Torture, Russian Style
Is making a person stand barefooted on a prison floor during winter torture? Alexander Herzen, who played a role in the emancipation of Russian serfs in the mid 1800s certainly seemed to think so. Writing in 1830, Herzen says:
“Peter the Third abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star chamber. Catherine the Second abolished torture. Alexander the First abolished it over again. Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.
That is so: and all over Russia, from the Bering Straits to the Crimea, men suffer torture. When flogging is unsafe, other means are used – intolerable heat, thirst, salt food; in Moscow the police made a prisoner stand barefooted on an iron floor, at a time of intense frost; the man died in a hospital,”
