74 IH Russian and French Prisons.
absolute silence; no occupation of any kind! It was only after three whole years of such confinement that they were allowed to have some books.
Knowing by two years and a half of personal experience what solitary confinement is, I do not hesitate to say that, as practised in Russia, it is one of the cruellest tortures man can suffer. The prisoner's health, however robust, is irreparably ruined. Military science teaches that in a beleaguered garrison which has been for several months on short rations, the mortality increases beyond measure. This is still more true of men in solitary confinement. The want of fresh air, the lack of exercise for body and mind, the habit of silence, the absence of those thousand and one impressions, which, when at liberty, we daily and hourly receive, the fact that we are open to no impressions that are not imaginative — all these combine to make solitary confinement a sure and cruel form of murder. If conversation with neighbour pri- soners (by means of light knocks on the wall) is possible, it is a relief, the immensity of which can be duly appreciated only by those who have been condemned for one or two years to absolute separation from all humanity. But it is also a Russian Prisons. 75 new source of suffering, as very often your own moral sufferings are increased by those you experience from witnessing day by day the growing madness of your neighbour, when you perceive in each of his messages the dreadful images that beset and overrun his tormented brain. That is the kind of confinement to which political prisoners are submitted when awaiting trial for three or four years. But it is still worse after the condemnation, when they are brought to the Kharkoff Central Prison. Not only the cells are darker and damper than elsewhere, and the food is worse than common; but, in addition, the prisoners are carefully maintained in absolute idleness. No books, no writing materials, and no implements for manual labour. No means of easing the tortured mind, nor anything on which to con- centrate the morbid activity of the brain; and, in proportion as the body droops and sickens, the spirit becomes wilder and more desperate. Physical suffering is seldom or never insup- portable; the annals of war, of martyrdom, of sickness abound in instances in proof. But moral torment — after years of infliction — is utterly intolerable. This our friends have found to their cost. Shut up in the fortresses 76 In Russian and French Prisons.
and houses of detention first of all, and after- wards in the central prisons, they go rapidly to decay, and either go calmly to the grave, or become lunatics. They do not go mad as, after being outraged by gendarmes, Miss M, the promising young painter, went mad. She was bereft of reason instantly; her madness was simultaneous with her shame. Upon them insanity steals gradually and slowly: the mind rots in the body " from hour to hour."
In July, 1878, the life of the prisoners at the Kharkoff prison had become so insupportable, that six of them resolved to starve themselves to death. For a whole week they refused to eat, and when the governor-general ordered them to be fed by injection, such scenes ensued as obliged the prison authorities to abandon the idea. To seduce them back to life, officialism made them certain promises: as, for instance, to allow them walking exercise, and to take the sick out of irons. None of these promises were kept. It was only later on, when several had died, and two went mad (Plotnikoff and Bogoluboff), that the prisoners obtained the privilege of sawing some wood in the yard, in company with two Tartars, who understood not a word of Russian. Only after obstinate demands for work, after Riissian Prisons. 77 weeks spent in black-holes for that obstinacy, they obtained some work in the cells by the end of the third year of their detention.
In October, 1880, a first party of thirty prisoners, condemned mostly in 1874, was sent to the Mtsensk depot before being despatched to Siberia. They were followed in the course of the winter by forty more of their com- rades, from the hundred and ninety -three. All were destinated for the Kara gold-mines in Neztchinsk. They knew well the fate that was reserved for them, and still the day they left the Byelgorod hell was considered as a day of deliverance. After the Central Prison, hard labour in Siberia looks like a paradise.
I have before me an account written by a person who was allowed to visit one of the prisoners at the Mtsensk depot, and I never saw anything more touching than this plain tale. It was written under the fresh impression of interviews at Mtsensk with a beloved being recovered after many years of disappearance from the world; and with a forgiving heart the writer consecrates but a few lines, a dozen or so, to the horrors that had been suffered at Byelgorod. " I shall not insist on these horrors " — it stands in the account — " because 78 In Russian and French Prisons.
