Page:By order of the Czar.djvu/71



BY ORDER OF THE CZAR, 59

spare Losinski, but with merciful consideration to kill him outright.

Such as German de Lagny described the punishment of the knout twenty years ago, so is it to-day, for Russia is singularly conservative in its Imperial despotism. A man is condemned to receive, say fifty or a hundred lashes. He is dressed in a pair of linen drawers, his hands tied together, the palms flat against each other, and he is laid upon his face, on a frame inclined diagonally, at the extremities of which are fixed iron rings. His hands are fastened to one end of the frame, his feet to another. He is then stretched in such a way that he cannot move, " just as an eel's skin is stretched in order to dry." His bones crack and are dis- located under this operation. Five and twenty paces away stands the public executioner, attired in a colored cotton shirt, velvet trousers (stuffed into a pair of jack- boots), his sleeves tucked up over bare brawny arms. He grasps his dreadful instrument in both hands. It is a thong of thick leather cut in a triangular form, four or five yards long and an inch wide, tapering off at one end and broad at the other. The small end is fastened to a wooden handle or whipstock about two feet in length. It is akin to the buffalo whip of the Western States of America, the crack of which is like the discharge of small artillery. The signal given, the executioner advances a few steps, bends his athletic body, grasping the knout in his two strong hands, the long lash dragging like a snake along the ground, and between his legs. Within three paces of the victim he flings the creeping lash above his head, then with a curious cruel knack lets it twirl for a moment before bringing it down, upon the naked object, around which it twines with malignant force " in spite of its state of tension, the body bounds as if it were submitted to the powerful grasp of galvanism." Retracing his steps, the executioner repeats the stroke with clock-like regu-