SOME NIHILIST DOINGS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 348, 19 December 1879, Page 3

SOME NIHILIST DOINGS.

The following stories are from the Russian correspondence in the Newcastle Chronicle : The evening of the day that witnessed the execution of Tchubaroff and the rest at Odessa saw a fresh demonstration on the Boulevard. Just before seven o'clock a young man sprang upon a seat and commenced a harangue against the Government. A crowd gathered round, and there were some cries of approbation. The police, however, rapidly arrived in force and arrested the youth, who, the whole way to the station, inveighed so loudly against the Government that his captors, to make him keep silent, gagged him. While being examined by the inspector at the station he Bpa,t upon that functionary, and disowned his authority. In the cell he tried to immolate himself with his lamp, like Somoff, the Nihilist, did three weeks ago. His clothes being extinguished, he refused his food, and when the police forced some soup down his throat by the aid of a funnel, he waited his opportunity, and then beat his head so savagely against the walls of his cell that he fell at last insensible. The same night he died of concussion of the brain. He was only seventeen. His death is officially described as arising from madness, but it is currently believed that he was impelled to commit suicide to avoid experiencieng the pressure (i.e. starvation and other acts verging upon torture) -which the police of Russia make use of to extort confessions from political prisoners. Attached to the Revolutionary Association at Odessa was a youth of seventeen, named Goronovitch, belonging to one of the public schools. Whether correctly or not, the committee imagined him to be acting as a spy for the Government, and determined to put him out of the way. Accordingly, one evening, in the autumn of 1877, as he was taking a walk on the outskirts of Odessa, he was set upon by men, and his head almost beaten to a jelly, after which, with diabolical cruelty, altogether Russian in its conception, the Nihilists poured vitriol over the wounds. Strange to say, Goronovitch survived this terrible treatment. In the hospital he made disclosures which were deemed so remarkable that as soon as he was convalescent he was sent to St. Petersburg to give evidence before General Mezentsoff. His appearance at the Third Department excited a shudder — he had no ears, eyes, or nose, and his hair was wholly burned away by vitriol, his head thus being like the scarified stump of a limb newly amputated, and having one solitary hole, drawn all awry, to serve as a mouth. To conceal his disfigurement the police made a hood tbat covered the head down to the chin, and left only an aperture for the \ outh. The icsult of his evidence was that three hundred persons were arrested, most of whom are still in prison awaiting trial at Odessa. Oa the 16th August, two days before the arrival of the Czar at Nicolaieff. two gendarme officers, while waiting the arrivals on the steamboat pier, observed a young man whose appearance struck them as being suspicious. Him they arrested and conveyed to the police station, where he described himself as a Joseph Stchenansky, student. In his possession were found false passports, a revolver, dagger, and a slip of paper with the address—" Engineer street, No. 10— ask for Btudent Bashko." Proceeding thither, the gendarmes found Wittenberg, the Jew, and Logovenko, the boatman, preparing a Voltaic battery and other apparatus for the Czar's assassination. Enough dynamite was discovered to have blown up an ironclad.