Coming Out of Solitary Confinement, Schlusselburg Fortress Prison, Russia, 1886

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Coming Out of Solitary Confinement, Schlusselburg Fortress Prison, Russia, 1886

Book excerpt

By: Vera Figner

Date: ca. 1921

Source: Scheffler, Judith A. (ed). Wall Tappings. New York.: Feminist Press, 2002.

About the Author: Vera Figner (1852–1942) was a Russian revolutionary and prominent Soviet era writer. A member of Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), she was implicated in several plots to kill Tsar Alexander II (1818–1881). After he was killed in St Petersburg in 1881, a round up of People's Will members took place and many, including Vera Figner, were sentenced to death. Figner's sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment, but she was released in 1904 and went into exile for eleven years. After the 1917 Revolution, she found worldwide fame as a writer with the publication of her Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

INTRODUCTION

On March 1, 1881, while traveling through the streets of central St. Petersburg, the carriage of Tsar Alexander II was attacked and destroyed in a grenade attack carried out by Ignacy Hryniewiecki, a Polish member of the revolutionary organization, Narodnaya Volya (People's Will). It was the third time the People's Will had tried to kill Alexander II and the fifth attempt on his life. He was taken away from the scene seriously injured and died a few hours later.

In the months that followed his murder, police rounded up members of the People's Will and sent them to trial. Many were executed for either their involvement in Alexander's assassination or even simply for membership of the People's Will or other renegade organizations. Amongst those arrested was Vera Figner, a former medical student and long standing revolutionary. Figner was a member of the People's Will's executive committee and spent nearly two years on the run after Alexander's murder. She was arrested in Kharkov in February 1883 and placed in solitary confinement for twenty months.

At her trial, Figner was sentenced to death, but this was later reduced to life imprisonment, and she was sent to the Shlüsselburg Prison thirty miles east of St. Petersburg where she remained until her release in 1904.

PRIMARY SOURCE

I Acquire a Friend

Early in January, 1/28/86, knowing that Ludmila Alexandrovna Volkenstein, one of my co-defendants in the Trail of 14, was also in the Fortress, I asked the inspector whey they did not permit me to take my walks in company with one of the other prisoners. The inspector was silent for a moment, and then said, "WE can grant you this privilege, only you mustn't …" He bent his forefinger and tapped on the door jamb, imitating our fashion of carrying on conversations by tapping on the wall. I replied that I did very little tapping.

The interview went no further, and I was left in solitude as before. But on January 14, when they took me out for my walk, and the door into the little enclosure which we called "the first cage," opened, I beheld an unexpected figure in a short cloth coat, with linen handkerchief on her head, who swiftly embraced me, and I recognized with difficulty my comrade Volkenstein. Probably she also was as shocked by the change in my appearance …

We were like people shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. We had nothing and no one in all the world save each other. Not only people, but nature, colors, sounds, were gone, all of them. And instead there was left a gloomy vault with a row of mysterious, walled-in cells, in which invisible captives were pining; an ominous silence, and the atmosphere of violence, madness and death. One can see plainly that in such surroundings two friendly spirits must needs find joy in each other's company, and ever afterwards treasure a most touching remembrance of the association.

Any one who has been in prison knows the influence that the sympathetic tenderness of a comrade has on one's life while in confinement. In Polivanov's memoirs of his imprisonment in the Alexey Ravelin, there is a touching picture of Kolodkevich, hobbling up to the wall on crutches to console him with a few tender words. A brief conversation through the soulless stone that separated the two captives, who were dying from scurvy and loneliness, was their only joy and support. The author of the memoirs confessed that more than once Kolodkevich's kind words saved him from acute attacks of melancholy, which were tempting them to commit suicide. And indeed, loving sympathy works veritable wonders in prison; and were it not for those light tappings on the wall, which destroy the stone barrier separating man from man, the prisoner could not preserve his life or his soul. Good reason was there for the struggle to maintain the system of tappings, the very first struggle that a captive wages with the prison officials; it is an out-and-out struggle for existence, and every one who is walled up in a cell clutches at this device as at a straw. But when those sentenced to solitary confinement are permitted to meet their co-prisoners face to face, and to replace the symbolic tapping with living speech, then the warm-heartedness and kindness expressed in the tones of the voice, in an affectionate glance, and a friendly handshake, bring joy unknown to one who has never lost his freedom.

