HORRORS OF RUSSIAN PRISON LIFE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1166, 29 July 1885, Page 4

HORRORS OF RUSSIAN PRISON LIFE.

The Troubetzkoi Ravelin is a department of tho fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul at St. Petersburg, the Russian' Bastile ; and though the prisoners are' kept in the strictest' solitary confinement, 1 , and every precaution is taken to prevent, them exchanging communication with the ' outer, world, they contrive to smuggle out an occasional letter. Last year three letters were smuggled out. One, the longest and most important, was written • with blood, which the writer, in absence of a knife, obtained by biting his own flesh. It was straightway printed in the clandestine Press of Narodnaia Nolio, ! and some extracts from it appeared in the London "Times" a few months ago. The authenticity of these letters has never been disputed.. 'fStepniak" has had them in his own hands, and cites from these blood-written pages the following thrilling description of the horrors of this terrible priaon-house : — " Prisoners are generally transferred to the Troubetzkoi Ravelin a few weeks after their conviction. You are told one fine morning, at a time, perhaps, when you are in daily expectation of being sent to Siberia, that you must change your cell. You are ordered to don a regular convict suit, the principal garment of which is a grey coat, ornamented with a yellow ali. Preceded by oue gendarme and followed by another, you are then- led through a maze of passages, corridors, and vaults, until a door, which seems to open into the wall, is reached. Here your conductor stops, the door is opened, and you are told to enter. For a minute or two you can spo nothing, so deep is the gloom. The coldness of the pJace chills you to the bone ; and there is a damp, mouldy smell, like that of a enamel house or an ill- ventilated cellar* The only light comes from a little dormer .window, looking towards the cpunter-scrap of the bastion. The panes are, dark, grey, being over-laid with a thick coating of dust that seems to have lain there for ages., When your eyes have become accustomed to the obscurity, i you perceive that you are the tenant of a !ceil a few paces wide and long. In one 1 ! corner is a bed of straw, with a woollen counterpane as thin as paper — nothing I else. The prisoners of the .Troubetzkoi [Bastion are not allowed to leave their 'cells for any, purpose whatever, either day or night,, except for regular exercise. You are thus obliged to live, sleep, eat, [and drink in an atmosphere reeking 'with corruption and fatal to health. In your other cell you had a few requisites, generally considered indispensable for all men above the level of savages, such as a comb, a hairbrush, a towel, and a piece of soap.

You were also allowed, a few books and a little tea and sugar, obtained of course at your own expense. Here you are denied even these poor luxuries, for by the rules of the Troubetzkoi Ravelin, prisoners are forbidden the possession of any object whatever not given to them by the administration, and as the administration gives neither tea nor sugar, neither brush nor comb, nor soap, you cannot have them. Worse still is the deprivation of books. In no part of the fortress may books be brought from without. Ordinary prisoners must content themselves during all their years of solitary confinement with such as are contained in the prison library, a few hundred volumes, consisting for the most part of magazines dating from the first quarter of the century. " But to the doomed captive of the Troubetzkoi— doomed to a fate worse than death — are interdicted books of every sort. 'They may not read the Bible,' says the letter. No occupation, either mental or manual, beguiles the wretched monotony of their lives. The least deatraction, the most trifling amusement, is forbidden as strictly to them as if it 'were an attempt to rob their gaolers, who exact from their victims all the suffering which is in the power of the latter to give. A prisoner named Zoubkoviski, having made somo cubes of bread-crumbs, wherewith to construct geometric figures, they were taken from him by the gendarmes, on theground that a prison was not a place for amusement. According to the regulations, the prisoners of the Troubetzkoi should have exactly the same amount of walking exercise as any other prisoner of the fortress. In point of facb, however, they are taken out only every 48 hours, to breathe the fresh air for ten minutes — never longer — and it sometimes happens to them to be left three' and four consecutive days in the fetid atmosphere without break, as would appear, for no other cause, but the neglect of the warders. . . . The mortality among the prisoners is frightful. While their bodies lose flesh, their faces become swollen and blotched, and the extremities, especially the hands, are in a continual nervous tremble. It might be supposed that the deprivation of books and the gloom of their cells would tend to .preserve their eyesight. But it is the very reverse. Their eyes 1 become inflamed, the lids swell, and are opened only with great difficulty. But maladies most fatal and frequent — which cause the greatest mortality and entail the most cruel suffering — are dysentery and scurvy ; both caused solely by the i insufficient and unsuitable dietary of the ! prison. Yet the. sick' are treated in exactly the same way, as - the .whole get the same food, same sodden black, bread, same sodden tea, ,ev6n the same sour soup, which, in their condition, is nothing less than poison. No wonder that,. under . such a regimen and without proper care — without any" care atall~patients suffering from these disorders die quickly. They lose: the use of their legs, the warders refuse to' change the! straw of their wretched bedsi and they are left to perish and rot in -their own .corruption. But these are horrora that defy description— that- only the pen :o£-Bante could adequately describe, f Ohji^youjcouldonlysee our sick !' ex6faims the writer of the bloodwritten letter. 'A year "ago they were youhg, healthy, and robust ; now they are bowed and decrepit old men, hardly able to walk. Several of them cannot rise from their beds. Covered with vermin and eaten up with scurvy, they emit an odour like that of a corpse.