beds are drilled and made hollow-and all this is done so thoroughly, so artistically, as almost to defy detection. Thus in the Sterlitamak prison, in the year 1880, a convict named Sookatsheff hid a live horse, which he had unyoked a short time previously from the cart on which flour had been conveyed to the prison. All attempts to find it were fruitless. At last at the request of the inspector, Sookatsheff himself undertook to 'search' for it. He' found' it, its feet tied together in the loft of a twostory house, the door of which was locked with the inspector s own lock,"* The next care of the members of the prison oligarchy is to establish regular communications with the outer world, mainly in order to smuggle in spirits, cards, tobacco, tools, and "materials." In this matter the warders and the sentries who guard the prison from the outside render them inestimable services. Wares that are not very bulky are brought directly into the prison, in spite of the circumstance that persons coming in are always searched; large objects are thrown over the wall at a place agreed upon beforehand, spirits being poured into tin vessels, which are rolled up in straw or rags and flung over. Maidans, or prison clubs, are founded for the sale of greasy cards, wet tobacco, and poisonous spirits; a "common" fund is formed-always for the sole benefit of the oligarchs-from the monthly subscriptions, something in the nature of the "garnish" levied in old English prisons before Howard's time, which every prisoner who receives foodmoney is compelled nolens volens to pay, and from the exorbitant tributes extorted by barbarous methods from the unfortunate wretches who pass through the forwarding prison on their way elsewhere. One, and not by any means the worst, of these inhuman practices consists in compelling all new comers, even though they pass but one night in the prison, to pay three roubles (about seven shillings) for the use of the parasha, or night vessel.† The oligarchs select a complete staff of officials to carry on the work of "governing :" "elders, 99 66 bakers, cooks, 'guardians of the parasha," etc., etc. Immorality is practised on a scale unsuspected in the very worst of over-civilized European countries, and contemplated only in the 99.66 99 66 Were penal code of the Old Testament.* it otherwise one might feel shocked enough to learn that not only do the prisoners succeed by means of bribery, cunning, or violence in gaining access to the female half of the ostrog, but they also organize, wherever possible, a Persian harem. Not only are these things connived at by the authorities, but the prison officials frequently outbid the convicts in unnameable immorality. Lastly, a prisoners' committee of safety is formed an institution which, in some respects, reminds one of the redoubtable Vehmgericht of the Middle Ages, terrible by the absolute, uncontrolled power it wields, by the Venetian suspiciousness with which it regards most men, and by the inexorable cruelty with which its decrees are exccuted. The life of every prisoner is in its hands. For acts which convicts call "light crimes," and free men term indifferent, seeing that they are devoid of moral guilt or merit, they are beaten with knotted handkerchiefs; for treachery or even neglect in executing commissions the penalty is death, and the sentence is immutable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians, and as sure to be carried out as a decree of faith.† The so-called "Central" differs completely from the forwarding prisonsamong other things, in that it is a strictly cellular prison.' Judging by its results it might be aptly termed a or;" it utterly destroys human personality. "All the customs, the personal characteristics, the traits that distinguish a man from other men, are all annihilated after he has spent some time in the Central Prison, where he becomes a mere thing, a number." He is not even so much * Law Messenger, 1890, No. iv. p. 324. An unmarried convict, or a married one whose wife refuses to follow him and is therefore ipso facto divorced from him, is sent to the Central' instead of to the mines. "I have known cases of men condemned for short terms of imprisonment in the Central' exchanging their names with men under long sentences, allured by the outlook of passing but a third of the long sentence in the terrible 'Central' and of being then sent on to Siberia. Thus a man condemned for seven years (this is called a short term in Russian law), which he must spend at the Central,' willingly exchanges his identity with one sentenced to fifteen years, because he will have to spend but a third in the Central' and the remainder in Siberia.''