Colonel Kanonovich fortunately had many influential friends, and the accusations brought against him could not injure him permanently. He was an officer of the Cossacks and was appointed to another command in the Trans-Baikal, and later promoted to be a general officer, in charge of the enlarged penal colony of Saghalien. He also supervised the erection of the new Verkhni Udinsk prison, in which a praiseworthy and conspicuous effort at reform was subsequently made. The building of the political prison at Middle Kara was under his direction, but he left just before it was occupied and was in no wise responsible for the atrocities committed there.
CHAPTER VIII
TREATMENT OF POLITICALS
Withdrawal of privileges accorded to politicals—Lunatics confined in association with other prisoners—Suicides—Many escapes attempted—Fresh deprivations—The politicals separated and confined in common prisons of the Kara district—Subjected to “dungeon conditions”—Much disease—Finally transferred to the state prison—Hunger strike which lasted thirteen days—Some remarkable female revolutionists—A hunger strike instituted by the women—Attempts to pacify them—The resignation of the governor Masyukov demanded—Madame Sigida strikes Masyukov in the face—Subjected to flogging and dies—Three of her companions commit suicide—Thirteen of the men determine to put an end to their lives—Governors, good and bad—Deutsch’s account of Nikolin’s régime—The atrocities committed by the governor Patrin at Saghalien.
The changed attitude of the government toward the state prisoners at Kara dated, as we have said, from the end of the year 1880, under the initiative of Loris Melikov, and this action, so inconsistent with his supposed views as a liberal minister, has never been explained. Kennan suggests that it was caused by bad advice, carelessly adopted. But, as Leo Deutsch tells us, the harsh régime was introduced at a time when the revolutionary agitation had revived in great strength, and the dominant bureaucracy was more than ever on the defensive, ready to wreak its revengeful feelings upon the captives it held in durance. In any case, the orders issued evidenced a retrograde policy and a revival of the old methods of repression with new punishments superadded. All existing privileges, even the most trivial, were withdrawn. A peremptory stop was put to all correspondence with relatives and friends; work in the open air for ordinary criminal convicts was forbidden; and all the politicals who had finished their sentences of imprisonment and were living in the “free command” were again immured, with the old inflictions of leg irons and half shaved heads. At three days’ notice they were sent back to prison, many of them leaving their wives and children alone and unprotected in a vicious and disorderly penal settlement.
When they reëntered they were herded with the rest in the new political prison at or near the Kara Lower Diggings, a building somewhat better than those for common criminals, being larger, more spacious and better lighted, with four kameras, each warmed with a brick oven and provided with the conventional nary or sleeping platforms. At first the windows looked out upon the valley, an open if not very picturesque prospect. This was the case in other prisons for all criminal convicts, but it did not please Governor-General Anuchin, who ordered the whole place to be shut in by a high stockade. “A prison is not a palace,” he cynically declared, as he condemned his fellow creatures to be deprived of all view and restricted in the matter of light. Anuchin, in his report to the Czar, dated two years later, admits that the life of state criminals was “unbearable,” but quite forgot how far he himself contributed to their sufferings.
Under the brutal system in force, insane companions, often raging lunatics, were confined with the rest. There were no asylums in Siberia, and the insane lived in association with the sane, adding much to the miseries of both. “In more than one place in the Trans-Baikal we were startled,” says Kennan, “as we entered a crowded prison kamera, by some uncared-for lunatic, who sprang suddenly toward us with a wild cry or with a burst of hysterical laughter.... It is easier and cheaper to make the prison comrades of a lunatic take care of him than to keep him in seclusion and provide him with an attendant. For educated political prisoners, who dread insanity more than anything else, it is, of course, terribly depressing to have constantly before them, in the form of a wrecked intelligence, an illustration of the possible end of their own existence.”
Several painful episodes soon followed the recommittal of the “free command” to prison. One was the suicide of Eugene Semyanovski, a young journalist connected with the underground journal Onward, who had gained his conditional freedom and lost it. He left a letter to his father bemoaning his hard fate, written the night before his reëntry to prison, and shot himself in his bed. Another political hanged himself in the prison bath-house, and a third poisoned himself by drinking water in which he had soaked lucifer matches. Another most affecting incident was the mental failure of Madame Kovalevskaya, a brilliant woman, who had been actively concerned in the revolutionary propaganda as the only means of securing free institutions in the empire. She was sentenced to penal servitude at Kara, where she presently joined the “free command.” Her husband was also exiled, but was sent to Minusinsk in Eastern Siberia, so that no less than a thousand miles intervened between the pair. Their only child had been left behind at Kiev in Russia. Madame Kovalevskaya’s insanity declared itself after she went back to Kara prison and while Colonel Kanonovich was still in command, and she was then allowed to join her husband, but after partial recovery she was returned to Kara. Eventually, after the cowardly oppression of her comrades, she committed suicide.
Another consequence of the increased severity in the treatment of politicals was their widespread determination to break prison. Many escapes were attempted, and although they were for the most part frustrated, the feeling of unrest was so general that the authorities resolved to use more severe methods of coercion. A high official stated that they meant “to reduce the prison to order and give the politicals a lesson.” Daily life was made more and more irksome; privileges, great and small, were withdrawn; all books were removed; money, underclothing, beds and bedding were taken from them; they might possess nothing more than the bare necessaries allowed to ordinary convicts. But worse than all, the whole number, kept hitherto in one prison, was broken up into small parties and distributed among the various common prisons of the Kara district, where they were to be treated under “dungeon conditions.” This treatment meant more than the deprivation of small luxuries as above mentioned; it also entailed the loss of all exercise in the open air or communication with the outside, and a diet of only black rye bread and water, with sometimes a little broth thickened with barley.
The removal was made forcibly. Cossacks were concentrated at the Lower Diggings in anticipation of resistance, or perhaps to provoke it, and suddenly a descent was made upon the prison in the dead of night. A strong, armed force marched into the prison with bayonets fixed, and seized the poor politicals as they were roused from sleep. They were stripped, searched, driven forth with blows and otherwise cruelly maltreated. The next morning, having been robbed and despoiled of all their private possessions, they were marched off under escorts to the other Kara prisons. They marched continuously for ten miles without food or drink, or a halt for rest, and one man who was chained to a wheelbarrow rolled it all the way. Goaded to desperation, those prisoners who were not ironed attacked the Cossacks with stones, but they were speedily overpowered. They arrived in a state of utter exhaustion at the common prisons, and were lodged two and two in “secret” cells, hitherto employed only for the safe custody of the worst criminals, which were bare rooms with no more furniture than the open parasha, or bucket, and with only the stone floor to sleep on.
These essentially “dungeon conditions” spent in the secret cells of the ordinary criminals were continued for two months, and at length the health of the politicals became grievously impaired. Foul air, insufficient food, close confinement and the lack of all exercise brought on an epidemic of scurvy, which resulted in serious illnesses in many cases. They were still without underclothing, bedding or nourishing food, although the authorities held prisoners’ moneys out of which the cost might have been defrayed. All the politicals were then transferred to the Lower Diggings, and lodged in the new cells of the state prison. Seven or eight prisoners were crowded into a narrow space obtained by dividing each kamera into three parts by the creation of partitions. The sleeping platform nearly filled each interior and left little standing room, and the pollution of the air was “simply maddening.” Protest and remonstrance were continuous, and only ceased when threats of flogging were made, a form of punishment never yet inflicted on politicals.