OUR CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION—SERGIUS BOBOHOV—THE END OF THE TRAGEDY

Among my recollections of the year 1889, one pleasant memory remains to me—how we commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. While the French nation, amid fervent rejoicings, celebrated the centenary of their great Revolution, a handful of convicts, imprisoned by the Russian despot in a barren wilderness of the Far East, took their share in the festival. Ours was truly but a modest ceremonial—no banquet, no toasts, no speeches. Tea and a cake provided at the common expense were all that we could afford; and our banqueting hall was the prison-yard, whither all the tables from our cells were carried for a public feast. There we sat, and thought of the great triumph of the Revolution, and of its heroes—the spiritual heroes of the civilised world.

“Will the day ever come when the people will demolish our Bastilles—the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Schlüsselburg, the Citadel of Warsaw, and all the other gaols in which Tsarism imprisons its foes?” we asked ourselves; “and will any of us be still alive then?”

“The battle for freedom will have been fought and won by the beginning of the twentieth century,” our optimists averred.

“Who knows if it will ever take place?” said the sceptics.

284The subject was argued over and discussed up and down. Many who then were full of hope now rest in their graves; others languish to this day in Siberian deserts.

I return to the sorrowful events that were then happening in Kara. After Sigida’s assault upon the commandant the women began their hunger-strike, their third and most terrible. They adhered resolutely to their decision; Masyukov must go, if it cost them their lives. For sixteen days they abstained from food. Sigida, it was asserted, remained fasting for twenty-two days, and when the prison doctor reported that he could not answer for her life, the Governor sent an order that she was to be fed artificially. Whether the doctor carried out that instruction I do not know. A rumour came to us during those dreadful days that he had had a scene with Maria Kovalèvskaya: he went—it was said—into her cell one day, when she was lying on her bed, exhausted by hunger; and she, supposing he had come to administer nourishment to her forcibly, struck him in the face. The doctor, a rather humane kind of man, seems to have looked on this simply as the act of an invalid not properly responsible for her actions; he told her she was doing him an injustice,—that he was not going to touch her,—whereupon she begged his pardon. He said to his friends afterwards that he had never seen a woman with such strength of character, so spirited and eloquent as she.

When it became evident that these women, who were already at death’s door, would never give in, the higher authorities consented to the following compromise: Masyukov could not be removed, lest it should be said that the prisoners had forced such a step on them, but the Governor should arrange that Sigida, Kalyùshnaya, Kovalèvskaya, and Smirnitskaya should no longer be under the commandant, but should be removed to the female criminals’ prison, and treated in future as ordinary convicts. Our comrades agreed to this, and ceased their 285hunger-strike. But the martyrdom of the unhappy women was not yet accomplished, worse sufferings still were in store for them.

In the second half of October Masyukov, who had kept in the background since Sigida’s encounter with him, entered our prison one day surrounded (as had never before been the case) by a guard of armed soldiers. The man looked thoroughly shaken and upset; he sheltered himself behind the soldiers, and told us to come and listen to an order from the Governor-General. When we had all assembled in the corridor he read aloud with trembling voice a document saying that in consequence of the disturbances among the political prisoners in Kara the Governor-General warned us that on any repetition of such occurrences the most stringent measures would be taken against us, and that recourse would even be had to corporal punishment.

Now the “politicals” had had much to bear, but had never been legally liable to personal chastisement; the mere threat was held by many as an insult only to be wiped out with blood, and this view was voiced by Sergius Bobohov. I have not hitherto mentioned this excellent man; for the part that he played, and that gives him a place in the annals of the Russian revolutionary movement, only began with this challenge from the Siberian satrap.

Sergius Bobohov was born in the Volga district. He had studied in the Petersburg veterinary college, and had been expelled towards the end of the sixties for taking part in a riot of the students directed against Professor Zion, an affair that made a good deal of stir at the time. He was subsequently banished by “administrative methods” to the government of Archangel, and in 1878 attempted unsuccessfully to escape. When he was recaptured he fired a revolver-shot in the air, hoping that this would cause him to be brought to trial, and that so he might have an opportunity of denouncing the arbitrariness 286of the so-called “administrative methods.” For this shot he was sentenced to twenty years’ “katorga,” and brought to Kara in 1879.

During the nearly thirty years of my intercourse with Russian revolutionists I have met many remarkable men, but none that lived on a higher moral plane than Bobohov. Genuine sincerity, seriousness of purpose, and boundless devotion to his ideal were his leading characteristics. He was the most modest of men, but when the honour of a revolutionist was at stake, or if it were a question of duty, he would undergo a transformation and become a fiery and inspired prophet. There was never the slightest contradiction between his words and his deeds, he was the most logical and consistent of men, and it was no wonder if he won universal respect and esteem in Kara, even though everyone did not share his opinions.

Bobohov was but a youth when I entered the prison, and the ideas that he had imbibed were the then prevalent, rather anarchistical views of the Buntari, to which he remained faithful all his life. Imprisonment and exile are apt to exercise a conservative influence on the mind; the opinions with which one enters prison tend to become stereotyped. Bobohov was well read, and interested himself keenly in all questions of social politics; but it happened with him as with many other intelligent men among us—he gathered from every book he read only what tended to strengthen anew the opinions he already held. He took great interest in the Social-Democratic theory, for instance, but his way of thinking prevented him from properly grasping its argument, and he was continually combating those who were attracted by it. He and I were never room-mates, but when walking in the yard I used to have endless discussions with him on this subject, and he always showed himself an............