+ The following two typical cases may be taken to illustrate the working and the injustice of the system: Ivan and Peter commit equally grave or perfectly identical crimes, and both are sentenced to six years' penal servitude. "Ivan happens to be married and his wife volunteers to accompany him to Siberia, in consequence of which, having worked hard for three years, say in the prison of Srednie Karinsk, he continues to work at the same mines but not in prison during the second half of the sentence, living in a convict colony with his family. The unmarried Peter goes to the Central' and undergoes his sentence there; and if he survives it, is released with his soul crushed out of him and his body diseased, and is sent on to Turukhansk or some such place where there is absolutely nothing for him to do but steal and enter the criminal army of tramps."S that is the work of their own hands, the spectacle that meets our eyes is one that would have sent a thrill of horror to the soul even of a Jefferies. The Maidan, or club-and some prisons are provided with several-has a canteen attached, in which tea and sugar, cards, spirits and tobacco are sold at exorbitant prices. All the news is reported and commented upon in the Maidan, all questions of interest to the prisoners are discussed and solved there, and always in accordance with the wishes of the omnipotent oligarchs. The prisoners have numerous amusements in which they indulge by order of these ringleaders, and more barbarous, filthy, hellish pastimes it would be difficult to imagine. They cannot even be darkly hinted in a Russian review read only by specialists, and which publishes things which cannot be alluded to in this country. Among the few prison games that are not of this kind may be mentioned the "Belfry," which consists in the prisoners getting up on each other's backs in two rows, and every four such hauling up a fifth by the beard or by the hair of the head, and swinging him about like the tongue of a bell, crying out the while, "Bom! bom!"* Another popular pastime is "Horse-selling" a convict is hoisted upon another's back and carried round the room, being mercilessly beaten with knotted handkerchiefs all the time. He often suffers quite as much from this amusement as from a sound flogging by the executioner. "The Prisoner's Oath" is a pastime which in cynical blasphemy outdoes all the others: it cannot be described. "The Sewing of the Caftan," by its obscenity and the exquisite torture it inflicts on the victim, has nothing else to match it.t It is not necessary to have incurred the serious displeasure of the oligarchs to be subjected to these kinds of punishments. For "serious" offences death is the penalty, with perfect impunity. In the prison of and the executioners do their bloody work Tsh... ski I saw a young man for whom they had sewn the caftan" the day before, and I shall never, as long as I live, be able to blot out from my memory the image of that martyr's face! shortly afterward died of the results. He * Law Messenger, p. 627. † Ibid. p. 628. + Ibid. "As a matter of course, the investigation that ensued brought nothing to light."'* If in the course of this or any other investigation a prisoner should say too much, if his reticence or his admissions compromise his fellows, if, generally speaking, he is of a talkative disposition, or a boaster, he is set down as a "heathen," and is mercilessly persecuted, beaten, tortured. If he informs on his colleagues, death is his portion, and the authorities are powerless to save him. "No matter how well a spy is screened and protected in secret cells, his fate will overtake him sooner or later. The greater the injury he inflicted on the convict corporation, the crueller their vengeance. I was acquainted with a convict condemned to deportation to Eastern Siberia, who, for the sake of lucre, had informed on three of his companions. Thanks to the efficient measures taken to screen him, he got as far as Moscow and in the Kolymashny courtyard was. interned in a secret cell. That very night the lock was picked by some person or persons unknown and the spy beaten within an ace of his life. After several months of careful medical treatment he recovered and was forwarded on. In Kazan, in the forwarding prison he was tortured and would have been killed outright had he not been torn out of the prisoners' hands in time. Put in hospital under the doctor's care, he was poisoned and his life was with difficulty saved. He then feigned madness and was placed in the Central Hospital for the Insane, where, thanks to his extraordinary ingenuity, he succeeded in remaining for about a year. Sent on along with the first spring gang of convicts, he reached the forwarding prison of Tiumen, where he was crushed to death by persons unknown,' This is by no means an exceptional instance, and the most horrible feature of such executions is that they sometimes take place on mere suspicion."t One has no difficulty in understanding the reluctance of prisoners, under such circumstances, to complain of the pain and misery inflicted upon them by their brutal colleagues, who really rule them. They are as little disposed to complain of the abuses for which the authorities are directly responsible, some few of which it may be well to point out. If in the first place we glance at the buildings-the étape prisons-we find that they are the most miserable lodgings any class of human beings has ever yet been housed in since the Troglodytes took to dwelling above ground. This perhaps is natural, seeing that the maintenance of the prisons is entrusted to unscrupulous petty speculators who receive from £35 to £45 a year for the work. One contractor will often include five or even more prisons within the sphere of his operations, receiving £45 for each. His part in the transaction generally ceases here, for he immediately cedes the contract to some still less scrupulous and more grasping village speculator, to whom he pays £5 per prison, thus gaining £200 without putting himself to the slightest trouble, or from whom he sometimes receives as much as £300 for ceding the contract. "For it is a very lucrative occupation, the money being earned in two ways, by not carrying out the very moderate conditions of the contract, and by engaging in illegal business with