Madame Elizabeth Kovalskaya, whose fruitless effort to escape from Irkutsk has been described, deliberately planned to offend a great official in order to secure her removal. One day, when Baron Korv, the governor-general, visited the prison, she failed purposely to rise from her seat in his presence. Baron Korv objected harshly to this mark of disrespect to a man in his position, and Madame Kovalskaya quietly replied that she had not elected him to it. The enraged official left the prison saying he would send instructions how to deal with this refractory female, and shortly afterward an order came to remove her to the central prison at Verkhni Udinsk, as her unruly behaviour had a demoralising effect at Kara. The new removal would have been in accordance with Madame Kovalskaya’s wishes, but it was most savagely carried out. The blame lay with the commandant of the Kara political prison. Colonel Masyukov, an officer of the gendarmerie, had held this post for about ten years. He was a man of weak character, of low mental calibre, without judgment and quite unfitted for the functions he discharged. Once an officer of the guards, he had wasted his substance in riotous living and had accepted this well paid post to discharge his liabilities and his gambling debts. Colonel Masyukov stupidly supposed that the female prisoners stirred up by Madame Kovalskaya would have risen to resist her transfer. He resolved, therefore, that she should be conveyed away secretly without a word of notice. A subordinate officer, named Bobrovski, accompanied by a party of gensdarmes and ordinary convicts, burst into her cell at four o’clock in the morning and dragged her out of bed, half naked, with no more covering than her nightdress. She was hurried to the office and here ordered to put on the coarse garments of a common criminal. After this she fainted, and, wrapped up unconscious in a blanket, was carried out to the bank of the river Shilka, where an open boat was in readiness to carry her to Stretensk, the steamboat navigation not being yet practicable. In this small boat she travelled seventy miles for three days and nights with the soldiers of her escort who had already treated her with shameful indignity.