E 50 In Russian and French Prisons.
soldiers laid hold on mo and insulted me shame- fully. I was not the only one thus outraged, for in the darkness I heard the cries of many desperate women besides. After many oaths and much foul language, the fire was lighted, and I found myself in a spacious room in which it was impossible to take a step in any direction without treading on the women who were sleeping on the floor. Two women who occu- pied a bed took pity on me, and invited me to share it with them...When I awoke next morning, I was still suffering from the scenes of yesterday; but the female prisoners- assassins and thieves — were so kind to me that by-and-by I grew calm. Next night we were ' turned out ' from the prison and paraded in the yard for a start, under a heavy rain. I do not know how I happened to escape the fists of the gaolers, as the prisoners did not understand the evolutions and performed them under a storm of blows and curses; those who pro- tested— saying that they ought not to be beaten — were put in irons and sent so to the train, in the teeth of the law which says that in the cellular waggons no prisoner shall be chained.
" Arrived at Kovno, we spent the whole day in going from one police-station to the other.
Russian Prisons.
Russian Prisons.
In the evening we were taken to the prison for women, where the lady- superintendent was railing against the head-gaoler, and swearing that she would give him bloody teeth. The prisoners told me that she often kept her promises of this sort...Here I spent a week among murderesses, thieves, and women ar- rested by mistake. Misfortune unites the un- fortunate, and everybody tried to make life more tolerable for the rest; all were very kind to me and did the best to console me. On the previous day I had eaten nothing, for the day the prisoners are brought to the prison they receive no food; so I fainted from hunger, and the prisoners gave me of their bread and were as kind as they could be; the female inspector, however, was on duty: she was shouting out such shameless oaths as few drunken men would use...After a week's stay in Kovno, I was sent on foot to the next town. After three days' inarch we came to Mariampol; my feet were wounded, and my stockings full of blood. The soldiers advised me to ask for a car, but I preferred physical suffering to the continuous cursing and foul language of the chiefs. All the same, they took me before their commander, and he remarked that I had walked three days E 2 E 2 52 In Russian and French Prisons.
and so could walk a fourth. We came next day to Wolkowysk, from whence we were to be sent on to Prussia. I and five others were put pro- visionally in the depot. The women's depart- ment was in ruins, so we were taken to the men's...I did not know what to do, as there was no place to sit down, except on the dread- fully filthy floor: there was even no straw, and the stench on the floor set me vomiting instantly...The water-closet was a large pond; it had to be crossed on a broken ladder which gave way under one of us and plunged him in the filth below. I could now understand the smell: the pond goes under the building, the floor of which is impregnated with sewage.
"Here I spent two days and two nights, passing the whole time at the window...In the night the doors were opened, and, with dreadful cries, drunken prostitutes were thrown into our room. They also brought us a maniac; he was quite naked. The miserable prisoners were happy on such occurrences; they tor- mented the maniac and reduced him to despair, until at last he fell on the floor in a fit and lay there foaming at the mouth. On the third day, a soldier of the depot, a Jew, took me into his room, a tiny cell, where I stayed with his wife.
Russian Prisons. 53...The prisoners told me that many of them were detained ' by mistake ' for seven and eight months awaiting their papers before being sent across the frontier. It is easy to imagine their condition after a seven months' stay in this sewer without a change of linen. They advised me to give the gaoler money, as he would then send me on to Prussia immediately. But I had been six weeks on the way already, and ray letters had not reached my people...At last, the soldier allowed me to go to the post- office with his wife, and I sent a registered letter to St. Petersburg." Madame C has influential kinsfolk in the capital, and in a few days the governor-general telegraphed for her to be sent on instantly to Prussia. " My papers (she says) were discovered immediately, and I was sent to Eydtkunen and set at liberty."
It must be owned that the picture is horrible. But it is not a whit overcharged. To such of us Russians as have had to do with prisons, every word rings true and every scene looks normal. Oaths, filth, brutality, bribery, blows, hunger — these are the essentials of every ostrog and of every depot from Kovno to Kamchatka, and from Arkhangel to Erzerum. Did space 54 In Russian and French Prisons.
permit, I might prove it with a score of such stories.
