Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/25

 14 was built for 150 inmates but contained 400 and all the prisoners slept on the bare floor), at Minsk, in Vyazma, government of Smolensk, where 37 prisoners out of 139 and 3 warders out of 10 were stricken by typhus.

Orel, Nijni-Novgorod, Totma, &c., &c., are now in the same condition, and finally in the great Butyrki prison of Moscow there were 70 new typhus cases during one week, from February 22nd to March 1st. Only later in March an abatement of the epidemic was reported.

At Simpheropol 30 typhus patients are reported; in the children's reformatory of Ekaterinoslav, 14 boys out of 19 are stricken with typhus. At the Uman and Berdichef gaols, no more prisoners are received on account of the terrible typhus epidemic which is raging in these prisons.

The relatives of the political inmates of the Perm prison wrote to the Duma deputy of that province, asking him to do something for them. The prison administration does not allow any additional food to be given to the typhus patients.

There are three cases on record—two of them at Kharkoff and one at Ekaterinoslav—of persons ill with typhus who have been brought before the Courts during their illness. Thus, in the first days of April last, two men accused of robbery were brought before the Court Martial of Kharkoff. Seeing that one of them was quite unable to answer the questions, having not yet recovered from a second attack of recurrent typhus—he was looking like a corpse—the President of the Court asked the Prosecutor to postpone the prosecution, and added "There is no need to call a doctor; you have only to look yourself at that man." The Public Prosecutor, after having approached the prisoner, withdrew his accusation, and the man was returned to the prison.

On February 26th the Court Martial, sitting at Ekaterinoslav, was also compelled to interrupt its sitting because one of the lawyers drew the attention of the Court to the fact that one of the prisoners brought before them was ill with typhus. A doctor was called in, the temperature of the prisoner was 104°, and he was returned to the prison.

In St. Petersburg it happened in the beginning of March last, that when a party of 75 prisoners was brought by rail to