Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/344



THE LIFE OF POLITICAL EXILES

N the city of Tomsk, where we spent more time than in any other West-Siberian town, we had an opportunity to become well acquainted with a large colony of political exiles, and greatly to extend our knowledge of political exile life. We met there, for the first time, men and women who had taken part in the so-called "propaganda" of 1872-75, who had been banished by sentence of a court, and who might fairly be called revolutionists. They did not differ essentially from the administrative exiles in Semipalátinsk, Ulbínsk and Ust Kámenogórsk, except that they had been longer in exile and had had a much wider range of experience. Solomon Chudnófski, for example, a bright and talented publicist, about thirty-five years of age, told me that he was arrested the first time at the age of nineteen, while in the university; and that he had been under police surveillance, in prison, or in exile nearly all his life. He was held four years and three months in solitary confinement before trial, and spent twenty months of that time in a casemate of the Petropávlovsk fortress. For protesting against illegal treatment in that great state-prison, and for insisting pertinaciously upon his right to have pen, ink, and paper, in order that he might address a complaint to the Minister of the Interior, he was tied hand and foot, and was finally put into a strait-jacket. He thereupon refused to take food, and starved himself until the prison