Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter XI
CHAPTER XI
EXILE BY ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS
The colony of political exiles in Ust Kámenogórsk was the last one that we saw in the steppe territories, and it seems to me desirable, before proceeding with the narrative of our Siberian journey, to describe more fully and carefully the particular form of punishment that these offenders were undergoing—a form of punishment that is known in Russia as "exile by administrative process."
Exile by administrative process means the banishment of an obnoxious person from one part of the empire to another without the observance of any of the legal formalities that, in most civilized countries, precede the deprivation of rights and the restriction of personal liberty. The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime, and may not have rendered himself amenable in any way to the laws of the state, but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is "prejudicial to public order," or "incompatible with public tranquillity," he may be arrested without a warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one year to ten years. He may or may not be informed of the reasons for this summary proceeding, but in either case he is perfectly helpless. He cannot examine the witnesses upon whose testimony his presence is declared to be "prejudicial to public order." He cannot summon friends to prove his loyalty and good character, without great risk of bringing upon them the same calamity that has befallen him. He has no right to demand a trial, or even a hearing. He cannot sue out a writ of habeas corpus. He cannot appeal to his fellow-citizens through the press. His communications with the world are so suddenly severed that sometimes even his own relatives do not know what has happened to him. He is literally and absolutely without any means whatever of self-defense. To show the nature of the evidence upon which certain classes of Russians are banished to Siberia, and to illustrate the working of the system generally, I will give a few cases of administrative exile from the large number recorded in my note-books.
Some of the readers of this chapter will perhaps remember a young naval officer named Constantine Staniukóvich, who was attached to the staff of the Grand Duke Alexis at the time of the latter's visit to the United States. From the fact that I saw in Mr. Staniukóvich's house in Tomsk the visiting cards of people well known in New York and San Francisco, I infer that he went a good deal into society here and that he may still be recalled to mind by persons who met him. He was the son of a Russian admiral, was an officer of great promise, and had before him the prospect of a brilliant career in the Russian naval service. He was, however, a man of broad and liberal views, with a natural taste for literary pursuits, and after his return from America he resigned his position in the navy and became an author. He wrote a number of novels and plays which were fairly successful, but which, in the language of the censor, "manifested a pernicious tendency," and in 1882 or 1883 he purchased a well-known Russian magazine in St. Petersburg called the Diélo and became its editor and proprietor. He spent a considerable part of the summer of 1884 abroad, and in the latter part of that year left his wife and children at Baden-Baden and started for St. Petersburg. At the Russian frontier station of Vérzhbolof he was suddenly arrested, was taken thence to St. Petersburg under guard, and was there thrown into the fortress of Petropávlovsk. His wife, knowing nothing of this misfortune, continued to write to him at St. Petersburg without getting any answers to her letters, until finally she became alarmed, and telegraphed to the editorial department of the Diélo, asking what had happened to her husband and why he did not write to her. The managing editor of the magazine replied that Mr. Staniukóvich was not there, and that they had supposed him to be still in Baden-Baden. Upon the receipt of this telegram, Mrs. Staniukóvich, thoroughly frightened, proceeded at once with her children to St. Petersburg. Nothing whatever could be learned there with regard to her husband's whereabouts. He had not been seen at the editorial rooms of the Diélo, and none of his friends had heard anything of or from him in two weeks. He had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. At last, after days of torturing anxiety, Mrs. Staniukóvich was advised to make inquiries of General Órzhefski, the chief of gendarmes. She did so, and found that her husband was a prisoner in one of the casemates of the Petropávlovsk fortress. The police, as it afterward appeared, had for some time been intercepting and reading his letters, and had ascertained that he was in correspondence with a well-known Russian revolutionist who was then living in Switzerland. The correspondence was perfectly innocent in its character, and related solely to the business of the magazine; but the fact that an editor, and a man of known liberal views, was in communication with a political refugee was regarded as sufficient evidence that his presence in St. Petersburg would be "prejudicial to public order," and his arrest followed. In May, 1885, he was exiled for three years by administrative process to the city of Tomsk in Western Siberia. The publication of the magazine was of course suspended in consequence of the imprisonment and ultimate banishment of its owner, and Mr. Staniukóvich was financially ruined. If the Russian Government deals in this arbitrary way with men of rank, wealth, and high social position in the capital of the empire, it can be imagined what treatment is accorded to authors, physicians, students, and small landed proprietors whose presence is regarded as "prejudicial to public order" in the provinces.
In the year 1880 the well-known and gifted Russian novelist Vladímir Korolénko, two of whose books have recently been translated into English and published in Boston,[1] was exiled to Eastern Siberia as a result of what the Government itself finally admitted to be an official mistake. Through the influence of Prince Imeretínski, Mr. Korolénko succeeded in getting this mistake corrected before he reached his ultimate destination and was released in the West Siberian city of Tomsk. Hardly had he returned, however, to European Russia, when he was called upon to take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., and to swear that he would betray every one of his friends or acquaintances whom he knew to be engaged in revolutionary or anti-Government work. No honorable and self-respecting man could take such an oath as that, and of course Mr. Korolénko declined to do so. He was thereupon exiled by administrative process to the East Siberian territory of Yakútsk, where, in a wretched native ulús, he lived for about three years.[2]
Mr. Boródin, another Russian author and a well-known contributor to the Russian magazine Annals of the Fatherland, was banished to the territory of Yakútsk on account of the alleged "dangerous" and "pernicious" character of a certain manuscript found in his house by the police during a search. This manuscript was a spare copy of an article upon the economic condition of the province of Viátka, which Mr. Boródin had written and sent to the above-named magazine, but which, up to that time, had not been published. The author went to Eastern Siberia in a convict's gray overcoat with a yellow ace of diamonds on his back, and three or four months after his arrival in Yakútsk he had the pleasure of reading in the Annals of the Fatherland the very same article for which he had been exiled. The Minister of the Interior had sent him to Siberia merely for having in his possession what the police called a "dangerous" and "pernicious" manuscript, and then the St. Petersburg committee of censorship had certified that another copy of that same manuscript was perfectly harmless, and had allowed it to be published, without the change of a line, in one of the most popular and widely circulated magazines in the empire.[3]
A gentleman named Achkín, in Moscow, was exiled to Siberia by administrative process in 1885 merely because, to adopt the language of the order that was issued for his arrest, he was "suspected of an intention to put himself into an illegal situation." The high crime which Mr. Achkín was "suspected of an intention" to commit was the taking of a fictitious name in the place of his own. Upon what ground he was "suspected of an intention" to do this terrible thing he never knew.
Another exile of my acquaintance, Mr. Y, was banished merely because he was a friend of Mr. Z, who was awaiting trial on the charge of political conspiracy. When Mr. Z's case came to a judicial investigation he was found to be innocent and was acquitted; but in the meantime Mr. Y, merely for being a friend of this innocent man, had gone to Siberia by administrative process.
In another case a young student, called Vladímir Sidórski (I use a fictitious name), was arrested by mistake instead of another and a different Sidórski named Victor, whose presence in Moscow was regarded by somebody as "prejudicial to public order." Vladímir protested that he was not Victor, that he did not know Victor, and that his arrest in the place of Victor was the result of a stupid blunder; but his protestations were of no avail. The police were too much occupied in unearthing what they called "conspiracies" and looking after "untrustworthy" people to devote any time to a troublesome verification of an insignificant student's identity. There must have been something wrong about him, they argued, or he would not have been arrested, and the safest thing to do with him was to send him to Siberia, whoever he might be—and to Siberia he was sent. When the convoy officer called the roll of the out-going exile party, Vladímir Sidórski failed to answer to Victor Sidórski's name, and the officer, with a curse, cried "Victor Sidórski! Why don't you answer to your name?"
