Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/480

 the contrary, they made the most terrible reprisals. In the district of Verkholénsk, near Irkútsk, sixty or more dead bodies of runaway convicts are found and buried every year, and most of them have been killed by the peasants. In the spring of 1886 eleven dead bodies were found in the town of Tiumén in the course of a single week, and as nearly all of them were unknown to the police, they were supposed to be the bodies of exiles. In 1884 the Government surgeon of Ishím made 200 post-mortem examinations of bodies of forced colonists that had been murdered by the peasants in his district alone. So exasperated do the old-resident Siberians become at times, as the result of incendiary fires, robberies, and murders attributed by them to the exiles, that they treat the latter with all the barbarous cruelty of Apache Indians. In the Marínsk district, for example,—the same district from which eleven murders were reported in a single letter,—the peasants caught a forced colonist who had stolen their horses and committed other depredations, threw him on the ground, tied his hands behind him, and then filled his eyes with finely broken glass, saying as they did so, "Ah, you varnák! You won't find your way to us again."

In view of such a state of things as this it is not at all surprising that the town councils of Yalútorfsk, Turínsk, Tára, Ishím, Kurgán, Yeniséisk, and Tomsk, half a dozen burghers' societies, and almost as many special delegations of Siberian merchants, should have protested, formally and vehemently, against the continuance of criminal colonization. But the Siberian people have not been alone in their protest. Nearly all the governors of the Siberian provinces and territories have called attention repeatedly in their official reports to the disastrous consequences of criminal deportation as now practised; the governor of the