detail, is sensational and exaggerated; but I have simply to say that the condition of that party has been described to me many times, not only by politicals, but by officers of the Exile Administration. One of the latter, who saw the party after it left Moscow and before it crossed the Siberian frontier, said to me that the prisoners who composed it were little more than epileptics-mere wrecks of human beings, who fainted at the least excitement. He probably would not have made this admission had he not been trying to prove in an argument with me that the condition of politicals in Siberia, and even at the mines, was far better than in the fortresses and central convict prisons of European Russia.

66 BREAKING THE CHARACTERS" OF POLITICAL OFFENDERS.

I HAVE never been able to obtain from any officer of the Russian government a satisfactory explanation of the fact, that while condemned murderers, highway robbers, and other common felons are allowed almost unrestricted intercommunication and association in the forwarding prisons, and are deported as speedily as practicable to Siberia, political criminals of the same grade are thrown into fortress casemates, or into the "secret" cells of central convict prisons, are detained there for years in the strictest isolation, and are sent to Siberia only when their minds and bodies have been almost hopelessly wrecked by hardships, privations, and solitude. There is a story current among the exiles in Siberia to the effect that when the penal servitude section of the Petropavlovsk fortress was organized, a late director of the Imperial Police, whose name I purposely withhold, explained its object by saying that it was intended to "break the characters" of political offenders. Whether such a remark was really made or not, and whether, if made, it was the authorized statement of a real purpose, I do not know, but in any case the words express forcibly and concisely the actual tendency of this cruel

At the time of that great spiritual and moral awakening of the youth of Russia which resulted in the socalled movement "to the people," between the years 1870 and 1875, it was a common thing for a young man to emancipate a young woman from the patriarchal tyranny and the cramped life of a Russian provincial household, by contracting with her what was called a "fictitious marriage." The ceremony was not fictitious in the sense of illegality, it was, on the contrary, a valid and binding tie,- but the contracting parties did not live together and never expected to do so. The young man voluntarily sacrificed his domestic future, and all his anticipations of home and family, for the sake of liberating some young girl from the despotic power of the head of her household, and giving her an opportunity to educate herself and to make herself useful to "the people and the Fatherland." Hundreds VOL. XXXV.- 104.

system of punishment. The records of Russian insane asylums, and particularly of the asylum at Kazan, would show, if they could be examined, in what way and to what extent the characters of political offenders are broken.

DELUSIONS OF INSANE POLITICAL CONVICTS." FICTITIOUS MARRIAGES."

THE EMPRESS'S PHOTOGRAPH.

IN the month of October, 1880, there arrived at the Russian provincial prison of Mtsensk a party of condemned politicals, who had just been released from four or five years of solitary confinement in the fortress of Petropavlovsk and the central convict prison of Kharkoff, and who were on their way to the East Siberian mines. It happened to be my fortune to find several of these condemned prisoners still alive in various parts of Siberia in 1885, and to make the acquaintance, near Irkutsk, of an exiled journalist named X—————, who was in the Mtsensk prison when these convicts arrived there. The condition of the condemned party was pitiable in the extreme. Two of them-Plotnikoff and Donetski — were hopelessly insane, three or four others were hysterical or subject to hallucinations, and all were so worn, emaciated, and weak that it was found necessary to postpone their deportation to Siberia until they could be revived and restored to something like health by means of stimulants and nourishing food.

It was pitiful [said Mr. X, in describing to me the appearance of these condemned convicts] to see how the mental powers of some of them had been wrecked by misery and solitude. Donetski, before his arrest, had contracted a "fictitious marriage" with a young girl in a Russian provincial town, for the purpose of freeing her from the patriarchal despotism of her home, and affording her an opportunity to educate herself at St. Petersburg. He had parted from her at the church door and had never again seen her; but after he went insane in the central prison of Kharkoff, he constantly raved about her, and seemed to think that she would come to him if she were not prevented from doing so by the Government. He had obtained in some way while in prison a small card photograph of the Empress, taken when she was the Crown Princess of such marriages were contracted in all parts of Rus. sia between 1870 and 1875, and in many cases the young men had never seen, previous to marriage, the young women to whom they bound themselves, and knew of their existence only through mutual friends. Sometimes fictitious husbands met and fell in love with their wives in prison or in exile many years after their nominal union; but in most cases their respective fields of activity were widely separated, and they remained strangers. The purpose of these fictitious marriages was a pure and noble one, but the method adopted to carry out that purpose was in the highest degree quixotic and impracticable, and it was ultimately abandoned. At the time when Donetski lay insane in the central prison of Kharkoff, his fictitious wife was under arrest upon a political charge in Moscow.

