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than this of one way in which revolutionary impulses in Russia are excited and kept alive. The agencies which transformed these innocent young people into revolutionists were unwarranted arrest, denial for an unreasonable length of time of the right to be heard in their own defense, and prolonged imprisonment under conditions that threatened to deprive them of health, sanity, or life. Three yearstwo years or even one year of solitary confinement in a casemate of the Trubetskoi bastion is quite enough to embitter and exasperate to the last degree a consciously innocent man; and if to such unjust imprisonment be added the loss of a brother, sister, wife, or friend in prison before trial, the transformation of the surviving sufferer into a revolutionist becomes at least an understandable phenomenon.

THE FATE OF THE "CONDEMNED." THIS, however, is by no means a complete presentation of that part of the revolutionist's case which relates to the fortress of Petropavlovsk. Political suspects awaiting trial are not the only persons therein confined, nor are the casemates of the Trubetskoi bastion the only cells in that vast state prison. The fortress is a place of punishment as well as a place of preliminary detention, and its gloomy walls hold the "condemned" as well as the "accused." When a burglar, murderer, or other common Russian felon has been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to penal servitude, he is, as a rule, released from the solitary confinement in which he has been held pending trial, is allowed to mingle with other prisoners of the same penal grade, and is forwarded without unnecessary delay to Siberia. When, however, a political offender has been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to penal servitude under the same code of laws, he is not released from solitary confinement, nor sent with reasonable promptness to Siberia, as he would be if he had merely killed his mother with an ax, but is thrown into a bomb-proof casemate in what is known as the "penal servitude section" of the Petropavlovsk fortress, or into one of the smaller cells of a "Central Convict Prison," and there lies in solitude and wretchedness for one, two, three, or even five years before he finally goes insane or is sent to the convict mines of Kara.* In what part of the fortress the "penal servitude section" is situated, the exiles whom I met in Siberia did not know. It is probable, however, that "condemned" politicals are distributed among various bastions and ravelins in that extensive fortification, and that the words "penal servitude section"

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, and Russian officials assert that political offenders are now

designate the criminal class or grade to which such prisoners belong, rather than the particular part of the fortress in which they are confined. The material environment of the "condemned" differs little from that of the "accused." They are shut up in the same spacious but damp and gloomy casemates, with the same high grated windows looking out upon a blank wall, with the same "Judas" pierced doors through which they are constantly watched, and in the same tremorless atmosphere of eternal silence. The difference between their life and the life of the "accused" is mainly a difference of treatment.

DEPRIVATION OF ALL CIVIL RIGHTS.

WHEN a criminal in Russia is judicially condemned to a term of penal servitude, or "katorga," the sentence of the court carries with it deprivation of all civil rights. The political offender who incurs this penalty ceases to be a citizen, and loses at once not only all the privileges and immunities that appertain to his rank or social station, but also all control over his property, his family, and his own person, and all right to claim the protection of the laws, even when his life is imperiled by the treatment to which he is subjected. He is virtually outside the pale of the law, and may be dealt with by the officers of the state as if he were a slave. The fact that the term of penal servitude to which he has been condemned is a short one does not lessen the force of this secular excommunication. A hard-labor sentence of four years divests the criminal of all his civil and political rights as completely as a sentence to penal servitude for life. The property which was his before his condemnation descends to his legal heirs as if he were dead, or is sequestered by the state. The family of which he was the head ceases to belong to him, and the state may assume the custody of his children. The exemption from liability to corporal punishment which he has previously enjoyed is taken away from him, and he may be flogged with the" rods" or the cat. Finally, during what is officially known as the "period of probation," which lasts from a year and a half to eight years, he is not allowed to have either bed, pillow, blanket, money, books, writing materials, or communication with relatives; his head is kept half shaved longitudinally from the forehead to the nape of the neck; he must wear the coarse gray convict dress, must live on the convict rations, and must wear a chain and leg-fetters weighing five pounds. For violent insubordination, even when it is held in solitary confinement after sentence only in the castle of Schlüsselburg.

the result of delirium or partial insanity, he may be handcuffed, flogged, confined in a strait-jacket, fettered to the wall of his cell, or chained to a wheel-barrow.*

LIFE IN THE "PENAL SERVITUDE SECTION." It is hardly necessary to point out the difference which this treatment makes between the life of the "condemned" and the life of the "accused," even although both may be imprisoned in the same fortress. For the "accused" there is always the hope of ultimate trial and release; for the "condemned" there is only the prospect of slow mental and physical decay in the solitude and gloom of a bombproof casemate, and finally death, insanity, or the mines of the Trans-Baikal.

