mitrofanovitch! You promised me full immunity, and now I am
arrested.â The jury refused to give a verdict, and insisted that a
further inquiry should be made, and the judge made an order accordingly.
At St. Petersburg[57] the police were informed that among the secret
police were several persons belonging to revolutionary organizations,
who had taken part in many robberies. This information was confirmed,
and on January 4^(th) an agent of the secret service of M. Ratchkovsky
was arrested, together with some others.
In Kieff, by a mere chance, the celebrated case known as the âAslaniadeâ
was brought to light.[58] A whole series of suspicious acts of the
secret police in Kieff were accidentally discovered. Well-known thieves
caught red-handed had been let out of prison by the director of the
secret police, Aslanoff, on the mere assurance of an hotel porter that
they were âall right.â The persons who had caught the thieves had been
threatened by Aslanoff with prosecution for defamatory accusations.
Criminals had frequently escaped from prison with the help of the secret
police. It was proved that secret houses of vise which the authorities
had ordered to be closed had continued to flourish with the full
knowledge of the police. An inquiry into the conduct of the secret
police was ordered by the Governor and is now going on. So far two
policemen have been discharged by way of scapegoats. The newspaper
Kievlianin states that Aslanoff is resigning.
There is no need to give further instances which prove in what hands the
liberty and the life of citizens are placed.
The English papers often give news of the so-called Union of Russian
Men, which was founded in 1906 under the presidency of a doctor, A. I.
Dubrovin, to combat the movement towards freedom by all possible means,
legal and illegal, and especially illegal.
This Union, composed of the most heterogeneous elements, has enjoyed the
special protection of the Emperor, who, up till quite lately, used to
wear its badge,[59] and spoke of its members as his most loyal subjects.
He lately made them a gift of ÂŁ1,000, and has from time to time helped
them with money. Whenever the President, Dr. Dubrovin, has applied to
him in behalf of members of the Union convicted of organizing and taking
part in pogroms and political murders, or of police officials convicted
of torturing prisoners, the Emperor has pardoned them.[60]
It was lately maintained that the murder of the Duma Deputy,
Hertzenstein, was organized with the knowledge of the President of the
Union, Dr. Dubrovin, and with the help of agents of the section of the
State police known as the Okhrana. The evidence of this was especially
strong at the second trial of one of the two murderers, at Kivenepe, in
Finland, on March 13â26 of this year. One of the two murderers of
Hertzenstein, Polovneff, having been already condemned by a Finnish
Court, M. Prussakoff, secretary to Dr. Dubrovin, stated now before the
Court on oath that the President of the Union had asked him to find
somebody--preferably somebody dying from consumption--who would agree to
declare himself the murderer of Hertzenstein, in exchange for a certain
reward and a promise that his escape should be arranged afterwards and
his family support in case of death. These revelations, which indicated
that Dr. Dubrovin had helped to organize the murder of Hertzenstein,
caused the Finnish Court to demand the extradition of Dr. A. I. Dubrovin
as an accomplice in the murder, and induced the representatives of the
Constitutional Democratic and the Social Democratic parties to make an
interpellation in the Duma, of which the text is given below.
The revelations summarized in the interpellation implicate also Count
Buxhoevden, a high official at Moscow, and a member of the same Union,
in the murder of another Deputy, M. Yollos, and in repeated attempts to
kill Count Witte. These most compromising disclosures freely circulate
in the St. Petersburg and Moscow leading dailies.
Here is the full text of the said interpellation in the Duma, made by
the representatives of the Constitutional Democratic and Social
Democratic parties in the Duma to the Ministers of Justice and Interior
on May 12â25 last:--
âIn a series of public trials (those of Leonid Andrianoff, Polovneff,
Vorobieff, and Seredinsky) the following facts have been proved:--
â1. E. S. Larichkin, accused of the murder of M. Ya. Hertzenstein, was a
member of the Union of Russian Men, and, as such, he received from the
police officer of the SchlĂŒsselburg district a revolver, the officer
explaining to him that the members of the Union of Russian Men had the
right of search and of makingarrests--the former to be exercised as far
as possible in the presence of the police, and the latter without the
presence and help of the police. According to the testimony of
Larichkin, the revolvers which were given to members of the Union of
Russian Men were the property of the Government, and were distributed in
the bureau of the St. Petersburg police. It also appears from the affair
of Vorobieff and Seredinsky, that if St. Petersburg police officers
happened to confiscate revolvers from members of the Union, the
President of the Union, Dr. Dubrovin, usually ordered the revolvers to
be given back, and this order was obeyed by the police.
