and badly ventilated prison of Kiev was not of itself sufficient to torture his prisoners into a confession of what he believed they knew with regard to the revolutionary movement, determined to make their life still more intolerable, and to break down, if possible, their obstinate resolution, by darkening their cells. Upon the pretext that he wished to make it impossible for them to talk with one another through their windows, he caused a sheet-iron hood to be put over the window of every cell in the prison occupied by a political offender. The hood was large enough to cover the entire window, and resembled in shape a shallow rectangular box with the cover and one end gone. It fitted the window closely on both sides and at the top, but was open at the bottom. The result of putting these shields over the windows was to deprive the prisoners almost entirely of light and air, and to turn every cell into a sort of cave or oubliette. The light which came in through the opening at the bottom of the hood was only sufficient to enable the prisoner to distinguish between night and day. The artisan who put up the hoods told General Strelnikoff that they would not answer the purpose for which they were designed,―that it would be as easy to talk from window to window as it had been before, but he was sharply informed that that was none of his business. Of course the life of the prisoners under such conditions became almost intolerable. Young, nervous, and impressible girls walked their cells from corner to corner in the gloomy twilight until they became nearly insane. Even the prison officials expressed to the sufferers their sympathy and pity. At last the political prisoners addressed a petition to Governor-General Drenteln asking him to send an officer to see how they were situated, and, if possible, to intercede for them. In response to this petition the governor of the province of Kiev, acting under orders from General Drenteln, made a visit to the prison, entered the cell of a young student named Xwhom I afterward met in Siberia, and said to him, "What do you understand to be the object of these hoods?" Mr. X— replied that they had been put up by order of General Strelnikoff to prevent oral communication between the prisoners. "Do they have the desired effect?" inquired the governor. "No," replied the young student. "I can show you, if you wish, that it is as easy to talk from window to window now as it was before." "Show me, please," said the governor. Mr. X― went to the window and called to a prisoner in the cell below. His comrade answered, and they carried on a conversation until the governor expressed himself as satisfied. "I appreciate," he said to Mr. X, "your situation,

but I cannot give you any reason to hope for a change at present. General Strelnikoff is acting under instructions and authority given him by the Tsar in person, and he is therefore independent, not only of Governor-General Drenteln, but of the Minister of the Interior himself. This being the case, the authorities of the province cannot and dare not interfere."

On the next day after the visit of the governor to the prison, General Strelnikoff was assassinated in Odessa. The hoods were immediately removed from the windows, amid great excitement and rejoicing on the part of the political prisoners, who were so much encouraged and emboldened, that they suggested to the governor the use of the sheet-iron hoods as material for a monument to their inventor.

I have space only for a brief reference to the many other methods of extorting testimony from arrested persons which are practiced by the gendarmes and the officers of the Department of Justice. One of the most cruel of them, it seems to me, is the custom of terrifying old and feeble parents into the belief that their sons or daughters will inevitably be hanged unless they confess, and then sending the poor old people, trembling with terror and blinded with tears, to make an agonized appeal to their imprisoned children in their cells. The officials know very well that the children will not be hanged-that it is extremely doubtful whether they will even be brought to trial. They are kept in prison simply because the Procureur hopes ultimately to obtain information from them. If the torture of solitary confinement can be intensified by adding to it the entreaties of half frantic parents, so much the better. A little fright will benefit the old people and teach them to look after their children more closely, and the children's obstinate determination not to betray their friends will perhaps be broken down by a sight of the grief and misery of their parents. It is a plan which, to the official mind, works beneficently both ways.

The mother of a young student named Zhebunoff in Kiev, a lady sixty-five years of age, was so terrified by a vivid description from General Strelnikoff of the way in which her son, if he did not confess, would "dangle and kick in the air, his neck in a noose," that she fainted on the floor of the Procureur's office. Yet Strelnikoff knew very well that there was not evidence enough in his possession even to bring Zhebunoff to trial-much less to hang him. As a matter of fact the young student never was tried, but was sent to Siberia by "administrative process."

