THE KNOUT AND THE PLÈTE—RUNNING THE GAUNTLET—GANGS OF EXILES—GRAND-DUCHESS MARIE—THE JOURNEY—RUSSIAN ALMS—A ‘POPE’—THE RUSSIAN SOLDIER—OMSK—PRINCE GORTCHAKOV—EKATERINSKI-ZAVOD.
To be exempt from corporal chastisement is one of the privileges of a Russian noble; and in cases of deportation a member of the nobility should not be obliged to make the journey on foot, or in a gang of convicts. This does not prevent the torture being applied to political prisoners, even when nobles, during the progress of an examination; yet their sentence is in general in accordance with the laws, and it is seldom that the statutes are set aside, as they were in the case of the Polish prince Roman Sanguszko, to whose sentence the Emperor Nicholas undoubtedly added with his own hand the order that the prince’s journey should be made on foot. Thanks to the accident of my birth, I had never known the ordinary aggravations of such a lot as mine had now become, I mean the knout, the plète, and the march in a gang; but as many of my countrymen have undergone such punishments, and as I also should forfeit (so said the decree against me) my right of being exempt from them when I reached my destination, I shall give some more precise details upon the subject, albeit a sad one.
The knout is a strip of hide, a thong which is steeped in some preparation, and strongly glazed as it were with metal filings. By this process it becomes both heavy and extremely hard, but before it hardens care is taken to double down the edges, which are left thin on purpose, and in this way a groove runs the whole length of the thong, except the upper part, which is supple, and winds round the hand of the executioner; to the other end a small iron hook is fastened. Falling on the bare back of the sufferer the knout comes down on its concave side, of which the edges cut like a knife. The thong thus lies in the flesh, and the operator does not lift it up, but draws it towards himself horizontally, so that the hook tears off long strips. If the executioner has not been bribed, and does his business conscientiously, the person under punishment loses consciousness after the third stroke, and sometimes dies under the fifth. A peculiarity of the Russian law may be also noted here, which orders that the number of blows from the knout shall always be an unequal one! The scaffold on which the sufferer is placed is called in Russ ‘a mare’ (kobyla). It is an inclined plane, to which the man is tied with his back uncovered. The head is firmly fastened to the upper part, the feet to the lower end, and the hands, which are also knotted together, go round below the plank; any movement of the body becoming in this way impossible. After receiving the prescribed number of strokes, the poor wretch is untied, and on his knees undergoes the punishment of being marked. The letters vor (meaning thief, or malefactor) are printed in sharp-pointed letters on a stamp, which the executioner drives into the forehead and into both cheeks, and while the blood runs, a black mixture, of which gunpowder is an ingredient, is rubbed into the wounds; they heal, but the bluish mark left remains for life. In old days, after thus marking a man, they sometimes tore off his nostrils with iron pincers; but a ukase of the last years of Alexander I. definitively abolished this additional piece of barbarity. I have myself encountered in Siberia more than one criminal thus hideously disfigured, but all dating from a time anterior to the publication of the ukase in question. As for those who had the triple inscription of vor, I have seen an incalculable number in Siberia; but I believe women cannot be punished in this way, and I never met with one who wore the triple brand.
The plète, so often and so erroneously confounded with the knout, is a less fearful instrument of punishment. Three stout thongs are weighted at the ends with balls of lead, the other extremity winds up the arm of the executioner, and according to the law it ought to weigh from five to six pounds. When it comes down on the back it strikes like three sticks; it does not tear up the flesh like the knout, but the skin breaks under the blows, which make a lesion of the spinal column, break the ribs, and I have been told detach even the viscera from their places; and those who have suffered under the plète, if they have received any great number of lashes, generally fall into consumption and perish. In order to give himself greater purchase, the person wielding it makes a run and does not strike till close to ‘the mare.’ I have said that it is possible to gain over the operator, and in this case he can manage not to touch the instrument with the little finger of the hand. This lessens the blow, although the attention of the superintending officer is not attracted by the practice, and any reader by experimentalising with a stick may convince himself that it does so. If however the sentence stands for a great number of strokes, the executioner is then bribed to inflict the first with tremendous violence, and as much upon the sides as possible, so that life is sooner extinct, and death puts a speedier end to the sufferings of the victim.
A third species of punishment is running the gauntlet (skvos-stroï, literally ‘through the ranks’); it is generally reserved for soldiers, and yet many of my countrymen have suffered thus for political offences. It is inflicted with long rods newly cut, which have been steeped in water for some days to make them more pliant. Soldiers are arranged in two files, but each man stands at some distance from the other, so that all may strike with a long swing without being in each other’s way. The condemned person, stripped to the waist, passes through the ranks, his hands are tied in front upon a musket of which the bayonet rests on his chest; the butt-end is held by the soldier who leads him. He walks slowly, receiving the rods on his back and shoulders, and if he faints and falls he is picked up again. A ukase of Peter the Great fixes the maximum of blows at twelve thousand, but it is seldom that more than two thousand are given at one time, unless for the sake of ‘setting an example;’ in general, after two thousand the patient is carried off to the hospital, and when healed of his wounds he pays the rest of his penalty.
