Upon the announcement of the result of the recent Nihilist trials in Russia condemning ten more victims to the gallows the following editorial from the pen of Henri Rochefort appeared in “L’Intransigeant:”
It will be with the death of Alexander II. as with that of Archbishop Darboy. The platoon which shot the latter was composed of twelve men. That is why the councils of war sentenced twenty-eight to the galleys and ten to the gallows as guilty of having fired at him.
So, for two bombs thrown under the carriage of the czar, five Nihilists, of whom one was a woman, have already been hanged. As for Hessy Helfmann, the sixth, who was pregnant, imperial pity was worth to her the privilege of being privately strangled in her prison, she and her child, of whom there has never been any news in spite of the most persistent demands therefor.
Nevertheless, in six condemnations to death for two bombs there was not sufficient food to appease the hunger of the Muscovite ogre. The tribunals of St. Petersburg now offer him ten more victims, of whom this time two are women, who, not being pregnant, will have the opportunity of being publicly suspended from the gallows with their comrades, instead of being secretly choked in their dungeon by an executioner instructed to submit them to torture.
We understand the eagerness of M. Gambetta to sign, the day after his accession to power, decrees for the expulsion of twenty-two Russian refugees, and the haste of M. de Freycinet to honor his signature in the case of the proscribed Lavroff. Evidently the Russian monarchy, to every possessor of power, is the ideal government. When a citizen becomes troublesome, they arrest him without telling him why, and confine him in a casemate dug beneath the level of the Neva. There he dies or goes mad in a very few months; or, should he have the impertinence to endure this freezing process, he is dragged before a court more or less martial, which refuses him the right to summon witnesses or present any other defense.
The public is excluded from the court-room, to which police agents and the servants of the czar are alone admitted, so that no one outside knows what goes on within the four walls from which the accused never emerge except on their way to the scaffold.
And when men rebel against these monstrosities, Messrs. Gambetta and Freycinet have them escorted back to the frontier under the pretext that they are preaching revolution. What the devil would these two cronies have them preach? The status quo perhaps? Then let our government have the courage of their abominable opinion.
If the strangling of pregnant women, the suppression of judicial trials, and the closed-door condemnations of accused parties forbidden to defend themselves seem to them to constitute so superior a political system that they arrest and violently expel Russians guilty of dreaming of another, let them, then, apply to France the Muscovite regime, and no more deafen us with their liberal and progressive declarations.
The day when the cabinet yielded to the executioners’ demands for expulsion, it took sides with them against the executed. Its duty was to answer as England, America, and even Austria would have answered: “We cannot prevent you from making martyrs of your countrymen and sending them to the gallows when they are at home. But, while they remain with us, we shall protect them from the rope which you twist for them.”
After the execution of Sophie Perovskaya, Jeliaboff, and their companions, we are to witness a new massacre, which certainly will be followed by many others.
Well! it is humiliating to have to admit it, but it is the French government which, by the baseness of its attitude toward the executioners, has encouraged them thus to double the number of their victims. They say to each other as they exhibit their gibbets to the crowd: “We are upheld in our little job, not only by monarchical Europe, but by republican France. Of what use is it to interfere with us?”
And at the next slaughter, instead of ten bodies there will be thirty-five.
Soon after the publication of the foregoing article a Russian despatch was sent all over the world announcing that Hessy Helfmann had just died in consequence of her confinement, to which the indomitable Rochefort replied as follows in an article headed “The Confession of the Crime:”
We demanded the other day what had become of Hessy Helfmann, whom first the Russian ministerial organs and then the French ministerial organs pretended had been pardoned by the czar at the solicitation of his gracious spouse.
We who had from an eye-witness the details of the assassination of the condemned, strangled in her prison after tortures which had induced a miscarriage,— we have never ceased to demand during the last six months that this woman said to be still alive and her pretended child be shown to some one capable of identifying them; for the Russian police had surrounded the crime with a series of falsehoods grouped like the characters in one of Dennery’s dramas.
In the first place, the prisoner had had her sentence commuted to hard labor in Siberia, for which she had expressed her warm gratitude toward the emperor. After which she gave birth in due season to a sound and healthy child.
And the sheets which had already denied the horrors of the Bloody Week denied with the same energy those of the dungeons of St. Petersburg. The “Telegraphe” laughed loudly at our accounts of the tortures of the prisoner, and declared that we owed our acquittal in the Roustan case to a bit of the rope with which “Hessy Helfmann was not hanged.”