The aged mother of an exile whom I met in the Trans-Baikal was made to believe that her son would certainly be hanged unless he told all that he knew, and then, upon condi

tion that she should try to persuade him to confess, she was allowed to go to his cell. A terrible scene followed, in which the whitehaired mother, frenzied with fear and choking with sobs, knelt to her son, clung about his legs, and tried to press her tear-wet face to his feet, as she implored him, by his love for her- by her gray hairs to promise that he would answer the questions of the gendarmes. The strain of such a scene upon the emotions and the resolution of a prisoner who is weakened and depressed by months of solitary confinement, who loves and reverences his mother, and who sees her for the first time since his arrest, and perhaps for the last time before he goes to Siberia, is simply heart-breaking. The mother finally departs in despair, bidding her son good-bye as she would bid good-bye to the dying, while the son lays up the memories of this bitter hour-the cruel deception of his mother, the torture of himself, and the attempt to make the most sacred of human feelings serve the purposes of the police — as memories which will steady his nerves and steel his heart when the time comes for vengeance.

This playing upon the deepest and most intense of human emotions as a means of extorting information from unwilling witnesses is practiced more or less in all Russian prisons where political offenders are confined. The details are of course varied according to the circumstances of the case or the ingenuity of the inquisitor. One prisoner, for example, after months of solitary confinement, is promised an interview with his mother. Filled with glad anticipations, he follows the guard out through the long, gloomy corridor into the prison court-yard, where the mother is sitting on a rude prison bench forty or fifty feet from the door through which he emerges. At the sight of the well-remembered, loving face, changed and aged by grief since he saw it last, his heart overflows with pity and tenderness, and he rushes toward her with the intention of taking her in his arms. He is at once stopped by the guard, who tells him that the interview is not to take place here, but in the reception-room of the prison, to which he is thereupon conducted. He waits impatiently ten minutes-fifteen minutes - half an hour-and at last the door opens. As he springs toward it he is met, not by his mother, but by the Procureur, who asks him whether, after this further period of reflection, he has changed his mind with regard to answering questions. He replies that he was brought there, as he supposed, to see his mother, not for examination. The Procureur, however, informs him that interviews with relatives are privileges not granted to obstinate and refractory prisoners, and that if he has nothing to add to his previous statements he

will be taken to his cell. Disappointed and embittered, the young man goes back to solitary confinement with a new cause for hatred and an intensified thirst for vengeance, while the heart-broken mother, whose misery has only been increased by this brief glimpse of her son under guard and in prison dress, returns to her distant village home.

In another case which came to my knowledge in Siberia, the prisoner was a young married woman with a baby in her arms. She refused to answer questions intended to elicit criminating evidence against her friends, and the gendarme officer who was conducting the examination threatened, if she continued obstinate, to take her child from her. She made a pathetic appeal to the Procureur, and asked him whether there was any law under which the gendarme officer could deprive her of her child if she refused to testify. The Procureur, instead of giving her a direct answer, told her that "the prudent course for her to pursue would be not to raise a question as to the legal authority of the examining officer, but to tell him truthfully all she knew; then it was certain that he could not take her child from her." In the face of a threat so terrifying to a young mother, she was not more than twentytwo years of age when I made her acquaintance in Siberia,- she adhered to her determination not to betray her friends. Her babe was finally left in her possession, but she suffered weeks of torturing apprehension, the mere remembrance of which bathed her face with tears as she told me the story.

I have devoted much space to these illustrations of the use of prison confinement as a means of torturing political prisoners into making confession, partly because my notebooks are full of records of such cases which were everywhere forced upon my attention in Russia, and partly because it seems to me to explain, more clearly than any other fact or set of facts, the state of mind in which so-called "terroristic" activity originates. Whatever view one may take of the events in their moral aspect, one can see that such causes might be adequate to produce such results without the ascription to the Russian revolutionists either of homicidal insanity or inhuman ferocity.

It may be supposed that officials who are capable of treating prisoners in this way must be constitutionally cruel, cold-blooded, and heartless; but such a supposition would be, in many cases, perhaps in a majority of cases, an erroneous one. Many of the officials are naturally no worse than other men, but they have been trained under a system which is intolerant of opposition, and especially of that form of opposition which in Russia is called insubordination; they have been accustomed to

regard themselves rather as the rulers than as the servants of the people; they have not felt personally the full weight of the yoke of oppression; they have been irritated and embittered by a long contest with fearless and impetuous men whose motives and characters they misunderstand, and whom they regard as unreasonable fanatics and treacherous assassins; and, finally, their fortunes and prospects of advancement depend upon the success with which they carry on this contest.

