less prisoners is known in the history of the Kará political prison as "the pógrom of May 11."[1] Three or four hundred Cossacks with bayoneted rifles marched noiselessly into the courtyard under direction of Lieutenant-colonel Rúdenko, filled the prison corridor, and then, throwing open suddenly and simultaneously the doors of all the kámeras, rushed in upon the bewildered politicals, dragged them from their sleeping-platforms, and proceeded with great roughness and brutality to search them, deprive them of their personal property, strip them of their clothing, and hale them out into the courtyard. All the remonstrances and protests of the sufferers were answered with insults; and when some of the more impetuous of them, indignant at the unprovoked brutality of the assault, armed themselves with boards torn up from the sleeping-platforms and made an attempt to defend themselves, they were knocked down and mercilessly beaten by the Cossacks with the butt-ends of their guns. Among the prisoners most cruelly maltreated were Voloshénko, Rodiónof, Kobyliánski, Bobókhof, and Orlóf. It is not necessary to go minutely into the details of this scene of cruelty and violence. I do not wish to make it out any worse than it really was, and for my purpose it is sufficient to say that before noon on the 11th of May, 1882, the bruised and bleeding political convicts, robbed of all their personal possessions and stripped of the boots and underclothing that they had bought with their own money and that they had previously been permitted to wear, set out in three parties, on foot and without breakfast, for the common-criminal prisons of Ust, Middle, and Upper Kará. They were guarded by convoys of from fifty to one hundred Cossacks, who had express instructions from Governor Ilyashévich not to spare the butt-ends of their guns. The party destined for Ust Kará, in which there was one man chained
- ↑ The word pógrom has no precise equivalent in the English language, It means a sudden, violent, and destructive attack, like one of the raids made upon the Jews by infuriated peasants in Russian towns some years ago.
