THE HISTORY OF THE KARA POLITICAL PRISON 237

such a state of destitution and despair that she finally shot herself. On the 6th of July, 1882, eight of the political convicts, who were regarded by the Government for some reason as particularly dangerous, were sent back in chains from Kara to St. Petersburg to be immured for life in the "stone bags" of the castle of Schlusselburg. 1 A few days later — about the middle of July — all the rest of the state criminals were brought back to the political prison at the Lower Dig- gings, where they were put into new and much smaller cells that had been made by erecting partitions in the original kdmeras in such a manner as to divide each of them into thirds. The effect of this change was to crowd every group of seven or eight men into a cell that was so nearly filled by the sleeping-platform as to leave no room for locomotion. Two men could not stand side by side in the narrow space between the edge of the platform and the wall, and the oc- cupants of the cell were therefore compelled to sit or lie all day on the plank ndri without occupation for either minds or bodies. To add to their misery, pardshas were set in their small cells, and the air at times became so offensive and polluted that, to use the expression of one of them in a letter to me, "it was simply maddening." No other re- ply was made to their petitions and remonstrances than a threat from Khalturin that if they did not keep quiet they would be flogged. With a view to intimidating them Khalturin even sent a surgeon to make a physical examina- tion of one political, for the avowed purpose of ascertaining whether his state of health was such that he could be flogged without endangering his life. This was the last straw. The wretched state criminals, deprived of exercise, living under 1 These "dangerous" prisoners were Trans-Baikal, told me that she was de- Messrs. Gellis, Voloshenko, Butsinski, nied a last interview with her husband Paul Orlof, Malavski, Popof, Shched- when he was taken away from Kara, rin, and Kobyliauski. Nothing is that she never afterwards heard from known with regard to their fate. Ma- him, and that she did not know whether dame Gellis, the wife of one of them, he was among the living or the dead,

whose acquaintance I made in the