We had evidently run amuck of the unutterably stupid police administration which the peasants are finding intolerable. During the year 1906 I was arrested five times, and this instance is thoroughly characteristic of each performance. A traveler, like myself, finds it inconvenient and annoying. The peasants find it brutal and not infrequently cruel. Whatever of faith has been lost in the Czar, the direct aim of the jacquerie of the next few years will be the landlords and the police administration.
CHAPTER VIII
A VISIT TO MARIE SPIRADONOVA
A tyrannical régime—A young girl’s daring—Tortures and outrages—Entertained by the governor—A kindly police-master—Grim prison walls—Difficulties—Appeal to the governor—Shackled prisoners—Marie Spiradonova—A terrible tale—Interruptions—A Spartan mother—Letters from the fair prisoner—“Greetings to France, to England, and to America.”
DJOINING the province of Saratoff, where I was arrested, is Tamboff, another government within the famine belt, where the long northern winters are more bitter because of the cruel ravages of starvation and hideous disease; and where there is—worst of all—the living, stalking dread of inhuman officialdom, martial law (which means Cossack excesses), police brutality, and governmental impositions that warrant the maddest crimes of men.
Here lived a young woman of twenty-one—a modern Charlotte Corday—who, early in the year 1906, killed the lieutenant-governor of the province. When her ghastly deed had been noised abroad—and the penalty she paid—the peasants gathered in their churches to offer thanksgiving and praise for using this girl as an instrument of His Divine Justice.
At the moment that I emerged from my Saratoff experience Marie Spiradonova was the most talked-of person in Russia, and perhaps the most notable prisoner in the world. The grim white-washed walls of Tamboff prison held her securely, while newspapers in Russia that dared to set forth the facts of her deed and the treatment she afterward received were confiscated by the police, and a Spiradonova League in France rolled up a lengthy list of subscribers. Correspondents from Germany, from France, from England, were sent to Tamboff to penetrate those stern walls and gather from the girl’s own lips the tragic story that was then thrilling a nation and interesting a continent. But for once neither diplomacy nor influence were of avail. Marie’s isolation was absolute and no one save her mother was privileged to so much as see her. In the meantime alarming reports of her precarious condition were emanating from Tamboff and in many sections there was intense excitement concerning her. It seemed well-nigh hopeless for me to reach her, yet I greatly desired to interview this daring spirit and to verify the extraordinary details of her ill-treatment that had kindled such intense feeling throughout Russia. Through the merest chance I succeeded. No one else has seen her or talked with her even up to the present time (she is now at hard labor in the mines of Akatui in central Siberia).
The story of Marie Spiradonova, which I set out to examine, was as follows: The lieutenant-governor of the province of Tamboff, one Luchenovsky, was one of the most tyrannical administrators in all Russia. His systematic cruelty and excessive severity spread terror throughout all the district where his power extended. He ordered the flogging of peasants and the burning of homes. It was said that he did not rebuke, if he did not actually and openly encourage, Cossack outrages; and all who knew of the inhumanities he practised and
