writer still living relates that
when visiting a prison in the province of Nizhni-Novgorod he found among
the inmates undergoing preliminary arrest two peasant women, who were
accused of setting fire to a hayrick to revenge themselves on a landed
proprietor, a crime for which the legal punishment was from four to
eight months' imprisonment. One of them had a son of seven years of age,
and the other a son of twelve, both of whom had been born in the
prison, and had lived there ever since among the criminals. Such a long
preliminary arrest caused no surprise or indignation among those who
heard of it, because it was quite a common occurrence. Every one knew
that bribes were taken not only by the secretary and his scribes, but
also by the judges, who were elected by the local Noblesse from its own
ranks.

* Old book-catalogues sometimes mention a play bearing the
significant title, "The Unheard-of Wonder; or, The Honest
Secretary" (Neslykhannoe Dyelo ili Tchestny Sekretar). I
have never seen this curious production, but I have no doubt
that it referred to the peculiarities of the old judicial
procedure.

With regard to the scale of punishments, notwithstanding some
humanitarian principles in the legislation, they were very severe, and
corporal punishment played amongst them a disagreeably prominent part.
Capital sentences were abolished as early as 1753-54, but castigation
with the knout, which often ended fatally, continued until 1845, when
it was replaced by flogging in the civil administration, though retained
for the military and for insubordinate convicts. For the non-privileged
classes the knout or the lash supplemented nearly all punishments of
a criminal kind. When a man was condemned, for example, to penal
servitude, he received publicly from thirty to one hundred lashes,
and was then branded on the forehead and cheeks with the letters K. A.
T.--the first three letters of katorzhnik (convict). If he appealed he
received his lashes all the same, and if his appeal was rejected by
the Senate he received some more castigation for having troubled
unnecessarily the higher judicial authorities. For the military
and insubordinate convicts there was a barbarous punishment called
Spitsruten, to the extent of 5,000 or 6,000 blows, which often ended in
the death of the unfortunate.

The use of torture in criminal investigations was formally abolished in
1801, but if we may believe the testi