little huts and cabins of their own. Most of the male prisoners were forced to go with the common felons to the gold placers; but as the hours of labor were not unreasonably long, they regarded it as a pleasure and a privilege, rather than a hardship, to get out of the foul atmosphere of their prison cells and work six or eight hours a day in the sunshine and the open air.
The officer in command of the Kará penal establishment at that time was Colonel Kononóvich, a highly educated, humane, and sympathetic man, who is still remembered by many a state criminal in Eastern Siberia with gratitude and respect. He was not a revolutionist, nor was he in sympathy with revolution; but he recognized the fact that many of the political convicts were refined and cultivated men and women, who had been exasperated and frenzied by injustice and oppression, and that although their methods might be ill-judged and mistaken, their motives, at least, were disinterested and patriotic. He treated them, therefore, with kindness and consideration, and lightened so far as possible for every one of them the heavy burden of life. There were in the Kará prisons at that time several state criminals who, by order of the gendarmerie and as a disciplinary punishment, had been chained to wheelbarrows.[1] Colonel Kononóvich could not bear to see men of high character and education subjected to so degrading and humiliating a punishment; and although he could not free them from it without authority from St. Petersburg, he gave directions that they should be released from their wheelbarrows whenever he made a visit of inspection to
- ↑ This is a punishment still authorized by law, and one still inflicted upon convicts who are serving out life senfences. The prisoner is fastened to a small miner's wheelbarrow by a chain, attached generally to the middle link of his leg-fetter. This chain is long enough to give him some freedom of movement, but he cannot walk for exercice, nor cross his cell, without trundling his wheelbarrow before him. Even when he lies down to sleep, the wheelbarrow remains attached to his feet. Four politicals have been chained to wheelbarrows at Kará, namely: Popko, Berezniúk, Fomíchef, and Shehedrín. The last of them was not released until 1884. Whether or not any have been thus punished since that time I do not know.