âThe same Larichkin was also prosecuted for the murder of Mukhin, a
working man, whom he killed in the Progonnyi Pereulok, in the presence
of a crowd.
âAt the present time, according to a persistent rumor, the Union of
Russian Men have deprived Larichkin of the possibility of ever appearing
before a Court.[61]
â2. Polovneff, now for the second time under sentence for the murder of
Deputy Hertzenstein,[62] was an agent of the Okhrana, a member the âHead
Council of the Union of the Russian Men,â a head of the âPutiloff
Fighting Legion,â and head of the âFighting Legion of the Union for
Active Opposition to Revolution and Anarchy.â
â3. Kazantseff, one of the accomplices in the murder of Hertzenstein,
who, as it now appears, incited Fedoroff to kill Count Witte and the
Duma Deputy Yollos, and was subsequently killed by Fedoroff at St.
Petersburg, was also a member of the Okhrana, a member of the Union of
Russian Men, and secretary to Count A. A. Buxhoevden, who is now in the
Civil Service acting as attaché to the Governor-General of Moscow.[63]
âThe photographs of both Kazantseff and Polovneff, delivered to them as
pass-cards by the Okhrana, and bearing the signature of the head of the
St. Petersburg section of the Okhrana, Colonel Gerasimoff, were
recognized by the gendarme Zapolsky[64] as representing Kazantseff and
Polovneff.
â4. Alexandroff, also sentenced by the Finnish court to monthsâ
imprisonment for abetting the murder of Hertzenstein, had likewise shown
Zapolsky his card of membership of the Okhrana, but Zapolsky could not
satisfactorily verify it, as he was hurrying to catch a train.
âAfter having served his term in the Finnish prison, Alexandroff
remained a member of the Union of Russian Men, from which continued to
receive moneys.
â5. A man named Rudzik, who is still wanted by the Court as an
accomplice in the murder of Hertzenstein, also described himself as a
member of the Okhrana.â
We omit three more paragraphs of less importance only to mention the
last paragraph:--
â8. A doctorâs assistant named Byelinsky, head of the âPunitive
Expeditionâ of the Union of Russian Men, acting upon orders received
from A. I. Dubrovin, engaged men to kill P. N. Milukoff. The attempt was
made, and failed for reasons beyond the control of the organizers. The
fact having been made known in the newspapers, Byelinsky has now
disappeared.
âLimiting ourselves to a brief mention of the facts already established
before the Law Courts, and leaving entirely aside for moment quite a
series of other accusations, now under judicial investigation, or made
in the Press only, the authors of this interpellation ask the following
questions:--
âAre the Ministers of Justice and the Interior aware--
â1. That the Head Council of the Union of Russian Men, with the
knowledge of the police and of the Okhrana Department, has organized
fighting legions, and that the police have assisted them to arm these
legions with revolvers and bombs?
â2. That quite a number of the members of the Union of Russian Men and
its fighting legions have been at the same time members of the Okhrana?
â3. That the same persons took part in the in the murder of Hertzenstein
and Yollos, and in attempts against Count Witte and P. N. Milukoff, with
the support of the Head Council of the Union of Russian Men, and of its
President, A. I. Dubrovin?
âIf these facts are known to the Ministers of Justice and of the
Interior, what measures do they intend to take in order to stop criminal
activity of the Union and its agents?â
Countless instances could be produced to show how the neglect of all
laws has become a normal feature of the Russian Administration, and how
the police officials consider themselves as the absolute rulers of the
country, and therefore permit themselves the most incredible
brutalities. Quite a series of such facts were last winter brought
before the session of the provincial tribunal of Kazan and the High
Chamber of the Kazan judicial district, several police officers being
tried there for the tortures they had inflicted upon free citizens, and
even for the murder of some of them.
In the introductory remarks it has been mentioned that a considerable
number of prosecutions have been started against persons who, during the
years 1905â1907, had taken advantage of the liberties granted by the
Constitution and acted upon them.
