Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/37

Rh to the anarchists sentenced to penal servitude in that State, require them to declare under oath that they were not anarchists, and then, if they refused, drag them out of their cells and hang them off-hand without benefit of clergy. Yet that is precisely analogous to the action that was taken by the Russian Government in the cases of administrative exiles who were living in Western Siberia when the present Tsar came to the throne. If the Minister of the Interior did not know that these men were disloyal, he had no right to punish them with exile. If, on the other hand, he did know that they were disloyal, he acted with cruel injustice in forcing upon them such a choice of alternatives as perjury or a living death in the sub-arctic province of Yakútsk. Scores of exiled men and women, who had committed no new offense, were sent from Western Siberia to Eastern Siberia, or to Yakút ulúses near the Asiatic pole of cold, simply because they would not perjure themselves and turn informers. One of these unfortunates was the gifted Russian novelist Vladímir Korolénko. He had already been banished three times, — once to Siberia through an administrative "mistake," — and he was then transported to the province of Yakútsk because he would not betray his friends, kiss the mailed hand that had smitten him, and swear that he was a loyal subject of "The Lord's Anointed," Alexander III.

The reader may perhaps think that in describing banishment to a Yakút ulús as a "living death" I have used too strong an expression. I will therefore describe it as it appears to well-informed and dispassionate Russians. In the early part of the year 1881, when the liberal minister Loris-Melikof was in power and when there existed in Russia a limited freedom of the press, Mr. S. A. Priklónski, a well-known author and a gentleman who served at one time on the staff of the governor of the province of Olónets, published in the liberal newspaper Zemstvo — which was shortly afterward suppressed — a long and carefully prepared article