You cannot imagine, Mr. Kennan [said a condemned revolutionist to me in Siberia], the misery of prolonged confinement in a casemate of the fortress under what are known as dungeon conditions [kartsernoi polozhenie]. My casemate was sometimes cold, generally damp, and always gloomy. Day after day, week after week, and month after month, I lay there in solitude, hearing no sound save that of the high-pitched, melancholy bells of the fortress cathedral, which slowly chimed the quarter hours, and which always seemed to me to half articulate the words, "Tee zdais seedeesh ee seedee tee" [Here thou liest lie here still]. I had absolutely nothing to do except to pace my cell from corner to corner and think. For a long time I used to talk to myself in a whisper; to repeat softly everything in the shape of literature that I could remember, and to compose speeches, which, under certain imagined conditions, I would deliver; but I finally ceased to have energy enough to do even this, and used to sit for hours in a sort of stupor, in which, so far as I can now remember, I was not conscious of thinking at all. Before the end of the first year I grew so weak mentally and physically that I began to forget words. I knew what ideas I desired to express, but some of the words that I needed had gone from me and it was with the great est difficulty that I could recover them. It seemed sometimes as if my own language were a strange one to me, or one which, from long disuse, I had forgotten. I greatly feared insanity, and my apprehension was increased by the fact that two or three of my comrades in cells on the same corridor were either insane or subject to hallucinations; and I was often roused at night and thrown into a violent chill of nervous excitement by their hysterical weeping, their cries to the guard to come and take away somebody, or something which they imagined they saw, or their groans and entreaties when, in cases of violent delirium, they were strapped to their beds by the gendarmes. My inability to see what was happening in the cells from which these groans, cries, and sounds of violence came gave full play, of course, to my imagination, and thus increased my nervous excitement, until I was on the verge of hysterics myself. Several times, when I feared that I was losing all self

Russian Penal Code [Ulozhenie o Nakazaniakh], Official Edition, sections 22 to 25, inclusive, and sections 27 and 28: Government Printing Office, St. Petersburg, 1885. See also the rules for the treatment of convicts which are contained in the XIVth volume of the Russian Collection of Laws [Svod Zakonof], and particularly the Statutes Relating to Exiles [Ustav o Sylnikh], Part II. An exception is made in the fortress to the rule that convicts shall wear leg-fetters, for the reason that the clanking of chains would facilitate communication between cells, and would break the

control, I summoned the fortress surgeon, or the "feldsher," who merely gave me a dose of bromide of potassium and told me that I must not excite myself so; that nothing serious had happened; that two or three of the prisoners were sick and delirious; but that there was nothing to be alarmed about. As the fortress contained no hospital, insane and delirious patients were treated in their cells, and were rarely removed to an asylum unless they were manifestly incurable, or the care of them became burdensome. The effect of the eternal stillness, solitude, and lack of occupation on the mind was greatly heightened by the want of proper exercise and nourishment for the body. "Accused prisoners awaiting trial in the Trubetskoi bastion were allowed to have money in the hands of the "smatritel," or warden, and could direct its expenditure for white bread, vegetables, tea, sugar, etc., to make up the deficiencies of the prison ration; but we, the "condemned," had to live upon black rye-bread, soup which it was often impossible to eat on account of the spoiled condition of the meat from which it had been made, and a small quantity of "kasha," or barley, boiled with a little fat and served without seasoning, and sometimes only half cooked. Such food, in connection with the damp, heavy air of the casemate and the lack of proper exercise, caused derangement of the digestive organs, and this was soon followed by more or less pronounced symptoms of scurvy. Madame Lebedeva, who was in the penal servitude section with me, suffered from scurvy to such an extent that her teeth became loose and her gums greatly swollen, and she could not masticate the prison bread without first soaking it in warm water. Scurvy, even in an incipient form, intensified, of course, the mental depression due primarily to other causes and made it almost insupportable. I never seriously meditated suicide,-it always seemed to me a cowardly thing to escape from suffering by taking one's own life, but I did speculate upon the possibility of suicide, and wondered how I could kill myself in a casemate where there was absolutely nothing that could be used as an implement of self-destruction. Once I went so far as to see if I could hang myself from the small cylindrical hot-air pipe which projected two or three inches into my cell from the face of the brick oven. I did not really intend to take my life, but I felt a morbid curiosity to know whether or not I could do it in that way. As soon as I threw my weight on the pipe, it pulled out of the masonry, making, as it fell to the floor, a noise which attracted the attention of the guard in the corridor. I was forthwith removed to another cell, and I never again tried a similar experiment. They say that poor Goldenberg succeeded in committing suicide in the fortress, but I cannot imagine how he accomplished it. I became satisfied that I could not kill myself in my casemate in any other way than by biting into an artery or dashing my head against the wall, and I ultimately became so weak that I doubt very much whether I could have fractured my skull by the latter method.