Quite a series of such cases was brought before the Courts during the
last few months. The most striking of them was the affair of two Odessa
University professors, the Dean and his assistant, who were prosecuted
and condemned for having shown leniency towards the students during the
excitement and disorders that took place in the University at the very
height of the first months of the Liberation Movement of 1905, and for
having used all their influence upon both the students and the military
to pacify them, as well as to avoid an armed conflict between the
troops, the police, and the students.
Writing about this affair to the Moscow Weekly, Prince E. Trubetskoy
(who is also a lawyer) said: âTo bring out such a condemnation the Court
had absolutely to ignore the conditions under which the incriminating
events took place,â and so it was asked to do by the prosecutor. âIt is
just as if the Dean of the Messina University were prosecuted for not
having taken measures to prevent crumbling of the walls during the
earthquake.â ... âThe worst is,â Prince Obolensky writes, âthat the same
systematical âcleaningâ is going to be done in all universities.â âA
series of âadministrative dismissalsâ of professors already taken place
in the Odessa University, and our universities are going to be
transformed into âtea-shops of the Union of Russian Men,â ... all decent
men will have go. And when the moral authority of the professors has
been destroyed, and all studentsâ unions forbidden then the universities
will again be ripe for the revolution.â
In April last, a series of such trials took place, described by the
Russian Press as âRevenge trials.â At Saratov a group of men were
prosecuted for having held peaceful meetings in connection with a strike
of railway men in September, 1907, and were condemned to imprisonment in
fortresses. At Moscow the local organization of the Social Democrats
prosecuted for what it did at the end of 1905--heaviest accusation being
that against a Social Democratic lawyer, Roshkoff, for having edited a
daily paper at that time, and inserted in it detailed reports about the
progress of the Moscow insurrection of December, 1905.--A hundred and
six persons, already tried once, and condemned, for the
anti-Governmental meetings and the constitutional manifestations held,
in November, 1905, at Novorossiysk, after the Sevastopol rising, were
tried again last April--the Military Prosecutor having lodged an appeal
against the first sentence of the Court Martial, âbecause it contained
no death sentences!â The new Court, too, could find no means better to
please the high authorities, and a third trial will probably take place.
In meantime two local lawyers, who had defended the accused, have been
exiled from the province; three witnesses--a local teacher, an official
of the local post administration, and a military official (a
lieutenant-colonel)--who spoke in Court in favor of the accused, have
been dismissed. Two Justices of the Peace, who were in the same case,
are being prosecuted, and complaints have been made even against
officials of the secret police who had spoken before the Court favor of
the accused, with the result that the ex-head of police, Kiréef, has
been dismissed. Inquiries are also being held to consider the case of a
gendarme officer, of the commander of the military district, and even of
the President of the Court Martial himself--all of them being accused of
âleniency towards the accused.[65]
We might add a quantity of similar seemingly insignificant cases that
are in reality equally important, owing to their numbers. Thus, also in
April last, a lawyer was prosecuted for having spoken, on November 21,
1905, in a village of the Vladimir government about the necessity of a
Constituent Assembly, and having exclaimed, âBread, light, and liberty
for the people!â And again, a Cossack woman, Davydoff, was prosecuted
for having organized several Liberation meetings three years ago, while
she was still a girl. The lawyer was acquitted, but the girl was sent to
Siberia in exile, and there are scores of thousands of people--thousands
of them employed in the meantime in the regular service of the
State--who now live in Russia under the menace of being dragged some day
to prison, and thence before a Court Martial, like the woman Davydoff,
for having taken part in the strikes and the Liberation Movement of
1905.
During the debates in the Duma, on March 7, 1909, the Deputy Tcheidze
gave the following interesting figures. During the last four years 237
ex-Deputies of the Duma were condemned to various terms of imprisonment,
eighteen being sent to the Siberian mines. At the same time 406 editors
of periodicals were condemned to prison, fortress, and penal servitude;
1,085 periodicals were forbidden. During the last sixteen months 418
fines, to the amount of ÂŁ29,100, were imposed by the Administration upon
publishers of newspapers.
