Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/79

 68 prosecuted for not having taken measures to prevent the crumbling of the walls during the earthquake." … "The worst is," Prince Obolensky writes, "that the same systematical 'cleaning' is going to be done in all universities." "A series of 'administrative dismissals' of professors has already taken place in the Odessa University, and our universities are going to be transformed into 'tea-shops of the Union of Russian Men,' … all decent men will have to go. And when the moral authority of the professors has been destroyed, and all students' unions forbidden, then the universities will again be ripe for the revolution."

In April last, a series of such trials took place, described by the Russian Press as "Revenge trials." At Saratov a group of men were prosecuted for having held peaceful meetings in connection with a strike of railway men in September, 1907, and were condemned to imprisonment in fortresses. At Moscow the local organisation of the Social Democrats was prosecuted for what it did at the end of 1905—the heaviest accusation being that against a Social Democratic lawyer, Roshkoff, for having edited a daily paper at that time, and inserted in it detailed reports about the progress of the Moscow insurrection of December, 1905. A hundred and six persons, already tried once, and condemned, for the anti-Governmental meetings and the constitutional manifestations held, in November, 1905, at Novorossiysk, after the Sevastopol rising, were tried again last April—the Military Prosecutor having lodged an appeal against the first sentence of the Court Martial,"because it contained no death sentences!" The new Court, too, could find no means better to please the high authorities, and a third trial will probably take place. In the meantime two local lawyers, who had defended the accused, have been exiled from the province; three witnesses—a local teacher, an official of the local post administration, and a military official (a lieutenant-colonel)—who spoke in Court in favour of the accused, have been dismissed. Two Justices of the Peace, who were in the same case, are being prosecuted, and complaints have been made even against officials of the secret police who had spoken before the Court in favour of the accused, with the result that the ex-head of the police, Kiréef, has been dismissed. Inquiries are also being held to consider the case of a gendarme officer, of the commander of the military district, and even of the President of the Court Martial himself—all of them being accused of leniency towards the accused.