I met in the town of Chita, in eastern Siberia, a Russian army officer - Colonel Novikoff who had been the commander of the Cossack battalion which served as prison guard at the mines of Kara, and who in 1880 sat as one of the judges in the court martial which tried Madame Rossikova, Miss Anna Alexeieva, and other politicals at Odessa. He was a man about forty-five years of age; was devotedly attached to his family; seemed to have broad and humane views with regard to the treatment of common criminals, and did not appear to be naturally a cruel or vindictive man. Yet this personally amiable, courteous, intelligent army officer, speaking to me of the political offenders in whose trial he had participated as judge, said: "If I had my way, I would give them all the shpitzruten." The "shpitzruten," it must be explained, is a peculiarly cruel form of "running the gauntlet" which was formerly much used in Siberia as a disciplinary punishment for the worst class of convicts. The prisoner, stripped to the waist, was forced to walk slowly between two lines of soldiers armed with rods "not too large to go into a musket barrel," and, as he passed, received one blow on the bare back from every soldier. The number of blows inflicted was from two thousand to five thousand, two thousand being the lowest number mentioned in the law. The sufferer, unless he was an exceptionally strong and vigorous man, usually fainted before he had received the prescribed number of blows, and was carried directly from the place of punishment to the hospital. This was the punishment which Colonel Novikoff said he would inflict upon political offenders, and which he had suggested and recommended

* Exile Statutes; Laws of the Russian Empire, Vol. XIV., Part II., Section 799.

+ Official certified copy of the sentence of the Court in the trial of the 193, signed by Chief Secretary Lutofski, and dated February 15th, 1878. It is in my possession, as is also the " Accusatory Act," or indictment, in the same case, a document of about 350 folio pages, authenticated by the signature of V. Zhelekhofski, "Associate Chief- Procureur of the Department of Criminal Appeals of the Governing Senate."

The bold and impetuous revolutionist Muishkin, who was one of the accused in this case, made a determined attempt to state these facts to the Court in a speech which he made in his own defense. He was VOL. XXXV.- 42.

to the court of which he was a member. "If," he added, “you punish in that way, you will soon put a stop to political agitation." When one considers the fact that such a method as this of dealing with politicals was actually suggested and advocated by a judge in his official capacity, and that he seemed utterly unconscious of the cruelty and barbarity of the proposed measure, one has little difficulty in understanding how gendarme officers and procureurs regard such comparatively trifling things as the arrest of the innocent with the guilty, the frightening of parents, and the deception of obstinate and refractory prisoners who refuse to testify.

But these are by no means all of the factors which must be taken into consideration in an attempt to explain the so-called policy of "terror." Another cause for the white-heat intensity of feeling which prompts violent retaliation is the illegal detention of political suspects in solitary confinement for months and years while the police scour the empire in search of evidence upon which to base indictments. In the trial of the regicides at St. Petersburg in 1881, Mr. Gerard, one of the ablest advocates at the Russian bar, and one of the boldest of the counsel for the prisoners, attempted to bring this cause to the attention of the court by referring to the well-known fact that out of more than a thousand persons arrested for alleged participation in the so-called "revolutionary propaganda" of 1872-75-out of more than a thousand persons held in solitary confinement for periods ranging from one to four years-only one hundred and ninety-three had ever been brought to trial, and even of that number ninety had been acquitted by a court of judges of the Government's own selection.†

In other words, more than nine hundred persons whose innocence was finally admitted by the Department of Justice had been subjected to from one to four years of solitary confinement, in the course of which eighty of them, or nearly ten per cent., had died, committed suicide, or become insane. Before Mr. Gerard had finished making this statement he was stopped by the Court, and directed to confine himself to the facts of the case on trial. § promptly ordered to stop, and when he refused to do so, he was throttled by three or four gendarmes and dragged out of the court-room. For his obstinacy, and for insulting references to the Court, which were regarded as an aggravation of his original offense, his sentence was made ten years of penal servitude, with deprivation of all civil rights. [Sentence of the Court in the trial of the 193 above cited, p. 13.] In a subsequent paper I shall give an account of the life of Muishkin, who was one of the most remarkable characters that the Russian revolutionary movement has yet produced.

Official Stenographic Report of the Trial of the Regicides at St. Petersburg in 1881, pp. 213-219.

