VIII
In Russia the struggle for freedom was taking on a more and more acute character. Several political trials had been brought before high courts—the trial of “the hundred and ninety-three,” of “the fifty,” of “the Dolgúshin circle,” and so on—and in all of them the same thing was apparent. The youth had gone to the peasants and the factory workers, preaching socialism to them; socialist pamphlets, printed abroad, had been distributed; appeals had been made to revolt—in some vague, indeterminate way—against the oppressive economical conditions. In short, nothing was done that does not occur in socialist agitations in every other country of the world. No traces of conspiracy against the Tsar, or even of preparations for revolutionary action, were found; in fact, there were none. The great majority of our youth were at that time hostile to such action. Nay, looking now over that movement of the years 1870–78, I can say in full confidence that most of them would have felt satisfied if they had been simply allowed to live by the side of the peasants and the workers, to teach them, to collaborate in any of the thousand capacities—private or as a part of the local self-government—in which an educated and earnest man or woman can be useful to the masses of the people. I knew the men, and say so with full knowledge of them.
Yet the sentences were ferocious—stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality. Hard labor for six, ten, twelve years in the mines, with subsequent exile to Siberia for life, was a common sentence. There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labor and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker; that was all her crime. Another girl of fourteen, Miss Gukóvskaya, was transported for life to a remote village of Siberia, for having tried, like Goethe’s Klärchen, to excite an indifferent crowd to deliver Koválsky and his friends when they were going to be hanged—an act the more natural in Russia, even from the authorities’ standpoint, as there is no capital punishment in our country for common-law crimes, and the application of the death penalty to “politicals” was then a novelty, a return to almost forgotten traditions. Thrown into the wilderness, this young girl soon drowned herself in the Yeniséi. Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and Northeast Russia, where they had to starve on the government’s monthly allowance, one dollar and fifty cents (three rubles). There are no industries in such hamlets, and the exiles were strictly prohibited from teaching.
As if to exasperate the youth still more, their condemned friends were not sent direct to Siberia. They were locked up, first, for a number of years, in central prisons, which made them envy the convict’s life in Siberia. These prisons were awful indeed. In one of them—“a den of typhoid fever,” as a priest of that particular jail said in a sermon—the mortality reached twenty percent in twelve months. In the central prisons, in the hard-labor prisons of Siberia, in the fortress, the prisoners had to resort to the strike of death, the famine strike, to protect themselves from the brutality of the warders, or to obtain conditions—some sort of work, or reading, in their cells—that would save them from being driven into insanity in a few months. The horror of such strikes, during which men and women refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to the gendarmes. At Kharkov, the prostrated prisoners were tied up with ropes and fed by force, artificially.
Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the youth.
