We have another portrait of Captain Nikolin from one who knew him but too well. Leo Deutsch suffered for some years under his régime and describes him “as a malicious, ill-natured man, continually devising petty humiliations for the prisoners.” In person he was a short, heavily built man, some fifty years of age, “with a bald head, a full gray beard, thin, tightly closed, rather cruel lips, an impenetrable face and cold gray eyes. His broad round face, cunning little eyes, and bristling moustache, gave him the look of a fat, spiteful old tom-cat, and he was always designated by that nickname. The expression of his eyes was particularly catlike; he looked as if just ready to pounce on a victim and stick his claws into it. He always spoke in a low voice, this ‘tom-cat;’ but he chattered unceasingly, and kept smacking his lips all the time, his expression being always peevish and discontented.... We petitioned our ‘tom-cat’ for leave to plant a garden in the yard; there was space enough, the work would have been beneficial, and then we might have had vegetables for our table, the deficiency in which particular had been so detrimental to our health. The ‘tom-cat’ roundly refused. ‘We should need spades,’ he said, ‘and they might be used to dig a hole whereby to get away.’ So, again, when one of us was sent some flower-seeds and sowed them in a wooden box, the box was taken away by Nikolin’s orders; the earth in it might have served to conceal some contraband article. Such needless tyrannies embittered us still more against the detested commandant. However peaceably we might otherwise have been inclined, our hatred of this man might well have blazed out at any opportunity; he himself probably guessed as much, for he became more and more mistrustful, at last never entering our prison. He felt that he had made enemies all round him, and sat lonely in his own house, or squabbled with his cook, afraid to show himself outside. It may be a matter of surprise that one of his many enemies did not find a way to put an end to him, that being a not unusual course of events in Kara; but finally he could endure such a life no longer, and applied to be transferred elsewhere. In the spring of 1887 his application was granted, and he departed, accompanied by the anathemas of the entire population of Kara.” Captain Nikolin was in due course succeeded by the Colonel Masyukov of whom we have heard so much in his conflict with the politicals of the state prison at Kara.