“At six I get up. At half-past six a hand is thrust through ‘the eye’ (spy-hole) in the door with some black bread. At seven a different hand pours boiling water into my jug in the same way. I have to buy my own tea. At ten I am led through the corridor into a little court, where I am allowed to walk round and round for twenty-five minutes with other ‘politicals.’ But if we speak or look at each other or say ‘good-morning,’ the walk is stopped—and it is my only chance of getting a breath of air. At eleven a bell rings, and the ‘eye’ is opened for letters or any orders for purchases that I want to send. But I am allowed to order things only four times a week, and, of course, only as long as my money lasts. At the same time a hand pours in boiling water again for tea. From half-past eleven till twelve is dinner-time, and I get a biggish basin of watery barley soup or pea soup, or else a thin fluid with scraps of meat and cabbage floating in it.
“There is rather a good prison library, especially strong in political economy. But it is very hard to get the books I want, and the pages are defaced by the gaolers, who always think the dots and hyphens are signals from the prisoners to each other. In the afternoon, especially when it gets dark, I lie on my bed, or walk up and down the cell, till at eight o’clock, as I said, the electric light is turned on for an hour. About six I get the boiling water and soup again. Sometimes letters reach me, but they are always kept till they are old. Sometimes I am allowed a visit of three minutes’ conversation through the ‘eye’ in the door. Of course, the gaoler is always within hearing.”
The treatment is not worse, it is perhaps rather better than the peculiarly brutalizing treatment of prisoners in England. There is something distinctly paternal in the provision of a library especially strong in political economy. But it must be remembered that this friend of mine had never been accused, had never been tried, and was only suspected of a crime which all the Liberals of England, from the Prime Minister downwards, commit every waking hour of their lives amid the applause of our nation; unless, indeed, it be urged against him that he fed the children of strikers—an offence from which our official Liberals are often exempt.
The particular prison in which this man was confined, was, as I said, a House of Inquiry, but the number of arrests had been so enormous since the Moscow rising that the suspects were now being thrust into the ordinary prisons straight away, or into any hole where they could be kept tied up. Just across the breadth of river from the Winter Palace of the Tsars, and the dilettante picture-gallery of the Hermitage, glitters the long-drawn brazen spire which marks the old fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, the citadel and grave of Peter the Great. Encased in monotonous marble slabs, and surrounded by hideous emblems of death and glory, there lie the bodies of all those melancholy tyrants from Peter downwards. Perhaps there are some people still left among the royal family who sincerely reckon those dull tombs among Russia’s treasures; but close beside the church along the Neva, so low that some of the cells are beneath the river level, run the dungeons which form the true Martyrs’ Memorial of the country—the places that will some day be honoured like the graves of the saints, for they are consecrated by the blood and suffering of hundreds of men and women who fought for freedom, though they seemed to fight in vain. This was the prison where again the foremost champions of freedom were now cooped up. Khroustoloff was there, the man of genius who organized the first general strike and was the chairman of the Workmen’s Council when I used to attend their sittings two months before. Not long after my return, the rumour went that he had been shot in the prison yard. Nothing was known for certain, but the thing was only too likely, for a tyranny does not spare its finest enemies, and Khroustoloff will be known to all Russian history as the man who forced the Government to defend itself by that lying Manifesto with which it betrayed the people as with a kiss.
Just outside the fortress the Tsar is building a palace for his former mistress—a Polish dancing girl, said to have been attractive without beauty—and less than a mile further up the river on the same bank, stands the large modern prison called the Cross (Kresty), whether from its shape or as an emblem of salvation, is uncertain. It is a dreary, red-brick building of the ordinary type, like Wormwood Scrubbs, and the officials hang their windows with caged birds as ornaments in keeping with the architecture. That prison also was crammed with “politicals.” In fact, it was the same story in all the prisons of Russia—the same thing as I had seen in Moscow, Kieff, and Odessa. Somehow room had to be found in the gaols for 20,000 Liberals—that was the lowest estimate I heard at the time, and a few weeks afterwards the moderate estimate rose to 70,000, and a high estimate of 100,000 was commonly accepted. We cannot wonder that a bankrupt Government felt only too delighted when it could kill off its prisoners by batches of thirty-five together as in Moscow, or of forty-five together as happened at Fellin in Esthonia just after Vladimir’s Day, when that number of journalists and men of letters were collected there and shot in bloody comradeship. The dead are so cheap in their subterranean cells.
