A Russian Execution.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 237, 14 January 1888, Page 8

A Russian Execution.

The St. Petersburg correspondent of the " Times " writes :— I referred the other day to the condemnation to the scaffold of fourteen peasants of Penza as an illustration of the permanent -and general character of the severe measures, which were originally intended by the Russian Government to be temporary and local/ for the suppression of purely political crimes. But ordinary criminals are now 1 being executed in all parts of' the empire. ■ , The following' h the account of the execution of . two Mohammedans in the Caucasus. The .men in question were natives of Terek, which borders on Dagbestan, and j their crime was highway robbery, * with murder: They belonged to a band consisting of nine men, all of whom were condemned to be hanged. The criminals, secured by fotters, were brought to the place of , execution under a military guard, with drum and fife music, and were accompanied "by a mollah. The sentence of death was formally read, and seven of them obtained a reprieve; sentence being commuted to hard labour in the mines for life.. These prisoners were then marched off the ground, leaving only two brothers who were to suffer death. After the mollah had exhorhed and condemned, they requested that he would read out of the Koran the prayers for the dead, and this request was acceded to. They tnen took leave of the mollah and embraced each other, after which their fettera were takon off by the executioner, who put shrouds on them and then led them to tho scaffold. They remained hanging for the space of half- an hour, and their bodies were then handed over to their relatives for burial. During the execution, these relatives and ■ friends of the condemned men were busily engaged in cutting up on the t spotthe carcase of an ox for distribution among the spectators, in accordance with tlie custom prevailing among the mountaineers of the Terek region. The bodies of the executed men were then placed face downwards on the ground, and after being washed in the sea — the execution took place 1 on the sea shore — they were robed in new shrouds and placed in arbas {native carts) for conveyance to their native village in the mountains of Terek. The execution, which was witnessed by a large and- motley crowd, took place at the town of Petrofsk, a small and highly pioturesque sheltered harbour in the Caspian Sea. Should capital punishment in Russia become general, as seems likely, it would be well for the authorities to 1 introduce a less primitive and more painless mode of carrying it into effect. The last batch of political prisoners executed in public at St. Petersburg were simply strangled by the weight of their, bodies. The condemned was 1 mounted on a wooden stool and a noose put round its neck, the rope being at its full tension. On a given signal the stool was I kicked away, and the body swung round, the struggles of the tortured wretches continuing in some cases, according to those who timed their sufferings, for over ton minutes.