How Nihilists are Treated in Russian Fortresses.

Te Aroha News, Volume I, Issue 38, 23 February 1884, Page 3

How Nihilists are Treated in Russian Fortresses.

London, December 28.— Another harrowing tale of suffering comes from the Russian prisons. The victim is one Netzhojeff, a nihilist who was sentenced in 1872 to twenty years' penal servitude in the mines of Siberia. It transpires mow that he was never deported to Siberia, but has served eleven years of his imprisonment in a fortress built on one of the marshy islands in the river Neva, near St. Petersburg. He has succeeded in getting a letter smuggled from the fortress and published in the Will of the People. The letter fully confirms the revelations of cruelty and inhumanity which have recently been made by prisoneos in the fortresses of St. Peter and St. Paul and Tr,oubletskai' Bastion, and some terrible details of suffering are given in addition,

The dungeons in which the prisoners are cofined are below the water-level in the adioining river and are bitterly cold and damp in winter, while in summer malarial scurvy is frightfully prevalent. A new horror has now been added to these gloomy vaults, as the men and women confied there are kept within their cells and the equally cheerless corridors from one year's end to another, outdoor exercise, which was formerly allowed for one hour in the twenty-four, having been entirely suspended since the assassination of the late Czar. The prison officials practice the most shameless extortions on prisoners as long as their money lasts and prisoners without money are fed on horse-flesh and chained in an outer range of cells, where, between their battles with water and rats, they soon perish.