Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/35

 24 Another prisoner was bound to his cot in a similar way in his cell for five days, during which time he was unconscious.

The sick and healthy are herded together.

Every day there are new cases of prisoners becoming mentally deranged.

The officials choose to consider most of these cases as "shamming," and many such prisoners commit suicide.

Those prisoners who are violent are kept strapped in their cots for whole days, where they lie in a state of untold filth.

Sixty-five per cent. of the prisoners are suffering from scurvy, and their fetters cut into their swollen legs. The death-rate is enormous. The consumptives die in fetters in the crowded cells, with other prisoners looking on.

In Tiflis, in the fortress, the governor issued, in January of this year, the order that "any prisoner approaching a window is to be shot at without warning, and the head is to be aimed at so that there may be no wounded." As the air is unbearable the prisoners inevitably approach the windows. This order is a sure way of getting rid of prisoners.

In one day one was killed and two wounded in the same cell.

On April 3rd a youth aged 20 was shot. This prisoner had been brought to Tiflis from Moscow in view of his serious state of health.

There are other numerous cases.

In Ekaterinoslav, the Duma Deputies said, there are 192 prisoners ill with typhoid, and the number is growing. There is one sanitary officer who nurses all these sick. The doctor visits them twice a week.

The death-rate is enormous; the typhoid patients remain fettered.

In Bachmut, a prison for 84, which now holds 350 inmates, there are 54 cases of typhus.

A similar communication was received from Pavlograd in April. Communications have been received from Kieff and Moscow giving the numbers of typhoid and typhus cases (see above).

Founded on these facts, the Social Democratic Party presented a list of four questions in which the above facts are put forward. We translate the fourth question:—

"4. Whether the above-mentioned facts are known to the President of the Council of Ministers, to the Ministers of Justice, of the Navy, and the Minister of War; then what measures have been