"That was for the murder. He'll get another one for escaping," I was taid as we wcnt home.
'I love to sec how thcy executc punishment!" the mili- tary medical assistant exclaims joyfully, extremely pleased with himself because he was satiatcd with thc abominable spcctaclc. "I love it! They arc such scum, such scoundrels. They should be hanged!"
Not only do thc prisoners become hardened and bru- talized from corporal punishmcnt, but thosc who inflict the punishmcnt become hardened, and so do the spectators. Educatcd people arc no exception. At any rate, I observed that officials with university training reacted in exactly the same way as the military medical assistants or those who had completed a course in a military school or an ecclesi- astical seminary. Others become so accusromed to birch rods and lashes and so brutalized that in the end they come to enjoy the floggings.
They tell a story about one prison warden who whistled when a flogging was being administered in his presence. Another warden, an old man, spoke to the prisoner with happy malice, saying, "God be with you! Why are you screaming? It's nothing, nothing at all! Brace yourself! Beat him, beat him! Scourge him!" A third warden ordered the prisoner to be tied to the bench by his neck so that he would choke. He administered five or ten strokes and then went out somewhere for an hour or two. Then he came back and gave him the rest.11
The courts-martial are composed of local officers ap- pointed by the island commandant. The documents on the case and the court's verdict are sent to the Governor-Gen- eral for confirmation. In the old days prisoners languished in their cells for two and three years while awaiting con- firmation of the scntence; now their fate is decided by telegraph. The usual sentence of the courts-martial is death by hanging. Sometimes the Governor-General reduces the semence to a hundred lashes, the ball and chain and deten- tion for those on probation with an indefinite term. If a murderer is sentenced to death, the sentence is very seldom commuted. "I hang murderers!" the Governor-General told me.
On the day before an execution, during the evening and throughout the entire night, the prisoner is prepared for his last journey by a priest. The preparation consists of con- fession and conversation. One priest told me:
At the beginning of my priestly career, when I was only twenty-five, I was ordered to prepare two convicts for death at the Voyevodsk prison. They were to be hanged for murdering a settler for i ruble 40 kopecks. I went into their cell. The task was a new one for me, and I was frightened. I asked the sentry not to close the door and to stand outside. They said, "'Don't be afraid, little father. We won't kill you. Sit down."
I asked where I should sit and they pointed to the plank bed. I sat down on a water barrel and then gaining courage, I sat on the plank bed between the two criminals. I asked what f!.«bern/)'rt they came from and other qucstions, and then I began to prepare them for death. \Vhile they were confessing I looked up and saw the men carrying the beams and all the other necessities for the gallows. They were passing just below the window.
"What is that?" the prisoners asked.
"They're probably building something for the warden," I said.
"No, little father, they're going to hang us. What do you say, little father, do you think we could have some vodka?"
"I don't know," I said. "1'lI.go and ask."
I went to Colonel L. and told him the prisoners wanted a drink. The colonel gave me a bottle, and so that no one should know about it, he ordered the turnkey to remove the sentry. I obtained a whiskey glass from a guard and re- turned to the cell. I poured out a glass of vodka.
"No, little father," they said. "You drink first, or we won't have any."
I had 10 drink a jigger, but there was no snack to go with it.
"Well," they said, "the vodka brightened our thoughts."
After this I continued their preparation. I spoke with 333
them an hour, and then another. Suddenly there was the command: "Bring them out!"
After they were hanged, I was afraid to enter a dark room for a long time.