I am eager to tell what has been a warm ray of light in the great darkness of the prisoners' life," and pages are filled in describing in detail the joy of the short interviews at Mtsensk with those who for so many years had been buried alive.
" Old and young people, parents, wives, sisters and brothers, all were coming to Mtsensk from different parts of Russia, from different classes of society; the common joy of the interviews and the common sorrow of part- ing had united them into one great family...What a dear, precious time it was! " " What a dear, precious time it was! " — What a depth of sorrow appears in this excla- mation coming from the very heart of the writer, when one knows that the interviews were interviews with prisoners who were going to leave Russia for ever, who had a journey of more than four thousand miles before them, who had to be transported for ever to the land of sorrow — Siberia! " What a dear, precious time it was! " And my informant minutely describes the interviews; the supplies of food they brought to the prisoners to invigorate them after a six years' seclusion, the tools to give them some distraction; the tidy prepara- Russian Prisons. 79 Russian Prisons. 79 tions for the long journey through Siberia; the padding they were manufacturing to prevent the chains from wounding the ankles of those five who had to perform the whole of the journey in irons; and finally, the sight of a long row of carts, with two prisoners and two gendarmes in each, which took them away to the next railway station, and the sorrow of parting with beloved beings, none of whom have yet returned, while so many have died either on the journey or in Siberian gaols, and so many again have put an end to their lives from sheer despair of ever seeing the day of liberation...The above fully shows what the common-law prisons in Russia are. More pages could be filled with like descriptions, more separate gaols could be described, it would be a mere repetition. JSTew and old prisons are alike. The whole of our penal institutions is described in one sentence of that record of prison-life on which I have already drawn so much: — " In conclusion," writes the author, " I must add that the prison now rejoices in another governor. The old one quarrelled with the treasurer on the subject of peculation from the prisoners' allowance, and in the end they were both dismissed. The new governor 8o In Russian and French Prisons.
is not such a ruffian as his predecessor; I understand, however, that with him the prisoners are starved far more than formerly, and that he is in the habit of giving full play to his fists on the countenances of his charges." This remark sums up the whole " Reform of Prisons " in Russia. One tyrant may be dis- missed, but he will be succeeded by some one as bad, or even worse, than himself. It is not by changing a few men, but only by changing com- pletely from top to bottom the whole system, that any amelioration can be made; and such is also the conclusion of a special committee recently appointed by the Government. But it would be mere self-delusion to conceive improvement possible under such a regime as we now enjoy. At least half a dozen com- missions have already gone forth to inquire, and all have come to the conclusion that unless the Government is prepared to meet extraordinary expenses, our prisons must remain what they are. But honest and capable men are far more needed than money, and these the present Government cannot and will not discover. They exist in Russia, and they exist in great numbers; but their services are not required. There was, for instance, one honest man, Rzisstan Prisons.
Rzisstan Prisons.
Colonel Kononovitch, chief of the penal settle- ment at Kara. Without any expense to the Crown, M. Kononovitch had repaired the weatherworn, rotten buildings, and had made them more or less habitable; with the micro- scopic means at his disposal, he contrived to improve the food. But the praise of an occasional visitor of the Kara colony, together with like praise contained in a letter intercepted on its way from Siberia, were sufficient reasons for rendering M. Kononovitch suspicious to our Government. He was immediately dismissed, and his successor received the order to reintro- duce the iron rule of past years. The political convicts, who enjoyed a relative liberty after the legal term of imprisonment had expired, were put in irons once more; not all, however, as two have preferred to kill themselves; and once more affairs are ordered as the Government desires to see them. Another gentleman in Siberia, General Pedashenko, has been dismissed too, for refusing to confirm a sentence of death which had been passed by a military tribunal on the convict Schedrin, found guilty of striking an officer for insulting two of his fellow- sufferers, MM. Bogomolets and Kovalsky. It is everywhere the same. To devote one- G G 82 In Russian and French Prisons.
