stantly, broke the windows of her cell, and became so violent that it was necessary to put her into a strait-jacket. A short time afterward, however, upon the intercession of a humane officer — I think of Colonel Kononóvich himself — she was permitted to join her husband in Minusínsk; and there, under more favorable conditions of life, she recovered her reason. About a year later she was regarded as sane enough to be again subjected to torture, and she was therefore returned to the mines. When she became once more "insubordinate" and unmanageable there, she was brought back to the Irkútsk prison, where, with Mesdames Róssikova, Kutitónskaya, and Bogomólets, she engaged in a hunger-strike that lasted sixteen days, and that brought all four of the women very near to death.[1] Some time in 1887 Madam Kavaléfskaya was sent for the third time to the mines, and in November, 1889, after the flogging to death of Madam Sigída, she committed suicide by taking poison.
When Madam Kavaléfskaya went insane in 1881, Colonel Kononóvich was still governor of the Kará penal establishment; the free command had just been returned to prison, and Semyónofski had just shot himself in the house of his friend Charúshin. Of course, Colonel Kononóvich was greatly shocked both by Semyónofski's suicide and by Madam Kavaléfskaya's insanity, but these were not the only tragedies that resulted from an enforcement of the Government's orders concerning the treatment of the political convicts. Soon after the self-destruction of Semyónofski, Uspénski, another political who had been sent back into prison, hanged himself in the prison bathhouse, while Ródin poisoned himself to death by drinking water in which he had soaked the heads of matches.
Colonel Kononóvich was too warm-hearted and sympathetic a man not to be profoundly moved by such terrible evidences of human misery. He determined to resign his position as governor of the Kará penal establishment,
- ↑ This hunger-strike was a protest against cruel treatment at the hands of the Irkútsk chief of police.