I could, if necessary, and without going outside the limits of official documents in my possession,- fill many pages of THE CENTURY with the names of young men and women who were severally subjected to from one to four years of solitary confinement, and who were finally acquitted by a court, or discharged with out trial, because the police, notwithstanding their unlimited power to arrest, imprison, and examine, had not been able to find so much evidence against them as would legally have justified their detention over night. I shall describe in another place the nature of the solitary confinement to which these innocent persons were subjected. I desire at present merely to call attention to the duration of their imprisonment, and to the fact that they were finally pronounced innocent by the Government itself. The above statements are made, it will be observed, not upon the ex-parte testimony of the sufferers, but upon the unimpeachable authority of official documents.

The question naturally arises, "What was the reason for the long delay in bringing these thousand or more prisoners to trial?" The reply of the Government is that the accused were engaged in a revolutionary conspiracy which had very extensive ramifications in all parts of the empire; that they were linked together in such a way as to render it practically impossible to try them separately, and that the prosecuting officers of the Crown could not do justice to the Government's case until all the proofs against all the prisoners had been collected, compared, and digested.* The persons accused in the case, however, deny the truth of these statements, severally and collectively. They say that they were not, as a body, engaged in a revolutionary conspiracy; that their actions at that time were not criminal; that more than three-fourths of them were unknown to one another, and had never had any relations with one another; that their cases, therefore, were easily separable, and that, as a matter of fact, the Government did separate into eighteen distinct groups the 193 who were finally tried.

Without expressing any opinion as to the merits of the prisoners' contention, it seems to me, and will doubtless seem to most unprejudiced persons, that the reply of the Government, regarded as a defense, is insufficient, even if it be true. The preface to the indictment in this case says: "By the autumn of 1874 most of the propagandists had been imprisoned, although a few succeeded in eluding arrest and continued their criminal activity until the beginning of 1875." The trial did

*Sentence of the 193, certified copy, p. 15. Indictment in the trial of the 193, p. 8. Sentence in the same trial, p. I.

not begin until the 18th of October, 1877,‡so that "most of the propagandists," including ninety persons admitted by the Court to be innocent, were held in solitary confinement without trial from the autumn of 1874 to October 18th, 1877, a period of three years. A large number of the accused were imprisoned in the gloomy casemates of the Petropavlovski fortress, and, according to the indictment, forty of them were there when the trial began. § To say, as the Government does, that it held ninety innocent persons in prison for three years, and more than eight hundred other innocent persons for shorter periods of one or two years, because it could not try them separately and was unable in a shorter time to review the evidence against the whole thousand, does not seem to be a sufficient answer to a charge of injustice and cruelty based on more than eight hundred wrecked lives and eighty cases of death, suicide, and insanity in prison.

was of

The case of the "propagandists course an exceptional one. I do not know any other instance in which so many prisoners were held so long without trial, and in which the number of persons accused was so overwhelmingly out of proportion to the number actually found to be guilty. Judicial procedure in Russia, however, is always and everywhere slow, and the long interval of solitary confinement between arrest and trial causes great suffering to the prisoners, and creates a feeling of intense exasperation in the hearts of those who are finally declared to be innocent. As one of the 193 who was acquitted by the Court said to me bitterly, "They punish us first with three years of solitary confinement, and then try us to see whether we ought to have been punished."

The course of procedure in the case of a person accused of a political offense is, under average and normal conditions, about as follows: He is arrested without the least warning, generally at night, and thrown into prison. After a week or two of solitary confinement, he is subjected to a preliminary examination before an officer of gendarmes. In order that he may not prepare himself for this examination, he is not, as a rule, informed of the nature of the charge made against him. The theory of the gendarmes is that if the prisoner knows specifically of what he is accused, he can form at least a conjecture as to the direction and scope of the impending inquiry, and can prepare himself to baffle it. If, however, he is ignorant of the charge upon which he is held,— if he does not even know whether he is undergoing examination as a principal or as a witness, - he is not so quick to see the drift of quesAppendix to the Indictment in the trial of the 193, pp. 1-3.

