Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/133

Rh wear mourning; and the very number of his grave in the churchyard was entered in the records. When the poet Ševčenko and his associates were sentenced in 1847 as members of the slavophil Cyrillo-Methodian Union, the tsar aggravated the punishment in the case of Ševčenko, to whom the use of writing materials was denied. In his diary the poet complains that while the pagan Augustus permitted Ovid to write, this indulgence was forbidden to himself by the Christian ruler. Not merely was the tsar chief officer of police, but in his own exalted person he revised the sentences of the courts. In the year 1837 two Jews were condemned to death in Odessa because, from fear of the plague, they had attempted to escape across the frontier. Nicholas commuted the death penalty as follows: "The convicts are to run the gauntlet—a thousand men—twelve times. God be thanked, with us the death penalty has been abolished, and I will not reintroduce it." This is but one among numerous instances of the theocratic sovereign's power of self-deception and of his cruelty—for who had proposed that the decabrists should be quartered, and who had commuted their punishment to hanging? In the year 1838 a student named Sočinskii gave the director of the surgical academy a box on the ear. He was sentenced to run the gauntlet—five hundred men—three times. Nicholas revised the sentence thus: "To be carried out in the presence of all the students of the academy. Subsequently the offender, instead of being sent to Siberia, is to spend ten years, wearing fetters, in the disciplinary battalion at Kronstadt." It is hardly necessary to add that though there was no capital punishment, the men thus sentenced died under the blows of the soldiers.

The severities of Nicholas were hardly credible. The wives of the decabrists who followed their husbands to Siberia were not permitted to return to Russia after the death of these; those among the decabrists who lived on into the reign of Alexander II received amnesty from that ruler. Only to one like Nicholas was it possible to have sane men declared insane, or to inflict upon Dostoevskii and the Petraševcy the tortures of a death sentence. Herzen, too, and some of his acquaintances, suspected of Saint-Simonism, were arrested. They were condemned to death in the first instance, but by the tsar's clemency the sentences were commuted, first to imprisonment and subsequently to exile.

Here is an additional contribution to the psychology,