Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1883 — A RUSSIAN INQUISITION. [ARTICLE]

A RUSSIAN INQUISITION.

Barbarities Inflicted Upon Political Priaoners— A Statement from a Sufferer. (From a St. Petersburg Letter.] The following letter from a political prisoner in Siberia will be found interesting not only as coming from such a source, but as containing facts not generally known. The writer studied the English language from books while in exile, and without any opportunity for practice acquired such proficiency that his letter loses none of its interest from being presented exactly as he wrote it: “Foreigners have such vague notions about Russia that they are as yet unable to understand the very reason and character of the revolutionary tendencies which prevail to such an extent in that vast country. I will tell here one fact which will show you clearly the character of the Russian Government. In 1836, soon after the execution of Karakozoff, a young workingman, itting in an inn where two or three persons were present, was foolish enough to say of the Czar, ‘You see he hanged now a man who was perhaps much better than he himself.’ Immediately he was arrested and brought to St. Petersburg, where they put him in the well-known prison of Sts. Peter and Paul. Then, without any trial, merely by the order of the Czar, he was sent to be imprisoned at the monastery at Soozdall. There are in Russia two monasteries which have prisons for political or religious libres-penseurs —the monastery called Solovetzkee, on an island in the White sea, and the monastery at Soozdall. The chiefs of these prisons are the holy fathers —the Abbots themselves. The young man was locked up in a small room. Once he committed some insignificant offense against the rules of the prison. Then the Abbot submitted the prisoner to such a punishment as the civilized world has not heard of since the times of the Inquisition. It is to make the world know this punishment that I decided to write this letter. , * “The Abbot ordered a box to be brought into the room of the prisoner, just as high and wide as the prisoner himself. On the inside of the box there were fixed on every point strong, large iron nails. The prisoner was put into this box and locked up. He could not turn himself, he could not move at all, because everywhere he would meet the iron nails. He remained in the box two days. Finally he could not bear any longer this torture, and said to the guard he wanted to see the Abbot. The latter came. ‘Do you wish,’ said the prisoner, ‘to kill me ? I cannot bear any longer this torture. I swear to you that if you will not release me instantly from this box I will kill you.’ Only then the Abbot released him. But no sooner had the prisoner left the box than he fell and fainted on the floor. His feet were so swollen they would not bear him.

“The holy fathers of the monastery use also several other kinds of torture. For instance, they put upon a prisoner iron fetters of 120 pounds weight, and keep him thus during some days. Only a man of great physical power can, with these fetters on his feet, rise or at all change the position of his body, as while sleeping he might desire. “Such are these monastery prisons, in which they keep for many long years, without any legal trial, innocent people who dare have their own opinions about religion different from those of the State’s church. I remember plenty of other facts of the same kind. Where, for instance, is now the well-known revolutionist, Naitshseff, sentenced in 1871 to twenty years’ imprisonment at hard labor? Nobody knows exactly, but there are persistent rumors that he is kept in one of the fortresses chained to the wall and fettered with irons of 120 pounds weight. -“Where is the political criminal Tomeen, sentenced in 1879 by the Martial Court to imprisonment for life? Nobody knows, but they say, and it is probably true, that he is kept i» one of the Siberian prisons—namely, at Tobolsk—and that there are two special guards to watch him, who receive a greater payment for this honor. “Why were the three newly-con-demned revolutionists, Sheeriaeff, Teechonoff and Gessi Gelfman, not sent to the Siberian prisons, as the law commands, but are kept in Slusselbourg, this Russian Bastilica? Because in the Siberian prisons they would not die so soon. “What right has the Government, in spite of the laws it created itself, to keep as it does, since more than ten years, in a pitiful small village, Villinsk, 500 miles from Yakoutsk, the celebrated Russian writer, Tcherneesheffski, author of ‘Remarks upon John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy,’ as well as many ether excellent books? By the Russian law Tcherneesheffski has long since the right of going through all Siberia, but the Government keeps him forcibly at Villinsk. Eight gendarmes and Cossacks, sent from Yakoutsk for this special purpose, are always watching him. He nfust live and sleep in the prison; only in the daytime he has the right to go into the village. But to him the most terrible punishment is that it is forbidden to him forever to write anything for publication. But the man is full of life and Energy. He cannot help writing; he must write, and he does. He writes leaves upon leaves; he covers piles of paper, and then —he puts them in the fire! Can you imagine this ? Is it not the tortures of Tantalus ? “And, after all, the facts give to the reader only a too insufficient notion of what is in fact the present government in Russia. And with such a Government will the European statesmen make treaties to give up those noble Russians, who have courage and selfsacrifice enough to protest against such barbarities ?”