RUSSIAN POLITICAL PRISONERS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 154, 29 June 1912, Page 15

RUSSIAN POLITICAL PRISONERS

HORRORS OF MARCH AND PRISON. Some information as to the nature of the punishment Miss Malecka will undergo was given to a press representative by Mile. Marie Shkolnik, a well-known member of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party, who arrived lately in London, having recently escaped from a Siberian prison. "Criminal' and political prisoners," she stated, "share the earn© punishment^ the conditions being precisely the same for both classes. Alter being taken to Irkutsk by train, women and men in troups of from 80 to 160 set out upon the orrible march of from 150 to 250 miles to the prisons. They coyer some 25 miles a day, resting at night in small wayside erections, which art) full o£ vermin. The whole 1 party are put into two i rooms in which they can sit or lie, if lying be possible, throughout the night. In the mornings the soldiers were so eager to start that wo ate our breakfast as we walked. We wero given about 5d a day with which to purchase food, but this sufficed to buy bread and water only, so that those who had no money of their own had to be content with .thai. "The women are set to work making mattresses. All their work, including the sorting of wool, is done in the room in which *hey live, and as a result deaths from consumption are so frequent that no notice whatever is taken of them. The women are entirely in the hands of thoir captors, and none escape ill-usage oil her by the officials or to CoEsacks "During the time I was there there were five cases of women who were killed by soldiers for resisting them. Nob one arrest was made. In one case a young married woman with a baby was strangled, and we knew who wac responsible. The political prisoners wrote to the higher officials, but no one was punished for the outrage."