Chapter 10

UNDER THE WATCH TOWER—THE LISBON POLICEMAN—THE INCENDIARIES

A man soon becomes used to prison, if he only has some inner resources. One quickly becomes used to the peace and complete freedom in one’s cage—no anxieties, no distractions.

At first, books were not allowed; the superintendent assured me that it was forbidden to take books from my home. I asked him to buy me some. ‘Something instructive, a grammar now, I might get, perhaps, but for anything more you must ask the general.’ The suggestion that I should wile away the time by reading a grammar was extremely funny, nevertheless I caught at it eagerly, and asked the superintendent to buy me an Italian grammar and lexicon. I had two red notes with me, I gave him one; he at once sent an officer for the books and gave him a letter to the chief police-master in which, on the strength of the paragraph I had read, I asked him to let me know the cause of my arrest or to release me.

The local superintendent, in whose presence I wrote the letter, tried to persuade me not to send it.

‘It’s a mistake, sir, upon my soul, it’s a mistake to trouble the general; he’ll say “they are restless people,” it will do you harm and be no use whatever.’

In the evening the policeman appeared and told me that the head police-master had bidden him tell me that I should know the cause of my arrest in due time. Then he pulled out of his pocket a greasy Italian grammar, and added, smiling, ‘it luckily happened that there was a dictionary in it so there was no need to buy one.’ Not a word was said about the change. I was on the point of writing to the chief police-master again, but the rôle of a miniature Hampden at the Pretchistensky police station struck me as too funny.

Ten days after my arrest a little swarthy, pock-marked policeman appeared at ten o’clock in the evening with an order for me to dress and set off to the committee of inquiry.

While I was dressing the following ludicrously vexatious incident occurred. My dinner was sent me from home, a servant gave it to the non-commissioned officer below and he sent it up to me by a soldier. They were allowed to send me from home about a bottle of wine a day. N. Sazonov took advantage of this permission to send me a bottle of excellent Johannisberg. The soldier and I ingeniously uncorked the bottle with two nails, the wine had a delicate fragrance that was apparent at a distance. I looked forward to enjoying it for the next three or four days.

One must be in prison to know how much childishness remains in a man and what comfort can be found in trifles, from a bottle of wine to a trick at the expense of one’s guard.

The pock-marked policeman sniffed out my bottle and turning to me asked permission to taste a little. I was vexed; however, I said that I should be delighted. I had no wine-glass. The monster took a tumbler, filled it incredibly full and drank it without taking breath; this way of imbibing spirits and wine only exists among Russians and Poles; I have seen no other people in all Europe who could empty a tumbler at a gulp or even toss off a wine-glassful. To make the loss of the wine still more bitter, the pock-marked policeman wiped his lips with a snuffy blue handkerchief, adding ‘First-class Madeira.’ I looked at him with hatred and spitefully rejoiced that he had not been vaccinated and nature had not spared him the smallpox.

This connoisseur of wines conducted me to the chief police-master’s house in Tverskoy Boulevard, showed me into a side-room and left me alone there. Half an hour later, a stout man with a lazy, good-natured air came into the room from the inner apartments; he threw a portfolio of papers on the table and sent the gendarme standing at the door away on some errand.

‘I suppose,’ he said to me, ‘you are concerned with the case of Ogaryov and the other young men who have lately been arrested?’

I said I was.

‘I happened to hear about it,’ he went on, ‘it’s a strange case, I don’t understand it.’

‘I’ve been a fortnight in prison in connection with the case and I don’t understand it, and, what’s more, I simply know nothing about it.’

‘A good thing, too,’ he said, looking intently at me; ‘and mind you don’t know anything about it. You must forgive me, if I give you a bit of advice; you’re young, your blood is still hot, you long to speak out, that’s the trouble, don’t forget that you know nothing about it, that’s the only safe line.’

I looked at him in surprise, his face expressed nothing evil; he guessed what I felt and with a smile said, ‘I was a Moscow student myself twelve years ago.’

A clerk of some sort came in; the stout man addressed him and, after giving him his orders, went out with a friendly nod to me, putting his finger on his lips. I never met the gentleman afterwards and I do not know who he was, but I found out the value of his advice.