English people are constantly marvelling, with some superiority in their tone, why it is that the Russian revolution has brought to light no man or commanding genius—“no Cromwell,” that is their usual phrase—to direct its energies to victory. Let them search the dungeons and the graves. Perhaps they may find a Cromwell there.
Till quite lately the very noblest of the “politicals” would naturally have been sent to the Schlüsselburg—the old fortress-prison standing on an island where the Ladoga Lake pours out the great stream of the Neva some forty miles above the city. But three days before the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a ukase was issued converting that ancient dungeon into a mint, and removing the few prisoners who still remained. I believe there were only five of them—old men and, perhaps, women who had tried to do something for freedom once, and in their living graves had already become myths of the dreadful past. About their identification and their removal to other dungeons there was much mystery, and the rumour ran that two of them had strangely disappeared, as well as others whose fading names and records were recalled by memories growing obscure.
To such mysteries another mystery now succeeded; for every one, except the few who clung to the orthodox photographic faith about the inexhaustible ingots of the Russian treasury, was marvelling why the terrible fortress had been converted into a mint, of all things, and whence the bullion was to come for coinage there. I am inclined to think that the Government was misled, like most people, by treacherous parallels from history, and, knowing the Schlüsselburg’s evil name, had feared a second Fall of the Bastille. It was a needless anxiety. The Schlüsselburg is too far away for popular frenzy; but the Peter-Paul fortress is close at hand and its abominations grow.
In any case, the conversion of a blood-stained fortress into an empty coin chest made no difference to the situation. The reaction went trampling along its course, and under it the country lay paralyzed. During the four weeks after the collapse of the Moscow rising (January 7th to February 7th), 78 newspapers were suspended, 58 editors imprisoned, 2,000 post and telegraph assistants dismissed, over 20 workmen’s restaurants closed in St. Petersburg to prevent relief to the unemployed, a state of siege was declared in 62 towns, a minor state of siege in 34 towns, 17 temporary prisons were opened, 1,716 “politicals” were imprisoned in St. Petersburg alone, and 1,400 “politicals” were summarily executed under martial law, not including the large and uncertain numbers that were put to death in Moscow after law and order had been re-established.[4]
Such was the terrified blood-thirstiness of that unhappy little body of men called the Committee of Ministers, who went down to Tsarskoe Selo by a guarded train along a guarded line nearly every day to discuss how best they could stifle down the hopes of liberty, and retain for themselves and their narrow circle of friends or patrons the cash, the medals, the jobbery, the social distinction, the female affection, and all the many other delights of power. They did not number more than eight or ten poor mortals, not removed by many years from the abyss of death, and, from all I hear, only two or three of them had been born more brutal or scoundrelly of nature than ordinary rulers are. One would have liked to listen to their conversation in those trains, as, with unctuous regret for the stern necessity laid upon them, they decided how many more should die. Some, like distracted Witte, whom we have heard blubbering over the wickedness of the dear children he was compelled to butcher; or like Count Dmitri Tolstoy, the Minister of Education, formerly President of the Academy of Artists; or like Shipoff, Minister of Finance to the penniless State, who only a year before had voted for universal suffrage; or like Nemeschaeff, Minister of Communications, who had been a chef to a railway, almost as good as a workman, and also had voted for universal suffrage; or like Birileff, Minister of Marine, who among Russian officers passed for a type of incredible integrity because he had abstained from swindling his country when he had the power; or like Rediger, the incapable but comparatively honest Minister of War—all these had once enjoyed a pleasing reputation for Liberalism, as had Prince Obolensky, the new Procurator of the Holy Synod, and successor to Pobiedonostseff as keeper of Russia’s orthodoxy. At one time probably nearly all of them had received the compliment of being thought a little dangerous by their relations, and now, under the ancient curse of tyrants, they were consumed by the knowledge of the virtue they had left behind. But they could not turn back—they had entered upon a road with iron walls. For guide to the entrance of that road they had deliberately chosen Durnovo, the new Privy Councillor, lately made permanent in his Ministry of Interior. And beside Durnovo stood his uneducated relation Akinoff, new-appointed Minister of Justice.