After events justified these fears.
CHAPTER XXVIII
OUR CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION—SERGIUS BOBOHOV—THE END OF THE TRAGEDY
Among my recollections of the year 1889, one pleasant memory remains to me—how we commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. While the French nation, amid fervent rejoicings, celebrated the centenary of their great Revolution, a handful of convicts, imprisoned by the Russian despot in a barren wilderness of the Far East, took their share in the festival. Ours was truly but a modest ceremonial—no banquet, no toasts, no speeches. Tea and a cake provided at the common expense were all that we could afford; and our banqueting hall was the prison-yard, whither all the tables from our cells were carried for a public feast. There we sat, and thought of the great triumph of the Revolution, and of its heroes—the spiritual heroes of the civilised world.
“Will the day ever come when the people will demolish our Bastilles—the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Schlüsselburg, the Citadel of Warsaw, and all the other gaols in which Tsarism imprisons its foes?” we asked ourselves; “and will any of us be still alive then?”
“The battle for freedom will have been fought and won by the beginning of the twentieth century,” our optimists averred.
“Who knows if it will ever take place?” said the sceptics.
The subject was argued over and discussed up and down. Many who then were full of hope now rest in their graves; others languish to this day in Siberian deserts.
I return to the sorrowful events that were then happening in Kara. After Sigida’s assault upon the commandant the women began their hunger-strike, their third and most terrible. They adhered resolutely to their decision; Masyukov must go, if it cost them their lives. For sixteen days they abstained from food. Sigida, it was asserted, remained fasting for twenty-two days, and when the prison doctor reported that he could not answer for her life, the Governor sent an order that she was to be fed artificially. Whether the doctor carried out that instruction I do not know. A rumour came to us during those dreadful days that he had had a scene with Maria Kovalèvskaya: he went—it was said—into her cell one day, when she was lying on her bed, exhausted by hunger; and she, supposing he had come to administer nourishment to her forcibly, struck him in the face. The doctor, a rather humane kind of man, seems to have looked on this simply as the act of an invalid not properly responsible for her actions; he told her she was doing him an injustice,—that he was not going to touch her,—whereupon she begged his pardon. He said to his friends afterwards that he had never seen a woman with such strength of character, so spirited and eloquent as she.
When it became evident that these women, who were already at death’s door, would never give in, the higher authorities consented to the following compromise: Masyukov could not be removed, lest it should be said that the prisoners had forced such a step on them, but the Governor should arrange that Sigida, Kalyùshnaya, Kovalèvskaya, and Smirnitskaya should no longer be under the commandant, but should be removed to the female criminals’ prison, and treated in future as ordinary convicts. Our comrades agreed to this, and ceased their hunger-strike. But the martyrdom of the unhappy women was not yet accomplished, worse sufferings still were in store for them.
In the second half of October Masyukov, who had kept in the background since Sigida’s encounter with him, entered our prison one day surrounded (as had never before been the case) by a guard of armed soldiers. The man looked thoroughly shaken and upset; he sheltered himself behind the soldiers, and told us to come and listen to an order from the Governor-General. When we had all assembled in the corridor he read aloud with trembling voice a document saying that in consequence of the disturbances among the political prisoners in Kara the Governor-General warned us that on any repetition of such occurrences the most stringent measures would be taken against us, and that recourse would even be had to corporal punishment.