Then a police-master came in, not Miller, but another called Tsinsky, and summoned me to the committee. In a large rather handsome room, five men were sitting at a table, all in military uniform, with the exception of one decrepit old man. They were smoking cigars and gaily talking together, lolling in easy chairs, with their uniforms unbuttoned. The chief police-master was presiding.

When I went in, he turned to a figure sitting meekly in a corner, and said, ‘If you please, father.’ Only then I noticed that there was sitting in a corner an old priest with a grey beard and a reddish-blue face. The priest was half-asleep and yawning with his hand over his mouth; his mind was far away and he was longing to get home. In a drawling, somewhat chanting voice he began exhorting me, talking of the sin of concealing the truth before the persons appointed by the Tsar, and of the uselessness of such duplicity considering the all-hearing ear of God; he did not even forget to refer to the everlasting texts, to the effect that all power is from God and that we must render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. In conclusion, he said that I must put my lips to the Gospel and the Holy Cross in confirmation of the oath (which, however, I had not given, and he did not insist on my taking) to reveal the whole truth sincerely and openly.

When he had finished he began hurriedly wrapping up the Gospel and the Cross. Tsinsky, barely rising from his seat, told him that he could go. After this he turned to me and translated the spiritual advice into secular language: ‘I will only add one thing to the priest’s words—it’s useless for you to deny the truth, even if you wish to do so.’ He pointed to the heaps of papers, letters, and portraits which were intentionally scattered about the table. ‘Only an open confession can mitigate your lot; to be at liberty or in Bobruisk in the Caucasus depends on yourself.’

The questions were put to me in writing: the naïveté of some of them was amazing: ‘Do you know of the existence of any secret society? Do you belong to any secret society, literary or otherwise? Who are its members? Where do they meet?’

To all these it was extremely easy to answer by the single word: ‘No.’

‘I see you know nothing,’ said Tsinsky after looking through the answers. ‘I have warned you, you are making your position more difficult.’

With that the first examination ended.

... Eight years later, in a different part of the very house in which this took place, there was living the sister of the new chief police-master, a woman who had once been very handsome, and whose daughter was a beauty.

I used to visit there; and every time I passed through the room in which Tsinsky and Co. had tried and examined us; then and afterwards, there hung in it the portrait of Paul, whether as a reminder of the depths of degradation to which a man may be brought by unbridled passion and the misuse of power, or as an incitement of the police to every sort of brutality, I do not know, but there he was, cane in hand, snub-nosed and scowling. I stopped every time before that portrait, in old days as a prisoner, later on as a visitor. The little drawing-room close by, full of the fragrance of beauty and femininity, seemed somehow out of place in this stern house of strict discipline and police examinations; I felt unable to be myself there, and somehow regretful that the blossom that was unfolding so beautifully should flower against the gloomy brick wall of a police office. The things that we said and that were said by the little circle of friends that gathered round them sounded so ironical, so surprising to the ear, within those walls accustomed to hear interrogations, secret information, and reports of wholesale police raids, within those walls which alone separated us from the whisper of policemen, the sighs of prisoners, the clank of gendarmes’ spurs and Cossacks’ sabres....

A week or two later, the little pock-marked policeman came and took me to Tsinsky again. In the vestibule several men in fetters, surrounded by soldiers with guns, were sitting or lying down; in the lobby also there were several men of different classes, unchained but strictly guarded. The little policeman told me that they were all incendiaries. Tsinsky was out at the fire and we had to await his return; we had arrived between nine and ten in the evening; no one had asked for me by one o’clock in the night, and I was still sitting very quietly in the lobby with the incendiaries. First one and then another of them was sent for, the police ran backwards and forwards, chains clanked, and the soldiers were so bored that they rattled their guns and did drill exercises. About one o’clock Tsinsky arrived, sooty and grimy, and hurried straight to his study without stopping. Half an hour passed, my policeman was sent for; he came back looking pale and upset, with his face twitching convulsively. Tsinsky poked his head out of the door after him and said: ‘The whole committee has been waiting for you all the evening, Monsieur Herzen; this blockhead brought you here when you were wanted at Prince Golitsyn’s. I am very sorry you have had to wait here so long, but it is not my fault. What is one to do with such men? I believe he has been fifty years in the service and he is still an idiot. Come, be off home now,’ he added, changing to a much ruder tone as he addressed the policeman.

