We succeeded in persuading the women to give in for the time and to take nourishment, they having now fasted for eight days; but they would not entirely forego their protest against Masyukov, only modifying it so far as simply to “boycott” him. Ever since the abduction of Elizabeth Kovàlskaya the commandant had been afraid of appearing in their sight; but now they determined to break off even indirect communication with him. This decision cost them perhaps the heaviest sacrifice they could have made: it meant that they refused to accept their mails, which had always to pass through the hands of the commandant, so that they received neither money nor letters. Consequently they were forced to subsist on the prison rations alone, all communication with their friends was stopped, and all tidings of the outer world that they could have obtained from newspapers were lost to them. The natural result was that in a very short time the poor women began to suffer greatly, both physically and mentally, and that some of them were well-nigh driven to despair. The commandant was obliged to send back whence they came all letters addressed to the women prisoners. The alarm of their relations and friends at getting no news and receiving back their own letters unopened may well be imagined; and the knowledge of the suffering thus caused to their dear ones was an added misery for the captives.
She who suffered most in this terrible ordeal was Nadyèshda Sigida, one of the latest arrivals in Ust-Kara. I never knew her personally, but from all I heard of her from her friends she must have been a very sensitive young creature, gentle, affectionate, and attracted by all that is good and beautiful. She was deeply attached to her family, who lived in Taganrock, a small town in South Russia. Before her marriage she had been a teacher in a school, and her whole heart had been in her profession; she had taken but little direct part in the revolutionary movement, and had been condemned to eight years’ penal servitude because a secret printing-press and some bombs had been found in the house inhabited by herself and her husband. The latter had been condemned to death, the sentence being afterwards commuted to penal servitude for life, and he had died on his way to the island of Saghalien. Fate had dealt hardly with the poor woman: she herself had been unjustly sentenced, she had lost a beloved husband, and she had arrived at the Siberian prison at a juncture when she was obliged to take part—almost involuntarily—in the drama I am now describing. The stoppage of all communication with home must have been especially cruel to her; her longing for her mother, brothers, and sisters made her nearly desperate, as she pictured their feelings on receiving back their unopened letters to her.
There seemed no way out of this terrible impasse. A year had gone by since Kovàlskaya’s departure, and Masyukov was still commandant. The women, in a state of desperation, declared at last that they could bear the position of affairs no longer, and would put an end to it, cost what it might. They consulted together, and again resolved to fast, so they set up a hunger-strike for the third time.
“Will it be any good?” Sigida asked herself. The authorities seemed determined not to yield; the hunger-strike had led to nothing hitherto, and would probably once again prove a fruitless undertaking; would it not be better that one victim should pay for all? Better that one alone should suffer, than that all should sacrifice themselves. Sigida resolved to save her companions.
One day she told the gendarme on duty that she wished for an interview with the commandant, and asked to be taken to him. Masyukov saw nothing out of the way in this request, and ordered Sigida to be brought to his office.
Some of us were witnesses that day of a strange scene, which could be followed by looking through the crevices in the stockade surrounding our yard. A carriage brought a young lady, attended by two gendarmes, to the commandant’s house; she entered, and shortly after the commandant, in a state of great excitement, jumped out of the window into the yard bareheaded, and ran away. The young lady soon appeared in front of the house, and spoke with evident earnestness and decision to the gendarmes; after which she began talking quietly with a warder’s children, and caressing them. All this seemed most enigmatical; we gathered little save that the young lady had insisted on having a telegram despatched. But the solution soon followed. We learned that when Sigida came face to face with the commandant she struck him a blow, saying, “That is for you as commandant!” and our hero, despite the presence of the gendarmes, took to his heels and fled, leaping out of the window as we had seen. Sigida, afraid that Masyukov would try to hush up the affair, had thereupon demanded that the occurrence should be telegraphed at once to the proper authorities. She was counting on the usual procedure in such a case; an officer receiving a personal injury from one of his charges being generally removed from the place where such a thing had happened, and the offender sentenced to death. Her calculations as to these probable results of her action proved false, however; the poor lady had offered her sacrifice in vain.
I must here pause to speak of other events, which, though not directly bearing on these struggles at Kara, yet greatly influenced the minds of those concerned in them. The year of which I speak, 1889, will never be forgotten by those who were then in Siberia. The news of the sanguinary scenes that took place in Yakutsk was told to the whole civilised world, and everywhere aroused horror at the cruelty of the Tsar’s Government; yet probably but few of my readers will recollect the particulars.
There were at that time interned in Yakutsk some young men and girls who were to be deported still further northward, “by administrative methods,” to those wretched forlorn hamlets that figure on the map of Siberia as Verkhny-Kolymsk, Nijni-Kolymsk, Verchoyansk, and so on. Among these young people, who of course belonged to the student class, there were boys and girls under age, to whose charge even Russian law could lay no crime.
The Vice-Governor, Ostàshkin, who was then in command of the province of Yakutsk, had given orders that these exiles should be conveyed to their appointed destinations in a manner that would have rendered the hardships of the journey quite unnecessarily severe; and when the young people learned this they made representations to the authorities, pointing out the danger that threatened them of perishing by cold and hunger on the way. They were told to come together to talk matters over, and they accordingly assembled in a dwelling-house to await the arrival of the chief of police; instead of whom, however, came an order to betake themselves at once to the police office. They now felt convinced that they were to be deported at once, without time for protest, and they refused to obey; whereupon there arrived immediately a troop of soldiers commanded by an officer, and a frightful scene began that beggars all description. The soldiers clubbed the exiles with the butts of their rifles, stabbed at them with bayonets, and fired on the defenceless assembly. Six corpses were left on the spot, among them that of a pregnant woman, and many were severely wounded. The wounded and injured—numbering twenty-seven—were then thrust into prison; and a court-martial was opened, wherein three persons were condemned to death and executed in Yakutsk, and nineteen were sentenced to penal servitude for life. That is briefly the history of the “Massacre of Yakutsk.”[[104]]
We in Kara received the news of these horrors just when our own situation was becoming critical. Sympathy with the innocent victims and anger against their oppressors were mingled with apprehensions for ourselves; for we naturally thought, “If the Government can treat so barbarously harmless people who are not convicts, what may be done to us, ‘deprived’ as we are ‘of all rights,’ convicts in a prison whence tidings need never penetrate to the outer world?”