The house of the dead or, Prison life in Siberia
punishments, severe as they were, with sweet satisfaction. How did he
manage to please them. How did he gain the popularity he certainly
enjoyed?
Our companions, like Russian people in general, were ready to forget
their tortures if a kind word was said to them; I speak of the effect
itself without analysing or examining it. It is not difficult, then, to
gain the affections of such a people and become popular. Lieutenant
Smekaloff had gained such popularity, and when the punishments he had
directed were spoken of, they were always mentioned with a certain
sympathy.
“He was as kind as a father,” the convicts would sometimes say, as, with
a sigh, they compared him with their present chief, the Major who had
replaced him.
He was a simple-minded man, and kind in a manner. There are chiefs who
are naturally kind and merciful, but who are not at all liked and are
laughed at; whereas, Smekaloff had so managed that all the prisoners had
a special regard for him; this was due to innate qualities, which those
who possess them do not understand. Strange thing! There are men who are
far from being kind, and who have yet the talent of making themselves
popular; they do not despise the people who are beneath their rule.
That, I think, is the cause of this popularity. They do not give
themselves lordly airs; they have no feeling of “caste;” they have a
certain odour of the people; they are men of birth, and the people at
once sniff it. They will do anything for such men; they will gladly
change the mildest and most humane man for a very severe chief, if the
latter possesses this sort of odour, and especially if the man is also
genial in his way. Oh! then he is beyond price.
Lieutenant Smekaloff, as I have said, ordered sometimes very severe
punishments. But he seemed to inflict them in such a way, that the
prisoners felt no rancour against him. On the contrary, they recalled
his whipping affairs with laughter; he did not punish frequently, for he
had no artistic imagination. He had invented only one practical joke, a
single one which amused him for nearly a year in our convict prison.
This joke was dear to him, probably, because it was his only one, and it
was not without humour.
Smekaloff assisted himself at the executions, joking all the time, and
laughing at the prisoner as he questioned him about the most
out-of-the-way things, such, for instance, as his private affairs. He
did this without any bad motive, and simply because he really wished to
know something about the man’s affairs. A chair was brought to him,
together with the rods which were to be used for chastising the
prisoner. The Lieutenant sat down and lighted his long pipe; the
prisoner implored him.
“No, comrade, lie down. What is the matter with you?”
The convict stretched himself on the ground with a sigh.
“Can you read fluently?”
“Of course, your nobility; I am baptized, and I was taught to read when
I was a child.”
“Then read this.”
The convict knows beforehand what he is to read, and knows how the
reading will end, because this joke has been repeated more than thirty
times; but Smekaloff knows also that the convict is not his dupe any
more than the soldier who now holds the rods suspended over the back of
the unhappy victim. The convict begins to read; the soldiers armed with
the rods await motionless. Smekaloff ceases even to smoke, raises his
hand, and waits for a word fixed upon beforehand. At the word, which
from some double meaning might be interpreted as the order to start, the
Lieutenant raises his hand, and the flogging begins. The officer bursts
into a laugh, and the soldiers around him also laugh; the man who is
whipping laughs, and the man who is being whipped also.
CHAPTER III.
THE HOSPITAL[4] (_continued_).
I have spoken here of punishments and of those who have administered
them, because I got a very clear idea on the subject during my stay in
the hospital. Until then I knew of them only by general report. In our
room were confined all the prisoners from the battalion who were to
receive the spitzruten [rods], as well as those from the military
establishment in our town and in the district surrounding it.
During my first few days I looked at all that surrounded me with such
greedy eyes that these strange manners, these men who had just been
flogged or were about to be flogged, left upon me a terrible impression.
I was agitated, frightened.
As I listened to the conversation or narratives of the other prisoners
on this subject, I put to myself questions which I endeavoured in vain
to solve. I wished to know all the degrees of the sentences; the
punishments, and their shades; and to learn the opinion of the convicts
themselves. I tried to represent to myself the psychological condition
of the men flogged.
It rarely happened, as I have already said, that the prisoner approached
the fatal moment in cold blood, even if he had been beaten several times
before. The condemned man experiences a fear which is very terrible, but
purely physical--an unconscious fear which upsets his moral nature.
During my several years’ stay in the convict prison I was able to study
at leisure the prisoners who wished to leave the hospital, where they
had remained some time to have their damaged backs cured before
receiving the second half of their punishment. This interruption in the
punishment is always called for by the doctor who assists at the
execution.
If the number of strokes to be received is too great for them to be
administered all at once, it is divided according to advice given by the
doctor on the spot. It is for him to see if the prisoner is in a
condition to undergo the whole of his punishment, or if his life is in
danger.