Dagmar, and after he became insane he imagined that it was a photograph of his fictitious wife, and would admiration. In the prison of Mtsensk, where he was put into a large cell with other political convicts, he would show to the latter this worn and soiled portrait of the Empress, and say, with a sort of childish pride, "This is my wife is n't she beautiful?" Then with a mournful intonation he would add, "I have asked them so many times to send for her-I know she would come-but [hysterically] they don't do it - they don't do it!"

look at it for hours with the most ardent affection and

Could anything [said Mr. X-] be more touching and pathetic than to find a political convict in chains and leg-fetters cherishing as his dearest possession a photograph of her Majesty the Empress to see a revolutionist insane from ill-treatment at the

hands of the Government and in love with the wife of the Tsar!

THE INSANE POLITICAL PRISONER,

PLOTNIKOFF.

THE case of Plotnikoff, the other insane prisoner in this party of condemned politicals from the central prison of Kharkoff, was, if possible, even more pitiable than that of Donetski. At the time of his arrest he was a student in the Moscow University- a quiet, modest young fellow about twenty years of age, with a very attractive and lovable character and a rather serious and thoughtful disposition. He had been well educated and was a good linguist, speaking fluently four or five languages, including English, French, and German. He had never been engaged in active revolutionary work, but was a member of a so-called "circle" of young people in Moscow, known from the name of its founder as the "Dolgushintsi." He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to penal servitude, and the world of the living knew him no more.

When he came to Mtsensk [said one of my informants] he was a broken, insane, emaciated man about twenty-eight years of age, and had been eight years in solitary confinement. How long he had been insane I do not know; but his condition was evidently hopeless, as his mania had assumed a religious form and was accompanied by profound melancholy. He still retained consciousness of the fact that he was a political criminal, but that fact seemed to be a source of distress and humiliation to him, and he did not like to be reminded of it. He was particularly ashamed of his chain and leg-fetters, and used to try in every possible way to conceal them. When I first saw him he had carefully wrapped up all the links of his chain in rags, so that they should not jingle when he moved and thus call the attention of others to what he regarded as his disgrace. He saved carefully all the pieces of old clothing and foot-wrappers which fell into his hands, and finally made out of them a sort of ragged patchwork petticoat, which, when tied about his waist, fell to the floor all around like a woman's dress and entirely concealed from sight both his leg-fetters and his muffled chain. His hair was long on one side of the head and closely shaven on the other, and this, with his coarse gray prison shirt, and the patchwork petticoat hanging from his waist to the floor and concealing his legs, made him the most extraordinary figure I had ever

seen.

During all the time that Plotnikoff had been in the penal servitude section of the fortress, and in the central prison of Kharkoff, his mother had neither seen him, communicated with him, nor had news of him; but as soon as she heard that he had been removed from the prison of Kharkoff to Mtsensk and was about to be sent to Siberia, she implored the Minister of the Interior to allow her a last interview with him. If the Minister had been aware that

Plotnikoff was insane, he probably would have refused to allow the mother to see him; but high Government officials cannot be expected to remember the names of all the condemned politicals in Russian prisons who happen to be insane.

When Madame Plotnikoff, eager and excited, presented herself at the Mtsensk prison and asked to see her son, the warden, who was naturally a kind-hearted man, tried to dissuade her from her purpose by telling her that her son was about to go to Siberia for life; that he was virtually dead to her already; that he was greatly worn and broken by long imprisonment; and that she would be happier if she would content herself with remembering him as he was in boyhood, or as he appeared when she last saw him, and not lay up for herself a new store of bitter memories by insisting upon an interview that could only increase her grief and renew her sense of bereavement. The mother, however, would not be denied. She had been granted permission to see her son, and see him she would. The warden then tried to prepare her for a great change in her son's appearance, and finally told her frankly that he was broken down mentally and physically and that she might not know him. The mother, however, would not believe that she could fail to recognize her boy, however pale, however wasted by prison confinement, he might be. Seeing at last that argument, persuasion, and forewarning were all useless, the warden conducted the mother to the interview room of the prison, where her son sat reading a prison Bible. For a moment she gazed at him in amazement and horror. In the wild-looking figure before her, with its thin, yellowish face, half-shaven head, coarse gray prison shirt, and patchwork petticoat, she could not see even a suggestion of the boy from whom she had parted eight years before. As she looked at him, however, some maternal instinct told her that it was indeed her son, and with a cry, which was half joy and half terror, she threw herself upon him and clasped him in her arms. The insane prisoner shrank away from her in alarm and embarrassment, and as he strove to unclasp her arms and escape from her embrace she looked into his eyes and the truth suddenly