I do not know what I gave to Ludmila Alexandrovna, but she was my comfort, my joy and happiness. My nerves and general constitution had been completely unstrung. I was physically weak, and spiritually exhausted. My general state of mind was entirely abnormal; and lo! I found a friend whom prison conditions had not affected so profoundly and painfully as they had me; and this friend was the personification of tenderness, kindness, and humaneness. All the treasures of her loving spirit she gave to me with a generous hand. No matter how gloomy my mood when we met, she always knew how to dispel it in one way or another, and how to console … Straightway I would begin to dream of our next meeting. We saw each other every other day; prison discipline evidently found it necessary to dilute the joy of our meetings, by making us pass a day in complete solitude. But perhaps this fact only made our longing to see each other more keen, and accentuated our "holiday mood," which was so pleasant to recall afterwards.

SIGNIFICANCE

Although Vera Figner's political ideas were articulated in a particularly extreme manner, incarceration for political or anti-monarchy views in Tsarist Russia was by no means unique. Many of Figner's fellow prisoners at Shlüsselburg, notably Alexander Ulyanov (the brother of Lenin who was later hanged for his part in an attempt to assassinate Alexander III), were there for their political opinions, whether they had been expressed in a benign or violent way. Many thousands more were sent into exile in Siberia.

Russia in the late nineteenth century was a country caught between two worlds. Although monarchies existed in most of its European neighbors, nowhere was the monarch more absolute than in Tsarist Russia and in no other country did the aristocracy exert as much power over its people. Not until 1861 did feudalism end. Yet, at the same time, a wealthy, educated and highly cosmopolitan elite were imbued with the ideas and ideals of the rest of the world in which they traveled widely. Nationalistic and idealistic, they envisaged varying models of a modern liberal democracy existing in Russia. Political debate, however, was all but banned and the Tsar's extensive secret police force worked assiduously to infiltrate both formal and informal political organizations. As such, political expression was often pushed to extremes and groups like the People's Will sought to inspire political revolution by creating social upheaval. In effect, their actions merely served to polarize the situation, to increase the clamp-down on political debate and further the numbers and pervasiveness of the Tsar's secret police. The prison population and numbers sent into exile in Tsarist Russia increased significantly in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.

Alexander II had been one of the most liberal Tsars in history and was slowly setting Russia on the course of becoming a constitutional monarchy. He had been responsible for the emancipation of the serfs, the most significant reform in centuries, and had set about reforming Russia's judiciary based on the French model. One of the ironies of his assassination was that it inadvertently set reform in Russia back by years. He was replaced by Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II whose reigns were far more despotic and repressive than his had ever been.

The political unrest of Nicholas II's reign, compounded by the appalling military losses and food shortages of the First World War, eventually gave way to revolution in February 1917. In the political chaos that followed, the Bolsheviks, a small socialist revolutionary party led by Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), seized political momentum and eventually power in October 1917 after staging a coup d'etat.

The Bolsheviks were the acknowledged successors of the People's Will, sharing many of the same influences and ideas. Despite the fact that many of its members had themselves suffered for their political beliefs, they were not in the business of enacting wholesale changes to the Russian judicial system nor of allowing their opponents—or even those within their own membership—any form of freedom of political expression. Lenin spoke of the necessity of discipline within his party ranks and the country as a whole and made no allowance for dissent, no matter how nuanced. One of his first acts as Russian leader was to establish the Council of People's Commissars (the Cheka, and later the NKVD), a secret police force whose pervasiveness and brutality very quickly outstripped that of the Tsarist police force.

To accommodate the large-scale arrest of Bolshevik opponents, something that increased exponentially after the succession of Lenin by Joseph Stalin in 1924 and continued until the 1980s, large-scale prison camps were set up across Siberia and beyond. Known as Gulags, the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn accurately observed that these camps came to form an 'archipelago' across Russia. Forced labor, prison officer brutality, hunger and the harshness of Siberian climate made these amongst the most notorious prison conditions in history. The scale of these gulags was also immense. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, 1.3 million people were incarcerated in them, and up to 20 million passed through them during Russia's Soviet era.

For her part, Vera Figner, whose earlier revolutionary activities had helped pave the way for the Bolsheviks and their repressive system, was a favorite of the new regime. Her memoirs made her famous in the USSR and across the world, although she herself maintained a distance from the Bolshevik government. In her later years, she was active in organizing famine relief for her fellow Russians and campaigned as far as she could to ease Russia's prison conditions.