The fear of death and the conditions under which exe- cution are carried out have an oppressive effect on those sentenced to death. On Sakhalin there has not been a single casc where the condemned man went to his death courageously. \Vhen the convict Chernosheya, the murderer of the shopkeeper Nikitin, was being taken from Alexan- drovsk w Due bcfore execution, hc suffered bladder spasms. Hc would suffer a spasm and have to stop. One of the ac- cessorics in the crime, Kinzhalov, went mad. Before the exccution thcy werc clothed in a shroud and the death sen- tencc was read out. Onc of the condemned men fainted whcn thc dcath scntcnce was bcing read out. Aftcr Pazhukin, the youngest murdcrer, had bccn dressed in his shroud and thc death sentencc was rcad out, it was announccd that his scntencc had bccn commutcd. How much this man lived through during that brief space of time! The long conver- sation with the pricsts at night, thc ceremony of confession, the half-jiggcr of vodka at dawn, the words "Bring them out," and then the shroud, and then listening to the death sentcncc, and all this followcd by the joy of commutation. Immediately after his fricnds were exccuted, he received a hundred lashes, and after the fifth stroke he fell in a dead faint, and then he was chained w an iron ball.
Eleven men were sentenced to death for the murder of some Ainus in the Korsakov district. None of the officers and officials slept on the night before the execution; they visited each other and drank tea. There was a general feel- ing of exhaustion; nobody found a comfortable place to rest in. Two of the condemned men poisoned themselves with wolfsbane—a tremendous embarrassment to the mili- tary officials responsible for the execution of the sentences. The district commander heard a tumult during the night and was then informed that the two prisoners had poisoned themselves. When everyone had gathered around the scaf- fold just before the execution, the district commander found himself saying to the officer in charge:
"Eleven were sentenced to death, but I see only nine here. Where are the other two?"
Instead of replying in the same official manner, the officer in charge said in a low, nervous voice: "Why don't you hang mel Hang me . . . ." It was an early October morning, gray, cold and dark. The faces of the prisoners were yellow with fear and their hair was waving lightly. An official read out the death sentence, trembling with nervousness and stuttering because he could not see well. The priest, dressed in black vest- ments, presented the Cross for all nine to kiss, and then turned to the district commander, whispering: "For God's sake, let me go, I can't. . . ." The procedure is a long one. Each man must be dressed in a shroud and led to the scaffold. \X'hen they finally hanged the nine men, there was "an entire bouquet" hang- ing in the air—these were the words of the district com- mander as he described the execution to me. When the bodies were lifted down the doctors found that one was still alive.
This incident had a peculiar significance. Everyone in the prison, all those who knew the innermost secrets of the crimes committed by the inmates, the hangman and his as- sistants—all of them knew he was alive because he was innocent of the crime for which he was being hanged.
"They hanged him a second time," the district com- mander concluded his story. "Later I could not sleep for a whole month."
Mr. Komarsky, the prison inspector under the local Governor- General, told me: "In the final analysis, if fifteen or twenty out of a hundred convicts turn out to be decent people, this is not due to the liberal measures we practice so much as to our Russian courts, which send these upstanding and reliable people to us."
A natural and unquenchable yearning for the supreme blessing of freedom is here regarded as an indication of criminal tendencies, and an attempt at escape is a serious criminal offense punished by penal servitude and flogging. A setder who is prompted by pure compassion, in the name of Christ, to offer shelter for the night to an escapee is punished with penal servirude. If a seeder is lazy and fails to live a sober life, the island commandant may sentence him to hard labor in the mines for a year. On Sakhalin even indebtcdness is considered a criminal offense. Settlers may not be transferred to pcasant status as a punishment for indebtedness. The island commandant permitted the police to sentence a settler to hard labor for a year on the grounds of his laziness and negligence in maintaining his homestead and deliberately evading the payment of debts due the government, for which the settler may be assigned immediatcly to the "Sakhalin Company" in order to earn the moncy to pay his debts (Order No. 4 5, 1890). In brief, an exile is often sentenced to penal servitude and liogging for offenses which in ordinary circumstances would only necessitate a repri- mand, arrest or imprisonment. On the other hand, robbery, which is so often committed in the prisons and settlements, is rarely punished, and if one may judge by the official statistics, we arrive at thc completely false deduction that exilcs are more respectful of other pcople's propcrty than free men.