"It is not my name," replied Vladímir, "and I won't answer to it. It 's another Sidórski who ought to be going to Siberia."
"What is your name, then?"
Vladímir told him. The officer coolly erased the name "Victor" in the roll of the party, inserted the name "Vladímir," and remarked cynically, "It does n't make a bit of difference!"
In the years 1877, 1878, and 1879, no attempt was made, apparently, by the Government to ascertain whether an arrested person was deserving of exile or not, nor even to ascertain whether the man or woman exiled was the identical person for whom the order of banishment had been issued. The whole system was a chaos of injustice, accident, and caprice. Up to November, 1878, as appears from an official circular to provincial governors, the local authorities did not even take the trouble to make a report of political arrests to the Minister of the Interior.[4] If a man was taken into custody as a political offender, that, in many cases, was the end of it so far as an investigation was concerned. The fact that he had been arrested by mistake, or in the place of some other person, did not necessarily insure his release. The local authorities reversed the humane rule of Catharine II. and acted, in political cases, upon the principle that it is better to punish ten innocent persons than to allow one criminal to escape.
The above-cited case of the student Sidórski is by no means exceptional. In the open letter to the Tsar for which Madame Tsébrikova has recently been exiled to the province of Vólogda, the reader will find a brief statement of a similar case in which two brothers were banished by mistake in place of two other brothers of like name but of different family. The banished young men were the sole support of their widowed mother and a fifteen-year-old sister. When, at last, the blunder was discovered and the innocent brothers were permitted to return to their home, they found that their mother had died of grief and privation, and that, after her death, their child-sister had been sold by a boarding-house keeper into a house of prostitution. "What must have been the feeling of those young men towards the Government," Madame Tsébrikova asks, "when they came back and were informed of their mother's death and their sister's shame?" In the light of such facts terrorism ceases to be an unnatural or an inexplicable phenomenon. Wrong a man in that way, deny him all redress, exile him again if he complains, gag him if he cries out, strike him in the face if he struggles, and at last he will stab and throw bombs. It is useless to say that the Russian Government does not exasperate men and women in this way. The case of Madame Tsébrikova herself is a recent case in point. For merely writing out the above story of injustice and other stories like it, and sending them to Alexander III. with an earnest and respectful letter imploring him to right such wrongs, Madame Tsébrikova has been exiled by administrative process to a remote village in the province of Vólogda. The only results of her letter were a decree of banishment and a contemptuous inquiry from the Tsar, "What business is it of hers?"
The two things that are most exasperating to a liberal and warm-hearted young Russian are, first, official lawlessness [próizvól] in the sphere of personal rights, and second, the suffering brought by such lawlessness upon near relatives and dear friends. In exile by administrative process these two exasperating agencies operate conjointly. The suffering of a loved wife, or the loss of an affectionate child, is hard enough to bear when it comes in the ordinary course of nature and seems to be inevitable; but when it comes as the direct result of unnecessary causes, such as injustice, tyranny, and official caprice, it has more than the bitterness of death, and it arouses fiercer passions than those that carry men into the storm of battle. As an illustration of this I will relate briefly the story of a young Russian surgeon who is known to a number of persons in the United States.
In the year 1879 there was living in the town of Ivángorod, in the province of Chernígof, a skilful and accomplished young surgeon named Dr. Biéli. Although he was a man of liberal views, he was not an agitator nor a revolutionist, and had taken no active part in political affairs. Some time in the late winter or early spring of 1879 there came to him, with letters of introduction, two young women who had been studying in one of the medical schools for women in St. Petersburg, and had been expelled and ordered to return to their homes in central Russia on account of their alleged political "untrustworthiness" [neblagonadiózhnost]. They were very anxious to complete their education and to fit themselves for useful work among the peasants; and they begged Dr. Biéli to aid them in their studies, to hear their recitations, and to allow them to make use of his library and the facilities of his office. As they were both in an "illegal" position,—that is, were living in a place where, without permission from the authorities, they had no right to be,—it was Dr. Biéli's duty as a loyal subject to hand them over to the police, regardless of the fact that they had come to him with letters of introduction and a petition for help. He happened, however, to be a man of courage, independence, and generous instincts; and, instead of betraying them, he listened with sympathy to their story, promised them his aid, introduced them to his wife, and began to give them lessons. The year 1879 in Russia was a year of intense revolutionary activity. Attempts were constantly being made by the terrorists to assassinate high Government officials; and the police, in all parts of the empire, were more than usually suspicious and alert. The visits of the young girls to Dr. Biéli's house and office soon attracted the attention of the local authorities in Ivángorod, and they took steps to ascertain who they were and where they had come from. An investigation showed that one of them was living on a forged passport, while the other had none, and that both had been expelled from St. Petersburg for political "untrustworthiness." Their unauthorized appearance in Ivángorod, when they should have been at their homes, and their half-secret visits—generally at night—to the house of Dr. Biéli were regarded as evidence of a political conspiracy, and on the 10th of May, 1879, both they and the young surgeon were arrested and exiled by administrative process to Siberia. Dr. Biéli eventually was sent to the arctic village of Verkhoyánsk, latitude 67.30°, in the province of Yakútsk, where he was seen in 1882 by Engineer Melville, Lieutenant Danenhower, Mr. W. H. Gilder, and all the survivors of the arctic exploring steamer Jeannette. At the time of Dr. Biéli's banishment, his wife, a beautiful young woman, twenty-four or twenty-five years of age, was expecting confinement, and was therefore unable to go to Siberia with him. As soon as possible, however, after the birth of her child, and before she had fully recovered her strength, she left her nursing baby with relatives and started on a journey of more than 6000 miles to join her husband in a village situated north of the arctic circle and near the Asiatic pole of cold. She had not the necessary means to make such a journey by rail, steamer, and post, as Lieutenant Schuetze made it in 1885-86, and was therefore forced to ask permission of the Minister of the Interior to travel with a party of exiles.[5] As far as the city of Tomsk in Western Siberia both political and common-criminal exiles are transported in convict trains or barges. Beyond that point the common criminals walk, and the politicals are carried in telégas, at the rate of about sixty miles a week, stopping in an étape every third day for rest. At this rate of progress Mrs. Biéli would have reached her husband's place of exile only after sixteen months of incessant hardship, privation, and suffering. But she did not reach it. For many weeks her hope, courage, and love sustained her, and enabled her to endure without complaint the jolting, the suffocating dust, the scorching heat, and the cold autumnal rains on the road, the bad food, the plank sleeping-benches, the vermin, and the pestilential air of the étapes; but human endurance has its limits. Three or four months of this unrelieved misery, with constant anxiety about her husband and the baby that, for her husband's sake, she had abandoned in Russia, broke down her health and her spirit. She sank into deep despondency and eventually began to show signs of mental aberration. After passing Krasnoyársk her condition became such that any sudden shock was likely completely to overthrow her reason—and the shock soon came. There are two villages in Eastern Siberia whose names are almost alike—Verkholénsk and Verkhoyánsk. The former is situated on the river Léna, only 180 miles from Irkútsk, while the latter is on the head-waters of the Yána, and is distant from Irkútsk nearly 2700 miles. As the party with which she was traveling approached the capital of Eastern Siberia, her hope, strength, and courage seemed to revive. Her husband she thought was only a few hundred miles away, and in a few more weeks she would be in his arms. She talked of him constantly, counted the verst-posts which measured her slow progress towards him, and literally lived upon the expectation of speedy reunion with him. A few stations west of Irkútsk she accidentally became aware, for the first time, that her husband was not in Verkholénsk, but in Verkhoyánsk; that she was still separated from him by nearly 3000 miles of mountain, steppe, and forest; and that in order to reach his place of banishment that year she would have to travel many weeks on dog or reindeer sledges, in terrible cold, through the arctic solitudes of northeastern Asia. The sudden shock of this discovery was almost immediately fatal. She became violently insane, and died insane a few months later in the Irkútsk prison hospital, without ever seeing again the husband for whose sake she had endured such mental and physical agonies.
