While in the Schlüsselburg, Vera Figner studied Italian and English, and translated many of Kipling’s works into Russian. After she had spent altogether twenty years in prison, she committed the offence of striking an officer. Her mother, who had promised not to intercede for her, could no longer keep silent; and appealed to the Czar, with the result that the life sentence passed upon the famous revolutionist was reduced to one of twenty years. Instead of releasing her immediately, however, Plehve kept her two more years in the Schlüsselburg, saying, “There is still too much life left in her.” To her unspeakable grief, her mother died a few weeks before she was released in 1904.
She was exiled to a tiny village close to the arctic regions, and a year and a half afterward she was allowed to return to her estate in the Kazan province. She has since made a trip to Italy for her health, and although her nervous system received such a shock that she has never fully recovered, she has renewed activity for the cause to which she has devoted her life by lecturing in foreign cities.
Another woman revolutionist who afterward suffered greatly at Kara was Madame Anna Pavlovna Korba, the daughter of a German nobleman naturalised in Russia, named Meinhardt. She had married a Swiss gentleman living in Russia. She was the friend of Madame Löschern von Herzfeld, who had been one of those banished, but afterward pardoned, in “the case of the 193.” She was again arrested at Kiev with arms in her hand, and suffered a second exile with a long imprisonment at Kara. On her return from the campaign of 1878–9 in Turkey, where she had worked as a nurse, she adopted the revolutionary programme. The “white terror” was at its height; the government was active in pursuing the politicals who were pledged to destroy the Czar; and in 1882, Soudyehkin, the chief of the secret police, laid a heavy hand on them, arresting them in batches, executing many and burying the rest alive in St. Petersburg dungeons. Anna Korba, undaunted, threw herself into the fight, and strove earnestly to replace those who had fallen in the ranks. She was arrested for being concerned in the manufacture of dynamite bombs at a secret laboratory, and her trial ended in exile at Kara with twenty years at hard labour, which nearly killed her.
Madame Elizabeth Kovalskaya, whose fruitless effort to escape from Irkutsk has been described, deliberately planned to offend a great official in order to secure her removal. One day, when Baron Korv, the governor-general, visited the prison, she failed purposely to rise from her seat in his presence. Baron Korv objected harshly to this mark of disrespect to a man in his position, and Madame Kovalskaya quietly replied that she had not elected him to it. The enraged official left the prison saying he would send instructions how to deal with this refractory female, and shortly afterward an order came to remove her to the central prison at Verkhni Udinsk, as her unruly behaviour had a demoralising effect at Kara.
The new removal would have been in accordance with Madame Kovalskaya’s wishes, but it was most savagely carried out. The blame lay with the commandant of the Kara political prison. Colonel Masyukov, an officer of the gendarmerie, had held this post for about ten years. He was a man of weak character, of low mental calibre, without judgment and quite unfitted for the functions he discharged. Once an officer of the guards, he had wasted his substance in riotous living and had accepted this well paid post to discharge his liabilities and his gambling debts.
Colonel Masyukov stupidly supposed that the female prisoners stirred up by Madame Kovalskaya would have risen to resist her transfer. He resolved, therefore, that she should be conveyed away secretly without a word of notice. A subordinate officer, named Bobrovski, accompanied by a party of gensdarmes and ordinary convicts, burst into her cell at four o’clock in the morning and dragged her out of bed, half naked, with no more covering than her nightdress. She was hurried to the office and here ordered to put on the coarse garments of a common criminal. After this she fainted, and, wrapped up unconscious in a blanket, was carried out to the bank of the river Shilka, where an open boat was in readiness to carry her to Stretensk, the steamboat navigation not being yet practicable. In this small boat she travelled seventy miles for three days and nights with the soldiers of her escort who had already treated her with shameful indignity.
This forcible seizure had aroused the whole prison, and the other women, maddened by the victim’s shrieks and believing that her honour was being outraged, became perfectly infuriated. They declared a hunger strike forthwith and refused food unless Masyukov was dismissed from his post. The commandant now deeply regretted his foolish action, and took counsel a little too late from his more sensible subordinates, especially one wise old sergeant, Golubtsov, a tactful man of long experience and much common sense. On his advice the male prisoners were called in to pacify their incensed women comrades and persuade them to abandon their strike. They suggested that the commandant should be requested to apologise to his offended charges, a satisfaction altogether scouted as insufficient by the strikers. The famishing women still insisted upon the withdrawal of Masyukov. The condition seemed impossible of concession by the authorities, but it was hoped that the commandant might himself solve the difficulty by applying for a transfer elsewhere. This settled the question for the moment, and the women consented to take food on the clear understanding that if Masyukov had not disappeared within a certain period, the hunger strike would be recommenced.
This in effect came to pass. The commandant held his ground. The malcontents again refused food, and now the men, although they thought the suggested apology would have been sufficient atonement by Masyukov, joined in the protest and also went out “on strike.” The commandant thereupon came to terms; he produced a telegram accepting his resignation; and once more food was eaten, after a week’s starvation. But the women would not forgive Masyukov and declined to hold any communication with him. He was “boycotted” completely to the extent even of a refusal on their part to receive their letters from home after passing through his hands. This high spirited resolve reacted very painfully upon themselves. Mental torture worse than the physical was superadded to their sufferings, and they were all but driven to despair. No letters were sent and all which were received were returned unopened through the post to their senders.
This absolute severance of home ties bore especially hard upon one of the latest arrivals in the prison,—Madame Hope Sigida, “a sensitive young creature, gentle, affectionate and attracted by all that was good and beautiful. She was deeply attached to her family, who lived in Taganrock, a small town in South Russia.” She had been a school teacher, and was condemned to eight years’ hard labour because a printing press and some bombs had been discovered in the house where she resided with her husband who was an officer in Taganrock circuit court. The latter was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to deportation to Saghalien, and he died on his way to that island. Madame Sigida, in her bereavement, felt acutely the cessation of all relations with her distant home, and when her comrades, goaded to desperation, were upon the point of resuming the hunger strike, she determined to sacrifice herself for the common good. Hoping that relief might in that way come to the rest, she planned to attack Masyukov alone. She sought an interview with the commandant, and it was granted in due course. A most dramatic incident followed, as told by eye-witnesses. She was driven to the office in a carriage under escort, and was taken in to speak to Colonel Masyukov, who the next moment was seen to jump out of the window, evidently much excited and terrified, and take to his heels. Then Madame Sigida came to the door, and after caressing some warder’s children who stood there, in a quiet, unperturbed voice begged that a telegraphic message might be despatched to the proper authorities informing them that she had assaulted the commandant by striking him in the face. She justified her violence as the only means of shaming him into taking his departure. At least she succeeded in forcing him to show himself in his character of a mean, despicable coward.
Madame Sigida was forthwith cast into a secret cell and subjected to “dungeon conditions,” while awaiting trial for her grave breach of discipline. Her self-sacrifice had not availed to avert the hunger strike. It began immediately afterward by all the women prisoners, and was persisted in for sixteen days with the same argument, that Colonel Masyukov, now ridiculed and disgraced, must go.