§8
In order to know what Russian prisons and Russian police and justice really are, one must be a peasant, a servant or workman or shopkeeper. The political prisoners, who are mostly of noble birth, are strictly guarded and vindictively punished; but they suffer infinitely less than the unfortunate “men with beards.” With them the police stand on no ceremony. In what quarter can a peasant or workman seek redress? Where will he find justice?
The Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence. He is impatient for the time when he will be sent to Siberia; for his martyrdom comes to an end when his punishment begins. Well, then, let it be remembered that three-fourths of those arrested on suspicion by the police are acquitted by the court, and that all these have gone through the same ordeal as the guilty.
Peter the Third abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star-chamber.
Catherine the Second abolished torture.
Alexander the First abolished it over again.
Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.
That is so: and all over Russia, from Behring Straits to the Crimea, men suffer torture. Where flogging is unsafe, other means are used—intolerable heat, thirst, salt food; in Moscow the police made a prisoner stand barefooted on an iron floor, at a time of intense frost; the man died in a hospital, of which Prince Meshcherski was president, and he told the story afterwards with horror. All this is known to the authorities; but they all agree with Selifan[[70]] in Gógol’s novel—“Why not flog the peasants? The peasants need a flogging from time to time.”
[70]. Gógol, Dead Souls, Part I, chap. 3. Selifan, a coachman, is a peasant himself.