![]() ![]() The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.Īccounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white a second went mad and never recovered his sanity a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. ![]() The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps-their funeral shrouds-and offered last rites. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. O n December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. ![]()
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