ARE FORTRESS PRISONERS FLOGGED AND TORTURED?

It is not my intention to create prejudice against the Russian government, nor to perfect stillness which is regarded as an essential part of prison discipline. The rule that there shall be no communication between the "condemned" and their relatives is sometimes so strictly enforced that a mother cannot even learn whether her son is living or dead. I met in Russia relatives and near friends of Muishkin, Nechaief, Gellis, and Madame Vera Phillipova, who told me that they had been unable to ascertain whether those unfortunate prisoners were in the castle of Schlüsselburg or in their graves.

excite sympathy for the Russian revolutionists, by exaggerating the sufferings of condemned politicals in the penal servitude section of the Petropavlovsk fortress. I desire to state only those things which I have the very strongest reason to believe are true. Stepniak and Prince Krapotkin have painted the life of condemned politicals in somewhat darker colors than my information would justify me in using. Of the fifty or more fortress prisoners whose acquaintance I made in Siberia, not one had ever heard of cells situated below the level of the Neva River; nor of the famous letter written by Nechaief in his own blood; nor of dungeons infested by rats; nor of the flogging of political prisoners with whips; nor of a single case of torture. I am not prepared to assert that the statements of Stepniak and Prince Krapotkin upon these points are inaccurate, or without foundation; but I must, in fairness, say that they are not sustained by the results of my investigations. There are cells in the fortress whose atmosphere is so damp that salt and sugar melt or liquefy in it after a few hours' exposure, and such cells are sometimes occupied by political offenders; but they are not situated below the level of the Neva. Nechaief was chained to the wall of his cell as a disciplinary punishment for striking the gendarme officer Potapoff; but previous to that time he had been treated fairly well, and if he was ever flogged, or ever wrote a letter in his own blood to Alexander III., or to any other person, the exiles in Siberia are ignorant of the fact. Condemned political prisoners in the fortress have frequently been beaten with the butts of guns and with the fists of the guard, but I have not been able to authenticate a single report of actual flogging with a whip, although the latter punishment is authorized by law. As for torture, that is, the infliction of pain by means of artificial appliances,- I do not believe that it has recently been practiced, either in the fortress or in any other prison of European Russia. A distinguished revolutionist, who is well known to Stepniak and whose biography the latter has written, said to me in Siberia:

I assure you, Mr. Kennan, that torture in the fortress, in our time, has not so much as been heard of. The nearest approach to torture of which I had knowledge during my three-years' confinement there was the forcible administration of chloroform to Oboleshef and Madame Vitanieva, for the purpose of rendering them unconscious while their photographs were being

*Oboleshef and Madame Vitanieva were thrown into the fortress upon a charge of participation in the plot to assassinate General Mezzentsef. They refused to allow their photographs to be taken, and were thereupon chloroformed by force. Madame Vitanieva became unconscious and quiet; but the chloroform ex

taken.* Several of the prison guard revolted even at that, and one of them refused to assist in holding the struggling prisoners, declaring that he was not a “palach” [hangman], and that it was not a part of his duty to poison people.

EFFECTS OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN

FORTRESS CASEMATES.

