Under the brutal system in force, insane companions, often raging lunatics, were confined with the rest. There were no asylums in Siberia, and the insane lived in association with the sane, adding much to the miseries of both. “In more than one place in the Trans-Baikal we were startled,” says Kennan, “as we entered a crowded prison _kamera_, by some uncared-for lunatic, who sprang suddenly toward us with a wild cry or with a burst of hysterical laughter.... It is easier and cheaper to make the prison comrades of a lunatic take care of him than to keep him in seclusion and provide him with an attendant. For educated political prisoners, who dread insanity more than anything else, it is, of course, terribly depressing to have constantly before them, in the form of a wrecked intelligence, an illustration of the possible end of their own existence.” Several painful episodes soon followed the recommittal of the “free command” to prison. One was the suicide of Eugene Semyanovski, a young journalist connected with the underground journal _Onward_, who had gained his conditional freedom and lost it. He left a letter to his father bemoaning his hard fate, written the night before his reëntry to prison, and shot himself in his bed. Another political hanged himself in the prison bath-house, and a third poisoned himself by drinking water in which he had soaked lucifer matches. Another most affecting incident was the mental failure of Madame Kovalevskaya, a brilliant woman, who had been actively concerned in the revolutionary propaganda as the only means of securing free institutions in the empire. She was sentenced to penal servitude at Kara, where she presently joined the “free command.” Her husband was also exiled, but was sent to Minusinsk in Eastern Siberia, so that no less than a thousand miles intervened between the pair. Their only child had been left behind at Kiev in Russia. Madame Kovalevskaya’s insanity declared itself after she went back to Kara prison and while Colonel Kanonovich was still in command, and she was then allowed to join her husband, but after partial recovery she was returned to Kara. Eventually, after the cowardly oppression of her comrades, she committed suicide.