Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/70

54 a police officer in cap and boots asleep on her bed. Fear of insult or outrage has forced most of the banished women in Siberia to live in the same houses with the exiled men. Madame Dicheskúla lived in one half of the house occupied by Mr. Lobonófski in Semipalátinsk; Madame Breshkófskaya occupied a room adjoining that of Mr. Shamárin in Selengínsk; and I found the same state of affairs existing in a dozen other parts of Siberia. In fact, it is inevitable. Among the political exiles are defenseless girls from sixteen to twenty years of age, and young married women whose husbands are in other parts of Siberia or in penal servitude at the mines. They cannot live entirely alone under a system of surveillance which authorizes a runaway convict, in the uniform of a police officer, to enter their apartments at any hour of the day or night.

Another feature of administrative exile life, which exasperates and embitters the politicals almost as much as surveillance, is the supervision of their correspondence. An exile whose correspondence is "under control" cannot send a letter to his wife without previously submitting it to the isprávnik for supervision and approval. The isprávnik may, in his discretion, forward it to its destination, destroy it, or send it to the Minister of the Interior. Letters for an exile received at the local post-office are turned over to the same official, who opens and reads them, crosses out anything that may seem to him objectionable, and delivers them, after such mutilation, at his leisure. If he wishes to torture or punish an exile who is personally obnoxious to him, or who has been "audaciously impudent," he may withhold such exile's letters altogether, and deprive him for months of all news from the wife and children whom he has been forced to leave uncared for in European Russia. The isprávnik of Tará, in the province of Tobólsk, used to take the letters of exiles to the local official club, read them aloud to his friends, and ask advice with regard to the erasure or "blacking out" of particular passages. More than one political in Tara heard