Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/240

 CHAPTER XXIII

TO THE CRIMINAL PRISONS

UR presentiments proved to be all too correct. St. Petersburg pressed more and more insistently for the closing of the political prison in Harbin and the transfer of all those under sentence to regular prisons throughout the Far East. Foreseeing the inevitable developments, our influential friends sought to have us transferred to the fortress at Vladivostok, where a group from the local branch of our Central Committee, with the brother of General Horvat, engineer W. L. Horvat, at its head, was already confined. The correspondence between Harbin and St. Petersburg lasted for a long time, unnerving us and causing us to lose our moral grip.

It was in March of 1907, when Nowakowski and the others who had been condemned to a year's imprisonment had only a fortnight left of their terms and when, of course, they had no wish to travel in prison cars to Vladivostok or any other Siberian town to be marched through its streets to a new and more degrading gaol. One day the spindle was sprung, when we were informed that the reactionary Minister of the Interior, Durnovo, had ordered that all those who had been condemned to fortress prison be placed, until the end of their terms, in criminal prisons. He was taking this measure to make the enemies of the Government feel the whole weight of 228