IN the main, however, the descriptions of fortress life given by Stepniak and Prince Krapotkin are much more nearly in accord with the results of my investigations than are those published by the Rev. Henry Lansdell and one or two other English travelers who visited and superficially inspected the Trubetskoi bastion some years ago. There can, I think, be no doubt and in my own mind there is not even the shadow of a doubt — that prolonged solitary confinement in one of the casemates of a Russian fortress, without books, writing materials, bedding, proper food, or communication of any kind with the outside world, is a much more terrible punishment than death. Madame Vera Phillipova, a well-known revolutionist and a beautiful and accomplished woman, who was tried and condemned at St. Petersburg in 1884, asked as a last favor that she might be hanged instead of being sent to the castle of Schlüsselburg, but her request was denied. Suicides and attempts at suicide in fortress casements are comparatively common, and condemned political prisoners frequently strike some officer of their guard with the hope of being tried by court-martial and shot. The presiding judge of a Russian circuit court, whose acquaintance I made in Moscow on my way home from Siberia, told me, in reply to an inquiry, that the revolutionist Muishkin was shot in the castle of Schlüsselburg in the summer of 1885 for striking the fortress surgeon. The desperate prisoner had resolved to escape from a life of hopeless misery by starving himself to death, and the prison surgeon had been sent to his cell to feed him by force. The high judicial officer who gave me this information was not a revolutionist, nor a sympathizer with revolution; he made the statement dryly, without comment and without manifestation of feeling, and there is, so far as I am aware, no reason for doubting its truth.

The inhumanity of the treatment to which condemned political prisoners are subjected in the penal servitude section of the Petropavlovsk fortress is clearly shown by the phys

cited Oboleshef, and made him so delirious and violent that the attempt to photograph him was finally abandoned. There were present on this occasion Major Nikolski, an officer of gendarmes, Doctor Vilms, the fortress surgeon, and a number of "nadziratels," or prison overseers.

ical condition of such prisoners when finally released. In April, 1883, the Department of Imperial Police sent an order to the commandant of the fortress to make up a large party of condemned politicals for deportation to the East Siberian mines. The commandant, after consultation with the fortress surgeon and with the officer appointed to take charge of the convoy, reported that most of the political prisoners named in the order were so weak that they probably could not endure three days' travel, that more than half of them were unable to stand on their feet without support, and that the convoy officer declined to take charge of prisoners who were in such physical condition unless he could be freed from all responsibility for deaths that might occur on the road. In view of this state of affairs the commandant recommended that the condemned politicals who had been selected for deportation be removed to the House of Preliminary Detention, and be held there under more favorable conditions until they should recover strength enough to render their transportation to Siberia practicable. Acting upon this suggestion, the Director of the Imperial Police ordered the removal of twenty-two prisoners, including six women, from the casemates of the fortress to comparatively light and airy cells in one of the upper stories of the House of Detention.* Of the prisoners so removed six were already in an advanced stage of consumption, and twelve were so feeble that they could not walk nor stand, and were carried from their casemates to carriages, either in the arms of the prison

*The names of these prisoners, with their ages, stations in life, and terms of penal servitude, are as follows:

WOMEN.

1. Anna Pavlovna Korba; age 32; school-teacher, and afterward, during the Russo-Turkish war of 187778, a Red Cross nurse in a field hospital at the front; 20 years' penal servitude.

2. Anna Yakimova; age 27; school-teacher; penal servitude for life.

3. Praskovia Ivanofskaya; age 30; school-teacher; penal servitude for life.

4. Tatiana Lebedeva; age 31; school-teacher; penal servitude for lite.

5. Nadezhda Smirnitskaya; age 31; student in women's college [Vwyshi Zhenski Kursi]; 15 years' penal servitude.

6. Antonina Lisofskaya; age 26; student in women's college; 4 years' penal servitude. [She died of consumption at the mines of Kara a few weeks previous to my arrival there.-G. K.]

MEN.

1. Mirski; age 26; student; penal servitude for life. [He had lain four years in a casemate of the Alexei ravelin.-G. K.]

2. Voloshenko; age 31; student; penal servitude for life.

3. Nagorni; age 25; student; penal servitude for life.

guard or upon stretchers. In the House of Preliminary Detention these wrecks of human beings received medical care and were fed with nourishing food and stimulants for about three months, at the expiration of which time all except Fridenson and Emelianoff were reported convalescent. Orloff and Madame Lebedeva were still suffering from scurvy, and the others were mere shadows of their former selves; but they were officially regarded as strong enough to begin their toilsome journey of nearly five thousand miles to the mines of the Trans-Baikal.