The little man repeated all the way home: ‘O Lord, what a misfortune! a man has no thought, no notion what is happening to him, he will be the death of me now, he would take no notice if you had not been kept waiting there, but of course it is a disgrace to him. O Lord, how unlucky!’

I forgave him my wine, particularly when he told me that he had not been nearly so frightened when he had been almost drowned near Lisbon. This last remark was so unexpected that I was overcome with senseless laughter: ‘Dear me, how very strange! However did you get to Lisbon?’ The old man had been for over twenty-five years a naval officer. One cannot but agree with the minister who assured Captain Kopeykin[123] that: ‘It has never happened yet among us in Russia that a man who has deserved well of his country should be left without recognition.’

Fate had saved him at Lisbon only to be abused by Tsinsky like a boy, after forty years’ service.

He was scarcely to blame.

The committee of inquiry formed by the governor-general did not please the Tsar; he appointed a new one presided over by Prince Sergey Mihailovitch Golitsyn. The members of this committee were the Moscow Commandant, Staal, the other Prince Golitsyn, the colonel of gendarmes, Shubensky, and Oransky, the ex-auditor.

In the instructions from the chief police-master nothing was said about the committee having been changed; it was very natural that the hero of Lisbon should have taken me to Tsinsky.

There was great excitement at the police station also; three fires had taken place that evening—and the committee had sent twice to inquire what had become of me and whether I had escaped. Anything that Tsinsky had left unsaid in his abuse the police station superintendent made up now to the hero of Lisbon; which, indeed, was only to be expected, since the superintendent was himself partly to blame, not having inquired where I was to be sent. In a corner in the office, some one was lying on the chairs, moaning; I looked, it was a young man of handsome appearance, neatly dressed, he was spitting blood and moaning; the police doctor advised his being taken to the hospital as early as possible in the morning.

When the non-commissioned officer took me to my room, I extracted from him the story of the wounded man. He was an ex-officer of the Guards, he had an intrigue with some maid-servant and had been with her when a lodge of the house caught fire. This was the time of the greatest panic in regard to arson; indeed, not a day passed without my hearing the bell ring the alarm three or four times; from my window I saw the glare of two or three fires every night. To avoid compromising the girl, the officer climbed over the fence as soon as the alarm was sounded, and hid in the stable of the next house, waiting for an opportunity to get off. A little girl who was in the yard saw him and told the first policeman who galloped up that he was hidden in the stable; they rushed in with a crowd of people and dragged the officer out in triumph. He was so badly beaten that he died next morning.

The people who had been captured were sorted out; about half were released, the others were detained on suspicion. The police-master, Bryantchaninov, used to ride over every morning and cross-examine them for three or four hours. Sometimes the victims were thrashed or beaten, then their wailing, screams and entreaties, and the moaning of the women reached me, together with the harsh voice of the police-master and the monotonous reading of the clerk. It was awful, intolerable. At night I dreamed of those sounds and woke in a frenzy at the thought that the victims were lying on straw only a few paces from me, in chains, with lacerated wounds on their backs, and in all probability quite innocent.

To know what the Russian prisons, the Russian law-courts and the Russian police are like, one must be a peasant, a house-serf, a workman, or an artisan.

Political prisoners, who for the most part belong to the nobility, are kept in close custody and punished savagely, but their fate cannot be compared with the fate of the poor. With them the police do not stand on ceremony. To whom can the peasant or the workman go afterwards to complain, where can he find justice?

So terrible is the disorder, the brutality, the arbitrariness and the corruption of Russian justice and of the Russian police that a man of the humbler class who falls into the hands of the law is more afraid of the process of law itself than of any punishment. He looks forward with impatience to the time when he will be sent to Siberia; his martyrdom ends with the beginning of his punishment. And let us remember that three-quarters of the people taken up by the police on suspicion are released on trial, and that they have passed through the same agonies as the guilty.