Such are the prisons of Western Russia. They are no better in the East and in the South. A person who was confined at Perm wrote to the Poryadok: — " The gaoler is one Gavriloff;...beating 'in the jaws' (v mordu), flogging, confinement in frozen black- holes, and starvation — such are the characteristics of the gaol...For every complaint the prisoners are sent 'to the bath' (that is, are flogged), or have a taste of the black-hole...The mor- tality is dreadful." At Vladimir, there were so many attempts at escape that it was made the subject of a special inquiry. The prisoners declared that on the allowance they received it was utterly impossible to keep body and soul together. Many complaints were addressed to headquarters, but they all remained unanswered. At last the prisoners complained to the Moscow Superior Court; but the gaoler got to hear of the matter, instituted a search, and took pos- session of the document. It is easy to imagine that the mortality must be immense in such prisons; but, surely, the reality surpasses all that might be imagined.
The hard-labour department of the civil Russian Prisons. 55 Russian Prisons. 55 prison at Perm was built in 1872 for 120 inmates. But by the end of the same year it received 240 prisoners, of whom 90 Circassians —some of those poor victims of the Russian conquest who cannot support the rule of the Cossack whip, revolt against it, and are deported by hundreds to Siberia. This prison consists of three rooms, one of which, for instance — 27 feet long, 19 feet wide, and 10 feet high — con- tained thirty-one inhabitants. The overcrowd- ing was the same in the other two rooms, so that the average space was from 202 to 260 cubic feet per each man; that is, let me explain, as if a man were compelled to live in a coffin 8 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 5 feet high. No wonder that the prisoners could not live in such confinement and died. Thus, from the end of 1872 to April 15, 1874, 377 Russians and 138 Circassians entered the prison; they were compelled to live there in dreadful humidity, terrible damp and cold, without anything of the nature of a blanket; and they died in the pro- portion of 90 Russians and 86 Circassians in the space of fifteen months; that is, twenty- four per cent, of the Russians and sixty-two per cent, of the Circassians, not to speak, of course, of those who were sent away to die on 56 In Russian and French Prisons.
the route to Siberia. The causes of the deaths were no special epidemics: nothing but scurvy, taking a great variety of forms, very malignant in its character, and of ten terminating by death.3 Surely, no Arctic expedition, recent or remote, has been so fatal as detention in a Russian central prison. As to the Perm depot prison for convicts sent to Siberia, the same official publication describes it in words hardly credible: it represents it as incomparably worse. The walls are dripping, there is no question of ventilation, and it is commonly so overcrowded that in the summer every inmate has " less than 124 cubic feet (a coffin of eight feet by five and three) to live and breathe in." 4 As to the first Kharkoff central prison, the chaplain of this prison said in 1868 from the pulpit, and the Eparchial Gazette of 1869 repro- duced the fact, that in the course of four months, of the 500 inmates of the prison two hundred died from scurvy. Things were not better in the Byelgorod prison. Out of 330 inmates who * There is no need to travel to Siberia to ascertain these facts. They are published in an official publication which may be consulted at the British Museum, namely, in the Journal of Legal Medicine published by the Medical Department of the Ministry of the Interior, 1874, vol. iii.
4 Same official publication, vol. iii.
\ .Russian Prisons. 57 were kept there in 1870, 150 died in the course of the year, and forty-five in the first half of the next year out of the same number of prisoners.5 At Kieff, the gaol was a sink of typhus fever. In one month in 1881, the deaths were counted by hundreds, and fresh batches were brought in to fill the room of those removed by death. This was in all the newspapers. Only a year afterwards (June 12, 1882), a circular from the Chief Board of Prisons explained the epidemics as follows: — " 1. The prison was dreadfully overcrowded, although it was very easy to transfer many of the prisoners to other prisons. 2. The rooms were very damp; the walls were covered with mildew, and the floor was rotten in many places. 3. The cesspools were in such a state that the ground about them was im- pregnated with sewage; " and so on, and so on. The Board added that owing to the same foul- ness other prisons were also exposed to the same epidemics.
