Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/48

 Rh of 142,700,000, no less than 2,800 persons condemned for murder, and 3,778 for wounding (Official Report of the Ministry of Justice for 1904). It thus appears that in 1907 there was indeed a sudden increase of acts of violence—provoked by the countless executions, without any form of trial, during punitive expeditions, especially in Siberia, the Caucasus, and the Baltic provinces, and the terrible brutalities of the police officers in the villages. But there was no increase whatever in the year 1908. Therefore the maintenance of the state of siege in two-thirds of the Empire cannot be defended on this ground. This has been also forcibly demonstrated during the debates in the Duma on the law of siege, on February 11th to 14th (O.S.).

Under the military law which is now in action in most of the Russian territory, the smallest agrarian disorders, and even the setting fire to a landlord's barn or stack are treated as implying the death penalty. The Military Courts themselves most reluctantly pronounce the death sentence in such cases, their members loudly condemning afterwards in private the obligation under which they are to apply military law, and the orders of the Emperor who wishes them to apply that law in in [sic] all its severity.

Thus, at Ufa, the Court Martial sitting on March 3rd last, pronounced the following sentences on five local peasants who had robbed another peasant of 1 rouble 40 kopeks (3 sh.): Pavel Abramoff, death; Petr Abramoff and Stepan Antonoff, 10 years' hard labour; Mihail Bagunoff, 8 years' imprisonment; and Kuzma Antonoff, 2 months' imprisonment.

The Court pronounced that ferocious verdict because such is the law in time of war; but it immediately had the courage to ask the Governor-General not to confirm their sentence, but to mitigate it. Most Courts, however, have not that courage, and men are hanged for what, under ordinary conditions, would imply a few months, or even a few weeks of imprisonment.

Many similar cases could be quoted: At Moscow, a Court Martial sentenced a peasant from one of the districts of the government of Moscow to death, for having set fire to a stack of hay on the property of a member of the State's Council, Herr Schlippe.

At Novocherkask, the Court Martial condemned within a few days twenty men to the death penalty—one of them for having spoken to another prisoner about making an attempt to kill a policeman. In the government of Tambov, eighteen