I have been compelled to restrict myself to the barest outline of this terrible tragedy; but if the reader could hear the story, as I heard it, from the lips of exiles who traveled with Mrs. Biéli, and who saw the flickering spark of her reason go out, in an East Siberian étape, he would not wonder that exile by administrative process makes terrorists, but rather that it does not make a nation of terrorists.[6]
A recent writer in the German periodical Unsere Zeit of Leipzig, who signs himself "A Russian Resident of Eastern Siberia," and who is, apparently, a sincere and earnest man, attempts to lay the whole responsibility for exile by administrative process upon the Russian revolutionists. He admits the truth of all I have said on the subject, and acknowledges that "no man knows at what moment he may be seized and cast into prison or doomed to exile without even a hearing"; but he declares that "all this has been brought upon us by a band so vile—so horribly vile—that their crimes are without parallel. . . . . But for the nihilists of Kará there would have never been any administrative exile."[7] The "Russian Resident of Eastern Siberia," however, is as much mistaken in the explanation that he gives of the origin of administrative exile, as in the character that he attributes to the Russian revolutionists. Exile by administrative process is not a new thing in Russia,[8] nor was it first resorted to by the Russian Government as an extraordinary and exceptional measure of self-defense in the struggle with the revolutionists. It is older than nihilism, it is older than the modern revolutionary movement, it is older than the imperial house of Románof. It has been practised for centuries as a short and easy method of dealing with people who happen to be obnoxious or in
the way, but who cannot conveniently be tried or convicted in a court of justice. If the "Russian Resident of Eastern Siberia" will read attentively the works of Tarásof, Sergéyefski, Maxímof, and Anúchin, he will find that administrative exile has been not only a recognized, but a well established, method of dealing with certain classes of offenders ever since the seventeenth century. In the reign of the Emperor Nicholas, for example, nihilism had not been so much as heard of,—the very word was unknown,—and yet men and women were being exiled to Siberia by administrative process, not in hundreds merely, but in thousands, and not only by order of the Tsar, but by order of the administrative authorities, by order of the ecclesiastical authorities, by order of the village communes, and even by order of private landowners. Most of them, it is true, were not political offenders; but they were none the less entitled to a trial, and they were all victims of the system that the "Russian Resident" says was brought into existence half a century later, "in a time of terrible necessity, as the only possible means to counteract the nefarious doings of those dark conspirators," the nihilists.
The careful and exhaustive researches of Anuchin in the archives of the chief exile bureau [Prikáz o Sílnikh] at Tobólsk, show that between 1827 and 1846 there was not a year in which the number of persons sent to Siberia by administrative process fell below three thousand, and that it reached a maximum, for a single year, of more than six thousand.[9] The aggregate number for the twenty-year period is 79,909. It can hardly be contended, I think, that the nihilists or the terrorists are responsible for a system that had sent eighty thousand persons to Siberia without judicial trial, long before such a thing as a nihilist or a terrorist was known, and before most of the modern Russian revolutionists were born. The "Russian Resident of Eastern Siberia" has simply put the cart before the horse. It was administrative exile, administrative caprice, and the absence of orderly and legal methods in political cases generally, that caused terrorism, and not terrorism that necessitated official lawlessness. The wolf always contends, with a show of virtuous indignation, that while he was peacefully drinking as usual, the lamb muddied the brook, and thus compelled him to "take exceptional measures for the reëstablishment of public tranquillity"; but his statement is very properly discredited when it appears that he was above the lamb on the brook, and that, for years, he had been taking "exceptional measures" of the same kind with other lambs that had not been near the brook. To defend or to justify the crimes of the terrorists is not the object of my work; but when the history of the nineteenth century in Russia shall have been written by some one having access to the secret archives of the Ministry of the Interior and the Third Section of the Tsar's Chancellery, it will appear, I think, to the satisfaction of all men, that most of the so-called terroristic crimes in Russia were committed, not, as the "Russian Resident" asserts, by "bloodthirsty tigers in human form at the prompting of presumptuous fancies," but by ordinary men and women exasperated to the pitch of desperation by administrative suppression of free speech and free thought, administrative arrest without warrant, administrative imprisonment for years upon suspicion, administrative banishment to the arctic regions without trial, and, to crown all, administrative denial of every legal remedy and every peaceful means of redress.
It is true that in 1879, as a result of the criminal activity of the terrorists, martial law was declared throughout European Russia, unlimited discretionary power was given to governors-general, and exile by administrative process, as a quick and convenient method of dealing with political suspects, was expressly authorized by the Tsar; but the imperial authorization was nothing more than a formal sanction of a preëxisting measure, and an intimation that it might, thenceforth, be given a wider scope. To say that this form of exile was previously unknown, and that it was forced upon the Government by the crimes of the terrorists, is to set chronology at naught and to ignore all the historical facts of the case. The first attempt on the part of the terrorists to assassinate a Government official was the attempt of Véra Zasúlich to kill General Trepof, the St. Petersburg chief of police, on the 5th of February, 1878. Administrative exile for political reasons had then been common for almost a decade. If I mistake not, Véra Zasúlich herself had been one of its victims seven or eight years before. I think she was one of twenty or thirty persons who were tried before a special session of the Governing Senate in 1871 upon the charge of complicity in the Necháief conspiracy, who were judicially declared to be not guilty, but who were immediately rearrested, nevertheless, and exiled by administrative process, in defiance of all law and in contemptuous disregard of the judgment of the highest court in the empire. A government that acts in this way sows dragons' teeth and has no right to complain of the harvest. The so-called "propagandists" of 1870-74 did not resort to violence in any form, and did not even make a practice of resisting arrest, until after the Government had begun to exile them to Siberia for life with ten or twelve years of penal servitude, for offenses that were being punished at the very same time in Austria with only a few days—or at most a few weeks—of personal detention.[10] It was not terrorism that necessitated administrative exile in Russia; it was merciless severity and banishment without due process of law that provoked terrorism.