âCivic freedom in Russia,â said Tcheidze, âis now confined to the
hangman alone, and executions have become an everyday incident.â
Famine-Stricken Provinces
Last summer there was a famine in several provinces European Russia;
Smolensk, Minsk, Ufa, Saratov, Simbirsk, and Tambov--the last four
belonging to the fertile regions of Russia. At the present time the
conditions are still worse, the crop of the year 1908 having been
35,000,000 cwts. below the average crop of the four preceding years,
1902â1906. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior has given orders
to levy, in the most stringent way, all the arrears which have
accumulated for the last few years, both in regard to the payment of the
taxes and in the repayment of famine loans.
âI draw the attention of the Governors,â the Prime Minister wrote in his
circular of September, 1908, âto the fact that it is absolutely
necessary to take the most decisive measures to recover the famine
debts--not only because this recovery would give the possibility of
granting further loans in case of a future failure of crops, but still
more so because it would produce a moral impression on the peasants.â
This order of the Ministry was understood by the Governors of the
provinces as a command to take drastic measures in levying the arrears;
and in some provinces (Vyatka, Tula, and Smolensk) special punitive
expeditions were sent out to collect the arrears--the Governors giving
to the commanders of such expeditions full powers to resort to all the
measures they might find necessary.[66]
The result is that in these provinces a wholesale flogging of the
peasants, men and women alike--although this is contrary to the existing
law--has been going on in order to recover the arrears. There is no
means of obtaining any redress against such treatment--those Governors
being best appreciated at St. Petersburg who have taken the most drastic
measures.[67]
For instance, a number of peasants from the Vyatka province have written
to their representative in the Duma, complaining of the most abominable
instances of wholesale flogging, but no attention is paid to these
complaints at the Ministry of the Interior.
Acting upon commands received from superiors, the district chiefs
(Zemskiy natchalniks), when they do not resort to flogging, order a sale
of the peasantsâ property. And sold it is--grain in stock, farm
buildings, &c., being disposed of on account of such ridiculously small
arrears as fifteen, ten, and even five shillings. Scores of such cases,
with full names and Wes, are reported in the St. Petersburg and Moscow
papers. The sales are said to have become the occasion of a special
traffic, the net result of which will be to ruin a great number of
peasants;[68] for, as there are often no ordinary buyers at the sales,
the only bidders are the police authorities themelves, and they buy for
five or six shillings a barn or a stock of grain, and afterwards resell
the property to the peasant for three or four times the price they have
paid.
The worst is that these punitive expeditions are at work even in those
provinces where the last yearâs crop was bad, and where, indeed, relief
expeditions ought to be organized. But from the Government no relief
comes, and private organization of relief is strictly forbidden. At the
end of the year 1908 a circular was sent out by the Minister of the
Interior, ordering all the branches of the famine-relief society, known
as Pirogoffâs Society, to be closed, under the pretext that the central
bureau of this society had not complied with all the necessary
formalities.
The infliction of corporal punishment in villages and towns is in open
defiance of the law. Corporal punishment was definitely abolished by law
in August, 1904, yet officials of all classes freely inflict it
everywhere, even on persons who were previously exemped by law from this
degrading punishment. Here are a number of authenticated cases:--
Two students were twice flogged by order of Reuss, the head of police in
the district of Elisabethpol. For this he was condemned to a monthâs
imprisonment by the High Court of Tiflis.[69]
Corporal punishment was inflicted on some peasants who wrecked the house
of M. Kaptandikoff, in the district of Bobrovsk. This was the subject of
an article in the daily paper Oko by General Kousmin-Karavaeff, Military
Procureur-Général, and a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party
in the Duma. The Governor of the province of Voronesh was questioned
about the matter, and announced that it was being inquired into. After
the inquiry the head of the district police was dismissed, and a
prosecution instituted.[70]
In the village of Demianovka, in the Melitopol district, Matnobin, the
head of the district police, ordered four peasants, one of them
seventy-five years old, to be brought to the manor-house, and caused the
workmen of the place to flog them. After being given over one hundred
strokes apiece, they went home in a cart on all fours, unable to sit or
lie down, and covered with blood. Two other peasants were flogged before
imprisonment.
