§9
The board appointed to investigate the fires sat, or, in other words, flogged, for six months continuously, but they were no wiser at the end of the flogging. The Tsar grew angry: he ordered that the business should be completed in three days. And so it was: guilty persons were discovered and sentenced to flogging, branding, and penal servitude. All the hall-porters in Moscow were brought together to witness the infliction of the punishment. It was winter by then, and I had been moved to the Krutitski Barracks; but a captain of police, a kind-hearted old man, who was present at the scene, told me the details I here record. The man who was brought out first for flogging addressed the spectators in a loud voice: he swore that he was innocent, and that he did not know what evidence he had given under torture; then he pulled off his shirt and turned his back to the people, asking them to look at it.
A groan of horror ran through the crowd: his whole back was raw and bleeding, and that livid surface was now to be flogged over again. The protesting cries and sullen looks of the crowd made the police hurry on with the business: the executioners dealt out the legal number of lashes, the branding and fettering took place, and the affair seemed at an end. But the scene had made an impression and was the subject of conversation all through the city. The Governor reported this to the Tsar, and the Tsar appointed a new board, which was to give special attention to the case of the man who had addressed the crowd.
Some months later I read in the newspapers that the Tsar, wishing to compensate two men who had been flogged for crimes of which they were innocent, ordered that they should receive 200 roubles for each lash, and also a special passport, to prove that though branded they were not guilty. These two were the man who had addressed the crowd, and one of his companions.