to a wheelbarrow, asked permission to stop and rest on the road, as they had had nothing to eat or drink that day and were marching a distance of fifteen versts (about ten miles). The soldiers of the convoy, however, refused to allow them to stop, and pricked them on with their bayonets. Thereupon the prisoners who were not handcuffed attacked the Cossacks with stones. An unequal contest followed, in the course of which the men who resisted were knocked down and beaten again with the butt-ends of guns, and all who were not already manacled had their hands tied securely behind their backs. Late in the afternoon, bruised, tired, hungry, and thirsty, they reached Ust Kará, and after being again carefully searched were shut up by twos in the dark and dirty "secret" cells[1] of the common-criminal prison, where they threw their weary bodies down on the cold, damp floors and congratulated themselves that the day was over. The parties sent respectively to the Amúrski prison
- ↑ "Secret "cells in Siberian prisons are those intended for the solitary confinement of persons accused of murder or other capital crimes. They were not generally shown us in our visits to prisons, but I was permitted by Colonel Makófski to inspect the "secret" cells in the prison at Irkútsk. These had neither beds nor sleeping-platforms, and contained no furniture of any kind except a parásha, or excrement bucket. The prisoners confined in them were forced to sleep without pillows or bed-clothing on the cold cement or stone floor, and during the day had either to sit on this floor or to stand. I saw men who had not yet been tried occupying such cells as these in the Irkútsk prison. If I had power to summon as witnesses the subordinate officials of the House of Preliminary Detention in St. Petersburg, I could prove, in a Russian court, that even in that show-prison of the Empire there were kártsers, or disciplinary cells, where there was not so much as a parásha, and where the floors were covered with excrement. Of course Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy and Mr. Kokóftsef, the heads of the Russian prison administration, were not aware of this fact; but, nevertheless, it is a fact, unless both political prisoners and the prison officials themselves severally and independently lied to me. The political offender Dicheskúlo was put into such a cell as this after the riot in the House of Preliminary Detention that followed the flogging of Bogoliúbof. I did not see the "secret" cells in the Kará prisons, but there is no reason to suppose that they were in any better condition than the kámeras that I did see and that I have described. I do not mean to have the reader draw the sweeping and mistaken conclusion that all cells, or even all "secret" cells, in Russian prisons are of this kind, nor that the higher prison officials are in all cases responsible for such a state of affairs. All that I aim to do is to make plain the conditions under which educated and delicately nurtured political offenders in Russian prisons are sometimes compelled to live.
