Monster Trial.

Cromwell Argus, Volume IV, Issue 179, 15 April 1873, Page 7

Monster Trial.

In the whole history of criminal jurisprudence there has never probably been anything equal to the gigantic trial which has concluded at Moscow, in Russia, on the 21st of November, and in which were arranged five hundred prisoners, upward of two hundred of whom were convicted and sentenced to cruel penalties. Among the accused were persons of everv station of life—grey-haired men and youths, men and women ; among the latter some highly accomplished and prepossessing in appearance. Ail the prisoners were charged with one of the gravest offences in the criminal code of Russia—-that of counterfeiting. That code says : " The person that counterfeits the coin or currency of the Imperial Government shall suffer death." Notwithstanding this rigorous provision Russia has been flooded for many years past with well executed counterfeits of the Government treasury notes. At length, in last July, a curious accident gave the Government the long looked for clue. Three thousand men and women were arrested, but after a preliminary examination twenty-' five hundred of them were discharged, and about five hundred weve held for trial. Among the latter were six Frenchmen, of St Petersburg, who had been caught printing the counterfeit notes, and a comparatively large number of women. On the 20th of October the trial was opened in the large hall of the Kremlin, which holds nearly five thousand persons. Two hundred and three of them were found guilty, among them about fifty women. Sentence of death was passed upon the six French printers, and the other convicted parties were confined to hard labour in the gold mines of the Ural moutains for life, or for ten years. The doomed men and women burst into piercing shrieks and howls, and well they might, for in the case of the former the sentence included barbarous flogging and branding on the forehead with red hot iron ; while the women, some of whom were of refined descent, shuddered at the idea of having to do the most menial work for life or ten years at the stationhouses, where the keepers of the male prisoners reside. In their despair some of the unfortunates threw themselves upon the ground, and their peircing cries, mingled with the clanking of their chains, produced a truly horrible effect. The excitement and frenzy of the condemned grew from minute to minute more intense, and the Judges, in order to restore quietude, had to call in the (soldiers, who, with their jkantschubs, beat the prisoners right and | left, and then dragged them back to the J vaults of the Kremlin.