Five hundred, one thousand, and even one thousand five hundred strokes
with the stick are administered at once. But if it is two or three
thousand the punishment is divided into two or three doses.
Those whose back had been cured after the first administration, and who
are to undergo a second, were sad, sombre and silent the day they went
out, and the evening before. They were almost in a state of torpor. They
engaged in no conversation, and remained perfectly silent.
It is worthy of remark that the prisoners avoid addressing those who are
about to be punished, and, above all, never make any allusion to the
subject, neither in consolation nor in superfluous words. No attention
whatever is paid to them, which is certainly the best thing for the
prisoner.
There are exceptions, however.
The convict Orloff, of whom I have already spoken, was sorry that his
back did not get more quickly cured, for he was anxious to get his
leave-ticket in order that he might take the rest of his flogging, and
then be assigned to a convoy of prisoners, when he meant to escape
during the journey. He had a passionate, ardent nature, and with only
that object in view.
A cunning rascal, he seemed very pleased when he first came; but he was
in a state of abnormal excitement, though he endeavoured to conceal it.
He had been afraid of being left on the ground, and dying before half of
his punishment had been undergone. He had heard steps taken in his case,
by the authorities, when he was still being tried, and he thought he
could not survive the punishment. But when he had received his first
dose he recovered his courage.
When he came to the hospital I had never seen such wounds as his; but he
was in the best spirits. He now hoped to be able to live. The stories
which had reached him were untrue, or the execution would not have been
interrupted.
He now began to think of a long Siberian journey, possibly of escaping
to liberty, fields, and forests.
Two days after he had left the hospital he came back to die--on the very
couch which he had occupied during my stay there.
He had been unable to support the second half of his punishment; but I
have already spoken of this man.
All the prisoners without exception, even the most pusillanimous, even
those who were beforehand tormented night and day, supported it
courageously when it came. I scarcely ever heard groans during the night
following the execution; our people, as a rule, knew how to endure pain.
I questioned my companion often in reference to this pain, that I might
know to what kind of suffering it might be compared. It was no idle
curiosity which urged me. I repeat that I was moved and frightened; but
it was in vain, I could get no satisfactory reply.
“It burns like fire!” was the general answer; they all said the same
thing.
First I tried to question M--tski. “It burns like fire! like hell! It
seems as if one’s back were in a furnace.”
I made one day a strange observation, which may or may not have been
well founded, although the opinion of the convicts themselves confirms
my views; namely, that the rods are the most terrible punishment in use
among us.
At first it seems absurd, impossible, yet five hundred strokes of the
rods, four hundred even, are enough to kill a man. Beyond five hundred
death is almost certain; the most robust man will be unable to support a
thousand rods, whereas five hundred sticks are endured without much
inconvenience, and without the least risk in the world of losing one’s
life. A man of ordinary build supports a thousand sticks without danger;
even two thousand sticks will not kill a man of ordinary strength and
constitution. All the convicts declared that rods were worse than sticks
or ramrods.
“Rods hurt more and torture more!” they said.
They must torture more than sticks, that is certain, that is evident;
for they irritate much more forcibly the nervous system, which they
excite beyond measure. I do not know whether any person still exists,
but such did a short time ago, to whom the whipping of a victim procured
a delight which recalls the Marquis de Sade and the Marchioness
Brinvilliers. I think this delight must consist in the sinking of the
heart, and that these nobles must have experienced pain and delight at
the same time.
There are people who, like tigers, are greedy for blood. Those who have
possessed unlimited power over the flesh, blood, and soul of their
fellow-creatures, of their brethren according to the law of Christ,
those who have possessed this power and who have been able to degrade
with a supreme degradation, another being made in the image of God;
these men are incapable of resisting their desires and their thirst for
sensations. Tyranny is a habit capable of being developed, and at last
becomes a disease. I declare that the best man in the world can become
hardened and brutified to such a point, that nothing will distinguish
him from a wild beast. Blood and power intoxicate; they aid the
development of callousness and debauchery; the mind then becomes capable
of the most abnormal cruelty in the form of pleasure; the man and the
citizen disappear for ever in the tyrant; and then a return to human
dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible.
That the possibility of such license has a contagious effect on the
whole of society there is no doubt. A society which looks upon such
things with an indifferent eye, is already infected to the marrow. In a
word, the right granted to a man to inflict corporal punishment on his
fellow-men, is one of the plague-spots of our society. It is the means
of annihilating all civic spirit. Such a right contains in germ the
elements of inevitable, imminent decomposition.
Society despises an executioner by trade, but not a lordly executioner.
Every manufacturer, every master of works, must feel an irritating
pleasure when he reflects that the workman he has beneath his orders is
dependent upon him with the whole of his family. A generation does not,