Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/55

 44 trusted agents provocateurs, and in three cases testimony against them was obtained from witnesses under physical torture.

Even those who are sent to the more fertile and favoured southern parts of Siberia are not better off than the others. Those who are not noblemen—and they are the great majority—receive in Southern Siberia only from 2r. 40k. (5s. 2d.) to 6r. (13s.) a month, but in the latter case they have to pay from 4s. to 6s. a month for their lodgings. In the small district towns of Southern Siberia there is exactly the same want of employment as in the Far North.

Those who are exiled to the most thinly populated parts of Northern Siberia are confined to the encampments of the natives. It is well known that skin diseases are terribly prevalent in Siberia. Nearly all the natives are infected, as also many families of Russian peasants; but the exiles are compelled to lodge with the natives in their tiny huts and tents, and are happy if they are given a corner in the log hut of a Russian settler.

The presence of the exiles is generally felt as a heavy burden by the native population, which is becoming more and more hostile to them, and the feeling of hostility is increased by the presence of criminals among them. For persons sentenced for theft and other breaches of the ordinary law are being sent to Siberia in company with administrative exiles transported for rebellion or other political offences. Perhaps the authorities do this from considerations of economy, perhaps for other reasons.

Those who have been exiled to the northern provinces of European Russia, namely, to Archangel, are in no better plight than those who have been transported to Siberia. A number of them have written to complain to M. Bulat, Deputy to the Duma, about the intolerable conditions under which they live. Having been exiled, not by administrative order, but by sentence of the Courts, these people receive no support from the Government; and they get nothing from the village communities; being themselves short of arable land, they do not give them allotments. "Save us from starvation and unavoidable death from hunger," they wrote to their Deputy to the Duma.

Altogether, the peasants who have been exiled for agrarian disturbances—and they are very numerous by this time—are in the most precarious condition. In Tsarev (government of Astrakhan), where two hundred administrative exiles are kept,