the prisoners, selling them spirits, cards, tobacco, tea, sugar, needles, thread, meat, and the sinful human body. In one of the étape prisons of the Mamadyshevski District in 1882 there lived two cheap enchantresses. Generally speaking, everything is dear at the étapes, except the human body.' These étape prisons are horrid holes, utterly unfit for human habitation, and unworthy to serve for the housing of brute beasts. These words have the ring of exaggeration about them, and yet the idea which they are capable of suggesting to a civilized reader will prove but a pale shadow of the dread reality. When speaking of Russian prisons and Russian convicts, ordinary expressions fail to convey the meaning intended. Nor is it a question of mere intensity, but of kind. The song has to be transposed into a wholly different key. The dry matterof-fact report from which I have been hitherto quoting speaks of the prison buildings in the following terms :— "Nearly all the étapes of the Government of Astrakhan are filthy mud hovels, heated only during two months of the year, and then insufficiently and only with the roots and branches of a shrub called tshilishnik. Scarcely a single prison is provided with a female section, and when this section does exist it is a dog-kennel, a stable, a black hole -anything but a place to live in. The prisons themselves are at best mere dark, low hovels built to accommodate from five to six men, the cost of erecting them amounting to no place where I saw good prisons was in the Sterlitamak district. The prisons of the district of Tshistopol and part of the Laisheff district are well built, but kept in a disgustingly more than from £10 to £15 each. The only * Lawo Messenger, No. ii. p. 343. filthly state. The Podlessensky élape (district of Ufa) was a complete ruin, its stove crumb. ling to pieces, its roof fallen in, the earthen floor burrowed to such an extent by pigs that these animals came in freely from the streets to the prisoners' rooms. This was duly reported to the authorities, and when, several years later, I was again passing through the village of Podlessnoïe, I yielded to my curiosity to examine it. There were some traces of improvement; the roof had been repaired with tree bark, the stove, which had only been recently put up, smoked terribly, and the pigs of the place went on with their destructive work as before.' It is no easy matter to realize fully what is meant by the words "in sufficiently heated," that one meets with so often in these reports. "In the winter of 1882," says the same authority— "in the Salikhovsky étape prison (district of Ufa) I was shown a barrel of water destined to be drunk by the prisoners; it was covered over with a large piece of ice that had become detached by thawing a little at the edges, and was five and a quarter inches thick. This barrel, I should mention, is never taken out of the room in which the prisoners live. This prison, like so many others, is only heated a few hours before the arrival of a convict party, and sometimes not even then, and when heated the stove yields more smoke than heat. The prison floor there was so rotten that one of the planks broke under me, and it was not without difficulty that I got my foot out of the deep hole that resulted. It was on this floor that the prisoners had to sleep, with absolute ly nothing under them, for there were not even any plank beds. The Elder' of the convict party complained of the weakness of the bolts, etc., and with two fingers of one hand twisted and bent with ease the tin bos on the windows.t "On the premises of the Tshookadytamak étape (near Belybay) the prison warder lives with his family, and he uses the common room in which the prisoners sleep, eat, drink, and live as a sheep-pen; early in the morning, before the departure of the convicts, 1 myself saw that while the convicts were still sleeping on their plank beds, there were thirty head of sheep and goats quartered immediately under the plank beds. The étape of the wealthy village of Alexeievsk (district of Menzelinsk) is situated in an underground cellar. The Uslonsky étape near Kazan is a mere wooden cage 194 feet square. It has no sections or partitions whatever, not even an ante-room; the floor is earthen. In March, 1882, a convict gang of twenty-seven prisoners and fifteen Cossacks arrived; the Cossacks were billeted in the neighboring huts, while the twenty-seven prisoners, thoroughly fagged out after a day's journey of 30 versts, carrying "It is not my intention," the writer significantly adds, "to give even an inadequate picture of some certain kinds of prison horrors. A glance at the official documents in the offices of the military commanders of the eight Volga Governments would be rewarded by the discovery of materials enough to fill up the outline." A Russian gentleman named Ptitsin was sent some time ago in a purely official capacity to Siberia, where he acquitted himself in a most conscientious manner of the difficult mission with which he was entrusted, carefully examining the prisons, many of which Mr. Kennan never saw. He drew up a lengthy report, which was duly pigeon-holed, as such reports usually are, part of which he recently published with the permission of the authorities, accorded with a very bad grace. This unimpeachable document is a complete confirmation of the report inserted in the Law Messenger. Notwithstanding the statistical brevity and lack of consecutiveness which characterize the style of both these documents, a few extracts from them is better calculated, I believe, to convey to Englishmen a correct idea of what prison life in Russia really is than the most vivid description *Law Messenger. † Ibid. It is very curious, that in the face of these things known and proclaimed even in Russia itself, men, and Englishmen, who know nothing of the language and customs of the country, and, if possible, still less about its prison system, should solemnly assure us that "on the whole there is no doubt that the Russian Govern ment treats its prisoners far better than we in England are inclined to give it credit for."