self to any educational work, or to the convict population, is inevitably to incur dismissal and disgrace. Near St. Petersburg we have a reformatory — a penal settlement for children and growing lads. To the cause of these poor creatures a gentleman named Herd — grandson of the famous Scotchman employed by Alexander I. in the reform of our prisons — had devoted himself body and soul. He had an abundance of energy and charm; his whole heart was in the work; he might have rivalled Pestalozzi. Under his ennobling in- fluence boy-thieves and ruffians, penetrated with all the vices of the streets and the lock- ups, learned to be men in the best sense of the word. To send a boy away from the common labour-grounds or from the classes was the greatest punishment admitted in this penal colony, which soon became a real model colony. But men like Herd are not the men our Go- vernment is in need of. He was dismissed from his place, and the institution he ruled so wisely has become a genuine Russian prison, complete even to the rod and the black-hole.
These examples are typical both of what we have to suffer and of what we have to expect. It is a fancy to imagine that anything could be Russian Prisons. 83 reformed in our prisons. Our prisons are the reflection of the TV hole of our life under the present regime; and they will remain what they are now until the whole of our system of government and the whole of our life have undergone a thorough change. Then, but only then, " Russia may show what it can realize;" but this, with regard to crime, would be — I hope — something quite different from what is now understood by the name of "a good prison."
G 2 84 In Russian and French Prisons.
CHAPTER III.
THE FOBTKESS OF ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL.
No Autocracy can be imagined without its Tower or its Bastille. The St. Petersburg Autocracy is no exception to the rule, and it has its Bastille in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress. This fortress, unlike the Bastille of Paris, has nothing particularly gloomy in its outer aspect, nothing striking. Its low granite bastions facing the Neva have a modern appearance; it contains the Mint, a cathedral where the Emperors and their families are buried, several buildings occupied by engineers and military, extensive arsenals in the new Cronwerk in the north; and the ordinary street traffic passes through it in the day-time. But a sensation of horror is felt by the inhabitants of St. Petersburg as they perceive on the other side of the Neva, opposite the Imperial palace, the grey bastions of the fortress; and gloomy are their thoughts as the northern wind brings across the river the The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 85 discordant sound of the fortress-bells which every hour ring their melancholy tune. Tra- dition associates the sight and the name of the fortress with suffering and oppressions. Thousands — nay, scores of thousands of people, chiefly Little Russians, died there, as they laid the foundations of the bastions on the low, marshy island of Jani-saari. No remembrance of glorious defence is associated with it; nothing but memories of suffering inflicted upon the foes of Autocracy.
It was there that Peter I. tortured and mutilated the enemies of the Imperial rule which he tried to force upon Russia. There he ordered the death of his son Alexis — if he did not kill him with his own hands, as some historians say. There, too, during the reign of the Empresses, the omnipotent courtiers sent their personal rivals, leaving it an open ques- tion in so many families whether their relatives had been drowned in the Neva or remained buried alive in some stone cellar. There the heroes of the first and only attempt at revolution in St. Petersburg, the Decem- brists, were confined — some of them, like Batenkoff, remaining there for twelve whole years. There Karakozoff was tortured and 86 In Russian and French Prisons.
hanged — almost a corpse, hardly showing any signs of life when he was brought to the scaffold. And since that time a whole gene- ration of men and women, inspired with love for their oppressed people, and with ideas of liberty filtrating in from the West, or nursed by old popular traditions, have been detained there, some of them disappearing within the fortress for ever, others ending their life on its glacis, or within its walls, on the gallows; while hundreds have left those mute walls for secret transportation to the confines of the snow- deserts of Siberia — a whole generation in which the hopes of literary and scientific Russia were bound up — suppressed, annihilated, for no purpose! How many are in the fortress still? "What is the lonely, disheartening existence they still drag out there? What will become of them?...Nobody can answer these questions; and a kind of superstitious fear attaches itself to the huge mass of stone- work over which the Imperial banner floats. It is the Bastille — the last stronghold of Autocracy. The fortress covers more than 300 acres with its six bastions and six courtines, two ravelins, and the wide red-brick cronwerk erected by Nicholas I. on the north. It has, The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 87 within its enclosure, plenty of all kinds of accommodation for all kinds of prisoners. Nobody, except the commander of the place, knows all of them.1 There is a lofty three-storied building, which PLAN OF THE FOBTBESS OF ST. PETEE AND ST. PAUL.
