More than once, a question has besieged me.

“Is corporal punishment useful in katorga?”

It seems to me this question is best answered by penal laborers who personally experience the lash or rod.

When an exile sees that his human “I” is disrespected by others and he has no possibility of compelling respect for his personhood, he ceases to value himself, waves off the entire moral codex he's ever accrued, and falls still lower, animalizing himself. In actuality, only the use of a cudgel or birch rods compels such a man to listen or to do anything. But that same exile only need be shown that he is considered to be a man, that his personhood is respected equally to that of other people, and immediately his “I” emerges within him and he begins to esteem his own name. By cultivating his sensibilities, a fully satisfactory man is not only protected against external insult, but he immunizes his moral constitution against all possible vices and crimes.

It is unpleasant to listen to the Russian aristocrat when he, having returned from abroad, starts comparing foreigners to his Russian muzhik and, of course, finds the latter deficient. He's a drunkard, a base swindler, a liar, a filthy, dissolute slave… In a word, according to his tongue, this vermin, our most contemptible muzhik, seems a nullity in the world.

Even if we allow for this, then who is to blame for it? Why is the German or English peasantry so attractive to the visiting Russian aristocrat? What is it about a foreigner that does not obliterate a recognition of his human dignity, that prevents his being insulted and beaten? In our aristocrat's eyes, he isn't a chattel. See the foreigner, how he values his honor and won't even allow his honesty to be doubted. It's said a German will endure a reprimand for stupidity or laziness, but he will for nothing suffer the humiliatingly informal “you.”

“Alles, alles,” he, terribly upset, indignantly tells his lord, “nur mit ‘sie’!” (“You can say anything, anything, albeit only with the formal ‘you’!”)