THE DEPARTURE FOR SIBERIA.

I SHALL never forget, while I live [said to me an exile who went with these condemned prisoners to Detention before our departure. It was the night of Siberia], the last night in the House of Preliminary July 24-25, 1883. A rumor was current among the political prisoners that a large party would start for Siberia on the following morning, but no one knew did not notice any unusual sounds until shortly after who was to go, and all were awake and watchful. I midnight, when a cell near mine was thrown open, and I heard, passing my door, the once familiar footsteps of a dear friend and comrade, who had been long in prison, and whom I had not seen since the years of our early manhood, when we breathed together the air of freedom and worked hand in hand for the realization of our ideals. The convict party was evidently being of the Trans-Baikal. In ten or fifteen minutes I heard made up, and my friend was to go with it to the mines his footsteps returning, but they were not so rapid and assured as before and were accompanied by the sharp metallic clink and rattle of chains. He had been put into leg-fetters. I knew, of course, that this was inevi table, and yet the first sound of the chains chilled me with vague sense of horror. It seemed unnatural and incredible that he the man whom I loved like a

4. Fomin; age 25;

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army officer; penal servitude for life. 5. Yevseief; age 26; peasant; penal servitude for life.

6. Zlatapolski; age 35; technologist; 20 years' penal servitude.

7. Pribuiloff; age 25; physician; 15 years' penal servitude.

8. Kaluzhni; age 26; student; 15 years' penal servitude.

9. Orloff; age 27; student; 13 years' penal servitude.

10. Novitski; age 29; student; 12 years' penal servitude.

11. Hekker; age 19; 10 years' penal servitude. 12. Stephanovich; age 30; student; 8 years' penal servitude.

13. Liustig; age 27; army officer; 4 years' penal servitude. [I saw Liustig in the Irkutsk prison in September, 1885, but had no opportunity to talk with him alone.-G. K.]

14. Kuziumkin; age 21; peasant; 4 years' penal servitude.

15. Emelianoff. 16. Fridenson.

The twelve prisoners carried out of the fortress were Mesdames Yakimova, Smirnitskaya, and Korba; and Messrs. Zlatapolski, Liustig, Voloshenko, Nagorni, Kaluzhni, Mirski, Hekker, Fridenson, and Emelianoff.

brother; the man whom I regarded as the embodiment of everything good, brave, and generous - had already been fettered like a common highway robber, and was about to go into penal servitude. For a time I paced my cell in uncontrollable nervous agitation, and at last, as prisoner after prisoner was taken from my corridor to the prison work-shop and came back in clanking fetters, I could endure it no longer, and throwing myself on the bed I covered my head with pillows and bed-clothing in order to shut out, if possible, the hateful sound of the chains.

About 3 o'clock in the morning an overseer unlocked and opened the door of my cell and said to me, "Come! I followed him to the office of the prison, where the commander of the convoy made a careful examination of my person, noted my features and physical characteristics as set forth in a description which he held in his hand, compared my face with that of a photograph taken soon after my arrest, and at last, being apparently satisfied as to my identity, received me formally from the prison authorities. I was then taken down a flight of stairs to the corps de garde, a large room on the ground floor, at the door of which stood an armed sentry. The spacious but low and gloomy hall was dimly lighted by a few flaring lamps and candles, and in the middle of it, at two long bare tables, sat ten or fifteen men and women, in coarse gray convict overcoats, drinking tea. The heads of the men were half shaven, they all wore chains and leg-fetters, and on the back of every prisoner, between the shoulders, appeared the two black diamonds which signify that the criminal so marked is a hard-labor convict. Near the door, in a little group, stood six or eight uniformed gendarmes and officers of the detective police, who watched the prisoners intently, whispering now and then among themselves as if communicating to one another the results of their observations. The stillness of the room was unbroken save by the faint hissing of two or three brass samovars on the tables, and an occasional jingle of chains as one of the convicts moved his feet. There was no conversation, and a chance observer would never have imagined that the gray-coated figures sitting silently side by side at the tables were near friends, and in some cases relatives, who had long been buried in the casemates of the fortress, and who were looking into one another's faces for the first time in years.