tions; he is not so likely to be ready with a prepared story, and he is more apt to be surprised into incautious admissions. The gendarmes justify this course by saying that "if the prisoner is innocent, it cannot injure him; and if he is guilty, he is not entitled to any information which would make it easier for him to mislead the investigators and defeat the ends of justice. The object of the inquiry is, for the present at least, none of his business. All that he has to do is to answer questions truthfully." Of course, a prisoner who is thus kept in the dark defends himself and his friends at a terrible disadvantage. If he answers the questions put to him, he does so without knowledge of their purpose or bearing; and if he refuses to answer, he prolongs his prison confinement, perhaps unnecessarily, and gives the gendarmes an excuse for putting into operation against him some of the methods of extorting testimony which I have described. Most prisoners take a middle course by answering some questions and refusing to answer others. The examination ends when the gendarme officer is satisfied that he cannot elicit anything more. The prisoner is then remanded to his cell, and another week elapses, in the course of which the gendarmes take the testimony of his acquaintances and friends, of the police, who perhaps have had him under secret surveillance for weeks, and of all other persons who know anything about him. This mass of testimony is then submitted to the Procureur, with a report and such comments as the examining officer may think necessary. The Procureur makes a careful study of all the evidence, compares the testimony of the accused with the statements of the witnesses in the light of the comments and suggestions of the gendarmes, and frames a new series of questions to be put to the prisoner at the "dopros," a more formal examination intended to complete the case for submission to the Ministry of Justice.

Úp to this time, it will be observed, the accused has not been informed of the nature of the charge made against him; he does not know certainly whether he is held as a criminal or as a witness; he has heard none of the testimony upon which the questions in the "dopros" are to be based; he is without counsel, and he is ignorant of all that has happened in the outside world since his arrest. It would be hard to imagine a more completely defenseless situation.

The Procureur begins the "dopros" by informing the prisoner that he is accused of the crimes set forth and described in such and such sections of the Penal Code. Most political prosecutions are based upon sections 245, 249, and 250, which are as follows:

"SECTION 245. All persons found guilty of composing and circulating written or printed documents, books, the Supreme Authority, or for the personal character of or representations, calculated to create disrespect for the GOSSUDAR [the Tsar], or for the Government of his Empire, shall be condemned, as insulters of MAJESTY, to deprivation of all civil rights and to from ment carries with it exile in Siberia for what remains ten to twelve years of penal servitude. [This punishof life after the expiration of the hard labor sentence.] "SECTION 249. All persons who shall engage in rebellion against the Supreme Authority, that is, who shall take part in collective and conspirative insurrection against the GOSSUDAR and the Empire; and also all persons who shall plan the overthrow of the Government in the Empire as a whole, or in any part thereof; or who shall intend to change the existing form of governlished by law; all persons who for the attainment of ment, or the order of succession to the throne estabthese ends shall organize or take part in a conspiracy, either actively and with knowledge of its object, or by participation in a conspirative meeting, or by storing insurrection; all such persons, including not only those or distributing weapons, or by other preparations for most guilty, but their associates, instigators, prompters, helpers, and concealers, shall be deprived of all civil rights, and be put to death. Those who have knowledge of such evil intentions and of preparations to carry them into execution, and who, having power to inform the Government thereof, do not fulfill that duty, shall be subjected to the same punishment.

"SECTION 250. If the guilty persons have not maniganized a society or association, intended to attain, at a fested an intention to resort to violence, but have ormore or less remote time in the future, the objects set forth in section 249, or have joined such an association, they shall be sentenced, according to the degree of their criminality, either to from four to six years of penal servitude with deprivation of all civil rights [including exile to Siberia for life].... or to colonization in Siberia [without penal servitude], or to imprisonment in a fortress from one year and four months to four years.'

These sections, it will be observed, are tolerably comprehensive. They not only include all attempts to overthrow the government vi et armis, they not only cover all action "calculated to create disrespect for MAJESTY"; but they provide for the punishment of the mere intention to bring about a change of administration at a remote time in the future by means of peaceable discussion and the education of the people. Even this is not all. A man may be perfectly loyal; he may never have given expression to a single thought calculated to create disrespect for the Gossudar or the Gossudar's government, and yet, if he comes accidentally to know that his sister, or his brother, or his friend belongs to a society which contemplates a "change in the existing form of government," and if he does not go voluntarily to the Chief of Gendarmes and betray that brother, sister, or friend, the law is adequate to send him to Siberia for life.

When the prisoner, at the beginning of the "dopros," is informed that he is accused of "the crimes set forth and described in sections

* Russian Penal Code, Tagantseff's edition, pp. 172174. St. Petersburg: 1886. The words in brackets

-G. K.

are my own.—