The changed attitude of the government toward the state prisoners at Kara dated, as we have said, from the end of the year 1880, under the initiative of Loris Melikov, and this action, so inconsistent with his supposed views as a liberal minister, has never been explained. Kennan suggests that it was caused by bad advice, carelessly adopted. But, as Leo Deutsch tells us, the harsh régime was introduced at a time when the revolutionary agitation had revived in great strength, and the dominant bureaucracy was more than ever on the defensive, ready to wreak its revengeful feelings upon the captives it held in durance. In any case, the orders issued evidenced a retrograde policy and a revival of the old methods of repression with new punishments superadded. All existing privileges, even the most trivial, were withdrawn. A peremptory stop was put to all correspondence with relatives and friends; work in the open air for ordinary criminal convicts was forbidden; and all the politicals who had finished their sentences of imprisonment and were living in the “free command” were again immured, with the old inflictions of leg irons and half shaved heads. At three days’ notice they were sent back to prison, many of them leaving their wives and children alone and unprotected in a vicious and disorderly penal settlement. When they reëntered they were herded with the rest in the new political prison at or near the Kara Lower Diggings, a building somewhat better than those for common criminals, being larger, more spacious and better lighted, with four _kameras_, each warmed with a brick oven and provided with the conventional _nary_ or sleeping platforms. At first the windows looked out upon the valley, an open if not very picturesque prospect. This was the case in other prisons for all criminal convicts, but it did not please Governor-General Anuchin, who ordered the whole place to be shut in by a high stockade. “A prison is not a palace,” he cynically declared, as he condemned his fellow creatures to be deprived of all view and restricted in the matter of light. Anuchin, in his report to the Czar, dated two years later, admits that the life of state criminals was “unbearable,” but quite forgot how far he himself contributed to their sufferings.