great length of time, so persistent and far-reaching a pursuit. Although two of them, Muíshkin and Khrúshchef, made a journey of more than a thousand miles, and actually reached the seaport town of Vládivostok, every one of the fugitives was ultimately recaptured and brought back to Kará in handcuffs and leg-fetters.[1]
In the mean time the prison authorities at Kará were making preparations to "give the political convicts a lesson"[2] and "reduce the prison to order." This they purposed to do by depriving the prisoners of all the privileges that they had previously enjoyed; by taking away from them books, money, underclothing, bedclothing, and every other thing not furnished by the Government to common criminals of the penal-servitude class; by distributing them in small parties among the common-convict prisons at Ust Kará, Middle Kará, and Upper Kará; and by subjecting them to what are known to Russian prisoners as "dungeon conditions" (kártsernoi polozhénie).[3] Anticipating, or pretending to anticipate, insubordination or resistance to these measures on the part of the politicals, Ilyashévich and Gálkine Wrásskoy concentrated at the Lower Diggings six sótnias of Cossacks, and after ten days of inaction, intended, apparently, to throw the prisoners off their guard, ordered a sudden descent upon the prison in the night. This unprovoked attack of an armed force upon sleeping and defense-
- ↑ The politicals who took part in this unsuccessful attempt to escape were Muíshkin, Khrúshchef, Bólomez, Levchénko, Yurkófski, Dikófski, Kryzhanófski, and Minakóf.
- ↑ This was the expression used by Major Pótulof in speaking to me of the events that followed the escape. It is believed by many of the politicals at Kará that the prison authorities deliberately intended to provoke them to violence, in order, first, to have an excuse for administering corporal punishment, and, secondly, artificially to create a "bunt," or prison insurrection, that would divert the attention of the Minister of the Interior from their (the officials') negligence in allowing eight dangerous criminals to escape.
- ↑ A prisoner living under "dungeon conditions" is deprived of money, books, writing-materials, underclothing, bedclothing, tobacco, and all other luxuries; he is not allowed to walk for exercise in the courtyard nor to have any communication with the outside world; and he must live exclusively upon black rye-bread and water, with now and then a little of the soup, or broth thickened with barley, which is known to the political convicts as balánda.
