almost to the point of suffocation rather than take such terribly polluted air into my lungs, I came out feeling faint, sick, and giddy.[1]
The prevalent diseases here, as in other Siberian prisons, were typhus fever, scurvy, anemia, rheumatism, and bronchitis—all of them disorders pointing to unfavorable sanitary conditions.
From the hospital we crossed the little interior garden to the so-called "secret" or solitary-confinement cells, where the chief of police said there was one political prisoner with whom he would allow me to talk. I had already heard much of the prison life of the Russian revolutionists, but I had not as yet seen a single one actually in solitary confinement. Entering a sort of hall at one corner of the courtyard, Captain Makófski, accompanied by a turnkey, preceded us through a locked and grated door into a long, narrow corridor, where an armed sentry was pacing back and forth in front of a row of cells. The heavy wooden doors of these cells were secured by padlocks, and in the middle of every one was a small square aperture through which food could be passed and the prisoner be watched by the guard. The name of the political offender whom we were about to visit was Ferdinand Liústig,—formerly an army officer, Captain Makófski thought,—who had been arrested in St. Petersburg in March, 1881, soon after the assassination of the late Tsar. He had been tried as a revolutionist, had been sentenced to four years of penal servitude, had finished his term, and was on his way from the mines of Kara to some place in Eastern Siberia, where he was to be settled as a forced colonist.
The turnkey unlocked and threw open a door marked "No. 6," and we stepped into a long but narrow and gloomy cell, where a good-looking young man with closely cut hair, blue eyes, and a full brown beard was sitting in a dejected attitude upon a small wooden bed. He rose hastily when
- ↑ See statements with regard to this prison in Appendix G.