Unfortunately for the Muscovite police as well as their Parisian champions, not a Siberian exile had Hessy Helfmann in his convoy. Inquiries were vainly instituted in every direction, and the uncle of the child of this tortured woman, having gone boldly to the director of the Third Section to announce his desire not only to see and embrace his nephew, but to take charge of him, was usable to find the new-born babe. Nevertheless, it was greatly for the interest of the Russian government to produce this human document in order to refute the charges of assassination circulated by numerous German, Italian, and French journals, especially by “L’Intransigeant.”
The czar has finally come to see that this comedy could last no longer, and here are the words with which he puts an end to the inconsiderate questionings of public opinion:
Hessy Helfmann, condemned to death and then pardoned because of her pregnancy, died last week at St. Petersburg from the results of her confinement. Her child, who bad been intrusted to a nurse, has been placed in the foundling hospital.
All the gazettes of moderately good breeding printed yesterday this necrological paragraph. Never did murderer, surprised with his knife in the throat of his victim, make more stupid confession of his crime,— the crime in this case being one of which we had been long aware and which we have revealed to our readers in all its details. It was said to the government of all the Russias:
“We accuse you of having executed Hessy in her cell, not having dared to hang her publicly because of the storm of indignation which the execution of a pregnant woman would have provoked. You affirm that you have pardoned her. We call upon you to show her to us pardoned.”
Thus driven to the wall, or rather, to the gibbet, the Russian government replies:
“She died last week at St. Petersburg from the results of her confinement.”
At St. Petersburg? In what part? In her dungeon under the Neva? In that case it was not worth while to save a woman from the gallows for the purpose of keeping her during her confinement in a freezingly cold cave. It was more than evident that that would only change the manner of her death.
In a hospital? Which one? In what ward, in what bed has she been cared for during the six months that these interminable “results of her confinement” have lasted?
As for the child, seeing that it would be going a little too far to make it die on the same day as its mother, the executioners have hit upon the ingenious device of changing this missing body into a boarder at the foundling hospital. Whenever any one shall express a desire for ocular evidence of the truth of this story, he will be shown the first baby he comes to, with the words: “There is the little Helfmann. He is the very picture of his mother.”
We shall see how the sceptics of the cringing press will receive this new yarn, whose enormity certainly passes all bounds. The real stranglers are certainly as cruel as any of the great bandits whose names have been handed down by history. Only they are infinitely more crafty. The Genghis Khans, the Cambyses, and even the Neros brought a certain bluster to the execution of their massacres. They exposed to the light the cruelties of which they willingly boasted. The Neros of to-day commit their crimes with closed doors, and then try to pass themselves off as the benefactors of the people of whom they have got rid in the darkness by means of the dagger or the rope.
It will be admitted that the revolutionists who blew to a height which he never could have expected to attain the csar, Alexander II., made no pretence of having pardoned him.
And yet some people profess astonishment that half of Russia has become Nihilistic. The surprising thing to us is that the other half has yet to become so.
In anticipation of the approaching executions, Vera Zassoulitch and thirty-five other Russian socialists who have sought refuge at Geneva have issued the following eloquent appeal:
Ten more gibbets erected by the executioners in the employ of the crowned coward who hides behind the walls of Gatchina.
Shall we allow all the brave to be hanged, all those who still feel the dignity of life and the pride of thought? Shall there be none left in Russia but judges to condemn the innocent, soldiers to cut off their heads, and dogs to lick up their blood?
European friends, we call you to our aid. Send our condemned comrades a word of enconragement. Let them not die without the knowledge that they will be avenged! For our cause is your cause, and it is the struggle began long ago on your barricades that we continue before the palaces of the Neva. If you abandon us, you deny your fathers, and — mark this well — you also condemn your children to a new slavery!
While the backbones of our governors bend lower before the czar with each crime that he commits, stand ye the stiffer, friends, give us your strong hand to reassure us that we are brothers. Tell your masters what you think of their friend, the hangman of all the Russias!
To these voices have been added the potent one of Victor Hugo, whose words, it is rumored, have frightened the czar into commuting the sentences of five of the condemned, though the truth of this report is yet to be established.
Strangely novel facts are taking place.
