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Rh from conscription — or, in other words, releasing, for two or three hundred rúbles, per capita, young men who had been legally drawn as conscripts and who should render military service. He undertook to bring the corrupt officials to justice; but they had strong and highly placed friends in Irkútsk, they trumped up a set of counter charges, packed the investigating commission with their own associates, and came very near sending Colonel Kononóvich to the province of Yakútsk "with a yellow diamond on his back," in fulfilment of the isprávnik's boast. Fortunately Kononóvich had influential friends in St. Petersburg. He telegraphed to them and to the Minister of the Interior, and finally succeeded in securing the appointment of another commission, in having the isprávnik and some of his confederates thrown into prison, and in obtaining documentary evidence of their guilt. The conspirators then caused his house to be set on fire in the middle of a cold winter night, and nearly burned him alive with all his family. He escaped in his night-clothing, and, as soon as he had gotten his wife and children out, rushed back to try to save the papers in the pending case against the isprávnik, but it was too late. He was driven out by smoke and flames, and most of the proofs were destroyed. Colonel Kononóvich then "shook his hand" against Siberia — to use a Russian expression — and went to St. Petersburg. He did not want to live any longer, he said, in a country where an honest man could not do his duty without running the risk of being burned alive. In St. Petersburg he was given another position, as representative on the general staff of the Cossack forces of the Trans-Baikál, and he lived there quietly until the summer of 1888, when he was promoted to the rank of general and appointed to command the largest and most important penal establishment in Siberia; namely, that on the island of Saghalín. This appointment is in the highest degree creditable to the Russian Government, and, taken in connection with the erection of