Note 9 — Chapter LIII · RUSSIANS AFLOAT.

As a flagrant instance, they complained of the falseness of the Daily Telegraph, respecting the carriage of convicts by the Nijni Novgorod, to which I have alluded in my first volume (page 45). I learn from the same paper of November 16th, 1881, that the Russians have been further annoyed by some untrue statements published by the Daily Telegraph on June 28th of this year, concerning “judicial and administrative abuses in Russia.” These misrepresentations were copied by other papers, from which Mr. Tallack, compiling his report for the Howard Association, and falling into the pit, reproduced the matter thus: “Yet even an Imperial commissioner has recently reported atrocious cruelties to prisoners in Central Russia, including the torture of women with red-hot tongs; the killing of numbers by imprisoning them in dark dungeons; other prisoners reduced to almost naked skeleton figures in hideous caverns; inhuman floggings, 125 lashes being inflicted even for addressing warders in the old peasant style of ‘thou’ instead of ‘you’; and other brutalities.” When I read these charges I felt sure they were untrue, but as I had not visited the prisons of Orenburg, where the atrocities were alleged to have occurred, all I could say was that I had seen prisons nearly all over Russia, and had witnessed nothing answering to such abominations. I ventured, however, to write to the editor of the Daily Telegraph for information respecting the Russian paper, the Sjeverny Viestnik (suppressed, I have since learnt, at least three years ago), from which the statements were said to have come, and I received a polite reply that the writer of the article was travelling in Russia. I then wrote to Mr. Tallack, who inquired concerning the matter of Mr. Kokovtzeff, one of three inspectors-general of prisons, who denied the truth of what had appeared. Accordingly Mr. Tallack (whose zeal in the cause of prison reform is well known), finding that he had been deceived, wrote to the Daily Telegraph to say so; but I was sorry to see that, though this paper had given a whole column in bold type to the misstatements, which had been multiplied therefrom by hundreds of thousands, yet all the space they could spare for contradiction was 15 lines in very small type!