5 Dr. Leontovitcli, in Archiv of Legal Medicine and Hygiene, for 1871, vol. iii.; and in Sbornik, published by the Medical Department of the Ministry of the Interior, 1873, vol. iii., p. 127. Shall I add that both the Archiv and Sbornik have been suppressed for their opasnoye naprav- leniye, that is, " dangerous direction " 1 Even official figures are dangerous to the Russian autocracy.
58 In Russian and French Prisons.
It might be supposed that some improve- ments have since been made, and the recurrence of such epidemics prevented. At least, the official publication of the Statistical Committee for 1883 would support such a supposition.6 There remains, however, some doubt as to the accuracy of its figures. Thus, in the three provinces of Perm, Tobolsk, and Tomsk, we find only an aggregate of 431 deaths reported in 1883 among prisoners of all categories. But if we revert to another publication of the same Ministry — the Medical Report for 1883 — we find that 1017 prisoners died same year in the hospitals of the prisons of the very same three provinces.7 And even in 1883, although no special epidemics are mentioned this year, the mortality at the two Kharkoff central prisons appears to have been 104 out of 846 inmates, that is, 123 in the thousand; and the same report states that scurvy and typhus continued their ravages in most Russian prisons, and especially on the way to Siberia.
The chief prison in St. Petersburg, the so- • Sbornik Svyedeniy po Rossii for 1883. St. Petersburg, 1886.
7 Otcliot Medicinskago Departamenta for 1883. St. Peters- burg, 1886.
Russian Prisons. 59 called " Litovskiy Zamok," is cleaner; but this old-fashioned, damp, and dark building should simply be levelled to the ground. The common prisoners have a certain amount of work to do. But the political ones are kept in their cells in absolute idleness; and some friends of mine — the heroes of the trial of the hundred and ninety-three who had two years and more of this prison — describe it as one of the worst they know. The cells are very small, very dark, and very damp; and the gaoler Makaroff was a wild beast pure and simple. The conse- quences of solitary confinement in this prison I have described elsewhere. It is worthy of notice that the common allowance for food is seven kopeks per day, and ten kopeks for prisoners of privileged classes, the price of black rye bread being four kopeks a pound.
But the pride of our authorities — the show- place for the foreign visitors — is the new " House of Detention " at St. Petersburg. It is a " model prison " — the only one of its kind in Russia — built on the plan of the Belgian gaols. I know it from personal experience, as I was detained there for three months, before my transfer to the lock-up at the Military Hospital. It is the only clean gaol for common 60 In Russian and French Prisons.
prisoners in Russia. Clean it certainly is. The scrubbing-brush is never idle there, and the activity of broom and pail is almost demo- niac. It is an exhibition, and the prisoners have to keep it bright. All the morning long do they sweep, and scrub, and polish the asphalte floor; and dearly have they to pay for the shine upon it. The atmosphere is loaded with asphaltic particles (I made a paper-shade for my gas, and in a few hours I could draw patterns with my finger in the dust with which it was coated); and this you have to breathe. The three upper stories receive all the exhala- tions of the floors below, and the ventilation is so bad that in the evenings, when all doors are shut, the place is literally suffocating. Two or three special committees were appointed one after the other to find out the means of improv- ing the ventilation; and the last one, under the presidencj" of M. Groth, Secretary of State, reported in June, 1881, that to be made habit- able, the whole building (which has cost twice as much as similar prisons in Belgium and Germany) must be completely rebuilt, as no repairs, however thorough, could make the ventilation tolerable. The cells are ten feet long and five feet wide; and at one time the Russian Prisons. 61 Russian Prisons. 61 prison rules obliged us to keep open the traps in our doors to the end that we might not be asphyxiated where we sat. Afterwards the rule was cancelled, and the traps were shut, and we were compelled to face as best we could the effects of a temperature that was sometimes stiflingly hot and sometimes freezing. But for the greater activity and life of the place, I should have regretted, all dark and dripping as it was, my casemate in the fortress of Peter and Paul — a true grave, where the prisoner for two, three, five years, hears no human voice and sees no human being, excepting two or three gaolers, deaf and mute when addressed by the prisoners. I shall never forget the children I met one day in the corridor of the House of Detention. They also, like us, were awaiting trial for months and years. Their greyish- yellow, emaciated faces, their frightened and bewildered looks, were worth whole volumes of essays and reports " on the benefits of cellular confinement in a model prison." As for the administration of the House of Detention, sufficient to say that even the Russian papers talked openly of the way in which the prisoners' allowances were sequestrated; so that in 1882, a committee of inquiry was appointed, when it 62 In Russian and French Prisons.