In the village of Sutkovo, district of Kolomna, a policeman named Mitin
so misused a peasant who been arrested for drunkenness that a few days
later he died.[71]
In the village of Mayanovo (government of Podolia), Sedletsky, the
village policeman, and a hundred Cossacks, went from hut to hut,
flogging every one, including women and children, and carrying off all
they could lay hands on. Four of the peasants were sent to a hospital
half dead, and any number were wounded and disfigured.[72]
The peasants of Trahaniotovka (Kouznetsky district) began to cut down
part of a forest. Saharoff, the deputy head of the district police, who
came at the head of a considerable police force to stop them, had nearly
every person in the village flogged with rods and nagaikas, and arrested
five leaders.[73] In a village named Seminastosi (Elisabetgrad
district), Sedletz, an officer of the police force, went to the village
vodka shop, flogged the keeper of it, and beat him with his fists. He
then took him to the village police-court, where one policeman sat on
his head, and another on his feet, while a third, by order of Sedletz,
mercilessly beat him with a nagaika.[74] At Obsharovka (Samara district)
the police tried to extort a confession from some men whom they
suspected of being implicated in a theft, by beating them with rods.
When several of the men had confessed, they were brought face to face
with the owner of the shop that had been robbed, but she identified none
of them, either from fear of vengeance or because they were really
innocent. At this the police fell on her, and beat her so cruelly that
she confirmed all they said.[75]
On November 10, 1906,[76] Meller Zakomelsky, Governor of the Baltic
Provinces, published in all the local newspapers the repeal of the law
permitting flogging, which had already been repealed by the Czar more
than two years before, in August, 1904! It was the fourth repeal of this
shameful law, but he wretched inhabitants of the Baltic provinces found
it only a mockery. The next day, November 11^(th), a punitive
expedition, under the command of three officers, arrived at Neu
Schwanenburg. They arrested ten peasants and two clerks, who were made
to give evidence in the case of Julius Ruben. It was desired that they
should prove that Ruben was a revolutionary, and had taken part in some
secret act of incendiarism. The witnesses had nothing to tell. Ruben had
been arrested in the spring and then discharged with a certificate from
the police, stating his innocence. Notwithstanding this, in August the
punitive column had caused him to be arrested again, and as there was no
evidence against him he had been tortured. He was then sent to prison,
where he still is. When the punitive column came again on Saturday,
November 11^(th), it was determined to use whatever force might be
necessary to obtain witnesses against him. Eight men, including the
secretary of the canton and his assistants, were twice cruelly beaten
with nagaikas. A man was made to lie down, and two Grenadiers were told
off to stand on each side of him, and flog his bare back. Thus every
stroke meant four strokes. From forty to fifty strokes--that is to say,
two hundred--were inflicted and the victims were then thrown on the
floor and left without medical aid. This took place at the manor-house
of Neu Schwanenburg.
Flogging has been revived by the rural peasant Courts, with official
encouragement, and in imitation of proceedings such as have been
described. In the government of Kieff, some peasants, suspected of
incendiarism, were beaten till their bones were bared, and then shut up
in unheated cells. That night another fire broke out, and the wretched
prisoners were again beaten till they gave information of their
soidisant accomplice--a girl Of 20. This girl received five hundred
strokes. And so on.[77]
I have attempted to give in the preceding pages a correct statement of
the violent repression which is going on now in Russia, since the
concession of representative government, contained in the Manifesto of
October 30, 1905, was nullified by an under-current of organized
reaction. In this statement I have done my best to avoid anything that
might be a distortion, or an exaggeration of facts, and yet the picture
is so terrible that it is almost shaking oneâs faith in human progress.
Suffering and martyrdom are certainly unavoidable in every struggle for
freedom. But the amount of suffering and cruel repression now prevalent
in Russia surpasses everything that is known from the lessons of modern
history.
Every nation is certainly bound to work out her liberty in her own way
and with her own forces, however painful the way may be. But one of the
greatest achievements of modern civilization is precisely the feeling of
intimate kinship among all nations. It is now impossible that one nation
should suffer, as Russia suffers at the present moment, without these
sufferings having their effect upon all the family of civilized nations
and awakening among them a general feeling of solidarity. Despotism in
one part of the world reacts upon all the races of the world. And when
it takes such brutal and mediĂŠval forms as it takes in Russian prisons
and in the punitive expeditions, by means of which autocracy is
maintained in the Russian Empire, all mankind feels the effect of such a
return to the horrors of the Dark Ages.
To all those who realize the unity of mankind this exposure of the
horrors of the present repression in Russia is sure to appeal.
[1] Interpellation addressed on April 23, 1909, to the Ministry, by the
Constitutional Democratic Party.