In the latter part of the reign of Alexander II., and particularly between the years 1870 and 1880, administrative exile was resorted to, in political cases, upon a scale never before known, and with a recklessness and cynical indifference to personal rights that were almost unparalleled. In Odessa, General Todleben, by virtue of the unlimited discretionary power given him in the Imperial ukáz of April 17, 1879, proceeded to banish, without inquiry or discrimination, the whole "politically untrustworthy" class—that is, to exile every person whose loyalty to the existing Grovernment was even doubtful.[11] The mere fact that a man had been registered as a suspect in the books of the secret police, or had been accused, even anonymously, of political disaffection, was a sufficient reason for his deportation to the remotest part of the empire. Parents who had never had a disloyal thought were exiled because their children had become revolutionists; school-boys who happened to be acquainted with political offenders were exiled because they had not betrayed the latter to the police; teachers were exiled for circulating copies of the Russian magazine Annals of the Fatherland; members of provincial assemblies were exiled because they insisted upon their right to petition the crown for the redress of grievances; and university students who had been tried for political crime and duly acquitted by the courts were immediately rearrested and exiled by administrative process, in violation of the most elementary principles of justice.
In December, 1879, a young revolutionist—a Jew—named Maidánski, was hanged in Odessa by sentence of a court-martial for having taken part in a conspiracy to assassinate a Government spy named Gorinóvich. His old father and mother, who lived in Elizabethgrad, came to Odessa to have a last interview with him before he should be put to death; but the authorities, instead of allowing the aged parents to see their condemned son, promptly arrested them both and sent them to Eastern Siberia by administrative process. They were nothing but poor illiterate peasants, and there was not the least evidence to show that they had encouraged their son's criminal activity, or even that they had been aware of it; but the opinion of the Government seemed to be that they deserved punishment for having brought such a son into the world. It may be thought, in the light of more recent events, that they were treated in this merciless way because they were Jews; but the Government, at that time, was dealing in precisely the same manner with orthodox Russians belonging to the educated and privileged classes.
In the late summer or early fall of 1879 two educated young women from Nikoláief—the sisters Livandófskaya—were exiled for political reasons to different parts of Eastern Siberia. One of them, named Véra, was banished by administrative process to Mínusínsk in the province of Yeniséisk, while the other was sentenced by a court-martial to forced colonization in the little town of Kírensk on the river Léna.[12] If the Government had been satisfied with the deportation of these two young women only, there would have been nothing unusual or particularly noteworthy in the case; but it went much further than this. The family of the two exiled girls consisted of a father aged about seventy, a mother aged fifty-five or sixty, and two younger sisters fifteen and sixteen years of age respectively.
After the banishment of Véra and the other elder sister to Eastern Siberia, all the remaining members of the family were exiled by administrative process for a term of three years to a village near the sub-arctic coast of the White Sea in the province of Archángel. As long as their term of banishment lasted they received a small monthly allowance from the Government for their maintenance, and so managed to exist; but when, in 1882, they were informed that they were at liberty to return to Nikoláief, and that their allowance would no longer be paid to them, they were left without any means of support in the place where they were, and had no money with which to get back to their home. They wrote a piteous letter to Véra in Mínusínsk, describing their sufferings and their almost helpless situation, and Véra, upon receipt of it, determined to make her escape, return to European Russia, and there, under an assumed name, earn money enough, if possible, to bring her aged parents and her two younger sisters back to their home in Nikoláief. Her attempt to escape was successful, she reached European Russia in safety, and began, in the city of Kiev, her search for employment. Failing to get anything to do, she used up, little by little, the small sum of money that she had brought with her from Siberia, and at last, to escape starvation, she was forced, in despair, to give herself up to the police. She lay for some months in prison, while the authorities were investigating her story, and was then sent back to Mínusínsk. In the meantime her aged father and mother had succeeded in obtaining from friends money enough to get as far south as Moscow, and when the unfortunate daughter passed through that city on her way to Eastern Siberia, her parents and sisters, whom she had hoped to help, came to see her in prison and were permitted to have a brief interview with her. Véra subsequently married, in Mínusínsk, the talented young author, publicist, and political exile, Iván Petróvich Belokónski, and lived there with him until the termination of her period of banishment. She then returned to European Russia in order that she might help take care of her aged father, who had gone insane, and her feeble and almost heart-broken mother. At the time when we left Siberia, she, herself, was living with her parents in the city of Kiev, her exiled husband was more than three thousand miles away in Mínusínsk, and her exiled sister was more than four thousand miles away on the head-waters of the river Léna.
To one who lives in a country where personal rights are secured by all sorts of legal and constitutional guarantees, it may seem, perhaps, that nothing could be more unjust and tyrannical than the banishment of an infirm father, an aged mother, and two helpless children, merely because certain other members of the family had become disloyal; but in the history of administrative exile in Russia there are things even more extraordinary and unreasonable than this.
Towards the close of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, when the conspicuous gallantry of General Skóbelef had attracted to him the attention of the world, and had made him the idol of enthusiastic young men throughout Russia, a large number of students in the university of Kiev undertook to give formal expression to their feeling of admiration for the great popular hero by getting up an address to him. There happened, at that time, to be more or less political excitement among a certain class of the Kiev university students, and the meetings that were held for the purpose of drafting and discussing the proposed address to Skóbelef were thought by the Government to have in view another and a more dangerous end. They were soon prohibited, therefore, by the authorities, and several of the students who had taken a prominent part in them were arrested on suspicion, held for a time in prison, and then sent by administrative process to the northern province of Vólogda. Among the students thus exiled was Ivan N———, the son of a wealthy landed proprietor in Khersón. When the young man had spent three or four months in the northern village to which he had been banished, his father, by means of a liberal expenditure of money, succeeded in getting him transferred to the province of Khersón, where the climate is milder than in Vólogda, and where the young exile was nearer his home. He was still kept, however, under police surveillance, and was regarded by the authorities as "politically untrustworthy." In April, 1879, General Todlében was appointed governor-general of Odéssa, with unlimited discretionary power, and as soon as he reached his post he proceeded to extirpate "sedition" in the provinces under his jurisdiction by banishing to Siberia, without trial or hearing, every man, woman, or child who was registered as a suspect in the books of the secret police, or who happened at that time to be under police surveillance. Among such persons was the unfortunate Kiev student Iván N———. His transfer from the province of Vólogda to the province of Khersón had brought him within the limits of the territory subject to the authority of Governor-general Todlében, and had thus rendered his situation worse instead of better. It was of no use for him to plead that the Government, in consenting to his transfer from a northern to a southern province, had intended to show him mercy, and that to send him to Siberia would be to punish him a second time, and with redoubled severity, for an action that was wholly innocent in the first place, and that ought not to have been punished at all. The chinóvniks in the office of the governor-general had no time to investigate or to make discriminations. The orders were to banish to Siberia all persons then under police surveillance; and if they should once begin to inquire, and investigate, and grant hearings, they would never get anybody banished at all. If he felt aggrieved he could send a petition to the Minister of the Interior from Siberia. All the young man's efforts to get his case reconsidered on its merits were fruitless, and in the summer of 1879 he was sent to Eastern Siberia by administrative process. In the prison of Krasnoyársk, where the exile party to which he belonged was detained for a few days, a misunderstanding of some sort arose between the prison officials and the politicals, in the course of which the latter became insubordinate and turbulent. The inspector of exile transportation came to the prison in a state of semi-intoxication to quiet the disturbance, and while he was haranguing and threatening the politicals, one of them exclaimed ironically, "Vazhno!" which may be rendered in English, "How important we are!" The inspector was beside himself with fury, and, not being able to find out who had uttered the offensive exclamation, he caused all the prisoners in that kámera to be sent to the sub-arctic territory of Yakútsk. The young student from Kiev was not a political and had taken no active part in the disorder, but he happened to be in the cell from which the ironical cry, "Vazhno!" came, and that circumstance alone was sufficient to send him to the arctic regions. In the next five years of enforced solitude he had ample time to reflect upon the danger of falling under suspicion in a country where the will of a chinóvnik is the law of the land, and where patriotic admiration for a great general may be punished as severely as an assault with intent to kill. The Persian poet Saadi, who evidently saw practised at Bagdad in the twelfth century the same governmental methods that prevail in Russia now, tells a story in the "Gulistan" of a terror-stricken fox who was seen limping and running away, and who, upon being asked what he was afraid of, replied, "I hear they are going to press a camel into the service."
