Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/49

Rh are regulations for the government of men and women who have been torn from their homes and banished without trial to the remotest parts of Siberia. The only suggestion of exile in the whole document is contained in the words:

There is nothing whatever in these colorless words to indicate that the "definite places of residence" to which the offending "persons" have been "assigned" may be situated within the arctic circle, 5000 miles east of St. Petersburg; and I am confident that an uninstructed reader might commit the whole Code to memory without even suspecting that it relates to men and women who have been banished without trial to the wild frontiers of Mongolia, or to Yakút ulúses near the Asiatic pole of cold. The author of the Rules has made police surveillance the most prominent feature of his legislation, and has artfully hidden behind it, in the background, what he euphemistically calls "assigned to definite places of residence."

It might have startled the moral sense even of the Russian community if he had entitled his Code, as he ought to have entitled it, "Rules to govern the behavior of men and women exiled without trial to Siberia by the Minister of the Interior." The plain, blunt words, "exile without trial to Siberia," sound badly; but there is nothing to shock the most sensitive mind in the periphrastic statement that "Persons prejudicial to public tranquillity may be assigned by administrative process to definite places of residence."

When one is told that a Russian citizen, not accused of any crime, may be arrested by the police, may be sent, by virtue of a mere executive order, to a peasant village in Siberia, and may be forced to reside there for a term of years, one naturally asks, "What are the conditions of the life that such a person is compelled to live? What