[2] Ryech, January 24, 1909.
[3] Sovremennoye Slovo, January 30, 1909.
[4] Long letter from one of the inmates in Russkoye Bogatstvo, April,
1909, pp. 89â90.
[5] Meeting of the Prison Committee of Ekaterinodar, April 5, 1909,
reported in Ryech.
[6] Russkiya Vedomosti, February, 1909.--As might have been foreseen,
the above conditions ended in a tragedy. A Tiflis telegram to the
Russian dailies says that on May 22^(nd), at 6.30 p.m., as several
prisoners, condemned to be executed, were taken to the scaffold, the
other prisoners became uproarious. âThere are five killed among them,â
laconically adds the telegram.
[7] See the St. Petersburg dailies for January 30, 1909.
[8] Kievskiy Vestnik, March 12, 1909.
[9] Novaya Russ, May 21, 1909.
[10] Ryech, February 4, 1909.
[11] Russkiya VĂ©domosti, February 25, 1909.
[12] Ryech, January 17, February 14, 1909.
[13] Ibid., January 27, February 22, 25, and 26, March 7 and 13, 1909.
[14] Kievskiy Vestnik, February 22 March 3, 4, 9, 12, 1909.
[15] Warsaw Echo, reproduced in Ryech, February 19,1909.
[16] See St. Petersburg papers for March 22^(nd).
[17] Russkiya VĂ©d., March 1, 22, April 8, 1909.
[18] This information is taken from the daily telegrams communicated to
the St. Petersburg papers during the months of March and April, 1909.
[19] Ryech, April, 1909.
[20] Ryech, March 4, 1909.
[21] Russ. VĂ©d., March 4 1909 (signed article).
[22] Russkoye Bogatstvo, April, 1909, pp. 90, 91.
[23] Long abstracts in Russkiya VĂ©domosti March 11, 1909.
[24] Ryech and other St. Petersburg papers, April 13, 1909.
[25] Novoye Vremya, February, 1909.
[26] St. Petersburg and Moscow dailies, March 6, 1909.
[27] Interpellation in the Duma of April 7â20, 1909.
[28] Russ. VĂ©d., March 19, 1909.
[29] Ryech, March 23, 1909.
[30] Ryech, April 7, 1909.
[31] Since this letter appeared Lomtatidze has been deprived of his
walks, his tea and sugar, &c. He is in very bad health, dying from
consumption and insufficient nourishment, and he has now been placed in
a tiny room with three other sick men, one of whom is ill with typhoid,
one with consumption, and one in the very last stages of consumption.
[32] On the method of making an interpellation and its value as evidence
see p. 56.
[33] See the St. Petersburg dailies: Novyi Put, September 27, 1906, No.
35; Tovarisch, April 12, 1907, No. 240 ; January 20, 1907, No. 170; and
July 31, 1907, No. 332 ; Parus, March 13, 1907, No. 26; Russkoye Slovo,
February 4, 1907, No. 27.
[34] Tovarisch, Ryech, &c., March 1, 1907, No. 204.
[35] Such sticks, fabricated on purpose, had been distributed to the
prison warders. M. Stolypin, during an interpellation in the Duma, did
not deny the fact of such sticks and other instruments of torture being
kept in a special cupboard at a Riga police-station; but he described
that collection as âa museum.â
[36] What was done to a girl, arrested at the same time, has been
described by the ex-agent Bakay in his Memoirs The facts were confirmed
on many sides.
[37] Russkoye Slovo, May 27, 1907, No. 121.
[38] Ryech, March 7, 1908, No. 57.
[39] According to a decision of the Ministry, the papers were forbidden
a few months ago to publish in full the crimes for which the death
sentences were pronounced, and a short time ago the Moscow Courts
Martial stopped communicating even the numbers of the executions which
took place. The executions are carried out in great secrecy at night,
and in May last it was learned that fifteen executions had taken place
at Moscow, of which no information had been supplied to the papers.
[40] Ryech, April, 1909.
[41] Russkiya VĂ©domosti, March 22, 1909.
[42] Ryech, April, 1909.
[43] See with reference to this subject the interpellation made in the
Duma on April 8 and 21, 1909.
[44] See page 50.
[45] Ryech, No. 85, April, 1909.
