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206 from the long and terrible history of the Kara penal establishment.

The Russian Government began sending state criminals to the mines of Kara in small numbers as early as 1873, but it did not make a regular practice of so doing until 1879. Most of the politicals condemned to penal servitude before the latter date were held either in the "penal-servitude section" of the Petropávlovsk fortress at St. Petersburg, or in the solitary confinement cells of the central convict prison at Kharkóf. As the revolutionary movement, however, grew more and more serious and widespread, and the prisons of European Russia became more and more crowded with political offenders, the Minister of the Interior began to transfer the worst class of hard-labor state criminals to the mines of Kará, where they were imprisoned in buildings intended originally for common felons. In December, 1880, there were about fifty political convicts in the Kará prisons, while nine men who had finished their term of probation were living outside the prison walls in