Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/49

 38 persons were condemned last March to be hanged, and out of them three prostitutes for having given shelter to some robber, and one peasant for having set fire to an empty barn.

The executions in Novocherkask were carried on by volunteer convicts in such a terrible way that the agony of some of the executed lasted from a quarter of an hour to half an hour, the executioner strangling the men with his own hands. As the executions took place in a remote suburb of that city, in the midst of winter, the condemned men were brought to the place of execution half frozen.

Owing to the haste with which all the affairs are conducted before the Courts Martial, judicial errors are much more frequent than is usually the case. Thus it appeared that out of the prisoners who were hanged at Odessa on February 1st last, the men Orenbach, Greyerman, and two brothers Truger were condemned by mistake. They not only took no part in the defence of a house in which some anarchists had locked themselves, receiving the police and military with shots, but they ran away from this house, together with other people, and had absolutely no knowledge of the men who had locked themselves in the house.

After the death sentence has been pronounced it continually happens that the condemned men wait for the execution for whole months, and the scenes which take place at the executions are such as might be expected only in Persia or Turkey.

Men executed without any form of trial.—The worst is that the question about the right of the Governors-General to execute people even without sending them before a Court Martial, by simple administrative orders, having been contested by several members of the Senate, this High Court of Russia has again decided a few weeks ago that such a right of summary execution results from the Imperial Decree by which the rules of the state of siege were determined, and that therefore the Governors-General, in inflicting the death penalty by simple administrative order, are responsible exclusively to the Emperor in person.

If all this be taken into account, one can easily see how it happens that, the action of the regular laws being suspended, military justice, designed exclusively for time of war, has