flashed upon her. The body was that of her son, but the mind was gone. The abruptness of this terrible shock was more than her overstrained nerves could bear. She sank on the floor in a deep swoon and was carried out of the room unconscious. Plotnikoff was sent to the insane asylum at Kazan, and shortly afterward died there.

The facts above set forth I obtained partly from political convicts who were confined with Plotnikoff in the prison of Kharkoff, and partly from exiles who were in the Mtsensk prison when he arrived there and when he was visited by his mother. All of my informants are still in Siberia, and most of them are in the Trans-Baikal.

ARE EXILES' ACCOUNTS OF PRISON LIFE EXAGGERATED?

It may, perhaps, seem to the reader that accounts of prison life obtained from political exiles are likely to be overcolored and exaggerated that it must in the nature of things be impossible for a man who has had such an experience to regard it fairly and judicially and to describe it without overstatement. I fully understand and appreciate this skeptical attitude toward such facts as those set forth in these papers; but I must say, in justice to the ex-prisoners whose acquaintance I made in Siberia, that they were reluctant, rather than eager, to live over again in narration these terrible months and years of their lives, and that when, by persistent questioning, I succeeded in getting at their darkest memories, it was often at the expense of an outburst of grief which was almost as painful to me as to the narrator. A Russian author, whose name is known even in Western Europe, and who is now an exile in Eastern Siberia, attempted to describe to me one night the death in the fortress of a comrade an army officer- to whom he was tenderly and devotedly attached. Before he ended his recital my eyes were full of tears, and he himself was pacing the floor with tightly clinched hands, striving to control his emotion and to keep his voice from breaking, while his breast heaved with the tearless, convulsive sobs which make the grief of a strong man more painful to witness than even the uncontrolled weeping of a woman. He succeeded in finishing his story; but he would talk of the fortress no more that night. In the mind of any one who heard that recital there could have been no question of exaggeration or overstatement. Men are not thus profoundly moved by the simulated recollection of unreal experience.

If his Imperial Majesty the Tsar, to whose eyes I hope these pages may come, will sum

mon the officer who was warden of the Kharkoff Central Prison in 1880, and the commandant and the surgeon who served in the Petropavlovsk fortress in 1883, and will personally examine those officers, and, if necessary, their subordinates, as to the mental and physical condition of the political convicts who left those prisons for Siberia in the years named, he will learn at least one of the reasons why, when he goes from St. Petersburg to Moscow, it is necessary to guard the railway with twenty thousand soldiers.

THE HOUSE OF PRELIMINARY DETENTION.

ONE of the most interesting prisons in European Russia, and the only one containing politicals that I was permitted to inspect, is the House of Preliminary Detention in St. Petersburg. It is not, properly speaking, a political prison, since most of the persons therein confined are common criminals; but it has held at times as many as three hundred political offenders awaiting trial or exile to Siberia. It is, in a certain sense, the great show prison of the empire, and has been particularly commended by the Rev. Henry Lansdell as an illustration of "what Russia can do" in this particular field. It was constructed in 1873-75, under the supervision of a special commission appointed by the Minister of Justice and the Minister of the Interior jointly, and in accordance with plans drawn by Actual State Counselor Maiefski. It cost more than 800,000 rubles (about $400,000 at the present rate of exchange), contained all sorts of modern improvements in the shape of heating and ventilating apparatus, and was believed to embody the latest results of scientific experiment in the department of prison architecture. From the fact, however, that a criminal suit based on alleged incompetence was instituted against the architect before the building had been fairly completed, it would appear that its defects as a prison soon became manifest. To what extent, when completed, it answered the purposes for which it was designed may be inferred from the fact that between 1875 and 1880 it was formally condemned by three successive prison commissions.*

In the summer of 1886, armed with a permit from Mr. Galkin-Vrasskoi, Chief of the Prison and Exile Department, I presented myself at the door of the House of Preliminary Detention, sent my card to the warden, and was promptly admitted. The prison is situated in the heart of the city, on a corner of the Liteni Prospekt, directly behind the Circuit Court.

