Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/69

Rh women. According to the Tomsk Provincial Gazette, an official journal, one of the recently appointed governors of that province received, on the occasion of his very first visit of inspection to the city prisons, no less than three hundred complaints of unjust imprisonment. Upon investigation, two hundred of them were shown to be well founded, and the complainants were set at liberty. So boundless is the power of isprávniks and chiefs of police in the smaller Siberian towns and villages, that among the peasants the expression once became proverbial, "In heaven, God; in Okhótsk, Koch." How many Kochs there are among the isprávniks and zasedátels in the remoter parts of Siberia only God, the peasants, and the political exiles know. The nature of the surveillance maintained by such officers as these over the banished politicals varies in different parts of Siberia; but to what extent the supervision may go is shown by an extract from the letter of an administrative exile published in the Juridical Messenger, the organ of the Moscow Bar Association. It is as follows:

A young lady who was in exile at Tunká, a small East-Siberian village on the frontier of Mongolia, told me that it was not an unusual thing to come back to her apartments after a short walk, or a call upon some other exile, and find