The personal experiences of an officer who spent a long time in a prison near St. Petersburg were afterward published in a liberal journal. “In the evening,” he reports, “the governor went his rounds and usually began his favourite occupation—flogging. A very narrow bench was brought out and soon the place resounded with shrieks, while the governor smoked a cigar and looked on, counting the lashes. The birch rods were of exceptional size, and when not in use were kept immersed in water to make them more pliant. After the tenth lash the shrieking ceased, and nothing was heard but groans. Flogging was usually applied on groups of five or ten men or more at one time, and when the execution was over a great pool of blood remained to mark the spot. People in the street without would cross themselves and pass to the other side. After every such scene we had two or three days of comparative peace; for the flogging had a soothing effect on the governor’s nerves.”
“On one occasion,” says the same writer, “we were visited by an inspector of prisons. After casting a look down at us, he asked if our food was good or if there was anything else of which we could complain. Not only did the inmates declare that they were completely satisfied; they even enumerated articles of diet which we had never so much as smelled.” The food here and elsewhere was neither plentiful nor palatable. “It consisted of a quarter of a pound of black bread for breakfast; and a soup made of bull’s heart or liver, or of seven pounds of meat, twenty pounds of waste oats, twenty pounds of sour cabbage and plenty of water.” The daily sum allowed to cover cost was one penny, three farthings, not a great deal when officials expected to embezzle a substantial part.
Leo Deutsch, an important political prisoner, says that his daily ration of black bread was two pounds, with a dinner at midday of two dishes, not bad, but insufficient and always half cold, as the kitchen was far away. This was in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. At the “Butirki”—this was the popular name for the central prison of Moscow—the food, he says, “was beneath criticism; even the most robust at their hungriest could scarcely swallow a spoonful of the repulsive malodorous broth in wooden bowls brought to our cells at midday. This is explained by the fact that the sum originally provided by government for our maintenance was extremely small; and on its way through to us a great part of it found its way into the bottomless pockets of officials great and small, among whom there is an organised system of general peculation. The big cauldrons used for cooking the food of several thousand prisoners were filled up with the worst materials that were procurable.”
George Kennan in his “Siberia” tells us he tasted the soup in the kitchen of the Tiumen, or forwarding prison, and “found it nutritious and good.” The bread was rather sour and heavy, but not worse than that prepared and eaten by Russian peasants generally. The daily ration of the prisoners consisted of two and a half pounds of this black bread, about six ounces of boiled meat, and two or three ounces of coarsely ground barley or oats with a bowl of kvas morning and evening for drink.
Carl Joubert says, “I inspected the rations in the prison at Tomsk. The soup stank with the odour of a soap factory. I asked for a piece of bread from a warder, and when I had examined it I called for a bowl of warm water. I put the bread to soak in the water, and in a couple of minutes I handed the wooden bowl to Dr. Anatovich, and asked him to look at it. ‘Why should I examine it?’ he asked. But a moment later I heard him exclaim: ‘My God! My God!’ The surface of the water was covered with worms.” The soup at the infamous prison fortress of the Schlüsselburg often contained cockroaches floating on the surface, and the director thus explained their presence to a complainant: Whenever the copper lid is lifted, the steam rises to the ceiling and dislodges the cockroaches which fall into the soup.
Various attempts have been made to bring the Russian prisons into line with the more modern development of penal principles, but they have never been carried out consistently nor resulted in marked reforms. A good deal of money has been spent in constructing new buildings on the most approved plans, and the favourite theory in vogue, that of cellular confinement, has been adopted to a limited extent. Such enormous numbers have to be dealt with, and over such a wide area, that no comprehensive uniform system could possibly be introduced to meet even a fraction of the demand. But a certain number of cellular prisons were provided, seemingly with the idea of intensifying the pains and penalties of imprisonment.
The prison at Kharkov was one of the worst of its class; the cells were dark and damp, and the régime of solitary confinement was unduly prolonged. The most terrible sufferings were endured by the political prisoners who were chiefly lodged in them, until special prisons were appropriated for them, such as those of St. Peter and St. Paul and the Schlüsselburg. At Kharkov a “hunger strike” was organised, the fixed resolve to abstain altogether from food—a form of protest common enough in Russian prisons until a remedy was applied to their grievances. Concessions were then made to the extent of permitting exercise in the open air, removing fetters from the limbs of the sick in hospital and giving daily employment, but not before disastrous results had shown themselves. Six of the political prisoners went out of their minds and several died.
During the time that the Kharkov prison was used for this class of offenders, it was the scene of some startling events. Several escapes and attempts at rescue occurred. The case of Hypolyte Myshkin, a determined and most courageous man, was remarkable and deserving of more success. Myshkin was lodged at Kharkov in a small cell on the lower story, which had once been occupied by Prince Tsitianov, a distinguished revolutionist. He concentrated all his energies upon contriving escape, and within the first year had manufactured a dummy figure to lie on the guard-bed in his place, and proceeded to excavate a tunnel beneath the prison wall. He had no implements except his hands and a small piece of board, but he dug deep and far, disposing of the earth by packing it into a space between the floor of his cell and the ground. He had also made a suit of clothes to substitute for the prison uniform when at large. The material used for this purpose was obtained from a number of old maps, given to the former occupant of the cell and which had been left lying on the stove. Myshkin soaked the paper off the muslin on which it was mounted, and made a shirt and a pair of trousers. He was actually on the point of departure, when, unfortunately, a gaoler visited his cell at an unusual hour. He was down in his tunnel, and the dummy betrayed him. The alarm was raised, the other end of the tunnel was entered, and the fugitive was caught in a trap. He was transferred to another cell from which there was no prospect of escape.
Myshkin, hopeless and reckless, now sought freedom in death. Resolving to commit an offence which would entail capital punishment, he obtained leave to attend divine service at the prison church, and managed to get close to the governor, whom he struck in the face when in the act of kissing the cross in the hands of the officiating priest. Under ordinary conditions, trial and condemnation to death would follow, but just at this time the distressing state of affairs at Kharkov had caused so much uneasiness that the Minister of the Interior had sent a sanitary expert to report upon the conditions which had produced so much lunacy and so many deaths. Professor Dobroslavin pronounced the place unfit for human habitation, and urged the immediate removal of all political convicts. It was no doubt supposed that Myshkin was of unsound mind when he struck the governor, and he was not even tried for the offence, but shortly afterward was despatched to the far-off silver mines of Kara.
Myshkin’s antecedents and his ultimate fate are of interest. He was a young student at the Technological Institute of St. Petersburg in 1870, when, fired by the ardent spirit of the new revolutionists, he conceived a bold project to effect the escape of the well-known author and political writer, Chernyshevski, at that time in Siberian exile. After spending some time in the old Alexandrovski central prison near Irkutsk, the prisoner was presently interned under police surveillance in Villuisk, a small village in the subarctic province of Yakutsk. Myshkin planned to travel across Asia disguised as a captain of gendarmerie, present a forged order to the head of the police at Villuisk, desiring him to hand over Chernyshevski to the sham captain, who was to escort him to another place on the