was found that the facts were even darker than had been reported. But all this is a trifle, indeed, in comparison with the treatment of prisoners. Here it was that General Trepoff ordered Bogoluboffto be flogged because he did not take his hat off on meeting the omnipotent satrap, had the prisoners who protested in their cells knocked down and beaten, and after- wards confined several of them — for five days — in cells by the washing-rooms, among excre- ments, and in a temperature of 110° Fahr. (45° Celsius). In the face of these facts, what pitiful irony is conveyed in an English panegyrist's admiring remark: — " Those who wish to know what Russia can do, ought to visit this House of Detention "! All that Imperial Russia really can do, is to build prisons where the prisoners are robbed, or flogged by madmen, and edifices which must be rebuilt five years after their construction.
The great variety of punishments inflicted under our penal code may be divided broadly into four categories. The first is that of hard- labour, with the loss of all civil rights. The convict's property passes to his heirs; he is dead in law, and his wife can marry another; he may be flogged with rods, or with the plete Russian Prisons. 63 (cat-o'-nine-tails) ad- libitum by each, drunken gaoler. After having been kept to hard-labour in the Siberian mines, or factories, he is settled for life somewhere in the country. The second category is that of compulsory colonization, accompanied by a complete or partial loss of civil rights, and is equivalent to Siberia for life. The third category deals with all convicts con- demned to compulsory labour in the arres- tantskiya roty, without loss of civil rights. The fourth — omitting much of less import- ance— consists of banishment to Siberia, with- out trial, and by order of the Executive merely, for life, or for an undetermined period. Formerly, the hard-labour convicts were sent straight off to Siberia: to the mines belong- ing "to the Cabinet of the Emperor" — which are, in other words, the private property of the Imperial family. Some of these, however, got worked out; others were found (or repre- sented) as so unremunerative in the hands of the Crown administration that they were sold to private persons who made fortunes with them; and Russia in Europe was compelled to take charge of her hard-labour cases herself. A few central prisons were therefore built in Russia, where convicts are kept for a time (one- 64 In Russian and French Prisons.
third to one-fourth of their sentence) before being sent to Siberia or Sakhalin. Society at large is of course inclined to regard hard- labour convicts as the worst of criminals. But in Russia this is very far from being the case. Murder, robbery, burglary, forgery, will all bring a man to hard labour; but so, too, will an attempt at suicide; so will " sacrilege and blasphemy," which usually mean no more than dissent; so will " rebellion " — or rather what is called rebellion in Russia — which is mostly no more than common disobedience to authorities; so will any and every sort of political offence; and so will " vagrancy," that mostly means escape from Siberia. Among the murderers, too, you will find not only the professional shedder of blood — a very rare type with us — but men who have taken life under such circumstances as, before a jury, or in the hands of an honest advocate, would have ensured their acquittal. In any case, only 30 per cent, or so of the 2000 to 2500 men and women yearly sent down to hard-labour are condemned as assassins. The rest — in nearly equal proportions — are either " vagrants " or men and women charged with one of the just-mentioned minor offences.
Russian Prisons. 65 Russian Prisons. 65 The Central Prisons were instituted with the idea of inflicting a punishment of the severest type. The idea was — there can, I am afraid, be no doubt about it — that you could not take too little trouble with convicts, nor get rid of them too soon. To this end these prisons were provided with such gaolers and keepers — mostly military officers — as were renowned for cruelty; and these ruffians were gifted with full power over their charges, and with full liberty of action, and had orders to be as harsh as possible. The end to which they were ap- pointed has been magnificently attained: the Central Prisons are so many practical hells: the horrors of hard-labour in Siberia have paled before them, and all those who have expe- rience of them are unanimous in declaring that the day a prisoner starts for Siberia is the happiest of his life.
