Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/95

 Rh these persons to whom the March Revolution at last opened the doors of their prisons, only to find the bars, after a brief period of liberty, again closed on them, this time, however, by your hands.

The prison regime to which our comrades have been subjected in the Yaroslav soviet house of detention has outdone the regime of the Tzarist central prison, and even during the walks of the prisoners for their airings they have been forbidden on pain of the severest penalties to exchange ordinary greetings with each other. Confined to damp, cold solitary cells, left for a long time already without necessary repairs, with broken-down heating, water and drainage systems, the prisoners have been deprived of sunshine, light and air, and compelled to live amidst filth and pestilential stench; and if some of them dared approach a window for a moment, the prison guards would open fire at the window, acting in accordance with instructions given them.

But if the outrages and brutalities, the denial of light and air, and the shooting at the windows only repeat and, perhaps, augment the methods used by the Tzarist jailkeepers, torture by hunger is a new invention of the "socialistic" prison regime.

The form of feeding the prisoners at Yaroslav falls even far below the rations officially acknowledged by you as hunger rations. The prisoners receive one pound of raw, half-baked bread, and soup with some beet leaves or herring bones for dinner, and three or four spoonfuls of gruel for supper. But then, this gruel is no longer given, and they are trying to make the dinner soup last for both dinner and supper. This is all the nourishment there is. Such is the regime of gradual death by starvation established by you for your prisoners.

You will perhaps point to the critical food situation all over soviet Russia, and you might say that the food committees are not in a position to allot from their supplies any more for the feeding of socialists languishing in communist prisons.