Peter III. abolished torture and the Secret Chamber.

Catherine II. abolished torture.

Alexander I. abolished it once more.

Answers given ‘under intimidation’ are not recognised by law. The officer who tortures the accused man renders himself liable to severe punishment.

And yet all over Russia, from the Behring Straits to Taurogen, men are tortured; where it is dangerous to torture by flogging, they are tortured by insufferable heat, thirst, and salted food. In Moscow the police put an accused prisoner with bare feet on a metal floor in a temperature of ten degrees of frost; he died in the hospital which was under the supervision of Prince Meshtchersky, who told the story with indignation. The government knows all this, the governors conceal it, the Senate connives at it, the ministers say nothing, the Tsar, and the synod, the landowners and the priests all agree with Selifan[124] that ‘there must be thrashing for the peasants are too fond of their ease, order must be kept up.’

The committee appointed to investigate the cases of incendiarism was investigating, that is, thrashing, for six months and had thrashed out nothing in the end. The Tsar was incensed and ordered that the thing was to be finished in three days. The thing was finished in three days. Culprits were found and condemned to punishment by the knout, by branding, and by exile to penal servitude. The porters from all the houses gathered together to look at the terrible punishment of ‘the incendiaries.’ By then it was winter and I was at that time in the Krutitsky Barracks. The captain of gendarmes, a good-natured old man who had been present at the punishment, told me the details. The first man condemned to the knout told the crowd in a loud voice that he swore he was innocent, that he did not know himself what he had answered under torture, then taking off his shirt he turned his back to the crowd and said: ‘Look, good Christians!’

A moan of horror ran through the crowd, his back was a dark-blue striped wound, and on that wound he was to be beaten with the knout. The murmurs and gloomy aspect of the crowd made the police hurry. The executioners dealt the legal number of blows, while others did the branding and others riveted fetters, and the business seemed to be finished. But this scene impressed the inhabitants; in every circle in Moscow people were talking about it. The governor-general reported upon it to the Tsar. The Tsar ordered a new trial to be held, and the case of the incendiary who had protested before the punishment to be particularly inquired into.

Several months afterwards, I read in the papers that the Tsar, wishing to compensate two who had been punished by the knout, though innocent, ordered them to be given two hundred roubles a lash, and to be provided with a special passport testifying to their innocence in spite of the branding. These two were the man who had spoken to the crowd and one of his companions.

The story of the fires in Moscow in 1834, cases similar to which occurred ten years later in various provinces, remains a mystery. That the fires were caused by arson there is no doubt; fire, ‘the red cock,’ is in general a very national means of revenge among us. One is continually hearing of the burning by peasants of their owners’ houses, cornstacks, and granaries, but what was the cause of the incendiarism in Moscow in 1834 no one knows, and, least of all, the members of the committee of inquiry.

Before 22nd August, Coronation Day, some practical jokers dropped letters in various places in which they informed the inhabitants that they need not bother about an illumination, that there would be a fine flare-up.

The cowardly Moscow authorities were in a great fluster. The police station was filled with soldiers from early morning and a squadron of Uhlans were stationed in the yard. In the evening patrols on horse and on foot were incessantly moving about the streets. Artillery was kept in readiness. Police-masters galloped up and down with Cossacks and gendarmes. Prince Golitsyn himself rode about the town with his aides-de-camp. The military appearance of modest Moscow was strange and affected the nerves. Till late at night I lay in the window under my watch tower and looked into the yard.... The Uhlans who had been hurried to the place were sitting in groups, near their horses, some were mounted on their horses. Officers were walking about; looking disdainfully at the police, aides-de-camp with yellow collars arrived continually, looking anxious and, after doing nothing, went away again.

There were no fires.

After this the Tsar himself came to Moscow. He was displeased with the inquiry into our case which was only beginning, was displeased that we were left in the hands of the ordinary police, was displeased that the incendiaries had not been found—in fact, he was displeased with everything and with every one.

We soon felt the presence of the Most High.