"Well, what of it?" said the interrogator; "what relationship is there between that animal and you?"
"Be silent!" rejoined the fox. "If the malignant, out of evil design, should say, 'This is a camel,' who would be so solicitous for my relief as to order an inquiry into my case? and 'before the antidote can be brought from Irak he who has been bitten by the serpent may be dead.'"
In the year 1879 there was living in the Russian city of Pultáva a poor apothecary named Schiller, who desired for some reason to change the location of his place of business. As druggists in Russia are not allowed to migrate from one town to another without the permission of the Government, Schiller wrote to the Minister of the Interior, stating his desire to move and the reasons for it, and asking that he be authorized to close his shop in Pultáva and open another in Kharkóf. Week after week passed without bringing any answer to his request. At last, the Minister of the Interior happened to stop in Pultáva for a day or two on one of his journeys from St. Petersburg to the Crimea, and Schiller, regarding this as a providential opportunity, attempted to get an interview with him for the purpose of presenting his petition in person. Of course the guard at the door of the house occupied by the Minister refused to admit a poor apothecary with a paper, and Schiller, indignant at what he thought was an injustice, wrapped his petition around a stone, to give it weight, and threw it into the window of the Minister's room. He was at once arrested and imprisoned, and a few months later, upon the charge of having behaved in a disorderly manner and shown gross disrespect to the higher authorities, he was banished by administrative process, as a political offender, to the village of Varnavin in the province of Kostromá. This was not regarded by the authorities as a particularly severe punishment; but Schiller, finding enforced residence in an unfamiliar village to be irksome and tedious, and having no further confidence in petitions, changed his location between sunset and dawn without asking leave of anybody—in other words, ran away. About this time the Tsar issued a poveléinie, or command, directing that all administrative exiles found absent from their places of banishment without leave should be sent to the East-Siberian province of Yakútsk.[13] When, therefore, a few months later, Schiller was rearrested in a part of the empire where he had no right to be, he was sent by étape to Irkútsk, and the governor-general of Eastern Siberia was requested to put him under police surveillance in some part of the territory named in the Imperial command. Governor-general Anúchin, who had then recently come to Irkútsk, and who had not had time, apparently, to familiarize himself with the vast region intrusted to his care,[14] directed that Schiller be sent to the district town of Zashíversk, which was supposed to be situated on the river Indigírka, a few miles south of the arctic circle. A century or a century and a half ago, this town of Zashíversk was a place of considerable local importance; but, for some reason, it lost its preëminence as a fur-trading center, fell gradually into decay, and finally ceased to exist. Its location was still marked with two concentric circles on all the maps,[15] its name continued to appear annually in the records of the governor-general's office, and I have no doubt that a coterie of chinóvniks in Irkútsk were dividing and pocketing every year the money appropriated for repairs to its public buildings; but, as a matter of fact, it had not contained a building nor an inhabitant for more than half a century, and forest trees were growing on the mound that marked the site of its ostróg.[16] Poor Schiller, after having been carried three or four thousand miles up and down the rivers Léna and Indigírka in a vain search for a non-existent arctic town, was finally brought back to Yakútsk; and a report was made to the governor-general that Zashíversk, apparently, had ceased to exist. The governor-general thereupon ordered that the prisoner be taken to Srédni Kolímsk, another "town" of forty-five houses, situated on the river Kolymá north of the arctic circle, 3700 miles from Irkútsk and 7500 miles from the capital of the empire. When, after more than a year of étape life, the unfortunate druggist from Pultáva reached the last outpost of Russian power in northeastern Asia and was set at liberty, he made his way to the little log church, entered the belfry, and proceeded to jangle the church bells in a sort of wild, erratic chime. When the people of the town ran to the belfry in alarm and inquired what was the matter, Schiller replied with dignity that he wished the whole population to know that by the grace of God, Herman Augustóvich Schiller, after long and perilous wanderings, had reached in safety the town of Srédni Kolímsk. Whether the mind of the exile had given way under the prolonged strain of hardship and suffering, or whether, as some assert, he had become intoxicated and rang the church bells merely as a drunken freak, I do not know; but the local police reported to the governor-general that the "political" exile Schiller was disorderly and turbulent, and that he had caused a public scandal before he had been in Srédni Kolímsk twenty-four hours. Upon this report the governor-general indorsed an order to remove the offender to some place at least twelve versts distant from the town. His idea probably was to have Schiller sent to some small suburban village in the general neighborhood of Srédni Kolímsk, but far enough away so that he could not easily get into the town to make a disturbance. Unfortunately there was no suburban village within a hundred versts in any direction, and the local authorities, not knowing what else to do, carried the wretched druggist about twelve versts out into the primeval wilderness, erected a log cabin for him, and left him there—assuring him cheerfully, as they bade him good-by, that "káknibúd" [somehow or other] he would get along. With a little help occasionally from wandering Chúkchi and Tongusí he did get along, catching fish, gathering berries, and snaring ptarmigan for his subsistence, and living, for several years, the life of a continental Crusoe. What eventually became of him I do not know.
Of course cases of this kind are exceptional. The Russian Government does not make a practice of sending to the arctic regions druggists who wish to change their places of business, neither does it regularly banish to the territory of Yakútsk students who express admiration for Skóbelef. Nevertheless, under a system of administration that allows an irresponsible official to punish at his own discretion, such results are not only possible but probable.
In the year 1874, a young student named Egór Lázaref was arrested in one of the south-eastern provinces of European Russia upon the charge of carrying on a secret revolutionary propaganda. He was taken to St. Petersburg and kept in solitary confinement in the House of Preliminary Detention and in the fortress of Petropávlovsk for about four years. He was then tried with one hundred and ninety-two other political suspects before the Governing Senate, found to be not guilty, and acquitted.[17] As there still existed, however, a possibility that he might be guilty on some future occasion, he was punished in advance by being sent as a soldier to a regiment then engaged in active service in the Trans-Cáucasus.[18] One would suppose that to be arrested without cause, to be held four years in solitary confinement, to be declared innocent by the highest court in the empire, and then to be punished with compulsory military service in Asia Minor for an offense prophetically foreseen, but not yet committed, would make a revolutionist, if not a terrorist, out of the most peaceable citizen; but Mr. Lázaref, as soon as he had been released from the army, quietly completed his education in the university, studied law, and began the practice of his profession in the city of Sarátof on the Vólga. He had no more trouble with the Government until the summer of 1884, when a police officer suddenly appeared to him one morning and said that the governor of the province would like to see him. Mr. Lázaref, who was on pleasant personal terms with the governor, went at once to the latter's office, where he was coolly informed that he was to be exiled by administrative process to Eastern Siberia for three years. Mr. Lázaref stood aghast.
"May I ask your high excellency for what reason?" he finally inquired.
