552 SIBEEIA easy one. On the contrary, complete isolation and constant confinement to their own limited circle' make their life unbearable. From the observa- tion of a person who has close relations with them, it appears that they are divided into parties hostile to one another, and merely make a show to the prison overseers of living together in peace and harmony. Such a situation has an injurious influence upon the weaker characters. There have been a number of suicides among them, and within a few days one of them, Pozen, has gone insane. A number of others are in a mental condition very near to insanity. In accordance with an understanding that I have with the Ministry of the Interior, all sufferers from mental disorder will be removed, if possible, to hired quarters in the town of Chita, since there are in Siberia no regular asylums for the insane, and all the existing institutions of that kind in European Russia are full. The other state criminals, who are living in forced colonization or in assigned residences under police surveillance, are distributed in small groups among towns and villages situated [as far as possible] away from the principal roads, so that escape from them may be more difficult. Most of these exiles have no adequate means of their own to live on, and the distribution of them in thinly settled districts renders the finding of work almost impossible, even for those of them who know some trade and would be willing to work. As a result of this it becomes necessary for the Government to assume the expense of their subsistence by giving to every one of them an allowance of from six to twenty rubles a month, ac- cording to local conditions. Exceptions to this are very rare. The surveillance of state criminals is very unsatisfactory, and it is a question whether the principal safeguard against their escape is not the deportation of them to remote and desolate places, which, of themselves, render escape a thing not to be thought of. Police supervision, which is not attended with satisfactory results even in the provinces of European Russia, amounts, in Siberia, to little or nothing, because there are districts here where a single isprdvnik and his assistant have to look after a terri- tory comprising several thousand square versts. The surveillance of the village authorities is only nominal. The offenses committed by the state criminals exiled to Siberia, and their accomplices, characterize sufficiently their personality and their aspirations. It is doubtful whether imprison- ment and exile have brought any of them to their senses. It is more than probable that they have become still more hardened and obdurate. Exiled as adherents of the party of anarchy, they do not conceal their convic- tions in the places to which they have been banished, but give open ex- pression to their false judgments. It must be said, frankly, that the Government itself, by means of exile and at its own expense, spreads anarchistic ideas in places where, as in Eastern Siberia, nothing of the kind has ever before been known or heard of. Some of the young people in Siberia have already been led astray, and it is impossible not to feel