-De Windt, op. cit., p. 411. given by the most impartial of their countrymen.* All along the Yakootsk tract, M. Ptitsin virtually tells us, the Government really do nothing, or next to nothing, for the prisoners. Thus the cost of forwarding the convicts along this immense tract falls directly upon the peasants, who are as poor as country mice. It is they, indigent as they are, who have to build the prisons at every post station, and keep them in repair. That they fail, lament ably fail, to discharge these duties is natural, nay, inevitable; but, whoever is to blame, the victims are always the wretched prisoners. Take, for instance, the forwarding prison of Katschoog (236 versts from Irkutsk); the rooms there, M. Ptitsin affirms, have only single windows, although in the streets the mercury registers at times 79 degrees of cold (Fahr.), with the result that in one room built to accommodate forty men at most the temperature is 39° Fahr., even when one hundred persons are passing the night there. In Verkholensk prison, we learn from the same authority, there are but two rooms, very low, eight arsheens (20 feet) long, and six arsheens (15 feet) wide. The prisoners receive fifteen copecks a day to live upon. They complained to M. Ptitsin that the jailer who purchased for them the bread on which they lived gave them a very bad quality, while the governor of the prison-a brutal peasantbeat them and their guards likewise most mercilessly in his drunken fits. The Tiumen forwarding prison, a low hut constructed for the accommodation of twenty convicts, frequently contains eighty. Some of the prisoners whom M. Ptitsin found there had no clothes, nothing but their linen, and this in the month of February (1883). Thus he mentions the convicts Goosyeff and Goltakoff by name, whom he found in this pitiable plight. The authorities, questioned on the matter, informed him that they had sold their clothes; the convicts, on the contrary, assured him that they had been stolen from them. When the stove was heated many of the prisoners were asphyxiated, and were with difficulty restored to life. The Karkinskaïa prison is a low un *M. Ptitsin's account was published in the December issue of the Northern Messenger, a Russian monthly magazine which appears in St. Petersburg. heated hut built for twenty men, but occupied by parties of from eighty to a hundred, who arrive every week. The convicts declared the Ponomareffsky prison a magnificent place by comparison, and yet they were squeezed together there like herrings in a barrel. To avoid death by asphyxiation the door was left open all night, although the thermometer registered 25° below zero (Fahr.). From Gruznovsky Station (the seventeenth from Irkutsk) to the town of Kirensk on the Lena, an extent of 540 versts, there are no prisons, the convicts being quartered on the peasants. The forwarding prison of Ust-Kutsk has but two cells almost dark, which can accommodate three men each at a pinch. They do not possess a stove or other heating apparatus. There are generally five, sometimes, though rarely, ten men in each room, who remain at times as long as fifteen days. No food whatever is allowed them, nor money to buy it. Every second day the jailer leads them to the village to solicit alms. What they get in this way is their only means of supporting life. When the prison can hold no more, the prisoners are quartered on the peasants, but as the latter discuss and deliberate, and squabble among themselves in choosing their prisoners (chiefly by their looks, each one anxious to obtain a convict who is comparatively harmless), the wretched exiles are left freezing in the open air, it may be six hours at a time, till some decision is taken. In one party there * It is instructive, or ought to be, to note the light in which an Englishman, who could, had he wished, have studied the subject before writing upon it, puts this same fact mixed up with some fiction before his readers. The criminals (as distinguished from politicals) have no complaint whatever to make as to food and clothing; each man has two pounds of black bread, three-quarters of a pound of meat, and a small allowance of quass daily. This, it must be remembered, is what the Government actually allows him [italics mine]. He may make what he can on the road in addition to this by soliciting alms from travellers and caravans. Imagine a convict travelling from Portland to Dartmoor being allowed to beg at the railway stations !"'-De Windt, op. cit. p. 411. "No travelling is done in winter," Mr. de t Windt assures us. Now this is a very grave mistake. In Europe and Siberia they cease travelling during the wet season, which lasts from three to eight weeks. But in the in-. terior of Russia, as well as in the interior of Siberia, convicts continue to journey on foot during the whole winter. Cf. for ex. the Law Messenger, No. iv. p. 638. |