"Prison and Exile" [Tiurma i Sylka], by V. N. Nikitin [one of the Directors of the St. Petersburg Prison Committee], p. 519. St. Petersburg, 1880.

It is a large, square, rather showy building, with high arched windows, and suggests to an American a town-hall or an opera-house rather than a prison. The exterior of the building, however, is merely an ornamental mask, designed apparently to disguise the real character and purpose of the structure. From the outside it appears to be only four stories in height, but upon entering the court-yard, or quadrangle around which it is built, one discovers that the high external windows are deceptive, that the building really consists of six stories, and that all the cells look out into the completely inclosed court-yard. Whether the high outside windows serve any useful purpose or not I failed to ascertain; but they certainly do not light any of the cells, and it is impossible for a prisoner to get through these windows, or any others, so much as a glimpse of the outside world. By standing on his stationary wash-basin he can look down into the quadrangle, but that is all. The prison contains 317 solitary confinement cells, and 68 kameras, or cells for more than one person, and was designed to hold 700 prisoners. The solitary confinement cells, which are all alike, seemed to me to be about 12 feet long by 7 feet wide and 71⁄2 feet high, with whitewashed brick walls and concrete floors. They contain a gas fixture, a stationary wash-basin, an iron bedstead which can be folded up against the wall, two hinged slabs of iron which fold up in the same way, and serve respectively as a table and a chair, and finally, in the end of the cell near the window, a modern water-closet seat and basin, with a round cover and a water trap to exclude noxious air from the soil pipe. As it is not my purpose to describe this prison more minutely than may be necessary in order to explain certain events of which it was the scene, I will merely say, briefly, that the cells and corridors shown me were scrupulously clean, and that the light in the upper stories

*There were imprisoned in the House:

on a pleasant day in summer was fairly good. The lower stories, however, seemed to be dark and damp, and the ventilation to be bad everywhere. As the cells all open through their windows upon the quadrangle, which is virtually nothing more than a deep square well, the wind rarely blows into or through them, and the circulation of air secured by artificial means is sluggish and inadequate. The sanitary condition of the building, as shown by hospital records, is very unsatisfactory. Even when it was new, 20 per cent. of its criminal population received hospital treatment some time in the course of the year,* and in 1884 it furnished 116 cases of anæmia and scurvy.t

The treatment of political offenders in the House of Preliminary Detention is generally lenient and fairly considerate. They are not obliged to wear any particular dress, they are allowed to have interviews with relatives and to receive from the latter unobjectionable books and articles of clothing, and they may keep money of their own in the hands of the warden and order all their own meals, if they choose, from a restaurant.

The difference between confinement in such a prison as this and incarceration in a casemate of the fortress is very great.

When I was transferred from the Trubetskoi bastion to the House of Detention [said Dr. Sokolof to me in Siberia], it was like going from a sepulcher to a watering-place hotel. The sound of footsteps, the rumble of ventilating apparatus, the comparative lightness and airiness of the cells, the doves flying about the windows, and the faint roar of vehicles in the adjacent streets, which suggested the busy life and activity of the world, all combined to give me a sense of unwonted exhilaration. In the "monastery "‡ I never saw a human being except the guard, and rarely heard a sound except, perhaps, the low tapping of a prisoner in an adjoining cell. In the House of Detention, on the contrary, heard noises of all sorts, and soon found myself in communication with everybody. Before I had been there a day, some one in the cell below mine knocked out to me on the steam pipe which ran up beside my door, Scoop the water out of your basin." I went and looked into my wash-basin and found it to be empty. In a few moments the command came again in a slightly different form, "Scoop the water out of your water-closet basin." Then the significance of the direction flashed upon my mind. Somebody wished to talk to me through the soil pipe with which his basin and mine were in communication. I succeeded, after some trouble, in clearing the trap, and as I did so a babel of hollow human voices came up through the basin, and I found myself able to talk freely with the inmates of eleven other cells, most of whom were politicals.