After such patients as these have recovered a little health and strength in a military hospital, they are hurried off to some one of the head-quarters of the empire, where a large number being assembled, they are classed according to their sentences, whether of simple transportation (possilenié), or of hard labour in the public works (katorga). Thus classified, they are told off into gangs of a hundred at the least, and of two hundred and fifty at the greatest computation. The gangs thus formed then separate for Siberia, and the time which is spent on the road is one of the greatest elements of suffering in their painful lot. For example, to go from Kiow to Tobolsk requires a long year; and if the gang has a farther destination (say the mines of Nertchinsk, in the government of Irkutsk), the journey will take more than two years. Criminals condemned to hard labour are placed under a stronger escort, and under a more severe watch than those who are simply deported, and they generally form a brigade by themselves. I met many of these caravans on my journey, and they travelled in the following order. In front rode a Cossack at a walk, completely armed, and with a lance in his hand; after him came men either singly or chained together by hands and feet; these were followed by twenty, all fastened at the wrists to long iron rods; the next were fettered in the same way, with their feet chained in addition, but the women, as far as I could judge, did not wear any irons. On both sides of the gang marched soldiers with loaded arms, while some Cossacks rode up and down. After the prisoners, and in the first carriage, one might see the officer in charge with his head down, and smoking his pipe; the other carriages brought the baggage and the sick, who wore a collar by which they could be chained to a pole fixed in the vehicle.
My heart felt ready to break every time that I met a company of the sort, and the sight of the women was most trying. A mournful silence reigned in their groups, and it was only broken by the dull noise of their chains. No doubt these men were in general real malefactors, the off-scourings of any society; but who could say that among them there were none that were innocent, no political criminals, no countrymen of my own? Later, and when sojourning on the banks of the Irtiche, I had for my companions two political exiles like myself, Siesieki and Syezewski: these men had done the whole distance on foot and in a gang, and they furnished me with every detail of their march. Thus, they told me that none of these unhappy creatures can stir in his sleep without awaking companions fastened to the same bar, and indeed without causing them sharp pain, if the movement should happen to be a rough one, as often is the case in sleep. At the times for halting and eating the prisoners are huddled together in a circle, while the foot soldiers watch them, and the Cossacks stray round them on horseback. The column walks for two days and rests on the third; and for this purpose, beyond Nijni-Novgorod, where the villages are few and far between, houses have been constructed to shelter the gangs at distances calculated to suit the recurrence of these days of rest. These buildings, long and low (for they are only one story high), extending in the middle of wide and desert plains, and only inhabited at intervals, are calculated to leave a strange impression. Military stations are also established at unequal distances along the route from Kiow to Smolensk, and even to Nertchinsk. In each of these stations is to be found an officer with a number of soldiers sufficient to replace the escort which arrives. The officer is in all cases responsible for the prisoners, and has over them a perfectly discretional power. He may punish them with the bastinado, the rods, and the plète; and abuses are, as may be supposed, inevitable, though, to the honour of humanity, it must be said that very many of these officers, far from making a cruel use of their dictatorship, often show themselves full of care and compassion for the unhappy beings whom they are obliged to conduct. At times of severe cold or of any great flood, the columns are obliged to stop at any station where they may happen to be. These expeditions are sent off in such a way that every week one gang enters Tobolsk as another leaves it to continue its march. At Tobolsk sits what is called the Commission of Deportation, whose business is to assign a definitive destination to each man, according to local convenience, or the necessities of the public works. It has been calculated that the number of transported persons amounts every year to little short of ten thousand.
I must give one more detail, supplied to me by the same Siesieki whom I have already mentioned. The train of which he formed a part was met near Moscow by the Duke of Leuchtenberg and his wife, Grand-Duchess Marie. The daughter of Nicholas, on learning that many Poles, condemned for political offences, were to be found in the column, had them pointed out to her, and remained for an hour in contemplation of the body; no word escaped her lips, but she dried continually the big tears which fell from her eyes. The Duke of Leuchtenberg approached Siesieki, asked him his name, and said that he should seek for his pardon at the hands of the Emperor. Did the Duke forget it, or did he not dare to ask? Nothing can be known; but this I know for certain, that, many a long day afterwards, I found Siesieki in Siberia, and that I was one day to leave him there.