Madame Sigida, still waiting judgment, refused food and remained fasting for twenty-two days, until medical intervention was decreed. Madame Kovalskaya struck the doctor in the face when she thought he was about to forcibly administer nourishment. But he was a humane man and disclaimed all such intention, and she begged his pardon.
For some time no formal inquiry into Madame Sigida’s assault was made, and no steps were taken to deal with her case. But after the lapse of a month or more, when the matter had been reported to St. Petersburg, a reply came directed against the whole body of the politicals. Colonel Masyukov, still holding his ground, assembled them and, escorted by soldiers, behind whom he sought protection, read aloud a letter from the governor-general in which he warned the politicals that they were in future amenable to corporal punishment. The penalty was deemed necessary by the authorities for the maintenance of discipline in the disturbed state of the prison.
Consternation fell upon these long suffering victims of a despotic government, who although defenders of their undoubted rights, as admitted in all civilised countries, had never rendered themselves liable to such reprisals. The penalty was, moreover, illegal in their case, and the threat to flog was considered an undeserved and outrageous insult. The desire to raise indignant protest possessed all, and many would have gone so far as to counsel a general suicide. The leader of this extreme view was Sergius Bobohov, a man of the loftiest sentiments, who had adopted revolutionary principles from a strict sense of their justice and necessity. Deutsch’s estimate of his character is worth quoting at length. “Genuine sincerity, seriousness of purpose, and boundless devotion to his ideal were his leading traits. He was the most modest of men, but when the honour of a revolutionist was at stake, or if it were a question of duty, he would undergo a transformation and become a fiery and inspired prophet.” Bobohov took the threat of flogging very much to heart, and passionately urged that an answering threat of suicide should be addressed to the minister of the interior. “I cling to life as much as any man,” he said, “but I am ready to face death as a means of protest.” His arguments had weight with his comrades, but might not have prevailed except for the disastrous course of events.
At this moment a catastrophe was precipitated by the almost incredible news that Madame Sigida, the assailant of Colonel Masyukov, was to be flogged by order of Baron Korv, the governor-general and persecutor of Madame Kovalskaya. The punishment was to be inflicted with rods in the presence of the prison doctor, but without previous medical certificate. The surgeon of the Kara penal settlement had given it as his opinion that the poor creature was unfit to receive even a single blow, and declined to be present, as the infliction was by administrative order and without a sentence of court. The governor hesitated to inflict the punishment, but Baron Korv persisted in the flogging, surgeon or no surgeon. The executioner was the same subordinate official, Bobrovski, who had distinguished himself in the misusage of Madame Kovalskaya. He had received promotion for his brutal conduct on that occasion, and was willing to curry favour further with his merciless superiors.
Details of this horrible tragedy are wanting as the lips of those who assisted are sealed. The authorities have, indeed, dared to deny the facts through their mouthpieces in the press, but they were well known throughout Siberia and their truth has been acknowledged by high officials who strove to justify the infliction. Ill-considered attempts have been made by at least imperfectly informed champions to discredit the whole story, which stands nevertheless as an indelible disgrace to Russian penal administrators, whose only excuse was that the nihilist women “had brought troubles upon themselves by being excitable and intractable, and an example was necessary.”
So the example was made. Madame Sigida was stripped and beaten with rods, when in a state of unconsciousness, for she soon fainted under the infliction, and was carried back senseless from the place of punishment to her cell. Two days later she died, but whether from the effects of the flogging or from deliberate poisoning is not positively known. Three of her female companions undoubtedly committed suicide, and on the men’s side seventeen out of thirty-nine resolved to put an end to their own lives. The result was not altogether successful. The drug, opium, was either old or adulterated, and many who lay down to die only woke to excruciating agony and were saved in spite of themselves. A few of them, Bobohov among the number, tried again, choosing morphia as the means of self-destruction, but once more the drug was ineffective and only two actually died.
