Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/297

Rh 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