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Rh contumacy would have for him disastrous consequences. While this appeal was pending, General Anúchin was appointed governor-general of Eastern Siberia, and, as a last resort, Kropótkin wrote to his aged mother in St. Petersburg to see Anúchin previous to the latter's departure for his new post and present to him a petition in her son's behalf. When the aged and heart-broken mother appeared with her petition in General Anúchin's reception-room she was treated with insulting brutality. Without reading the petition Anúchin threw it violently on the floor, asked her how she dared to come to him with such a petition from a traitor to his country, and declared that if her son "had his deserts he would be cleaning the streets in some Siberian city under guard, instead of walking about at liberty."

By this time all of the other political exiles in Minusínsk had submitted to the new regulation and were reporting at the police office, and Kropótkin was notified by the ispávnik that if within a stated time he did not follow their example he would be banished to Túrukhánsk, a wretched settlement of twelve or fifteen houses, situated in the province of Yeniséisk, near the coast of the arctic ocean. Kropótkin, however, still adhered to his resolution, and after a terribly trying interview with his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached, he succeeded in extorting from her a promise to return to European Russia with their young child, and let him go to Túrukhánsk alone. What this promise cost them both in misery I could imagine from the tears which suffused their eyes when they talked to me about it. At the last moment, however, while Mrs. Kropótkin was making preparations to return to European Russia, she happened to see in the Siberian Gazette a letter from some correspondent—a political exile, I think—in Túrukhánsk, describing the loneliness, dreariness, and unhealthfulness of the settlement, the arctic severity of the climate, the absence of all medical aid for the sick, and the