"I do not know," replied the governor. "I have received orders to that effect from the Ministry of the Interior, and that is all I know about it."
Through the influence of friends in St. Petersburg, Mr. Lázaref obtained a respite of two weeks in which to settle up his affairs, and he was then sent as a prisoner to Moscow. He reached that city after the last party of political exiles had been despatched for the season, and had to live in the Moscow forwarding prison until the next spring. While there he wrote a respectful letter to the Department of Imperial Police, asking, as a favor, that he might be informed for what reason he was to be exiled to Eastern Siberia. The reply that he received was comprised in two lines, and was as follows: "You are to be put under police surveillance in Eastern Siberia because you have not abandoned your previous criminal activity." In other words, he was to be banished to the Trans-Baikál because he had not "abandoned" the "previous criminal activity" of which a court of justice had found him not guilty! In the Moscow forwarding prison, soon after Mr. Lázaref's arrival, a number of the political prisoners were comparing experiences one day, and asking one another for what offenses they had been condemned to banishment. One said that forbidden books had been found in his house; another said that he had been accused of carrying on a revolutionary propaganda; and a third admitted that he had been a member of a secret society. Finally Mr. Lázaref's turn came, and upon being asked why he was on his way to Siberia, he replied simply, "I don't know."
"Don't know!" exclaimed one of his comrades. "Did n't your father have a black-and-white cow!"
"Very likely," said Mr. Lázaref. "He had a lot of cows."
"Well! "rejoined his comrade triumphantly, "what more would you have? That 's enough to exile twenty men—and yet he says he does n't know!"
On the 10th of May, 1885, Mr. Lázaref left Moscow with an exile party for Siberia, and on the 10th of October, 1885, after twenty-two weeks of travel "by étape," reached the town of Chíta, in the Trans-Baikál, where I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance.
The grotesque injustice, the heedless cruelty, and the preposterous "mistakes" and "misunderstandings" that make the history of administrative exile in Russia seem to an American like the recital of a wild nightmare are due to the complete absence, in the Russian form of government, of checks upon the executive power, and the almost equally complete absence of official responsibility for unjust or illegal action. The Minister of the Interior, in dealing with politicals, is almost wholly unrestrained by law; and as it is utterly impossible for him personally to examine all of the immense number of political cases that come to him for final decision, he is virtually forced to delegate a part of his irresponsible power to chiefs of police, chiefs of gendarmes, governors of provinces, and subordinates in his own ministry. They in turn are compelled, for similar reasons, to intrust a part of their authority and discretion to officers of still lower grade; and the latter, who often are stupid, ignorant, or unscrupulous men, are the persons who really make the investigations, the searches, and the examinations upon which the life or liberty of an accused citizen may depend. Theoretically, the Minister of the Interior, aided by a council composed of three of his own subordinates and two officers from the Ministry of Justice, reviews and reëxamines the cases of all political offenders who are dealt with by administrative process;[19] but practically he does nothing of the kind, and it is impossible that he should do anything of the kind for the very simple reason that he has not the time.
In the years 1886 and 1887 there came before the Department of Justice 1883 political cases, involving no less than 2972 persons.[20] A very large proportion of these cases were dealt with by administrative process, and if the Minister of the Interior had given to each one of them a half, or one-quarter, of the study which was absolutely essential to a clear comprehension of it, he would have had no time to attend to anything else. As a matter of fact he did not give the cases such study, but, as a rule, simply signed the papers that came up to him from below. Of course he would not have signed the order for the exile of Mr. Korolénko to the province of Yakútsk if he had known that the whole charge against the young novelist was based on a mistake; nor would he have signed the order for the exile of Mr. Boródin if he had been aware that the magazine article for which the author was banished had been approved by the St. Petersburg Committee of Censorship. He accepted the statements passed up to him by a long line of subordinate officials, and signed his name merely as a formality and as a matter of course. How easy it is in Russia to get a high official's signature to any sort of a document may be illustrated by an anecdote that I have every reason to believe is absolutely true. A stóla-nachálnik, or head of a bureau, in the provincial administration of Tobólsk, while boasting one day about his power to shape and direct governmental action, made a wager with another chinóvnik that he could get the governor of the province—the late Governor Lisogórski—to sign a manuscript copy of the Lord's Prayer. He wrote the prayer out in the form of an official document on a sheet of stamped paper, numbered it, attached the proper seal to it, and handed it to the governor with a pile of other papers which required signature. He won his wager. The governor duly signed the Lord's Prayer, and it was probably as harmless an official document as ever came out of his office.
How much of this sort of careless and reckless signing there was in the cases of political offenders dealt with by administrative process may be inferred from the fact that, when the liberal minister Loris-Melikof came into power in 1880, he found it necessary to appoint a revisory commission, under the presidency of General Cherévin, to investigate the cases of persons who had been exiled and put under police supervision by administrative process, and to correct, so far as possible, the "mistakes," "misunderstandings," and "irregularities" against which the sufferers in all parts of the empire began to protest as soon as the appointment of a new Minister of the Interior gave them some reason to hope that their complaints would be heeded. There were said to be at that time 2800 political offenders in Siberia and in various remote parts of European Russia who had been exiled and put under police surveillance by administrative process. Up to the 23d of January, 1881, General Cherévin's commission had examined the cases of 650 such persons, and had recommended that 328, or more than half of them, be immediately released and returned to their homes.[21]
Of course the only remedy for such a state of things as this is to take the investigation of political offenses out of the hands of an irresponsible police, put it into the courts, where it belongs, and allow the accused to be defended there by counsel of their own selection. This remedy, however, the Government persistently refuses to adopt. The Moscow Assembly of Nobles, at the suggestion of Mr. U. F. Samárin, one of its members, sent a respectful but urgent memorial to the Crown, recommending that every political exile who had been dealt with by administrative process should be given the right to demand a judicial investigation of his case. The memorial went unheeded, and the Government, I believe, did not even make a reply to it.[22]
Before the year 1882 the rights, privileges, and obligations of political offenders exiled to Siberia by administrative process were set forth only in secret circular-letters, sent from time to time by the Minister of the Interior to the governors of the different Siberian provinces. Owing to changes in the ministry, changes in circumstances, and changes of ministerial policy, these circular-letters of instruction ultimately became so contradictory, or so inconsistent one with another, and led to so many "misunderstandings," "irregularities," and collisions between the exiles and the local authorities in the Siberian towns and villages, that on the 12th of March, 1882, the Minister of the Interior drew up, and the Tsar approved, a set of rules for the better regulation of police surveillance and administrative exile. An official copy of this paper, which I brought back with me from Siberia, lies before me as I write. It is entitled: "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance" [Polozhénie o Politséiskom Nadzóre].[23] The first thing that strikes the reader in a perusal of this document is the fact that it declares exile and police surveillance to be, not punishments for crimes already committed, but measures of precaution to prevent the commission of crimes that evil-minded men may contemplate. The first section reads as follows: "Police surveillance [which includes administrative exile] is a means of preventing crimes against the existing imperial order [the present form of government]; and it is applicable to all persons who are prejudicial to public tranquillity." The power to decide when a man is "prejudicial to public tranquillity," and when exile and surveillance shall be resorted to as a means of "preventing crime," is vested in the governors-general, the governors, and the police; and in the exercise of that power they pay quite as much attention to the opinions that a man holds as to the acts that he commits. They can hardly do otherwise. If they should wait in all cases for the commission of criminal acts, they would not be "preventing crime," but merely watching and waiting for it, while the object of administrative exile is to prevent crime by anticipation. Clearly, then, the only thing to be done is to nip crime in the bud by putting under restraint, or sending to Siberia, every man whose political opinions are such as to raise a presumption that he will commit a crime "against the existing imperial order" if he sees a favorable opportunity for so doing. Administrative exile, therefore, is directed against ideas and opinions from which criminal acts may come, rather than against the criminal acts themselves. It is designed to anticipate and prevent the acts by suppressing or discouraging the opinions; and, such being the case, the document which lies before me should be called, not "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance," but "Rules for the Better Regulation of Private Opinion."[24] In the spirit of this latter title, the "Rules" are interpreted by most of the Russian police.
