Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/214

202 State character of our activities. Now I appeal to the honesty of you Judges and Generals present here to confirm my assertion that, if the Central Committee, at the moment when the revolutionary passions exploded, had not succeeded in concentrating effective authority in its hands, you gentlemen would surely have been killed by the bullets of your soldiers or hung on the lamp-posts by the maddened and lawless anarchists. This is the only thing I ask from the Court and from the consciences of those who sent us to this bench of the accused."

Each of my companions spoke in turn. Nowakowski was listened to with great attention, as he gave a detailed analysis of the conditions prevailing in the Far East for the benefit of the judges, who had specially come from European Russia for this trial and to whom these were entirely unknown, owing to the fact that no one in St. Petersburg or Moscow had any knowledge of either the state of affairs in this region before the Revolution broke out or of the constitution of the various layers of the local society and of the character and ideology of the local population.

At about eight in the evening the session ended and the judges retired for deliberation. After what was later learned to have been a stormy four hours, they returned at midnight and read their findings. The President of the Revolutionary Government, who at this unfortunate moment happened still to be myself, was condemned to eighteen months of fortress prison, without any deduction for the two months already spent in the military prison awaiting trial. Nowakowski was given one year and the rest shorter terms, with the exception of Kozlowski and Lepeshinsky, whom the Court singled out as belonging to distinctly revolutionary and socialistic parties and to whom it gave, in addition to the original