Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

marine dungeons of Kronstadt contain, among other state prisoners, miserable beings who were placed there in the reign of Alexander. These unhappy creatures are reduced to a state below that of the brute, by a punishment the atrocity of which nothing can justify. Could they now come forth out of the earth, they would rise like so many avenging spectres, whose appearance would make the despot himself recoil with horror, and shake the fabric of despotism to its centre. Every thing may be defended by plausible words, and even by good reasons: not any one of the opinions that divide the political, the literary, or the religious world, lacks argument by which to maintain itself: but, let them say what they please, a system, the violence of which requires such means of support, must be radically and intensely vicious.

The victims of this odious policy are no longer men. Those unfortunate beings, denied the commonest rights, cut off from the world, forgotten by every one, abandoned to themselves in the night of their captivity, during which imbecility becomes the fruit, and the only remaining consolation of their never-ending misery, have lost all memory, as well as all that gift of reason, that light of humanity, which no one has a right to extinguish in the breast of his fellow-being. They have even forgotten their own names, which the keepers amuse themselves by asking with a brutal derision, for which there is none to call them to account; for there reigns such confusion in the depths of these abysses of inicµiity, the shades are so thick, that all traces of justice are effaced.

Even the crimes of some of the prisoners are not