The pretense that administrative exile is not a punishment, but only a precaution, is a mere juggle with words. The Government says, "We do not exile a man and put him under police surveillance as a punishment for holding certain opinions, but only as a means of preventing him from giving such opinions outward expression in criminal acts." If the banishment of a man to the province of Yakútsk for five years is not a "punishment," then the word "punishment" must have in Russian jurisprudence a very peculiar and restricted signification. In the case of women and young girls a sentence of banishment to Eastern Siberia is almost equivalent to a sentence of death, on account of the terrible hardships of the journey and the bad sanitary condition of the étapes—and yet the Government says that exile by administrative process is not a punishment!
In 1884 a pretty and intelligent young girl named Sophia Nikítina, who was attending school in Kiev, was banished by administrative process to one of the remote provinces of Eastern Siberia. In the winter of 1884–85, when she had accomplished about 3000 miles of her terrible journey, she was taken sick, on the road between Tomsk and Áchinsk, with typhus fever, contracted in one of the pestilential étapes. Physicians are not sent with exile parties in Siberia, and politicals who happen to be taken sick on the road are carried forward, regardless of their condition and regardless of the weather, until the party comes to a lazaret, or prison hospital. There are only four such lazarets between Tomsk and Irkútsk, a distance of about a thousand miles, and consequently sick prisoners are sometimes carried in sleighs or telegas, at a snail's pace, for a week or two—if they do not die—before they finally obtain rest, a bed, and a physician. How many days of cold and misery Miss Nikítina endured on the road that winter after she was taken sick, and before she reached Áchinsk and received medical treatment, I do not know; but in the Áchinsk lazaret her brief life ended. It must have been a satisfaction to her, as she lay dying in a foul prison hospital, 3000 miles from her home, to think that she was not undergoing "punishment" for anything that she had done, but was merely being subjected to necessary restraint by a parental Government, in order that she might not sometime be tempted to do something that would have a tendency to raise a presumption that her presence in Kiev was about to become more or less "prejudicial to public tranquillity."
I have not space for a quarter of the evidence that I collected in Siberia to show that administrative exile is not only cruelly unjust, but, in hundreds of cases, is a punishment of barbarous severity. If it attained the objects that it is supposed to attain, there might, from the point of view of a despotic Government, be some excuse if not justification for it; but it does not attain such objects. Regarded even from the side of expediency, it is uselessly and needlessly cruel. In a recent official report to the Minister of the Interior, Major-General Nicolái Baránof, the governor of the province of Archangel, in discussing the subject of administrative exile says:
Truer words than these were never written by a high Russian official, and so far as the practical expediency of exile by administrative process is concerned, I should be content to rest the case against it upon this frank report of the governor of Archangel. The subject, however, may be regarded from a point of view other than that of expediency—namely, from the point of view of morals, justice, and humanity. That side of the question I shall reserve for further discussion in later chapters.
- ↑ "The Vagrant," a series of sketches of Siberian life and experience, and "The Blind Musician."
- ↑ A statement of the circumstances of Mr. Korolénko's first exile to Siberia was published over the signature of the well-known author S. A. Priklónski in the newspaper Zémstvo for 1881, No. 10, p. 19. Korolénko has been four times banished to various parts of the empire without trial or hearing.
- ↑ Zémstvo, 1881, No. 10, p. 19. It is not often, of course, that facts of this kind, which are so damaging to the Government, get into the Russian newspaper press. The account of Mr. Boródin's experience and of the exile of Mr. Korolénko was published at the time when the liberal ministry of Loris-Mélikof was in power, just at the close of the reign of the late Tsar, when the strictness of the censorship was greatly relaxed.
- ↑ Circular letter from the Department of Executive Police No. 159, November 4, 1878, in "Prison Circulars," p. 655. Ministry of the Interior, St. Petersburg, 1880.
- ↑ By Russian law a wife may go to her exiled husband at the expense of the Government, provided she travels with an exile party, lives on the exile ration, sleeps in the roadside étapes, and submits generally to prison discipline.
- ↑ My authorities for the facts of this case are: first, a well-known member of a Russian provincial assembly, a man of the highest character, who was personally cognizant of the circumstances attending Dr. Biéli's arrest and banishment; second, exiles who went to Siberia in the same party with Dr. Biéli; and third, exiles—one of them a lady—who were in the same party with Dr. Biéli's wife.
- ↑ The passages of the "Russian Resident's" article to which I desire to call the reader's attention are as follows: "And now came the most terrible calamity of all—the delegation by the Tsar to the administrative authorities of the power of exile, which, until then, had been the imperial prerogative. It was a measure resorted to in a time of terrible necessity, when the nihilists, in the indulgence of their bloody phantasy, were recklessly wielding the assassin's dagger, and not hesitating even to hurl railway trains to destruction by dynamite. The power of exile was committed to the administration as a means of precaution. The governors-general were intrusted with power to banish all suspected persons. It appeared to be the only possible means to counteract the nefarious doings of these dark conspirators. It was an unfortunate decision and a serious error. It did not save the Tsar and has done nothing for the suppression of nihilism; but the incalculable evil and misery to which the wretched system has reduced us is indescribable. What Kennan writes on this head is true, every word of it. The word neblagonadiózhni [untrustworthy] has become a curse-word in the Russian language and will be recalled with a shudder by latest generations. This is the unspeakable misery that the terrorists have plunged us into with their murders. From the day this power was delegated, no man knows at what moment he may be seized and cast into prison or doomed to exile without even a hearing. All this has been brought upon us by a band so vile—so horribly vile—that their crimes are without parallel; young people from eighteen to twenty-three, without ideals, without moral restraint, without regard for family, fatherland, or station, spreading blood and ruin at the prompting of their presumptuous fancies. . . . . . The same author who knew so well how to stir our sympathies for undeserved sorrow wields his pen with equal facility in denunciation of the just fate of a band of profligates. . . . . . Are Kennan and Frost, perhaps, of opinion that the murders of Lincoln and Garfield are to be reckoned as benefactions to the race? Did it never occur to Kennan that for all the nameless miseries which he depicts in the first part of his book" [the first of my magazine articles republished in Germany in book form] "we are indebted to the heroes of the second part—that but for the nihilists of Kará there never would have been any administrative exile?" [Unsere Zeit, Leipzig, August, 1890. Translation in the Literary Digest of the same month and year.] I shall recur in a later chapter to the controverted question of the moral character of the Russian revolutionists, but, in the meantime, it may not be out of place to ask the "Russian Resident of Eastern Siberia" whether it never occurred to him that an unprejudiced investigator who, he admits, is perfectly right in his description of Siberian prisons, right "beyond question" in his account of common-criminal exile, and right "to a word" in his statements concerning administrative banishment, may, possibly, be right also in his estimate of the character of men with whom he lived for a whole year upon terms of the closest intimacy? Did it never occur to the "Russian Resident" that a man who tells the exact truth in ninety-nine consecutive instances is likely to tell the exact truth also in the one hundredth, unless there be, in that particular case, some good and previously non-existent reason for deception or error?