Ás I entered the room, one of the prisoners, whose face I did not at first recognize but who proved to be an old friend, rushed forward to meet me, and as he threw his arms around me whispered in my ear, "Don't recognize anybody but me— - the gendarmes are watching us." I understood the warning. The police really knew very little about the history and the revolutionary records of some of the political convicts who were present, and it was important that they should not be able to get a clew to any one's identity or past history by noting recognitions as prisoner after prisoner was brought in. The incautious manifestation of emotion by one convict as he met another might result in the return of both to the casemates of the fortress and their detention there until their mutual relations could be investigated. This was the reason for the silence which prevailed throughout the gloomy hall and for the seeming indifference with which the prisoners regarded one another. They were apparently strangers, but in reality they were bound together by innumerable ties of friendship and memories of the past; and as they looked into one another's faces, and noted the changes that time and suffering had wrought, they maintained their composure only by the most heroic effort. On one side of the table sat an old comrade of whom we had heard nothing in years and whom we had all supposed to be dead. On the other side were a young man and his betrothed, who for five years had not seen each other, and who, when thus reunited under the eyes of the gendarmes, did not dare to speak. Near

them sat a pale, thin woman about twenty-seven years of age, who held in her arms a sickly baby born in a casemate of the fortress, and who looked anxiously at the door every time it opened with the hope of seeing her husband brought in to join the party. Most of us knew that her husband was dead, but no one dared to tell her that she watched the door in vain.

Nothing could have been more dramatic than the scene in that gloomy hall at half-past 4 o'clock in the morning, when the last of the condemned prisoners had been brought in. The strange and unnatural stillness in a room filled with people; the contrast between the blue and silver uniforms of the gendarmes and the coarse gray overcoats, chains, and leg-fetters of the prisoners; the furtive whisperings of the detective police; and the silence and assumed stolidity of the pale, emaciated, shaven-headed convicts would have made the scene striking and impressive even to a chance spectator. To one, however, who could look beneath the surface of things; who could appreciate the tragic significance of the situation; and who could see with spiritual insight the hot tides of hatred, agony, sympathy, and pity which surged under those gray overcoats, the scene was not merely striking and impressive, but terrible and heart-rending.

At 5 o'clock we were taken in closed carriages to the station of the St. Petersburg and Moscow railway, were put into convict cars with grated windows, and began our long and eventful journey to Siberia. I could not describe, if I would, the scenes that I witnessed in that train, when we were at last freed from the espionage of the gendarmes; when we could greet and embrace one another openly without fear; and could relate to one another the histories of our lives during the long years of our enforced separation. The experiences of all were essentially alike, and the stories were an endless epopee of suffering. We talked all day, and should perhaps have talked all night had not the over-strained nerves of the weaker members of the party given way at last under the tension of excitement and the sudden in-rush of a flood of new sensations and new emotions. To a prisoner who had lived for years in the silence and solitude of a bomb-proof casemate the noise and rush of the train, the unfamiliar sight of God's green world, and the faces and voices of friends who seemed to have been raised suddenly from the dead, were at first intensely exciting; but the excitement was soon followed by complete prostration. Early in the evening one of my comrades, without the least warning, suddenly became hysterical, and in less than ten minutes seven men in our car were either delirious or lying on the floor in a state of unconsciousness. Some of them raved and cried, some went from one long faint into another, and some lay motionless and breathless in a profound swoon until we almost gave them up for dead. The surgeon who accompanied the convoy was summoned, stimulants were administered, water was dashed into the white, ghastly faces, and everything was done that could be done to restore the sufferers to a normal condition; but all night the car was filled with moans and hysterical weeping, and the women of the party-particularly Anna Pavlovna Korba, who was stronger and more self-possessed than any of the men — went from one fainting or hysterical patient to another with restoratives, stimulants, and soothing ministrations. When we arrived in Moscow nearly half of the party had to be carried out of the car in the arms of the guard, and our journey was temporarily suspended in order that they might receive medical treatment.

It may perhaps seem to the reader that the above description, which was first given to me orally by a member of the party, and which afterward, at my request, was written out in

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