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.
§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.