The fate of those in durance is largely dependent upon the character and quality of those who have them in charge. Nowhere does this fact stand out more prominently than in Russian prisons. The governor, director or commandant is a petty despot; within his own narrow limits he is almost irresponsible, though subject, of course, to the control of superiors, but this has never been very closely exercised. Inspections are for the most part perfunctory, and abuses, especially that of power, may flourish freely without detection or interference. This ramifies through all the grades, and the prisoner, of whatever class, is very much at the mercy of the subordinate officials with whom he is brought into daily personal contact. The ordinary warder is very much the same everywhere: a man placed in authority over others often superior to himself in antecedents, birth, education and experience of life. He is apt to become arbitrary, tyrannical and self-sufficient from the authority he wields, whether delegated or usurped. After all he is only an agent, a deputy and go-between, carrying out the orders of his masters, whose moods he reflects, whose attitude he imitates, and whose temper animates him, inspiring him to harass and oppress or, more rarely, to be merciful and forbearing. Warders almost invariably take their tone from their supreme chief; hence the deep importance that attaches to the governor in prison life.
There were good and bad rulers in Russian prisons, the latter perhaps predominating, although occasionally a humane, well-intentioned and considerate man was to be met with, such as Kanonovich, who for a time governed the Kara political prison kindly and leniently, as has already been described. After him came a succession of gendarmerie officers from Irkutsk whose characters are summed up by Kennan as follows:—“Khalturin was brutally cruel, Shubin was a man of little character, and Manaiev was not only a drunkard, but a thief who destroyed hundreds of the prisoners’ letters and embezzled 1,900 rubles of money sent to them by their relatives and friends in European Russia.” Then came Captain Nikolin, of whom more directly. All these were men of much the same stamp as the “Major” of the Omsk ostrog described by Dostoyevski. He was, he says, “a fatal being for prisoners, whom he had brought to such a state that they trembled before him. Severe to the point of insanity, ‘he threw himself upon them,’ to use their expression. But it was above all that look, as penetrating as that of a lynx, that was feared. It was impossible to conceal anything from him. He saw, so to say, without looking. On entering the prison, he knew at once what was being done. Accordingly the convicts, one and all, called him the man with the eight eyes. His system was bad, for it had the effect of irritating men who were already irascible.” Fortunately for the prisoners, he was under a superior, for, as the writer tells us, “the commandant was a well-bred, reasonable man who moderated the savage onslaughts of the major, or the latter would have caused sad misfortune by his bad administration.”
This major was universally loathed by the prisoners, and more than once was on the verge of murderous attack. There were times when the convicts at Omsk were goaded to desperation by his brutality. One day a dozen men from Little Russia swore to take his life, and their leader had borrowed the kitchen knife and secreted it about his person. The grievance for the moment was the badness of the food, and when the major came in to expostulate, the assailant rushed at him, but found that his victim was drunk, or, according to prison superstition, “under special protection.” It was more than he deserved, for he was a blasphemous and overbearing wretch. After having carried the knapsack for many long years, promotion to the grade of officer had turned his head.
Captain Nikolin was an officer of gensdarmes who had been specially selected at St. Petersburg and sent out to govern the state prisons at Kara. Kennan speaks of him as “an old and experienced gendarme officer of the most subtle and unscrupulous type, who had received his training under General Muraviov, ‘the hangman, in Poland,’ and had been about thirty years in the service.... He had the suavity and courteous manners of the accomplished gendarme officer, ... and he greeted me with what he intended for frank, open cordiality, softening, so far as possible, all the hard lines of his face; but he could not bring a spark of good fellowship into his cold, watchful gray eyes, and I felt conscious that all his real mental processes were carefully masked.” He was very proud of his position: that he, a simple captain of gensdarmes, had been sent to this important command, where he was independent of local control and entitled to correspond direct with the minister of the interior. His whole object was to hoodwink Kennan, whom he assured blandly and mendaciously that the prisoners led a life of ease, even of luxury, sitting in a kamera like a club smoking room, reading and writing and pleasantly conversing. He further asserted that the “politicals” received considerable sums from their friends in Russia; that they bought what books they pleased, had newspapers, including the London Punch and other illustrated papers, and in a word, were “treated with gracious clemency by an enlightened and paternal government.” Nikolin showed the cloven foot later when he urged his colleague to seize Mr. Kennan’s baggage and search it, by which high-handed proceeding, happily avoided, much of the incriminating material so daringly secured by the fearless American, would have been lost to the indignant readers of the civilised world.