Exploring these prisons as a " distinguished visitor," you will, if you are in search of emotions, be egregiously disappointed. You will see no more than a dirty building, crammed with idle inmates lounging and sprawling on the broad, inclined platforms which run round the walls, and are covered with nothing; o but a sheet of filth. You may be permitted 66 In Russian and French Prisons.
to visit a number of cells for " secret " or political cases; and if you question the in- mates, you will certainly be told by them that they are "quite satisfied with everything." To know the reality, one must oneself have been a prisoner. Records of actual experience are few; but they exist, and to one of the most striking I propose to refer. It was written by an officer who was condemned to hard labour for an assault committed in a moment of excite- ment, and who was pardoned by the Tsar after a few years' detention. His story was pub- lished in a Conservative review (the RussJcaya Ryech, for January, 1882), at a time, under Loris-Melikoff's administration, when there was much talk of prison reform and some liberty in the press; and there was not a journal that did not recognize the unimpeach- able veracity of this tale. The experience of our friends wholly confirms it.
There is nothing uncommon in the account of the material circumstances of life in this Central Prison. They are in some sort in- variable all over Russia. If we know that the gaol was built for 250 inmates, and actually contained 400, we do not need to inquire more about sanitary conditions. In like manner, the Riissian Prisons. 67 food was neither better nor worse than else- where. Seven kopeks (If d) a day is a very poor allowance per prisoner, and the gaoler and bursar being family men, of course they save as much as they can. A quarter of a pound of black rye bread for breakfast; a soup made of bull's heart and liver, or of seven pounds of meat, twenty pounds of waste oats, twenty pounds of sour cabbage, and plenty of water — many Eussian prisoners would coni- sider it as an enviable food. The moral con- ditions of life are not so satisfying. All day long there is nothing to do — for weeks, and months, and years. There are workshops, it is true; but to these only skilled craftsmen (whose achievements are the prison-keeper's perquisite) are admitted. For the others there is neither work, nor hope of work — unless it is in stormy weather, when the governor may set one half of them to shovel the snow into heaps, and the other half to shovel it flat again. The blank monotony of their lives is only varied by chastisement. In the particular prison of which I am writing, the punishments were varied and ingenious. For smoking, and minor offences of that sort, a prisoner could get two hours of kneeling on the bare flags, in a p 2 p 2 68 In Russian and French Prisons.
spot — the thoroughfare of icy winter winds- selected diligently ad hoc. The next punish- ment for the same minor offences was the blackholes — the warm one, and the cold one underground with a temperature at freezing- point. In both, prisoners slept on the stones* and the term of durance depended on the will of the governor.
" Several of us " (says our author) " were kept there for a fortnight; after which some were literally dragged, out into daylight and then dismissed to the land where pain and suffering are not." Is it any wonder that during the four years over which the writer's experience extended, the average mortality in the prison should have been thirty per cent, per annum? "It must not be thought " (the writer goes on to .say) " that those on whom penalties of this sort were inflicted were hardened desperadoes; we incurred them if we saved a morsel of bread from dinner for supper, or if a match was found on a prisoner." The insubordinate were treated after another fashion. One, for instance, was kept for nine months in solitary confinement in a dark cell — originally intended for cases of ophthalmia — and came out all but blind and mad. There is worse to follow.
Russian Prisons. 69 Russian Prisons. 69 "In the evening" (he continues) "the governor went his rounds and usually began his favourite occupation — flogging. A very narrow bench was brought out, and soon the place resounded with shrieks, while the governor, smoking a cigar, looked on and counted the lashes. The birch-rods were of exceptional size, and when not in use were kept immersed in water to make them more pliant. After the tenth lash the shrieking ceased, and nothing was heard but groans. Flogging was usually applied in batches, to five, ten men, or more, and when the execution was over, a great pool of blood would remain to mark the spot. Our neigh- bours without the walls used at these times to pass to the other side of the street, crossing themselves in horror and dread. After every such scene we had two or three days of com- parative peace; for the flogging had a sooth- ing influence on the governor's nerves. He soon, however, became himself again. When he was very drunk, and his left moustache was dropping and limp, or when he went out shooting and came home with an empty bag, we knew that that same evening the rods would be set to work." After this it is un- necessary to speak about many other revolting 7O In Russian and French Prisons.
details of life in the same prison. But there is a thing that foreign visitors would do well to lay to heart.
