is, he never answers. The only human being with whom I exchanged a few words every morning was the colonel (governor) who came to write down what I wanted to buy: tobacco or paper. But he never dared to enter into conversation, as he himself was always watched by some of the warders.”
The fortress contained other prisons far worse than that of the bastion. There was the Trubetzkoi Ravelin to the west of it, the cells in which are so dark that candles are burned in them for twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. Their walls were literally dripping with moisture and there were pools of water on the floor. An account of the sufferings of some who were concerned in the “Trial of the Sixteen,” whose death sentences had been commuted to imprisonment in the ravelin, was published in the Narodnaya Volya. “Not only books were prohibited, but everything that might help to occupy the attention. Zubkovski made geometrical figures with his bread to practise geometry, and they were immediately removed by the gaoler, who said that hard-labour prisoners were not permitted to amuse themselves.” Of those whose sentences were commuted one became consumptive and another was attacked with scurvy and brought to death’s door. Two of the five condemned to hard labour in the same fortress went mad, and one attempted to commit suicide.
One of a party transferred to the Moscow prison was so helpless from scorbutic wounds that he was carried out of the cellular wagon in a hand-barrow. Two fainted as soon as they were taken into the open air. Tatiana Lebedieva had been sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour. “But,” says the medical report, “she cannot live so long. Scurvy has destroyed all her gums; the jaws are visible beneath; she is moreover in an advanced stage of consumption.” Another, a mother, was nursing her eighteen months’ old baby, and every minute it seemed the child must die in her arms. As for herself, she did not suffer much, either physically or morally.
Regarding the Alexis Ravelin on the eastern front, no very authentic details are forthcoming, but it is said to contain underground cells as bad as any oubliettes in the dark ages. The only proof of their existence is to be found in the fact that a number of soldiers of the garrison were tried by court-martial for having conducted a clandestine correspondence for some of the prisoners, carrying out letters for them and smuggling in newspapers, money and other prohibited articles. The prisoners concerned were nameless. The inevitable fate of those committed to the Alexis Ravelin was to lose their identity; they were forgotten and became mere numbers, only distinguished by the numerals of the oubliettes they occupied. This happened to one, Netchaiev, who killed a spy at Moscow and fled to Switzerland, from where he was extradited by the authorities of a free country, but on condition that he should be tried as a common-law prisoner. Netchaiev absolutely disappeared after he was tried at Moscow and sentenced to hard labour. There is no record of his incarceration in any central prison or of his departure for Siberia. It is nearly certain that he was lost to all knowledge in some hidden depth of the Schlüsselburg fortress.
Netchaiev was treated with great inhumanity. Overtures had been made to him by General Potapov to turn informer, and so insultingly that the prisoner struck the general in the face. For this he was flogged terribly, chained hand and foot and riveted to the cell wall. He managed to appeal direct to the Czar, Alexander II, in a letter written with his own finger nail and in his own blood; a modest letter stating the facts of his imprisonment, and asking if they were really known to the emperor and met with his sanction. This letter was entrusted to some one working under his window, but it was intercepted and the ultimate fate of the prisoner was never positively known. It was said that he had died of a second flogging, and posthumous letters attributed to him were published in the year 1883.
The régime of the Alexis Ravelin was brutally severe. Exercise was forbidden, the windows of the cells were boarded up, and the hot-air openings of the stove were closed, so that consumption rapidly developed in the feeble frames of the prisoners. It was fatal to one young man, Shirayev, whose crime was too free comment upon the state of affairs. He had dared to prophesy a time when the Czar would no more govern, and power would be held by popular representatives. Another, Shevich, an officer of the military academy, went mad in the Alexis Ravelin, to which he was committed for having left the ranks and improperly addressing Alexander III on the occasion of an imperial parade.
Despite the elaborate precautions taken, and the strict rules prescribed, the secrecy of the Alexis Ravelin could not be kept inviolate. The government hoped that the silence of the grave might close over its captives. But too many travelled the sad road, and news came back from some. Letters penetrated the thick walls; the inmates found sympathy with their gaolers, who would not remain invariably mute. Some more effectual tomb for the living must be devised, and a large sum (150,000 rubles) was forthwith expended upon the enlargement and improvement, from a disciplinary point of view, of the ancient castle of Schlüsselburg, once the favourite prison of Paul I.
This new prison became available in 1884, and was to be the receptacle for the most dangerous and influential politicals. It was freely admitted by the authorities that the very harshest régime would prevail there: close confinement, scanty diet and entire absence of all that makes life endurable—books, correspondence, the visits of relatives and friends. Above all, when the gates closed on a new arrival in the Schlüsselburg, hope died within him. Lifelong imprisonment was before him; there was no release this side of the grave. Few who enter the prison are ever set free again. The inmates are buried alive, suffering perpetual martyrdom.
It was here that the “humane” Peter the Great imprisoned his first wife, the unhappy Evdokia. He had forced her to enter a convent as he had become tired of her. Young and beautiful, she rebelled against the life of a working nun, and when, a few years later, a young army officer was detailed to inspect the convent, they fell in love with each other. When Peter heard of this, he had the officer impaled on a stake, and at the instigation of his new wife, the empress Catherine, Evdokia was thrust into the Schlüsselburg. The stone tower which she occupied and where she died is still known as the “Czarina’s Bower.”
In a cell underneath this stone tower, the great Polish patriot Valerian Lukasinski spent the greater part of the thirty-seven years of his imprisonment in the fortress. He had previously been immured in a Polish prison for nine years, so that he endured a continuous imprisonment of forty-six years, and died in the Schlüsselburg at the age of eighty-two.
The castle of Schlüsselburg figured in the war with Charles XII when Peter the Great took it from the Swedes in 1702. It stands just where the Neva issues from Lake Ladoga, a bare fortress on a lonely island. A small, desolate town surrounds it, whose sparse inhabitants are easily kept under surveillance, and access to the castle is impossible for any but those authorised or permitted by the police.
The political prison was emptied in 1905; the prisoners were freed, and the building was thrown open to the public for inspection. It was supposed this would end the gruesome history of the fortress as a prison, but just one year later, after the triumph of the reactionists, it was again put to use as a place of durance, and instead of the few veteran politicals who were liberated in 1905, three hundred revolutionists were crowded into the prison under fearful conditions.
A French publicist, M. Eugene Petit, a member of the bar, seems to have visited the prison, and his report appeared in the Revue Penitentiare of July, 1906.
The government has always chosen to send whom it pleases to this state prison and to subject them to such treatment as it pleases, usually of the most arbitrary and rigorous kind. The leading idea is absolute isolation in cells of limited dimensions, nine feet by seven feet. The furniture is of the conventional kind; an iron flap, fastened to the wall when not in use, supplies the bed, but cannot be let down except between eight o’clock in the evening and six in the morning, and at other times rest can only be obtained by lying on the floor. A petroleum lamp lights the cells while darkness lasts, which in winter is for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and this has a very injurious effect on the eyesight besides vitiating the air; the windows are high and glazed with opaque glass. The prisoner is kept constantly under observation through the “judas” or inspection plate in the door, and a warder in slippered feet