1. Courtine of Catherine.
2. Trubetskoi Bastion.
3. Trubetskoi Ravelin.
4. Alexeyevskiy Ravelin.
5. The Mint.
6. Cathedral.
1 For those who are unacquainted with fortress termi- nology the following explanations may be useful. Each fortress has the shape of a polygon. At the protruding angles are bastions, that is, pentagonal spaces enclosed In Russian and French Prisons.
once obtained the nickname of " St. Peters- burg Imperial University," because hundreds of students were marched there, between two files of bayonets, after the disorders at the University in 18G1. Scores of young men were kept there for months before they were transported to " more or less remote provinces of the Empire," and saw their scientific career destroyed for ever by this "measure of the Emperor's clemency."
There is again the Courtine of Catherine which faces the Neva, under whose wide em- brasures graceful flowering bushes grow at the foot of the granite walls, between two bastions. It is there that Tchernyshevsky wrote in 1864 his remarkable novel "What is to be done?" which is just now stirring the hearts of the Socialist youth of America, and in Russia between two long and two short walls, and having sometimes a second interior building — the reduct — this last being a two- storied pentagonal suite of vaulted casemates, intended for the defence of the bastion when its outer wall is already damaged. Each two bastions are connected by a courtine. The courtine and the two interior angles of the bastions being the weakest parts of the fortifications, they are often masked by a triangular fortification made outside the fortress proper (but enclosed within the same glacis) — the ravelin. The St. Petersburg fortress has but two ravelins; the Trubetskoi in the west, and the Alexeievskiy in the east.
The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 89 made a revolution in the relations of the students and the women who were striving for their right to knowledge. From the depth of a casemate in the Courtine, Tchernyshevsky taught the young men to see in woman a com- rade and a friend — not a domestic slave — and his lesson has borne its fruits.
It was there again that, a few years later, Dmitri Pissareff was imprisoned for having taken up the same noble work. Compelled to abandon it in the fortress, he did not lie idle: lie wrote his remarkable analysis of the " Origin of Species," one of the most popular, and surely the most attractive ever penned. Two great talents were thus destroyed pre- cisely as they were reaching their full growth. Tchernyshevsky was sent to Siberia, where he was kept for twenty years, in the mines first, and then, for thirteen years, in Viluisk, a hamlet of a few houses situated on the confines of the Arctic region. A petition for release, signed by an International Literary Congress, produced no effect. The Autocrat was so much afraid of the influence Tchernyshevsky might enjoy in Russia, that he permitted him to return from Siberia and to be settled at Astrakhan, only when he had no more to fear 9O In Russian and French Prisons, from his noble pen: when the writer was a ruin after a twenty years' life of privation and sufferings among semi-savages. There was a simulacrum of judgment passed upon Tcherny- shevsky: his writings, all of which had passed through the hands of the Censorship, his novel written in the fortress, were brought forward as so many proofs of guilt before the Senate. Pissareff was not even brought before a court: he was merely kept in the fortress until reported harmless...He was drowned a few months after his release.
