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.
0 kommentar(er)