"PIPE CLUBS" OF POLITICAL PRISONERS.

IF the reader will imagine six capital Y's that the stem of each rests in the fork of the placed over one another in such a manner next one below, he will have a rough general idea of the way in which the soil pipes of the

House of Detention are arranged. The arms of the Y in each story terminate in the water-closet basins of two adjoining cells, while the stem forms a section of the large perpendicular pipe which runs from the roof to the ground, and with which twelve cells are thus connected. All that it is necessary to do, therefore, in order to open oral communication with the occupants of these twelve cells is to clear the water-traps. The political prisoners confined in the House of Detention soon discovered that they could talk with one another through these pipes, and when the number of such prisoners was so great that the dark punishment cells of the prison would not hold a tenth part of them, the authorities of the prison were almost powerless to prevent such intercommunication. Before 1876 all attempts to prevent it had been virtually abandoned, and the political prisoners had formed what they called "Water-closet Clubs" or "Pipe Clubs," for social intercourse and mutual improvement. Each club consisted of ten or twelve members, and had its own name and rules. Frequently, when I asked a political exile in Siberia whether he knew such or such a person, he would reply, "Oh, yes! I have never seen him, but I know him wellhe was a member of my pipe club in the House of Detention." Educated political prisoners gave lessons through these pipes to the uneducated; languages were taught through them; newspapers were read through them; and they served all the purposes for which speaking and pneumatic tubes are employed in large public buildings. Miss Medvedieva, who afterward became the wife of the Russian author Machtet, read aloud to the members of her pipe club the whole of Turgenieff's novel "Virgin Soil." The political prisoners, however, were not contented with mere oral communication through these pipes, but made them useful also as a means of conveying packages from cell to cell within the limits of each club. A prisoner, for example, in one of the upper stories, would ravel out a part of one of the sheets from his bed, twist the threads into a long cord, fasten to it a securely inclosed package, throw or push the package through the branch pipe of the watercloset basin into the main perpendicular pipe, and then lower it. The prisoner in the cell below for whom it was intended could not reach it, as it hung in the main pipe, but he would have ready another similar cord with a small weight attached, would throw that out through the branch pipe into the main pipe, and the two prisoners would then jerk their respective cords up and down until they became intertwined, when the lower prisoner would haul in the package through his branch pipe and basin.

In this way, and by means of weighted cords, swung like pendulums from window to window between clubs, small articles were circulated and distributed throughout the whole prison.

PRISON CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL FOURTH OF JULY.

IN the summer of 1876, when there were confined in the House of Detention more than three hundred political offenders, it was decided to have a general prison celebration of the Centennial Fourth of July — the birthday of the American Republic. As early as the first week in June the prisoners began to make preparations for the proposed celebration, by requesting relatives who visited them to send to the prison for their use as many red and blue handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, shirts, and pairs of red flannel drawers as could be sent without exciting suspicion, and at the same time all the prisoners who were permitted to have movable lights began to purchase and hoard candles. The colored garments were torn into strips, the candles were cut into inch-long bits, and both were distributed by means of the water-closet pipes throughout the whole prison. Some of the women, who were allowed to have needles and thread and to sew in their cells, succeeded in making rude American flags, and before the 1st of July almost every political offender in the prison had either a flag, or a few strips of red, white, and blue cloth, and an inch or two of candle.

Day breaks in the latitude of St. Petersburg, in summer, very early, and on the morning of the Fourth of July, 1876, hours before the first midnight cannon announced the beginning of the great national celebration in Philadelphia, hundreds of American flags and streamers of red, white, and blue fluttered from the grated windows of the politicals around the whole quadrangle of the great St. Petersburg prison, and the members of the prison "clubs" were faintly hurrahing, singing patriotic songs, and exchanging greetings with one another through the water-closet pipes which united their cells. The celebration, of course, was soon over. The prison guard, although they had never heard of the Declaration of Independence and did not understand the significance of this extraordinary demonstration, promptly seized and removed the flags and tricolored streamers. Some of the prisoners, however, had more material of the same kind in reserve; and at intervals throughout the whole day scraps and tatters of red, white, and blue were furtively hung out here and there from cell windows or tied around the bars of the gratings. Late in the evening, at a preconcerted hour, the