played a political part even during the ancient regime. Several of these sick women, brought from various parts of the Empire, played such a part even at Tsarskoye Selo in the apartments of the mystically minded Empress Alexandra. Under the Soviets everything remained as it was. The epileptics, hysterics, and "klikushas" received the right of revenge, not only against children, but also against the bourgeoisie, and often they were put in charge of the "workshops of revenge" run by the Chekas.
Those epileptics and hysterio-maniacs were the children of women who had been daily thrashed by their drunken husbands, or who complained all their lives of their "forlorn fate," bewailing their sad lot. Incapable of, and unwilling to work, they could not find any escape out of the impossible conditions of a life which they hated with all the might of their pitiful souls.
The well-known Russian pathologists and psychologists, Bechtierev, Miezeyevski, Karpinski, and Wedenski, maintained that the terrifying number of abnormal people In Russia was the result of the abnormal life of the wives and mothers of Russia.
And in Soviet Russia, under the influence of the horror of terrorism and the impossible, inhuman conditions of life in that "freest of all countries," the number of pathological cases reached 4.8 millions in 1919, exactly as much as the total population of some of the smaller European States.
