General Strélnikof, the procureur in this case, was a man of striking personality, an able officer, and a brilliant speaker; but he was also a bitter and vindictive enemy; and when speaking, without critics, in a closed court to a bench of sympathetic judges he allowed his passionate hatred of political offenders to carry him beyond the bounds, not only of truth, but of reason. Every artist knows that in drawing a caricature it is necessary carefully to preserve some of the features of the original, and to stop short of such exaggeration and distortion as may render the subject unrecognizable. General Strélnikof's caricatures never would suggest the persons that they misrepresent if they were not carefully labeled "political" and "socialist," as well as "robber" and "fanatic."[1] If the young prisoner in Kiev had been tried by a jury of his peers, in an open court, under the observation of a free press, with an unprejudiced judge to protect his witnesses and a fearless lawyer to protect him, General Strélnikof, I think, would have tried to make his caricature at least recognizable.
According to the statements of the learned procureur, all of the political offenders that had been brought before the Kiev court-martial belonged to one or another of three classes, namely: 1. Fanatics; 2. Notoriety-seekers; 3. Common robbers. They were "mere boys" and intellectually immature, although they were older, on an average, than William Pitt was when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain, and older than Napoleon was when the Convention appointed him brigadier-general after the capture of Toulon. They were almost wholly without education, and yet two
- ↑ I met many political exiles in Siberia who had been prosecuted by Strélnikof and who knew him well. If he were living I should like to give him two or three of my Siberian notebooks and let him read the estimates of his character that were furnished me by the unfortunate men whom he wanted hanged as enemies of all social order. It would bring a flush of shame to his face, I think, to see how much more fair, accurate, and generous these despised "robbers" and "fanatics" were in judging and describing his character, than he had been in judging and describing theirs.
