Arthur Griffiths

“ Hunger strikes were more especially the weapon of the weaker sex, although there was no weakness among the women revolutionists, and the movement owed much of its vigour and vitality to their indomitable courage and unconquerable strength of character. In the days to come, when the great, patient people of a cruelly oppressed and misgoverned land have achieved its emancipation, ample justice must be done to the feminine champions, who entered boldly into the fray and fought strenuously for the vindication of the rights of their fellow countrymen to freedom and independence. ”

“ Working always under surveillance in the barracks, ever in the unvarying companionship of two hundred others; never alone, never! This enforced cohabitation was the sharpest and most painful sensation endured. Nowhere is it so horrible as in a prison, where the society must contain many with whom no one would willingly live. ”

“ The so-called excesses of the revolutionists have not been committed, as the champions of the Russian government would have us believe, “by bloodthirsty tigers in human form at the prompting of presumptuous fancies,” but “by ordinary men and women exasperated to the pitch of desperation by administrative suppression of free speech and free thought, administrative imprisonment for years upon suspicion, administrative banishment to the arctic regions without trial, and, to crown all, administrative denial of every legal remedy and every peaceful means of redress.” ”

“ The Czar and his bureaucracy are more and more fiercely and systematically assailed, despite the increased reprisals of despotic power and the temporary triumph of a reactionary policy.
Rulers, with their backs to the wall, plead these outrages are imperative in self-defence. The malcontents, ever increasing in numbers and violence, have openly determined to make government impossible and that terrorism by bomb-throwing and assassination is the only argument left. They will accept no compromise; they distrust all promises, and move steadily on to social revolution. ”

“ To unaccustomed senses, it seems so saturated with foulness and disease as to be almost insupportable. As we entered the corridor, slipped upon the wet, filthy floor, and caught the first breath of this air, Major Potulov (the commandant) turned to me with a scowl of disgust, and exclaimed, ‘It is a repulsive prison.’” In the cells there was absolutely no ventilation whatever. Even the brick oven drew its air from the corridor. ”

“ There are in every exile party a number of abject creatures, degraded gamblers, who have lost their clothing (government property) and mortgaged their food allowance for weeks ahead, and who will sell their souls for a few rubles and a bottle of vodka. Such a creature will listen greedily to the overtures of the more prosperous convict, who has won or saved money on the road, and who tempts with splendid offers: a warm overcoat, five rubles and a few glasses of drink as the price of his personality. ”

“ The Fortress of Schlüsselburg is situated on an island in Lake Ladoga, about forty miles from St. Petersburg. The worst of all fates meted out to political prisoners in Russia is imprisonment in the subterranean dungeons of this fortress. No news penetrates the walls of the isolated prison and no information from within leaks out. Few ever leave the prison alive except to be transferred to an insane asylum. ”

“ The women revolutionists also showed the highest spirit and were always ready to fight for their own rights. A police ispravnik had insulted a political, mistaking him for another with whom he had a difference. It came to the knowledge of the wife of the political, who was a clever resolute woman, and she went straight to the police office and boxed the officer’s ears. The harshness with which one police officer, the chief at Irkutsk, had treated a number of women politicals brought down on him a severe rebuke. The officer accompanied a high official during a visit to the prison of that city. ”

“ Imprisonment, the absolute loss of physical freedom, has taken a wider meaning in Russia than in other countries, for it is the lot in one form or another of two classes of offenders: the ordinary criminal under a civil code, from which capital punishment is now excluded, and the political dissidents deemed criminal by the arbitrary government of the land and deserving of exemplary and vindictive punishment. ”

“ Nothing would reconcile one to continued residence, not even the acquisition of comparative wealth and the possession of lands and herds, a house to shelter him, and domestic ties. Anyone who can happily scrape together the necessary means hungers to spend it in paying his passage home. He must possess his soul in patience for a long time. Six years must be spent as an exile settler after release from his prison probation; six more as a peasant, and then only permission is granted to cross to the mainland, but never to return to St. Petersburg or Moscow. ”

“ A year or two before, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia had reported to the Czar that the number of doctors in the country was utterly insufficient, saying, “In the cities only is it possible to take measures for the preservation of health. In every other part of Eastern Siberia physicians are almost wholly lacking, and the local population is left helpless in its struggle with diphtheria and other contagious diseases which desolate the country.” ”

“ As a general rule, there is no differentiating treatment, no regard for antecedent conditions of rank, position, or education, and it is argued, no doubt rightly, that the offender of the better class knows better and has no excuse for lapsing into crime. When he falls, it is under the impulse of irresistible evil nature, and his misdeeds will rival the worst. There were five ex-nobles at Omsk, and the majority, three at least, were incorrigible blackguards, criminal to the backbone. Dostoyevski sketches their portraits in a few incisive strokes and in the blackest colours. ”

“ He was the most modest of men, but when the honour of a revolutionist was at stake, or if it were a question of duty, he would undergo a transformation and become a fiery and inspired prophet.” Bobohov took the threat of flogging very much to heart, and passionately urged that an answering threat of suicide should be addressed to the minister of the interior. “I cling to life as much as any man,” he said, “but I am ready to face death as a means of protest.” His arguments had weight with his comrades, but might not have prevailed except for the disastrous course of events. ”

