Of her three friends, one, Madame Kutitonskaya, has been mentioned; a second was Sophia Bogomoletz, whose maiden name was Prisyetskaya, and who was the daughter of a rich landowner of Poltava. She had graduated at a medical school in St. Petersburg and, having married a doctor, threw herself ardently into revolutionary work. She was arrested as a member of the South Russian Workmen’s Union and was sent to ten years’ hard labour in Siberia with a companion, Madame Kovalskaya. They escaped from the Irkutsk prison but were recaptured in a few weeks, before they could leave the city. When brought back, the customary search was personally supervised by Colonel Soliviov, an adjutant of the governor-general and a man of vicious character, and by his order the two women were stripped naked before him. After this disgrace to humanity and the uniform he wore, he went immediately to one of the men’s wards and boasted of the shameful deed, adding contemptuously, “Your political women are not much to look at.” Whereupon one of those present, Shchedrin, who had been a school-teacher before sentence, struck the brute upon the mouth, calling him coward and liar. For this violent protest Shchedrin was condemned to be chained perpetually to a wheelbarrow as already described.
Madame Bogomoletz was punished with an additional five years’ penal sentence, to be passed as a “probationer” prisoner, serving the full term without the remission granted to others, and with no prospect of the “time of alleviation” or that of conditional release. She was quite indomitable, and looked upon all prison officials as her natural enemies to whom she would make no compromise and yield no obedience. Nothing deterred her, no fear of punishment, threats, or infliction of the most irksome conditions, and the whole staff trembled before her.
Elena Rossikova had been sentenced to a life term for a daring robbery from the finance department at Kherson. She was the wife of a country gentleman who had been a school-teacher at Elizabetgrad, and with a confederate she had succeeded in seizing a large sum of public money, meaning to devote it to revolutionary purposes. Her accomplice was Anna Alexieova, afterward Madame Dubrova, a convict and a professional burglar who had escaped from Siberia. They had entered the government treasury through a tunnel driven under the stone floor in the vault of a house adjoining, a wild and desperate scheme for two young and inexperienced girls. That they planned and dared effect it bears witness to the determined character of the Russian women revolutionists. Kennan says the thieves were caught before they could remove all the stolen money, but, according to Leo Deutsch, they succeeded in their attempt. The next day, however, a woman was intercepted as she drove a cart laden with sacks through the town, and the sacks were found to be stuffed full of ruble notes, to the number of a million. Arrest followed, including that of the convict, who at once confessed her share in the transaction and gave such information as led to the recovery of the greater part of the stolen money.
Madame Rossikova, as the elder woman and originator of the plan, was condemned by court-martial, before which she was arraigned, to hard labour for a long term at the mines; Anna Alexieova was sentenced merely to exile as a forced colonist and she married Dubrova, a missionary at Krasnoyarsk. The two girls began as philanthropists, eager to benefit and improve the peasant class, but developed under the persecution of the authorities and their unjust, overbearing treatment into pronounced revolutionists. Both were large-minded women, capable of the greatest self-sacrifice and acting in accordance with a high moral standard. Madame Rossikova had given proof of her sincerity by accepting the ordeal known as “going to the people”; in other words, she lived for seven or eight months like a common peasant woman, in a peasant village, that she might see how best to reach and help the people. She had long disapproved of terrorism, but became a pronounced terrorist herself, moved to the fiercest indignation by the reports that reached her of the sufferings of her exiled friends.
Perhaps one of the most celebrated of the female revolutionists was Madame Vera Phillipova, born Figner, who never found her way to the mines of Kara, where she would undoubtedly have become prominent among the most active champions of her party. She was long the most popular personage in the revolutionary movement; her name was in everybody’s mouth, her fine traits, her unfailing and unlimited constancy, her undefeated, self-sacrificing devotion to the cause, her talents for organisation, her boundless inventive powers, her tireless energy,—all won for her profound respect from her comrades; and even her enemies, the members of the court-martial which condemned her, were forced to admire her dignified demeanour when arraigned and tried for her life. A mere girl, of striking beauty, and possessing extraordinary personal influence, she freely spent herself in the service of her fellows. Like many other well-born girls, her chief aim was to help the peasants, and she devoted herself to the rough life in small villages on the Volga, enduring all the hardships and privations of the labouring classes, and her self sacrifice was greatly stimulated by what she saw of misery, poverty and hopeless ignorance.
It was borne in on her that reform could only be effected by the most reckless measures, and she became a terrorist heart and soul, vowed to violence, and prepared to go to any extreme. In this temper, she readily joined in the plot for the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II, on his return from Livadia to St. Petersburg, and the dynamite for use in the bombs was stored in her house. This did not absorb all her energies, and she was still active in the organisation of secret societies and in preaching revolutionary principles among people of good society, to which she belonged by birth and education; for she was the daughter of a distinguished general and was well received by the best people.
At Odessa she mixed much with the military set and thus became identified with the conspiracy of “the Fourteen.” Nearly all of those concerned were military or naval officers, five of whom, with Vera Figner and Ludmilla Volkenstein, were condemned to death. She knew that she and her companions had been betrayed, and she might have escaped by timely flight into another country, but she scorned to yield, although arrest was certain, and she held her ground, only to be convicted and thrown into the Schlüsselburg, condemned to imprisonment for the term of her natural life.
Russian Prisoners
After the painting by Marckl
The Fortress of Schlüsselburg is situated on an island in Lake Ladoga, about forty miles from St. Petersburg. The worst of all fates meted out to political prisoners in Russia is imprisonment in the subterranean dungeons of this fortress. No news penetrates the walls of the isolated prison and no information from within leaks out. Few ever leave the prison alive except to be transferred to an insane asylum.