to satisfy their demands. The entreaties of the wretched, heart-broken women, and the promises of the commandant finally broke down the resolution of the politicals, and on the thirteenth day the first hunger-strike in the history of the Kará political prison came to an end.
While these events were taking place, a young married woman about twenty-four years of age, named Maria Kutitónskaya, who had been condemned to penal servitude on account of her revolutionary activity in Odessa, finished her prison term in Kará, and was sent as a forced colonist to a small village called Akshá, situated in the southern part of the Trans-Baikál, on the frontier of Mongolia. She had been an eye-witness of the brutalities that attended the "reduction of the political prison to order" by Rúdenko and Pótulof; she had seen the "lesson" given to the political convicts with the butt-ends of guns; she herself had felt the shame and misery that impelled Madam Léschern and Mrs. Rogatchóf to attempt self-destruction; she was acquainted with the causes and history of the long and desperate hunger-strike that had just ended; and, stirred to the very depths of her soul by a feeling of intense indignation, she determined, as a last resort and at the cost of her own life, to assassinate General Ilyashévich, the governor of the Trans-Baikál, and thus call the attention of the world to the cruelties practised by his authority, and in part under his direction, at the mines of Kará. She was at this time pregnant, and was aware of her condition; she knew that it would be impossible to escape after committing the crime that she contemplated; she knew that she was about to sacrifice her own life, and probably the life also of her unborn child; but so intense were the emotions aroused by all she had seen and known at Kará, that she was ready to commit murder, and to die for it, upon the chance that the deed and its investigation would give publicity to the wrongs and outrages that she and her companions had suffered. As soon as she could get together money enough for her traveling