“ Captain Nikolin’s colleague at Kara, coequal in authority, but with independent functions, was Major Potulov, who governed the ordinary criminal prison at Kara. He was a man of a pleasanter type, who was both civil and hospitable to George Kennan, possibly to keep an eye upon his motions and, perhaps, take the sting out of the condemnation his command so richly deserved. He is described as a tall, fine looking, soldierly man about fifty years of age, affable in manner and disposed to act fairly by his charges, so far as it lay within his power. ”

“ Naturally the exile seeks to supplement his inadequate income. His position is nearly hopeless. Possibly he has had the best education, is a graduate of the university, knows several languages, and is a skilful surgeon or practised physician. He does not, of course, expect to find in the wilds of Siberia as many openings for his trained intelligence as in St. Petersburg or Moscow, but surely there is room for an expert penman, a good accountant, a competent teacher, a fair musician? Yet he seems to have no chance to earn a few rubles, a few kopecks even, day by day. ”

“ In spite of restrictions, hardships and almost intolerable conditions, the political exile has been a distinct aid and valuable factor in the settlement and development of Siberia, carrying with him ideals and standards and a degree of intelligence far in advance of the native Siberian settler and peasant. The infusion of such an element is all the more needed because of the low average of intelligence of the great mass of the convicts, many of whom become permanent residents of Siberia. ”

“ The majority of the administrative exiles were political prisoners, but all politicals were not let off with simple banishment. A considerable number of political offenders were sentenced to hard labour and also to penal exile. They did not live apart but were incorporated with the common-law criminals and subjected to precisely the same irksome treatment; they were equally deprived of civil rights, and could never count upon freedom absolute and unconditional. ”

“ The names of such places as the frontiers of Mongolia, the arctic province of Yakutsk, or the sub-tropical mountain districts of Central Asia are never mentioned, but there can be no mistakes as to the irksome character of the rules. It is a life of sufferance, of sometimes open arrest, and often of rigorously curtailed freedom of movement. The exile must remain where he is planted; to move his quarters he must give notice and obtain the consent of the police, to whom he must constantly report himself. ”

“ Young people who read certain forbidden books or join forbidden societies for the ventilation of certain principles are deemed untrustworthy.
The power to send people into exile thus arbitrarily was vested in petty authorities, officers of gendarmerie, subordinate police officials, or mere executive orders countersigned by the minister of the interior and approved by the Czar. There is nothing new in this system. The people of Russia, from noble to serf, have never enjoyed the semblance of liberty ”

“ He was a poor devil, always impecunious, ready for any menial occupation and regularly employed as a lookout man by the gamblers when at play. For five kopecks a night he kept watch in the passage in absolute darkness and in temperatures varying between winter cold and extreme summer heat, to give alarm if any superior officer paid a night visit, for when caught at cards the convicts would pay the penalty with their backs,—all would be soundly flogged. But the terrors of corporal punishment did not conquer the passion for play. ”

“ All the male political prisoners in Moscow wore chains and the convict dress. It was a degrading costume, made the more humiliating by the method of shaving the right side of the head and leaving the left side with the hair cut close.
To Leo Deutsch, who was subjected to the prison barber before leaving Kiev, the ordeal was extremely painful. He says: “When I saw my own face in the glass a cold shudder ran down my spine and I experienced a sensation of personal degradation to something less than human. I thought of the days—in Russia, not so long ago—when criminals were branded with hot irons. ”

“ Beyond this there remains nothing but to tie a man to the tail of a wild horse, and drive him into the steppe, or chain him to a corpse and leave him to his fate. One does not wish to believe that a human being can be subjected, without trial and by a mere executive order, to such grievous torment.... And yet we are assured ... that up to this time none of the exiles in the province of Yakutsk have been granted any alleviating privileges. ”

“ Of the partial attempts made by Russia to reform the methods of inflicting penal servitude on wrong-doers, I shall speak more at large. A detailed account must be given of the new prisons erected more in conformity with modern ideas; and the persistent pursuit of that will-o’-the-wisp, penal colonisation by deportation to the desert island of Saghalien, with its futile processes and disappointing results, claims attention. Before leaving the older methods of enforcing hard labour, it will be well to describe its last stronghold and the system obtaining there until quite a recent date. ”

“ They are horribly overcrowded with wretched, hopeless beings for whom trial is often greatly delayed, and who lie there in inconceivable discomfort at the mercy of brutal and extortionate gaolers, “packed like herrings in a cask, in rooms of inconceivable foulness, in an atmosphere that sickens even to insensibility any one entering from the open air,” says one writer.
The same author gives the experiences of a lady who was expelled from Russia for opening a school for peasants’ children, and who was transferred to the Prussian frontier from prison to prison. ”

“ Russian women of all stations, and some of them of the highest rank, have won the admiration of the whole world, for their disregard of self, the sacrifice of all ease and comfort, and the braving of the worst dangers and the most poignant sufferings in their constant efforts to oppose political slavery. ”