" On one occasion " (the writer says) " we were visited by an inspector of prisons. After cast- ing a look down the scuttle, he asked us if our food was good? or was there anything of which we could complain? Not only did the inmates declare that they were completely satisfied, they even enumerated articles of diet which we had never so much as smelt. This sort of thing " (he adds) " is only natural. If complaints were made, the inspector would lecture the governor a little and go away; while the prisoners who made them would remain behind and be paid for their temerity with the rod or the black-hole."
The prison in question is close by St. Petersburg. What more remote provincial prisons are like, my readers may imagine. I have mentioned above those of Perm and Kharkoff; and, according to the Golos, the Central Prison at Simbirsk is a centre of peculation and thievery. In only two of the central prisons, namely at Wilno and Simbirsk, the inmates are occupied with some useful work. At Tobolsk, the authorities, being at their wits* Russian Prisons.
Russian Prisons.
end bow to occupy the inmates, discovered a law of March 28th, 1870, which ordered the prisoners to be occupied in the removal of sand, stones, or cannon-balls from one place to another, and from there back again; and they acted accordingly for some time, in order to give some exercise to the inmates, and prevent the spreading of scurvy. As to the other hard- labour prisons, with the exception of some book- binding, or some repairs made by a few prisoners, the great bulk spent their life in absolute idle- ness. " All these prisoners are in the same abominable state as those of the old time," writes a Russian explorer.8 One of the worst of the hard-labour prisons was that of Byelgorod, in the province of Kharkoff, and it was there that the political prisoners condemned to hard-labour were detained in 1874 to 1882, before being sent to Siberia. The first three batches of our friends — those of the Dolgushin and Dmohovsky trial, the trial of the fifty at Moscow, and that of the hundred and ninety-three at St. Petersburg, — were sent to that prison. The most alarming reports were in circulation about this grave, 8 Mr. Tahlberg, in the St. Petersburg review, the Vyestnik Evropy, May, 1879.
72 In Russian and French Prisons.
where seventy prisoners were buried without being allowed to have any intercourse of any kind with the outer world, and without any occupation. They had mothers, sisters, who, undaunted by repeated refusals, never ceased to apply to all who had any authority at St. Petersburg, to obtain permission to see — were it only for a few minutes — their sons, or their brothers. It was known through the Byelgorod people that the treatment of the prisoners was execrable; from time to time it was reported that somebody had died, or that another had gone mad; but that was all. State secrets, however, cannot be kept ad infinitum. The time came when one mother obtained permission to see her son, once a month, for one hour, in the presence of the governor of the prison, and she did not hesitate to live under the walls of the prison for the sake of these short and rare interviews with her son. And then, came the year 1880, when it was dis- covered at St. Petersburg (after the explosion at the Winter Palace) that it was no longer possible to torture political prisoners at Byelgorod, and to refuse them the right they had acquired to be transported to a hard-labour prison in Siberia. So, in October, 1880, thirty Russian Prisons. 73 Russian Prisons. 73 of our comrades were transported from Byelgorod to Mtsensk. It was found that they could not bear the long journey to the Nertchinsk mines, and they were brought to Mtsensk, to recover a little strength. Then the truth came out. Reports about the confine- ment at Kharkoff were published in the Russian revolutionary papers, and partially penetrated also the press of St. Petersburg; written ac- counts of the life at Byelgorod were circulated. It then became known that the prisoners had been kept for three to five years in solitary confinement, and in irons, in dark, damp cells that measured only ten feet by six; that they lay there absolutely idle, absolutely isolated from any intercourse with human beings. The daily allowance of the Crown being five farthings a d ay, they received only bread and water, and thrice or four times a week a small bowl of warm soup, with a few grits mixed with every kind of rubbish. Ten minutes' walk in the yard each second day, was all the time allowed to breathe fresh air. No bed, no sort of pillow, nothing whatever to cover them; for the rest, they slept on the bare floor, with some of their clothes put under their heads, wrapped in the prisoner's grey cloak. Unbearable loneliness,