Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/56

 Rh typhus is raging among them. No medical assistance is given, and the typhus patients are sleeping by the side of the healthy men in the common doss-houses of Tsarev, because the owners of private houses have sent them away from fear of infection.

In the face of such misery, which is an unavoidable result of the system, we hardly dare speak of the abuse of the powers of the local police and the gendarme authorities, which in some cases renders the state of things still worse. Thus, in the government of Vyatka, the exiles for a long time did not receive their dress money. In February last they at length received the small allowance for summer clothes, the winter allowance being still unpaid.

At Tchelyabinsk it appears, from a telegram sent to the Head of the Prison administration by M. Tcheidze, Deputy to the Duma, that the exiles were in the most terrible plight because the authorities had given them no food money and no dress money, and forbade them to move from one village to another.

The only bright feature is that the political exiles do everything possible to maintain each other's courage and to prevent demoralisation. Everywhere they have organised their own societies for mutual help, to which every one who receives any monies from home pays a regular contribution of so much per cent. With this money they start soup kitchens, small libraries, and lectures, but the difficulty of getting books and papers and the high cost of light in the northern parts during the winter is extreme, and the authorities continually put hindrances in the way of such organisations. In some places in the Far North during the long winter nights sheer despair lays hold of the exiles. In January last, in one of the remote settlements of the Obdorsk region, five exiles ended their lives by suicide. A girl took the lead, and she was followed by four men.

The following extracts will give a still more concrete idea of the life of some of the exiles. One correspondent, writing from the Ilga canton, says:—