- ↑ Administrative punishments generally, as distinguished from judicial punishments, have been inflicted in Russia from the very dawn of history. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the right to inflict punishment by administrative process was vested in more than twenty different classes of Russian officials, including governors, vice-governors, voevóds, commandants, chiefs of detective police, ecclesiastical authorities, chiefs of provincial bureaus, excise officers, landed proprietors, chief foresters, post-station masters, officers of the mints, and managers of Government salt works. Most of these officials were empowered not only to exile at their own discretion, but to confiscate property, to inflict torture, to brand, and to flog with the knut. For references to the laws that conferred such powers upon Russian officials see "Personal Detention as a Police Measure to Insure Public Safety," by I. Tarásof, Professor of Criminal Law and Jurisprudence in the Demídof Juridical Lyceum, part 2, p. 9. Yaroslavl, 1886. Exile by administrative process is also specifically authorized in the "Statutes Relating to the Anticipative Prevention and Frustration of Crime," articles 1, 300, 316, and 334-339; in the "Exile Statutes," article II, and in article 667, part 1, Vol. II, of the "Collection of Russian Laws." All of these legal enactments originated long prior to the existence in Russia of a revolutionary party.
- ↑ The precise figures are as follows:
1827 . . . . 6,326 1837 . . . . 3,976 1828 . . . . 5,613 1838 . . . . 4,077 1829 . . . . 3,509 1839 . . . . 4,552 1830 . . . . 3,377 1840 . . . . 4,683 1831 . . . . 4,050 1841 . . . . 4,125 1832 . . . . 3,395 1842 . . . . 3,737 1833 . . . . 3,371 1843 . . . . 4,067 1834 . . . . 3,134 1844 . . . . 3,741 1835 . . . . 3,618 1845 . . . . 3,184 1836 . . . . 4,469 1846 . . . . 2,905 Total 79,909 See "An Investigation of the Percentages of Siberian Exiles," by E. N. Anúchin, chap, ii, p. 22. Memoirs of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Statistical Section, Vol. III, St. Petersburg, 1873.
As an evidence of the trustworthiness of Mr. Anúchin's statistics, it is only proper to mention the fact that, for the great work above cited, the author was awarded the Constantine medal of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society for 1869. The book was intended to comprise two volumes, but the second volume, containing statistics of the exile system since 1846, has never appeared, owing to "circumstances over which the author has no control." The censor has even mutilated the first volume by striking out Anúchin's condemnation of exile by administrative process—the very subject now under consideration. The author's expressions of disapproval are contained in the copy sent to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, but they are not to be found in my copy, nor in any other of later date than the first edition. The fact is not without interest as a significant proof that the Russian Government itself is ashamed of this atrociously unjust form of exile, although not yet willing to abandon it.
- ↑ See the reference by W. R. S. Ralston to the trial of Austrian socialists at Lemberg in March, 1877. ["Russian Revolutionary Literature," by W. R. S. Ralston, Nineteenth Century, May, 1877, p. 413.] See also official report of the trial of Austrian socialists in Cracow, where the severest sentence imposed was one month of imprisonment. [Newspaper Golos, St. Petersburg, 1880, Nos. 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, and 128.]
- ↑ See the article upon Count Lóris-Mélikof in the Russian historical review Rússkaya Stariná for the month of January, 1889, p. 62.
- ↑ Véra was first banished in 1878 to the village of Velíki Ústia in the European province of Vólogda. When, about a year later, her sister, with twenty-seven other political offenders, was tried by court-martial in Odéssa and sentenced to forced colonization in Kírensk, Vêra was rearrested and exiled to Mínusínsk.
- ↑ This Imperial command was issued on the 2d of April, 1880, and was intended to discourage attempts on the part of political exiles to escape. In the hands of local police officials it was soon made an instrument for the punishment of politicals who incurred their hostility. The first time, for example, that an obnoxious exile went two hundred yards beyond the limits of the village—perhaps only into a neighboring forest to gather flowers or berries—he was arrested upon the charge of attempting to escape and immediately banished to the province of Yakútsk—the wildest part of northeastern Asia. It made little difference whether the charge rested upon any basis of fact or not. In the latter part of the year 1880, a political named Peter Mikháilovich Volokhóf—an acquaintance of the Russian novelist Korolénko—was banished to the province of Yakútsk for an alleged attempt to escape from Archángel. As a matter of fact he had never even been in Archángel, much less attempted to escape from there.
- ↑ Eastern Siberia has an area considerably greater than that of the United States and Alaska taken together, and most of the vast territory of Yakútsk is as wild and unsettled as the northern part of British North America.
- ↑ It is shown as a district town on an official map of the Russian general staff published as late as 1883.
- ↑ The site of Zashíversk is about 3200 miles by the usually traveled route from Irkútsk and about 7000 miles from St. Petersburg. Exiles have been sent there more than once. A political named Pik very nearly starved to death there in the reign of Catherine II., from which I infer that the town was virtually extinct before the beginning of the present century. Seventy-five or eighty years later, however, Governor-general Fredericks is said to have sent there a drunken and incorrigible exile named Tsigankof, who had been banished to Siberia for impertinence to a gendarme officer in a St. Petersburg restaurant. [See newspaper Volzhski Vestnik, Kazán, September 23, 1885, and newspaper Vostochnoe Obozrénie, St. Petersburg, April 24, 1886, p. 9.]
- ↑ Official certified copy of the sentence in the case of "the 193," p. 8.
- ↑ This was a favorite method of Nicholas for the punishment of literary men and students whose opinions were too liberal for his taste. He compelled the gifted Russian poet Shevchénko to serve ten years as a common soldier, and kept him most of that time in the hottest and most desolate part of Central Asia—the district of Mángishlák. The talented novelist Dostoyéfski was also forced to serve as a common soldier after the expiration of his term of hard labor in the Omsk convict prison. I cannot now recall any case in which Nicholas insulted his own courts by punishing administratively persons whom they had just declared to be innocent, but such cases were common in the reign of Alexander II. Most of the prisoners acquitted by the Senate in the trial of "the 193" were immediately rearrested and banished by administrative process, or sent as common soldiers into the ranks.
- ↑ See "Rules Relating to Measures for the Preservation of National Order and Public Tranquillity." Appendix D.
- ↑ Report of the Minister of Justice for 1886–7.
- ↑ An official announcement by the Government, quoted in the newspaper Sibir for Jan. 31, 1881, p. 1.
- ↑ Newspaper Zemstvo, 1881, No. 10, p. 21.
- ↑ For a translation of these "Rules" see appendix D.
- ↑ This is the view of the "Rules" taken by the most competent Russian authorities. In the Annals of the Fatherland for May, 1882, will be found a very full discussion of administrative exile, with quotations from the principal newspapers of the empire to show the view generally taken of the "Rules," and some interesting and pertinent remarks by Professor Kistiakófski upon "punishment on suspicion."
- ↑ Juridical Messenger (the journalistic organ of the Moscow Juridical Society, or Bar Association), October, 1883, p. 332.