Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/248

232 great length of time, so persistent and far-reaching a pursuit. Although two of them, Muíshkin and Khrúshchef, made a journey of more than a thousand miles, and actually reached the seaport town of Vládivostok, every one of the fugitives was ultimately recaptured and brought back to Kará in handcuffs and leg-fetters.

In the mean time the prison authorities at Kará were making preparations to "give the political convicts a lesson" and "reduce the prison to order." This they purposed to do by depriving the prisoners of all the privileges that they had previously enjoyed; by taking away from them books, money, underclothing, bedclothing, and every other thing not furnished by the Government to common criminals of the penal-servitude class; by distributing them in small parties among the common-convict prisons at Ust Kará, Middle Kará, and Upper Kará; and by subjecting them to what are known to Russian prisoners as "dungeon conditions" (kártsernoi polozhénie). Anticipating, or pretending to anticipate, insubordination or resistance to these measures on the part of the politicals, Ilyashévich and Gálkine Wrásskoy concentrated at the Lower Diggings six sótnias of Cossacks, and after ten days of inaction, intended, apparently, to throw the prisoners off their guard, ordered a sudden descent upon the prison in the night. This unprovoked attack of an armed force upon sleeping and