[46] Tovarisch, April 6, 1908.
[47] Novaya Russ, 1909, date missing on our cutting.
[48] Russ. VĂ©d., April 1, 1909.
[49] Kievskiy Vestnik, December 29, 1908.
[50] This chapter has been compiled for this statement by the kindness
of a friend.
[51] Every quotation and every figure in this and in the following pages
is taken from the official shorthand reports of the sittings of the
Duma.
[52] The Warsaw lawyers mentioned the following cases :--
[53] Novoye Vremya, February 11, 1909.
[54] Tovarisch, No. 366, September 8, 1907.
[55] Put, No. 56, October 21, 1906.
[56] Russkoe Slovo, No. 216, October 21, 1907 ; Tovar., No. 382.
[57] Ibid., No. 7, January 9, 1908.
[58] Ryetch, No. 85, April 9, 1908.
[59] The wearing of this badge was, however, prohibited in May last by a
Ministerial order.
[60] Here are a few instances in point: The President of the Volsk
section of the Union of Russian Men applied to the Emperor to obtain the
pardon of four townsmen--Dolgoff, Glazoff, Mironoff, and
Ereméeff--condemned to hard labor for a pogrom in Volsk on October 20,
1905. He was informed that âHis Imperial Majesty has deigned to write,
on February 18, 1907, in his own hand, on the said petition: âI grant
pardon to the four condemned,â which decision the Prime Minister has
communicated by telegram to the Governor of Saratof.â On February 7,
1908, the Russian papers announced that His Majesty had pardoned seven
peasants of the province of Grodno, sentenced to imprisonment for
pogroms of the Jews. âThe head of His Majestyâs Chancery for the
reception of petitions, Baron Budberg, has communicated this decree of
the Monarch to the President of the Union of Russian Men, Dr. Dubrovin.â
Of late such pardons have become quite usual.
[61] We translate verbally this mysterious statement.
[62] In Finland, by a Finnish Court, after an appeal against the first
condemnation.
[63] The Duma Deputy Yollos, who, like Hertzenstein, was a specialist in
matters concerning the peasants and the land question, was killed at
Moscow by Fedoroff. This young man afterwards expressed his repentance
to the Revolutionary Socialists at Paris, and revealed to them that he
had acted at the instigation of a certain Kazantseff, whom at that time
he believed to be a revolutionary. Kazantseff had also incited him to
murder Count Witte, and he had made an attempt to blow up Count Witte in
his room by lowering infernal machines through the chimneys. The
machines did not explode, and Kazantseff urged him to make another
attempt, this time by throwing a bomb at the Countâs motor-car on his
way to the Council of State. The bomb was to be supplied by Kazantseff;
but meantime Fedoroff had learned that Kazantseff was a member of the
Union of Russian Men, and had told the revolutionists about his conduct.
They urged Fedoroff to kill him, which he did at St. Petersburg. Having
taken refuge in France, Fedoroff recently gave himself up to the French
Government, and asked to be extradited to Russia on condition of being
tried by a jury, as a common law murderer, for the murders of Yollos and
Kazantseff. The extradition has been granted. The text the Russian
demand for the extradition of Fedoroff has appeared in Paris Tribune
Russe. This extraordinary official document gives all details of the
attempt of the Union of Russian Men to kill Count Witte.
[64] A witness, before the Finnish Court, for the prosecution of
Polovneff for the murder of Hertzenstein.
[65] Ryech, April, 1909. Russkiya VĂ©domosti, February 20, 1909.
[66] Ryech, January and February, 1909; detailed summary in the St.
Petersburg reviews, Sovremennyi Mir, March, 1909, and Russkoye
Bogatstvo.
[67] About the flogging arrear expeditions in the governments of Tula
and Vyatka, see the Constitutional Democrat paper, Ryech, February 14
and 18, 1909.
[68] Ryech, February 18, 1909.
[69] Novyi Put, No. 66, 1908.
[70] Ibid., No. 44, 1908.
[71] Ibid., No. 66.
[72] Tovarisch, February 27, 1907, No. 203.
[73] Ibid., No. 131.
[74] Ryech, March 7, 1908, No. 57.
[75] Tovarisch, No. 131.
[76] Ibid., No. 121
[77] Stolitchnaia Pochta, February 29, 1908, No., 250.