In the years 1870 and 1871 a great number of young men and women were kept in the Courtine in connection with the circles of Netchaieff — the first which dared to say: "Be the people! " and induced the youth of Eussia to go and spread Socialism whilst living the life of the people itself. But soon, that is, in 1873, a new, wider and safer prison — the Trubetskoi bastion — was opened within the fortress; and since that time the Courtine of Catherine has become a military prison for St. Petersburg officers condemned to " detention in fortresses " for breaches of discipline. Its wide and lofty casemates have been rebuilt, decorated and rendered more or less comfort- The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 9 1 able. Being in connection with the Trubetskoi bastion, where political prisoners are kept whilst awaiting trial, it is there that a few of them are indulged by an occasional interview with kinsfolk. Special Commissions nomi- nated for preliminary inquiries into State affairs, sometimes have their sittings in the same Courtine, extorting information from the prisoners which may guide them in their re- searches. Political prisoners are no longer lodged there, and Solovioff, who was hanged in 1879, seems to have been the last "political" in the Courtine. Some inmates of the Tru- betskoi bastion are, however, still occasionally taken there for a few days, in order to be se- cluded from their comrades for some unknown purpose. One instance in point within my knowledge, is that of Saburoff. He was se- cluded in the Courtine, to be stupefied by drugs, that he might be photographed...So he was told, at least, when he returned to con- sciousness. At any rate, the Courtine of Catherine is no longer a prison for " politicals." The Trubetskoi bastion, close by, was rebuilt for that purpose in 1872, and began to receive inmates from the end of 1873.
There, the " politicals " are kept now for 92 Iii Russian and French Prisons.
two, three years, awaiting the decisions of secret Commissions which, may send them before a court, or despatch them to Siberia without ever bringing them before any judge.
The Trubetskoi bastion, where I spent more than two years, is no longer enveloped in the mystery which clothed it in 1873, when it was first made use of as a House of Preliminary Detention for political prisoners. The seventy- two cells where the prisoners are kept occupy the two stories of the reduct — a pentagonal building with a yard within, one of the five faces of which is occupied by the apartment of the governor of the bastion and the guard- room for the military post. These cells are large enough, each of them being a vaulted casemate, destined to shelter a big fortress gun. They measure eleven paces (about twenty-five feet) on the diagonal, and so I could regularly walk every day seven versts (about five miles) in my cell, until my forces were broken by the long im- prisonment.
There is not much light in them. The window, which is an embrasure, is nearly of the same size as the windows in other prisons. But the cells occupy the interior enclosure of the bastion (that is, the reduct}, and the high wall of the The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 93 bastion faces the windows of the cells at a distance of fifteen to twenty feet. Besides, the walls of the reduct, which have to resist shells, are nearly five feet thick, and the light is inter- cepted by a double frame with small apertures, and by an iron grate. Finally, everybody knows that the St. Petersburg sky is anything but bright. Dark they are;2 still, it was in such a cell — the lightest of the whole building — that I wrote my two volumes on the Glacial Period, and, taking advantage of brighter summer days, I prepared there the maps that accompany the work and made drawings. The lower story is very dark, even in summer. The outer wall intercepts all tbe light, and I remember that even during bright days writing was very difficult. In fact, it was possible only when the sun's rays were reflected by the upper part of both walls. All the northern face of the reduct is very dark in both stories.
The floor of the cells is covered with a painted felt, and the walls are double, so to say; that is, they are covered also with felt, and, at a s The cells in common prisons — those, for instance, of the prison of Lyons, in France — although having windows of the same size, cannot be compared for brightness with those of the fortress.
94 In Russian and French Prisons.
distance of five inches from the wall, there is an iron-wire net, covered with rough linen and with yellow painted paper. This arrangement is made to prevent the prisoners from speaking with one another by means of taps on the wall. The silence in these felt-covered cells is that of a grave. I know cells in other prisons. Outer life and the life of the prison reach one by thousands of sounds and words exchanged here and there. Although in a cell, one still feels oneself a part of the world. The fort ress is a grave. You never hear a sound, excepting that of a sentry continually creeping like a hunter from one door to another, to look through the " Judas " into the cells. You are never alone, as an eye is continually kept upon you, and still you are always alone. If you address a word to the warder who brings you your dress for walking in the yard, if you ask him what is the weather, he never answers. The only human being with whom I exchanged a few words every morning was the Colonel who came to write down what I had to buy — tobacco or paper. But he never dared to enter into any conversation, as he himself was always watched by some of the warders. The absolute silence is interrupted only by the bells of the clock, The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 95 which play each quarter of an hour a Gospodi pomilui, each hour the canticle Kol slaven nash Gospod v Sionye, and each twelve hours God save the Tsar in addition to all this. The cacophony of the discordant bells is horrible during rapid changes of temperature, and I do not wonder that nervous persons consider these bells as one of the plagues of the fortress.
