Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/71

Rh of his letters for the first time on the street from some person to whom the isprávnik had shown them. The reader can perhaps imagine, without any assistance from me, the feelings of a political exile who knows that the sacred words of love and tenderness written to him with agony and tears by the unhappy wife who is dearer to him than his own soul have been read aloud by the isprávnik between drinks of vódka to a circle of boon companions at the club. Even when an exile, by a fortunate accident, has heard of a letter addressed to him, he may not be able to get it. The isprávnik, after reading it to his friends, may conclude that it contains a hidden cipher, and that delivery of it is inexpedient. I have seen exile letters that had been scorched with heat and treated with chemicals by suspicious officials who believed, or pretended to believe, that there was invisible writing in sympathetic ink between the lines. Such letters are frequently held by the isprávnik or the chief of police for months, and then, scorched or blistered by experimental tests, and with all of the suspiciously vague or ambiguous expressions carefully crossed out, they are finally delivered. Sometimes an exile is summoned to the police station and subjected to a searching examination with regard to the contents or the meaning of a letter that he has never seen and that is still in the possession of the isprávnik. How maddening such treatment of private correspondence must be to a man who has never been accused of crime, who has never been tried, who has never been legally deprived of his rights as a citizen, and who is already aflame with just indignation, the reader can perhaps imagine.

Another source of exasperation to the administrative exile — and it is the last that I now have space to mention — is the anomalous position in which he is placed by virtue of banishment without trial and subjection to the "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance." He is neither a citizen living under the protection of law, nor a criminal deprived of civil rights by law. He is subject to all the