Despotism and Nihilism continue their war. Shameless war of evil against evil; a duel of the darkness. At intervals an explosion rends the obscurity; a ray of light appears, and night becomes day. It is horrible. Civilization must intervene.
Here is the situation at this hour: Unlimited obscurity; in the midst of the shadow ten human creatures, two of them women (two women!), are marked for death. And ten others are destined for the Russian cellar, Siberia.
Why?
Why this gibbet? Why this dungeon? A group of men has assembled. It has called itself a high tribunal. Who assisted at its sessions? Nobody. No public? No public. Who reported the proceedings. Nobody. No journals. But the accused? They were not present. But who spoke? No one knows. But the lawyers? There were no lawyers. But what code was cited? None at all. On what law did they base their decisions? On all and on none. And what is the result?
Ten condemned to death. And the others.
Let the Russian government beware!
It is a regular government. It has nothing to fear from a regular government; it has nothing to fear from a free nation, nothing to fear from an army, nothing to fear from a legal State, nothing to fear from a correct power, nothing to fear from a political force. It has everything to fear from the firstcomer, from a passer-by, from any voice whatsoever.
Mercy!
Any voice whatsoever is nobody, is everybody, is the anonymous immensity. That voice will be heard; it will cry: Mercy! I cry mercy in the shadow. Mercy below is mercy above. I ask the emperor to spare the people; if he does not, I ask God to spare the emperor.
To these exposures of Russian horrors past and present may be fitly added the following revelation of one still more frightful that perhaps is yet to come. Again we quote from “L’Intransigeant,” this time under the head of “A Russian St. Bartholomew:”
Let our friends, the revolutionists of Russia, who struggle with so much courage and perseverance for Liberty, be on their guard: at this very hour, in the palace of the czar, a plot is being hatched against them for the extermination of all Russians who have committed the unpardonable sin of not considering the despotism of the czars as the ideal of governments.
This plot a mere chance, an extraordinary circumstance, has revealed to us. The information that follows reaches us from the most reliable source, and we can certify to its absolute accuracy. We get it, in fact, from the czar’s own household.
Here is what happened but a few days ago at the imperial palace:
The ministers were gathered in council. Alexander III. was present at the sitting. The discussion bore on the rapid and instant progress of Nihilism and the measures to be adopted for the suppression of the impending revolution.
Several ministers inclined to the opinion that the establishment liberal regime, the concession of a constitution, could alone restrain the revolutionary movement. And one of them, whom we could name, said that in his view a general amnesty was not only necessary but absolutely indispensable to the extinction of the hatreds aroused by bitter persecution and the re-establishment of peace in Russia.
General Ignatieff remained silent while his colleagues spoke. When all had expressed their opinion, he arose, and very oddly addressed the council in substance as follows:
“There is a better course than a constitution and an amnesty. Let the government promise both; let it officially announce its indention of allowing the return of the exiled revolutionists and of setting at liberty those now detained in Siberia or in prisons; in short, let it permit the establishment for a few weeks of a regime of tolerance.”
“The Nihilists will grow bolder; this intangible Executive Committee which the Third Section bat pursued in vain for several years will uncover itself; many revolutionists now in hiding will reappear under the broad day; of those in foreign countries a large number will come back to Russia. And then, knowing its enemies and having them in hand, the government of the czar can take advantage of their unsuspecting weakness to wipe them out at one swoop, at the same time crushing the Revolution.”
Such are almost the exact words of the wicked proposition made by General Ignatieff a few days ago to the emperor, Alexander III., which the latter — we affirm it in the most positive manner — has accepted.
But the Muscovite plan is not novel in its bloodiness. It was conceived, in its general outline as well as in the details of its execution, by Catherine de Medicis a little more than three hundred years ago. Then as now the problem was to draw into an abominable trap people whose presence was embarrassing; consequently General Ignatieff has not found it necessary to draw heavily on his imagination. The means which succeeded in 1572 seem to him as good as ever in 1882: a feigned reconciliation, promises of amnesty, liberty, and general pacification,— will not these suffice to put to sleep the vigilance of the Russian revolutionists?
The Russian government thinks so, and, we repeat, it has adopted the plan of General Ignatieff, at once so simple and so monstrous.
This plan might have succeeded, but only on condition of nothing leaking out, of no warning coming to put the Nihilists on the alert.
Now our friends in Geneva and London are warned, and certainly not one of them will put his foot in the trap.