The cells are heated from the corridor out- side by means of large stoves, and the tempe- rature is kept exceedingly high, in order to prevent moisture from appearing on the walls. To keep up such a temperature, the stoves are very soon shut, whilst the coal is still blazing, so that the prisoner is usually asphyxiated with oxide of carbon. Like all Russians, I was accustomed to keep a high temperature, of 61° to 64° Fahrenheit, in my room. But I could not support the high temperature of the fortress, and still less the asphyxiating gases; and, after a long struggle, I obtained that my stove should not be shut up very hot. I was warned that the walls would be immediately covered with moisture; and, indeed, they soon were dripping in the corners of the vault; even the painted paper of the front wall was as wet as if water were continually poured on it. But, as there 96 In Russian and French Prisons.
was no other choice than between dripping walls and extenuation by a bath -like tempe- rature, I chose the former, not without some inconvenience for the lungs, and not without acquiring rheumatism. Afterwards I learned that several of my friends who were kept in the same bastion expressed the firm conviction that some mephitic gas was sent into their cells. This rumour is widely spread, and has also reached foreigners at St. Petersburg; and it is the more remarkable as nobody has expressed the suspicion of having been poisoned otherwise; for instance, by means of the food. I think that what I have just said explains the origin of the rumour; in order to keep the stoves very hot for twenty-four hours, they are shut up very soon, and so the prisoners are asphyxiated every day, to some extent, by oxide of carbon. Such was, at least, my explanation of the suffocation which I experienced nearly every day, followed by complete prostration and de- bility. I did not notice it again after I had finally succeeded in preventing the hot-air con- duct to my cell from being opened at all.
The food, when General Korsakoff was Com- mandant of the fortress, was good; not very substantial, but very well cooked; afterwards The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 97 it became much worse. No provisions from without are allowed, not even fruits — nothing but the calatclii (white bread) which com- passionate merchants distribute in the prisons at Christmas and Easter — an old Russian custom existing until now. Our kinsfolk could bring us only books. Those who had no relatives were compelled to read over and over again the same books from the fortress library, which contains the odd volumes left there by several generations since 1826. As to breath- ing fresh air, it is obvious that it could not be allowed to a great amount. During the first six months of my confinement I walked half-an- hour or forty minutes every day; but later on, as we were nearly sixty in the bastion, and as there is but one yard for walking, and the dark- ness, under the sixtieth degree of latitude, comes at 4 p.m. in the winter, we walked but twenty minutes each two days in the summer, and twenty minutes twice a week during the winter. I must add also that, owing to the heavy white smoke thrown off by the chimney of the Mint which overlooks the yard, this walk was completely poisoned during easterly winds. I could not endure on such occasions the continual coughing of the soldiers, exposed H H 98 In Russian and French Prisons.
throughout the day to breathe these gases, and asked to be brought back to my cell.
But all these are mere details, and none of us have complained much about them. We know perfectly well that a prison is a prison, and that the Russian Government was never gentle with those who attempted to shake off its iron rule. We know, moreover, that the Trubets- koi bastion is a palace — a true palace — in com- parison with those prisons where a hundred thousand of our people are locked up every year, and submitted to the treatment I have described in the foregoing pages.
In short, the material conditions of detention in the Trubetskoi bastion are not exceedingly bad, although very hard, in any case. But half of the prisoners kept there have been arrested on a simple denunciation of a spy, or as acquaintances of revolutionists; and half of them, after having been kept for two or three years, will not even be brought before a court; or, if brought, will be acquitted — as was the case in the trial of the hundred and ninety-three — and thereupon sent to Siberia or to some hamlet on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, by a simple order of the administration. The in- quiry is pursued in secrecy, and nobody knows The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 99